Knowledge

It could be said that "our description of the world around us and ourselves within it" is made of two "parts" - our "transient now" and ever evolving "cultural imprint". Our "transient now" appears to be an emergent property of interplays of "descriptions..." (our sensory "apparatus", central nervous system and other organs, cells, our genetic makeup...) that "resides within us" and the "cultural imprint", also an emergent property, that "resides within us and outside of us". Thus, we live in the world in which we have a constant interaction between the richness of the world of our transient now and its symbolic interpretation of the culture we grew into.

Homo erectus of 800,000 years ago skipped into adulthood at an estimated age of eight. Some estimate that homo sapiens of 50,000 years ago was a fully grown individual at the age of twelve. Nowadays, age of 18 or later is considered to be the age of a fully grown individual. Obviously the volume of the accumulated knowledge has significantly increased in this period requiring a longer period of our growing into a culture.

Our "cultural imprint" carries evolved, accumulated knowledge of hundreds of thousands of years in a symbolic form that needs to be integrated with our subjective experiences. As babies, for example, we need more than a year to learn how to walk while a calf runs around a few hours after birth. It is obvious that we have here two parallel "mechanisms" of transfers of the accumulated knowledge - through our genetic makeup and through our "cultural imprint". The transfer through our genetic makeup is practically instantaneous. However, the accumulation of the knowledge is limited and very slow. Our "cultural imprint" though appears to have almost unlimited capacity - but it does require more time for transfer. The evolutionary shift in transferring the knowledge through genetic makeup only towards a combination of both - the genetic makeup and "cultural imprint" - seems obvious.

The breakthrough in our evolution appears to be in the dissociation between those two "mechanisms" for the transfer of accumulated knowledge. When this happened in our history is still debated, but the emergence of the FOXP2 gene that enables us to speak seems to be the turning point. Before its emergence, we might have a limited capacity to symbol, but very much related to our transient now and very little to the passage of time. The current discussions on how homo sapiens (Cro-Magnons) overwhelmed Neanderthals might shed a bit more light on this.

The "cultural imprint" probably made redundant some of the previously genetically transferred knowledge. Did we lose some genes or parts of them? Did we develop some genes or parts of them under the impact of our "cultural imprint"? Indications are that we did, but I'm not aware of a study that could say something more conclusive. I would suggest however that our "social imprint" did have some impact on our genes. It seems for example that the invention of writing impacted our genes as a genetic base for dyslexia indicates. (Dyslexia is of course a much more complex phenomenon also related to speech and sense of rhythm as the article Poor rhythm 'at heart of dyslexia' suggests.)

I had the honour of training a very intelligent, young lady to drive. Her struggle to rationalise every move was a big obstacle and it took her three months to stop thinking and start driving. I would suggest that all of our knowledge is of this kind that involves all of our body with feelings, emotions, sense of beauty, humour...

I would also suggest that our knowledge is not a "pure" symbolic form that could be entirely rationalised. It is rather a combination of our "subjective" experiences with symbols established by our "cultural imprint". This is obvious when we examine how we grow into a culture - in other words - learn. The "cultural imprinting" is a slow ongoing process and there is not much difference between learning to play basketball for example and studying physics. Although we could say that learning to play basketball is more physical than studying physics, the fact remains that both involve all of ourselves - and body and mind so to speak. (As we saw in Mystery our mind/body divisions should be left out of our considerations.)

Once we grow into a culture (a culture of physicists for example), the process of the "cultural imprinting" continues but at much slower pace. In research, we try to confirm or challenge some of the concepts imprinted. In fencing as another example, we grow into a team (a kind of small culture) where we learn (internalise) sets of body movements (and a whole philosophy around it) required in this sport. Every new move of our bodies, just like a new concept, takes time to entirely internalise. This time always depends on how much we need to unlearn to reestablish a kind of equilibrium within our modified "cultural imprint" and "subjective" experiences of our transient now.

In a sense, we could say that our knowledge is a complex network of “habits” - originated in “habitual” (learned) interplays between our genes and other “parts” of our cells and crowned with “habitual” (learned) interplays of concepts of our cultural imprint. However, we - made out of our “habits” - can alter what we are made of, even at the level of our genetic makeup.