The Origin of Knowledge

(having great confusion after--these four months spent on--reading Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind, Robert Nozick's Nature of Rationality, Steven Pinker's Instinct Language and John Seely Brown's Social Life of Information)

“Knowledge about life is one thing; effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being, is another.” 

– William James

‘The Canvas of Imaginations’ by Gilang Danu

 

Some life questions: Who has the authority to create knowledge? Nature or society? Are truths simply wait to be discovered naturally or are truths should perceived as socially constructed?

I gave you two--abstract--analogies about how nature and our social life can create knowledge.

NATURAL KNOWLEDGE
Let's imagine we're all isolated fishes. Swimming forever in the darkest bottom of ocean water. Pretty much nothing else in our natural surroundings, no coral reef, no seaweed, nor another sea creatures. This fish--all it would feel would be the pressure of the water, the temperature of the water, the motion of the water. Would this fish have invented the natural numbers--1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on? I think probably not, because there's nothing to count there – everything this creature would have felt would have been continuous rather than discrete, so this creature might have invented a completely different type of mathematics. A different way of seeing things. For they lived among continuous set of things that was hard to distinguish one from another.

 

SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE
Now imagine we're living in a totalitarian nation, which is ruled by a iron-handed ruler. The ruler didn't allow any of his citizen to receive any information at all. Everyday is work day for the citizen. No free-time, no free-speech, pretty much like a robotic life. We're all totally isolated within our home boundaries, not even talk to our neighbors. We're all just prisoners, silenced and forced to obey every command the ruler gave us. The only thing we can learn was primitive language to received order from the government. One day, a peasant managed to escape the national border and made it to the other country. He sees many things he never saw before, he learn many things from this new country. The government of the new country even put him to university and taught him many lessons. As without any teachings, the peasant couldn't know anything except his native language of his former nation.

 

Those analogies may not perfectly captured the essence of how knowledge can be constructed (as always, I talked in abstracts, not concrete) but...you got the idea, right? Now, back to the main questions:

How is knowledge created and who has the authority to speak?

What are the limitations of creating new knowledge and what can empower us?

The nature or the people?

Facts alone or consensus? 

Or is it both?

The Rules on Simplifications

Meaning-making. The main purpose of our language is to trigger some kind of meaning to the perceiver. So does drawings as a language symbol, the illustrator must made their drawings had this kind of meaning to—at least himself—the audiences.

The greatest roadblock for many painters/ designer/ illustrators mainly didn’t come from the skill areas. Sometimes, one thing that hit us the most was how to put such intangible and unspeakable ideas into the concrete projection of drawings. That is—to say—to put a very subjective matter into objective understanding. To simplify the ideas (that mainly didn’t come in linguistic form) and making it meaningful. And hell, we had to through this kind of problem in daily basis.

Simplifications of idea in the visual media required a careful approach, you may not cut your idea down randomly—for it’ll cut the whole meaning as well.  One philosophical ideas that I kept my whole life was Occam’s Razor. This the tool which I used to 'cut' everything to their simplest core, without cutting any original meanings or ideas.

The term coined by 14th-century English thinker, William of Ockham (though it was Bertrand Russell whose introduced me to it). The main idea of Occam's Razor is:

'Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem'

or

'Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.'

Many more thinkers and great figures re-shaped this statement over time. Leonardo Da Vinci had his own quote,

'Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.'

Isaac Newton got his own cool version,

'We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.'

And Einstein stated in the same fashion,

'Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.'

Thanks to the bias and misquotes, for today the Occam's Razor known best for

'The simplest explanation that covers all the facts is usually the best.'

At first there are no strict explanations how to apply this Razor in daily life (let alone the visual media), but Ludwig Wittgenstein (the disciples and partner-in-crime of Bertrand Russell, and also my favorite philosopher) set the applicable method so that the Razor could be installed in daily problem. Luki (my dearly nickname for Ludwig Wittgenstein….hahaha) explained that the true nature of this Razor is the eradication of error through the clarification of language. A principle he called himself logical atomism. A logically perfect language according to him would remove all ambiguity by reducing facts to their simplest components. Here goes the example:

Gilang Danu is cool.

(a simple statement, huh, take a look at here as I'm trying to break it down by its 'atomic facts')

1. There is a Gilang Danu

2. There is only one Gilang Danu

3. Whatever is Gilang Danu is cool.

See, just follow those atomic facts closely, and the first statement would all gone clear. This is the most efficient simplification according to Luki.

Now, how could this intangible philosophical ideas could be applied to visual media, like drawings? I must stated, in the terms of drawings I created a separation between two main ‘islands’, based on the subject: abstract and concrete. We have more freedom to construct and imply our meanings the more abstract the subject is. If a subject is more explicit, less is required of the audience to construct its own meaning because it is designed more concretely. When we abstract an image… we are not so much eliminating details as we are focusing on specific details.

By stripping down an image to its essential meaning, an artist can amplify that meaning. Look at my example down below.

1. There’s a real photograph of me smiling, let’s simplify it.

2. Now, we got a comical-realistic drawing, with shadow and all. A simplification from the photo version.

3. Now, we strip down the shadow and the complexity, to make it more simpler. Here’s a cartoony-basic drawing of Calvin smiled.

4. Now, the last: we got this. A universal symbol of happiness.

 

By making the same face more and more abstract by taking features away, it allows the face to mean more. The first photograph represents me alone, and not anybody else, smiling. While the last picture, it represents billions of people. The sequence progresses from meaning just one face, to meaning all faces. One faces represents many. That is the main idea. Just like the example in linguistic form I gave above: one specific characteristic of Gilang Danu could be broke down into many parts without so much cutting the meanings of the subjects. Of course the detail would be at loss, but the ‘bigger picture’ appeared hundred times greater. To make something specific became simpler may seems so naive and ‘stupid’ for some people, but this kind of approach is truly beneficial in our daily life, it isn’t a way to cut the meanings, not an escape from details and avoid the problems. In this kind of simplification, you can’t say I’m avoiding the problems to make all the details, no, the problems have been eliminated in my concept-making process. The smiley symbol may look simple, but the process of making it was rich and complicated. How lesser words could made richer meanings, and how partial information could triggered deeper meanings that is the magic of intuitions. 

That is amplification through simplification. That’s how we could interpret one simple smiley into greater understandings, and allowing our imaginations to wander around without losing its grip to the original meanings.