I think there is most assuredly a difference between knowing a person and knowing about a computer.* The primary difference is that you can ask a human to tell you about himself/herself. If you ask a person this, they will not tell you that they can run a mile in 6 minutes, that they can effectively remember approximately 8 new names per day. Instead they are likely to tell you about what is important to them (hobbies, religion, family, etc). The information given, and the fact that the person feels the information reveals their own defining characteristics, can give much insight in getting to know a person. A computer, on the other hand, does not define itself. To know about my computer, I go to start->control panel->system, and there I have all the information that my computer's creator thought vital to give me. I can thus know the essence of my computer. But to study a human being's birth certificate, high school transcript, and medical records... that gets me no closer to knowing that person than asking questions like "How fast is your mile?"
*As a side note that may or may not be relevant, the idea that knowing about a computer is different from knowing a human is demonstrated in the French language with simply a difference of terms to refer to the kinds of "knowing." "Savoir" means to know facts, while "Connaitre" means to know a person, or be familiar with someone (or a place/idea). One is able "savoir" a computer's memory, its processing speed, etc. And one is able "savoir" a person's birth date and grades in school. But as far as knowing people... one is able "connaitre" a person, but one is never able "connaitre" a computer. (To be accurate for French speakers of the class, I realize there are ways connaitre could be used in talking about a computer, but in such a context you lose the meaning “know”, which is of course the focus of this post.) With these terms, it is obvious that the French, at least, recognize an intrinsic difference between knowing people and knowing about such things as computers.
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3 comments:
It was interesting to me that in contrasting our approaches to people and computers you said "know a person" and "know about a computer." Perhaps this is our English attempt to convey what you so wonderfully brought out about French. I can know many things ABOUT a computer, but it makes no sense to say that I know my computer. I can also know many things ABOUT a person, but I can also know a person, and usually I am much more interested to know the person than to know facts about him or her.
Brilliant use of language, via French, to approach this. Latin, too, has several verbs roughly translating "to know," but with various shades of meaning.
Pushing a bit more on how you know a person... You mentioned talking with people and their choice of what to reveal. What else do you use? How do emotion and intuition figure as ways of knowing here? What about authority or logic?
I believe that you could, in theory, know a person the same way you know a computer. With a computer, you can get all the technical specs and you'll be able to predict every aspect of how a computer will respond to a given circumstance. This isn't exceedingly difficult given the human engineered computer that is made of traits which can be isolated and quantified. So, it seems to me, if you could isolate and quantify all the traits of a human (a task which indeed is exceedingly difficult) then you could predict how they would react to a given circumstance.
After all, isn't the statement that you know a person (connaitre implies familiarity rather than knowledge) a statement that you can estimate how they would react to given circumstances? For example, if someone asked you "Does Barack Obama like to eat salmon?" you might say "I don't know, I don't know him". Yet if you knew Barack Obama you would be able to predict his behavior in given circumstances (he seems like a salmon eater to me).
Ben raises an interesting point, one that we continually seem to be thrown back upon. The question is whether, with regard to humans, the whole is equal to the sum of the parts, or is greater than the sum of the parts. Many people would say that with regard to an object, such as a computer, the whole is simply equal to the sum of its parts. Is this true of humans? The reductive physicalist says no, the dualist says yes.
A great thought experiment involves a character known as Color-blind Mary. Mary is born color blind and can only discern various shades of black and white. She pursues as her career a study of light and vision. After having learned everything there is to know about the physical properties of light, color, and human sight, she is suddenly and miraculously endowed with the ability to perceive color with her own eyes. The question: does she know something more about the color red when she first perceives it with her own eyes than she did when she knew every physical detail about light, the part of the spectrum that is red, and how humans perceive color? Many people say she does, that the experience of knowing red is different from knowing all the physical facts.
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