On the Pursuit of Knowledge, Power, and Freedom
There are two forms of knowledge — biased (cognoscere) and unbiased (sapere). Both are found in all people and are interdependent. All humans are confined to the limits of their perception which when met with reality form biased, perceptual knowledge. The aggregation of different perceptual sources of knowledge is cultivated into an unbiased knowledge that is closer to the truth. Pure truth may be unattainable through human perception alone — we do not have the capacity to see all the frequencies of electromagnetic energy, nor the hearing to perceive all frequencies of sound. We do not have a sense that detects magnetic fields, or many other senses that allow other organisms to receive stimuli from their environments.
All knowledge is familiarity and understanding. The more you understand the state of things and how things influence each other, and the specifics of these relationships, the more you can instantiate these changes in state, or avoid them. This is the foundation of power: knowledge of systems. Power is the demonstrated ability to determine the state of an entity; its predecessor — potential — is the possibility of such a change of state. Perceptual knowledge and unbiased knowledge beget different forms of power. The power gained through perceptual knowledge is influence over those who share perceptions. The power gained from unbiased knowledge is influence over those regardless of perceptions.
A human’s talent in the world is the ability to know. A human that cannot know, who cannot learn, is an eagle that cannot fly.
[Expand: On foundational understanding as the anchor of knowledge is power. The engineer who understands why the airplane works can navigate failure modes no one anticipated. Most people will use the airplane and never need to know. But when something unprecedented happens, only the one who knows from the ground up can reason forward. As AI handles more of the known, the unknown becomes more valuable. The person who understands deeply enough to ask the next question — not answer current ones — becomes increasingly rare and increasingly powerful.]