Posted: Sep 13, 2017 1:35 pm
DavidMcC wrote:John Platko wrote:...
2) Agential states are knowledge
3) Therefore agential states must be able to survive noise, to some extent, and therefore be error correctable.
4) For 3 to be possible there must be more than one physical set of states that map to a given agential state so that if an error is introduced by noise in the set of physical states that define an agential state, the state can still be recovered. There are many ways agential states can be encoded to provide for error correction but suffice it to say that if there is only one physical state mapping to an agential state, then if that physical state mapping changes in any way, then that agential state is lost. Such an information mechanism does not meet the definition of Knowledge because it can't meet the survivability criteria.
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If I read this correcly, you are claiming that we can't forget anything that we know, otherwise we didn't know it in the first place! But, given enough time, I suspect that any knowledge that an individual has at any given time, can be forgotten, unless of course, you refer to knowledge databases (ie, electronic hardware, libraries, etc), rather than the contents of an individual's brain.
The definition of 'knowledge' is grossly overstated. It doesn't sustain itself, it is sustained by the almost-ignored 'suitable environment'. Therefore 'knowledge' is as vulnerable and impermanent as that substrate/environment's capacity to preserve it. Brains can forget, molecules can degrade and there is no inherent self-repair in the information itself. It doesn't exist appart from in it's substrates.