Monday, December 18, 2000
The stages of knowledge acquisition (revised):
- Instinctive: If you possess a genetic mutation that confers a favorable behavior, you pass it on. If the mutation confers a disadvantageous behavior, you don't pass it on (because you die). Thus behaviors become encoded into our genetic code.
- Memory: If you do something that results in bad consequences (short of death), you don't do it again. If you do something resulting in good consequences, you do it again. That is how you, as an individual, learn.
- Intelligence: Based on experience, you deduce general rules of cause and effect. In specific situations, you induce a course of action based on these general rules. You predict which actions yield good results, and which ones lead to bad ones, even though you might never have been in such a situation before.
- Culture: You learn from someone else's experience, and others learn from yours. Furthermore, knowledge doesn't disappear with the individual, but instead lives on. In conjunction with the previous, you can also learn from the speculation of other people.
It is, of course, obvious. But people tend not to think of culture as a form of learning. Tradition exists for a reason. Culture is rapid selection of favorable behaviors.