In the previous Philosophy Monday, I introduced knowledge as an objective basis for values. Today I want to expand on what I mean by knowledge. I had previously in this series written a post about knowledge that in retrospect I realize I should have called "knowing" instead (if I eventually pull these posts together into a book, I will fix that). That post was much more about what it means to know something. In the context of values though I am much more concerned with knowledge as a set externalized artifacts.

I have written about this meaning of knowledge in my book The World After Capital. Here is the relevant excerpt

Knowledge, as I use this term, is the information that humanity has recorded in a medium, and improved over time. There are two crucial parts to this definition. The first is “recorded in a medium,” which allows information to be shared across time and space. The second is “improved over time,” which separates knowledge from mere information.

A conversation that I had years ago but didn’t record cannot be knowledge in my sense—it isn’t accessible to anyone who wasn’t there when it happened, and even my own recollection of it will fade. However, if I write down an insight from that conversation and publish it on my blog, I have potentially contributed to human knowledge. The blog post is available to others across space and time, and some blog posts will turn out to be important contributions to human knowledge. As another example, the DNA in our cells isn’t knowledge by my definition, whereas a recorded genome sequence can be maintained, shared and analyzed. Gene sequences that turn out to be medically significant, such as the BRCA mutation that increases the risk of breast cancer, become part of human knowledge.

My definition of knowledge is intentionally broad, and includes not just technical and scientific knowledge but art, music and literature. But it excludes anything that is either ephemeral or not subject to selection and improvement. Modern computers, for example, produce tons of recorded information that are not subsequently analyzed or integrated into any process of progressive bettering. The reasons for this definition of knowledge will become clear as I use the term in the following sections and throughout the book.

Given this definition it should once again be clear that as of today humans are the only species on the planet that has knowledge. This is for better or worse why we live in the anthropocene. Now it is particularly important at this moment that we really figure out what value can be derived from knowledge as a basis. Why? Because we are on the threshold of two other species having full access to the power of knowledge: transhumans and neohumans. Here is the relevant passage from The World After Capital:

There’s another reason for urgency in navigating the transition to the Knowledge Age: We find ourselves on the threshold of creating both transhumans and neohumans. Transhumans are humans with capabilities enhanced through both genetic modification (for example, via CRISPR gene editing) and digital augmentation (for example, a brain-machine interface, such as Neuralink). Neohumans are machines with artificial general intelligence. I’m including them both here because both can be full-fledged participants in the knowledge loop.

I am intentionally referring to these new species as humans. That’s planting a flag that I believe the values that derive from knowledge will be equally accessible and applicable to them. There is a lot of debate going on around what else machines would need to have in order to qualify as humans. Is it feelings? Is it consciousness? Would it be sharing a biological substrate with us? I will dig into these questions more in upcoming posts.

Illustration by Claude Sonnet 3.7 based on this post.