running for my mind

Headed to the West High track to mostly keep Josh company on his workout. I had planned on 6-7 miles with some strides for today, but thought I could just jump in periodically with Josh on his 400s and get what I was looking for. Ended up doing 2 x 400 and 6 x 200 with some other strides tossed in here and there. It was nice to have Adam and Josh at the track. Josh pushed through a tough workout with lots of factors weighing in favor of cutting it short.

Aside from running -- Now that I am no longer in school, I have been able to read more of what I actually want and not just text books. It has made me think about the process of obtaining knowledge and what is knowledge in general. My friend said something interesting yesterday when I was chatting with him about it that I figured some might find interesting. Below is his comment.

It is my belief that all knowledge comes from experience. The best way I have thought about explaining this idea is to describe knowledge like a tree. Each branch represents a different kind of knowledge acquisition based on a certain type of experience: the religion branch, the gender branch, the spiritual branch, the parent branch, etc. Each separate branch is unique because the knowledge within each is acquired through a different type of experience.

I think you would agree that you get a very different set of knowledge when you become a parent. It is not scientific knowledge. It is not even religious knowledge.

In my observation, the world (particularly the scientific world) believes that all knowledge is obtained or can be obtained in the same way scientific knowledge is obtained. I think this is false. If I were to perform a scientific experiment and pick up one of your children and get a hug, I would acquire different knowledge than each of you would acquire. Science requires the same information/result from the experiment no matter who performs the experiment.

Your parent experience/knowledge provides you with different knowledge than I could obtain through the scientific experiment. No matter how much scientific knowledge I obtain about your children, I would not know them or about them in the way that you do. (A wrinkle in this example is the practice of adoption, but that is for another day.)

There are all kinds of examples that illustrate the difficulty with claiming that all knowledge is obtained in the same manner as scientific knowledge. There is knowledge that we have as men that our wives do not have. The same is equally as true. We will never understand them, at least not in this life. No matter how many science experiments we conduct, we would not acquire the same type of “gender” knowledge our wives have.

I think the same thing happens in spiritual or religious matters. In church, we talk about seeing things with “spiritual eyes.” I think that spiritual experience is the path to spiritual knowledge. The same would be true of other types of knowledge and experience: gender/religious/parent experience leads to gender/religious/parent knowledge. I do not believe we obtain these types of knowledge through scientific experiments.

Sorry that was so long. Obviously, feel free to comment. Or, just ponder. I am still processing what he said.

running for my mind

Week starting Jun 01, 2014