Conscious vs Real Knowledge According to the Daoist Tradition
Discussion
Dev Lewis:
"According to Daoist Cosmology humans have access to two types of intelligence:
- Conscious Knowledge CK(意知 ) = everyday awareness of life, formed by training and experience. It involves intellectual study, reasoning, and conceptualization.
- Real Knowledge RK (真知) = non-discursive, immediate knowing, originally inherent in human beings and not the product of learning.
source: Translation of Understanding Reality (Wu Chen P’ien by Chang Po-tuan) in Volume 2 of Daoist Classics a collection of translations by Thomas Clearly. All the following references are also made from this seminal 10th century text.
Conscious Knowledge (CK) is the realm that our world primarily recognises as ‘intelligence’.
CK refers to any intelligence expressed through words or numbers, woven together with reason, logic, pattern recognition, etc. Artificial Intelligence, especially Generative AI chat bots like Chat GPT, falls within the pure CK spectrum too. These are are based on Large Language Models trained to ‘predict the next word’, requiring vast amounts of data and training (Chat GPT-3 was trained on a corpus of approximately 500 billion words). Even if we were to achieve the holy grail of so-called ‘General AI’, which Shane Legg founder of Deep Mind defines as “ a machine that can do the sorts of cognitive things that people can typically do, possibly more”, and the so-called Singularity-moment– an AI capable of autonomously improving itself without human intervention– are confined to the scope of CK. Human Being are not.
- I’ll leave a caveat here for a creation of some synthetic version of RK that becomes originally inherent in AI. There are some fascinating lenses to discuss creation and AI as a ‘being’ in its own right in the cosmos but that will have to be for another post. (Even so, I have to assume it will be different from the RK that humans have access to).
On the other hand, Real Knowledge (RK) is non-discursive i.e. not expressed in words, and not an outcome of obtained knowledge but an innate knowing originally inherent in humans. This sets it fundamentally apart from AI and is often missing from our own construct of intelligence. Yet, it's something many of us rely on for important things, often unconsiously.
Phrases like ‘trust your gut’ or ‘don’t over think it’ hint at an intelligence beyond the thinking mind. Many successful leaders often say something to the effect when describing management. Artists and creative people talk about a ‘flow state’ where creation takes places effortlessly without thinking. Listen to an athlete reflecting back on a moment of brilliance in a game and one common phenomenon they all describe - they stopped ‘thinking’.
This allows us to start to understand what is meant by non-discursive intelligence but is still a relatively surface level reading of RK which points to a space far deeper. A connection to a wider intelligence from which life itself is contained within. Explained in terms of Plato’s allegory of the cave, turning attention away from the shadows on the wall to the source of light itself.
According to Daoist teachings, conscious and real knowledge are interlinked, like complimentary opposites. To live a truly balanced life humans must acknowledge and merge together conscious and real knowledge. Some emphasis here: it does not demand giving up conscious knowledge or ignoring its role in our lives. Quite the contrary. It is simply pointing to opening up to find and strike a balance between both.
The fusion between real and conscious knowledge creates a 'stable human mind' that is as described by this 10th century text by Chang Po-tuan :
‘fully awake, autonomous, capable of exercising free will…rather than be a product of socio-cultural construct'."