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What is the fundamental nature/ontology of knowledge? Is knowledge a physical state? Is knowledge a specific arrangement of physical particles in a brain, a book, a solid-state drive, a GPU, etc.? Or is knowledge fundamentally non-physical, existing in some non-material (idealist? spiritual?) realm/domain/dimension of reality, akin to how mathematical platonists would claim that mathematical abstractions objectively exist outside of space and time?

Note. For a broader context, see the related questions: Is non-physicalism reasonable?, What are examples of non-physicalist approaches to acquiring knowledge?, and Is the fundamental nature of knowledge intimately linked to the fundamental nature of minds (consciousness)?.

Mark
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    I think the real question is why would one entertain the possibility of knowledge being non-physical? What would be the purpose of this exercise? – Yuri Zavorotny Mar 06 '24 at 19:12
  • @YuriZavorotny Feel free to check out the answers to the first related question and ask the authors of said answers. – Mark Mar 06 '24 at 19:13
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    This is like asking if joy is non-physical. Electromagnetic elements are physical, our interpretation of them is metaphysical. – RodolfoAP Mar 06 '24 at 20:00
  • @Mark -- I think the key to understanding is to pull on every loose thread that you can find. This is a loose thread. – Yuri Zavorotny Mar 06 '24 at 20:41
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    It depends on one's metaphysics of abstract objects. To some (realists) they are non-physical ideal entities, to others (nominalists) they are shared linguistic entities, so not quite arrangements of physical particles but rather labeled sets/classes/types of such arrangements with labels linked to the arrangements themselves by physical recognition procedures. – Conifold Mar 06 '24 at 21:02
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    @YuriZavorotny, because such questions are important to a right understanding of reality. See for example https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/110012 on why such assumptions may be harmful to the search for truth. For a good example, consider 'i' (a.k.a. √-1). By its nature, you can't measure 'i'; it is immaterial. And yet it is incredibly useful. If 'i' can exist as an immaterial construct, how do you turn around and argue that ideas (and knowledge) cannot? How do you measure logic and reason? Can information exist outside of its physical manifestation? These questions matter. – Matthew Mar 06 '24 at 21:43
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    It may just be semantics but there is a difference between knowledge and understanding. Understanding is an abstract concept and difficult to describe. Knowledge can be physical (written in a book) but understanding the knowledge contained within a book is an abstract process. – Idiosyncratic Soul Mar 06 '24 at 23:57
  • @Conifold -- I understand different schools of thought. What I don't get is why people still consider the existence non-material dimensions even though we know for a fact that any information, anything knowledge can be stored / recorded on physical media? And that our brains, the neural networks in them, appear to be just another example of such a media? – Yuri Zavorotny Mar 06 '24 at 23:57
  • Because a state of the material carrier is not identical to what it stores or records. Many people, including physicalists, want to say that information stays the same when transferred from paper to electronic or human memory and back. But that means that whatever it is cannot be a state of either of them. Information has to be something more complex and relational (to what it is information about), even if ultimately physical. To some, it suggests an additional, ideal, layer of reality instead. – Conifold Mar 07 '24 at 00:14
  • @Conifold -- Perhaps this is the idealists' way to rationalize their intuitive belief in what is otherwise known as the law of conservation of information? The law states that information cannot be destroyed -- it can only be transferred from one media to another. This means that, no, information is not dependent on any particular media. But this also means that every bit of information is always stored in somewhere in the physical Universe -- w/o, that is, the need for an ideal layer to preserve it. – Yuri Zavorotny Mar 07 '24 at 00:33
  • Let's say that information could be destroyed (in black holes, say, as Hawking originally thought), would it make a difference? I doubt it. The intuition of transferability does not depend on a universal conservation law. And some of those who thought, like Aristotle, that "form" (a historical pre-cursor of information) must always be tied to matter ("substance"), still had metaphysics that is not entirely materialist. Because they faced the question of what it is that gets shared by substances or transferred from substance to substance, and found nominalist workarounds for it uncompelling. – Conifold Mar 07 '24 at 00:52
  • It might be helpful for you to contemplate and behold the subtle difference between knowledge (now+owl+edge) and metaphysical (meta+physical) reality for your seemingly common and deep concern... – Double Knot Mar 07 '24 at 18:37
  • @Conifold While information is independent of any particular substrate, it must have one - something that also seems to be so with respect to temperature and velocity, to pick just two of many examples. At least in ordinary usage, the physical is taken to encompass not only what is in the world, but how it is arranged and what it is doing. – sdenham Mar 19 '24 at 13:31

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"Knowledge" is an abstract concept. It is a convenient label, generally considered to apply to true beliefs (with considerable wiggle around what exactly that means, and how one might know about knowledge).

A specific arrangement of particles in a brain may correspond to knowledge but is not knowledge itself. There could be some super-natural dimension, as you suggest, but that really comes down to the same thing: whatever the "storage" is... again, it isn't knowledge.

There are two pencils on the desk in front of me, but that isn't the number two, and never will be.

You could argue that, as an abstract concept, knowledge doesn't actually exist. Or that the abstractions of math don't either. If you like. That seems less convenient, but if it's important to how you want to structure things, can be a reasonably self-consistent approach.

mattdm
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  • Or that the abstractions of math don't either - mathematical platonists would beg to differ. – Mark Mar 06 '24 at 19:22
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    @Mark Sure. As I said, one could argue that (and people have) — but it's not like there's a settled answer. – mattdm Mar 06 '24 at 19:24
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    An arrangement of particles in a brain, or pencils on a desk, is an abstract concept, too. Consider the arch. An arch is an arrangement of bricks (or stones, concrete, etc), and it is also an abstract concept. Arrangements are abstract. Specifically we could identify an arrangement with the set of its possible instances. And so it is conceivable that knowledge, being also abstract, could be an arrangement of objects; a set of possible instances that constitute knowledge. – causative Mar 07 '24 at 02:50
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    I think there's confusion in OP's question about the concept of "knowledge" (which is a label as you say, non physical) and where/what all instances of knowledge are. And then you could ask or argue, "is there a type of knowledge that is non physical/stored on non-physical entities". – Jemox Mar 07 '24 at 11:02
  • @causative Point taken, but — and, maybe this is really just down to semantics — a brick arch is an arch. Patterns of information which are identical in every way may or may not be "knowledge" depending on external factors. – mattdm Mar 07 '24 at 20:28
  • @mattdm Then those external factors would have to be included as part of the knowledge pattern, so the patterns are not identical in every way. – causative Mar 07 '24 at 23:22
  • @causative Does the information in a book cease to be knowledge when those who understand the language become extinct? What if the speakers of the language are extinct but there is another book on how to learn the language written in an extant language? What if there is a book of gibberish written that means nothing, but by miraculous coincidence a language is later produced where the gibberish actually ends up meaning something? Was it not knowledge before but then suddenly becomes knowledge? I guess that does happen in real life...landmarks or random features that resemble a face. – DKNguyen Mar 08 '24 at 20:09
  • @DKNguyen You say say that anything is knowledge in potential, waiting for the right interpretation. Even a fully random string of bits could be knowledge in potential. But it is only knowledge in actuality if there is also an interpreter. The knowledge is only knowledge as part of a larger system that includes an interpreter. – causative Mar 08 '24 at 20:16
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    @causative I suppose I can accept that interpretation: that the representation of something can repeatedly become or cease to become knowledge. Sort of like the state of something being a poison. I don't think many people would deny that if the biochemistry the poison acts on no longer exists that the poison no longer exists in that it is no longer a poison, even though the material itself continues to. And if the biochemistry begins existing again it becomes a poison again. – DKNguyen Mar 08 '24 at 20:25
  • @causative If you follow the "external factors" idea to its logical conclusion, don't you arrive at something like "knowledge is encoded by the total current state of the observable universe"? (That doesn't seem very useful.) – mattdm Mar 09 '24 at 19:13
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I think this is unfortunately one of those questions where there's no canonical answer, and so the answer you get from each person really only tells you about their beliefs and not much more.

The majority of professional philosophers are physicalist, but it's only JUST a majority, as small of a majority as you could get. https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/4874

Thus, if you cared what the bulk of professionals in philosophy think, they think knowledge is encoded in physical brains, but only 52% believe that, and they obviously may be wrong.

There's still a lot of work to be done in understanding cognition and consciousness and how our minds work. It's not called "the hard problem" for nothing - it's really really hard!

TKoL
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  • And then at least some of the physicalists are instrumentalists, who think even if you ever measured a bit of knowledge physically that would only be a measurement and say nothing fundamental or true about the world per se... – Stian Mar 07 '24 at 20:08
  • Hi TKol in the distinction between "physicalism and non-physicalism" do they count things like e/m waves, electrical energy, quantum fluctuations, dead cats, and what not... the fermions, bosons, etc... all as being "physical"... and leaving as "non-physicalism" strictly "other-stuff-types, or like soulds or ideas or locations or entities or dimensions or what??". If you know. Is there a firm line, or do people self-identify? Or a list of what stuff belongs on which side? – Alistair Riddoch Mar 09 '24 at 05:39
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    @AlistairRiddoch yes, physicalism includes anything that physicists study. The common word used to be 'materialism', and I'm not entirely sure why that went out of fashion, but one of the reasons may be that it created confusion. People would (and still do, sometimes) think "well if you think only the material exists, then you must not believe in energy, because energy isn't matter", but... clearly, no, any materialist / physicalist believes in energy, because energy is the concept we use to describe how material changes and moves, and clearly materialists believe material changes and moves. – TKoL Mar 09 '24 at 07:53
  • Great info and helped me along a little in my quest to understand "what I am"... in philosophical terms, if self-identifying to others in a community of philosophers. My education in philosophy in uni, got cut short by the arrival of a bunch of kids... so I am close to uneducated in the technical terminology of the field. I think I need a new calssification to describe myself. I am unique as far as I know. I think a "puritanical fundamental physicalist". Not quite the same as an average, run-of-the-mill, everyday physicalist. – Alistair Riddoch Mar 09 '24 at 08:02
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    @TKoL Another reason the term got replaced is probably because materialism is used to denote a system of values focused only on the material goods (opposed to honor, legacy, etc). – rus9384 Mar 09 '24 at 09:05
  • I think some caution is needed to interpret that survey. For example, emergentism is an alternative view, yet, that largely has a physical foundation. – Jarrod Christman Mar 09 '24 at 10:36
  • @JarrodChristman sure, survey interpretations are always warranted, because it's not always obvious what people mean by certain answers. I would probably say most people agreeing with "emergentism" probably mean the mind emerges from the brain - ie a form of physicalism (in fact, that's what physicalism MEANS about the mind, usually). – TKoL Mar 09 '24 at 10:47
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Knowledge is typically taken to be non-physical. For instance, to ride a bicycle, you use what epistemologists might call knowledge-how (SEP). If you tie your shoes, for instance, you can't go to the store and buy a pound of shoe tying in the same way you might for okra. However, that comes from the caveat that according to a typical physicalist set of presumptions, that knowledge is somehow encoded by physical things like neurons.

There is typically a duality when dealing with information and knowledge and mental states that reflects the traditional division of mind-body duality. Consider that software and hardware are such a dualism. In communication theory, one talks about the medium and the message. And of course, the classic discussion is about mind and body. So, when most people refer to knowledge, they are talking about something that is not concrete, but abstract. In the same way a painting is more than paints, knowledge is more than connected neurons, or semantics is more than syntax.

In typical usage, therefore, what a person knows dies with them, unless it is written down and read by someone else. Books are seldom described as knowing things, but rather are treated conceptually as containers for knowledge. On the classical view of knowledge, it must be at least justified, true belief, and belief is a state that is rather peculiar to philosophical agents.

J D
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  • Knowledge is typically taken to be non-physical - What would be an example of an exception? Eliminative materialism? Reductive materialism? – Mark Mar 06 '24 at 22:50
  • JD -- do I detect a drift toward dualism/triplism? ;-> Four and a half decades ago, the "Hard Problem of Consciousness", plus the even harder "problem of values/valuing" for physicalism convinced me to pursue dualism as a Research Programme. Could knowledge be the tipping point for you? – Dcleve Mar 06 '24 at 23:30
  • @Mark In the USMC, the terms 'knowledge' and 'wisdom' in boot camp refers to the physical binder recruits are given for passing their oral exams. One can also point to a book and say it contains knowledge. So, in some senses of the word, 'knowledge' doesn't denote a the message, but rather the medium, so to speak. Thus some definitions of knowledge refer to a physical entity in some way. – J D Mar 06 '24 at 23:33
  • @Dcleve I think it's a foundationalist's obsession with trying to declare primitives and work through complexes to all encompassing theories of everything. Consciousness and experience, reason and language, and sensory data are integrated to the point where none and all are primary depending on the model one prefers to build. An idealist simply recognizes that without thought, one cannot think about the physical. A physicalist recognizes that thought is inescapably linked to physical systems, and consciousness is just where thought introspects. Whether one's model is 1, 2, or 3-istic is just.. – J D Mar 06 '24 at 23:40
  • a preference for one's language categories which are increasingly looking like nothing more than data types expressed in natural language ontology used in metaphysical discourse. To really be a pluralist, one has to set aside the question of which model is right and simply ask if a model is adequate relative to a goal. – J D Mar 06 '24 at 23:43
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    @JD -- and that I think is the question here: is the "physicalist" model adequate? And if not -- why not? And if it is, then why we keep entertaining "idealist" models? After all, we know for a fact that any kind of knowledge can be recorded on a physical media (and, therefore, exist as such). Why, then, would one propose that this model is not adequate enough and that knowledge must also exist in some non-material form? – Yuri Zavorotny Mar 07 '24 at 00:18
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    "Consider that software and hardware are such a dualism" - I would actually say that's a perfect example of monism. Hardware and software are both encoded in physical forms, and software is implemented through physical mechanisms (logic gates). – TKoL Mar 07 '24 at 08:12
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    @TKoL Software is an abstraction. Ot is no more physical than mathematical pairs of functions defining circles or the truth-aptness of propositions. 1s and 0s are abstract objects, not physical ones. – J D Mar 07 '24 at 13:23
  • It is exactly the kind of "physical" than physicalists mean. – TKoL Mar 07 '24 at 13:37
  • @TKoL As a physicalist, I repudiate that claim. – J D Mar 07 '24 at 14:44
  • As a physicalist, you repudiate the claim that software is implemented, in the real world, the way a physicalist model of the world would suggest? Are you sure you're a physicalist? – TKoL Mar 07 '24 at 14:52
  • @TKoL As a software engineer, I'd suggest you think more about the differences between software and hardware. Hardware is physical, and software is an abstraction of hardware. I'd recommend: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computation-physicalsystems/ – J D Mar 07 '24 at 14:59
  • @JD the only examples of working software we have work because they are implemented on physical machines, not because of a secondary software soul substance. I don't see how you could think software is a counter example to physicalism while calling yourself a physicalist. – TKoL Mar 07 '24 at 15:01
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    @TKoL That's because you are confused. I never said anything remotely resembling what you claim I said. – J D Mar 07 '24 at 16:40
  • Oh, you don't know the difference between Cartesian and generic dualism, right? – J D Mar 07 '24 at 16:41
  • Cartesian dualists aren't physicalists. I don't think generic dualists are either. Which one are you? – TKoL Mar 07 '24 at 16:57
  • @TKoL I think it's a foundationalist's obsession with trying to declare primitives and work through complexes to all encompassing theories of everything. Consciousness and experience, reason and language, and sensory data are integrated to the point where none and all are primary depending on the model one prefers to build. An idealist simply recognizes that without thought, one cannot think about the physical. A physicalist recognizes that thought is inescapably linked to physical systems, and consciousness is just where thought introspects. Whether one's model is 1, 2, or 3-istic is just.. – J D Mar 07 '24 at 17:06
  • a preference for one's language categories which are increasingly looking like nothing more than data types expressed in natural language ontology used in metaphysical discourse. To really be a pluralist, one has to set aside the question of which model is right and simply ask if a model is adequate relative to a goal – J D Mar 07 '24 at 17:07
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Knowledge is information about facts. It is stored in the memory of our brain and can be retrieved by suitable mental processes.

Apparently, information is non-physical.

Jo Wehler
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    "Apparently, information is non-physical" -- what about information processed by computers, or information stored in a hard-drive, or the information on a vinyl record. Would you describe such information as non-physical too? In what sense a vinyl record is non-physical? – Yuri Zavorotny Mar 06 '24 at 23:46
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    @YuriZavorotny I distinguish between information and the carrier of the information. You name different carrier of information, while my point is the information. It is independent from the carrier. Analogy: A printed book has pages. The pages are not the information but the carrier of the information. – Jo Wehler Mar 07 '24 at 05:19
  • I understand that we can make that distinction because information is independent of any particular media. Any physical carrier can be destroyed -- but all information that was recorded on it gets transferred on some other media (smoke, heat radiation, etc). Therefore, any information survives only because it is (re-)recorded someplace on some physical media. And, therefore, the information is inseparable from the media it is currently recorded on. – Yuri Zavorotny Mar 07 '24 at 07:23
  • This apparent paradox -- that information is both independent and inseparable from its physical carrier -- is, I think, the reason for all this confusion. Still, I think that the fact that no information can exist outside of its carrier(s) should be enough to describe it as physical. – Yuri Zavorotny Mar 07 '24 at 07:26
  • @YuriZavorotny I do not agree that "information is inseparable from its physical carrier": You can move information from one physical stick to another physical stick. – Jo Wehler Mar 07 '24 at 07:29
  • OK, maybe think of the Universe as one big physical carrier that contains all its information (which, according to the law of conservation, can be neither destroyed nor created). Yes, the bits of this information keep being moved within the Universe. But every bit is always recorded somewhere -- which is to say that information cannot and does not exists outside the physical Universe, which is to say that it is inseparable from the physical Universe. – Yuri Zavorotny Mar 07 '24 at 07:46
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    @YuriZavorotny You have an interesting perspective. Why don't you just go ahead and post an answer of your own? – Mark Mar 07 '24 at 11:57
  • @YuriZavorotny The extension of that is that would be that everything is physical, including things like dreams, numbers, ideas, etc. – DKNguyen Mar 09 '24 at 05:06
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Knowledge is information that is analyzed, interpreted, understood, assigned meanings and linked with other pieces of knowledge within the mind.

Knowledge can exist only within the mind. If you write down what you know, it becomes information again. Whoever reads it must analyze, interpret and understand it in order to turn it into knowledge.

Knowledge is immaterial just like all information is. Knowledge has no measurable physical properties at all. There are no laws of physics governing knowledge, no equations for calculating knowledge, no parameters to put in such non-existing equations.

Pertti Ruismäki
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  • Since you are linking the nature of knowledge to the nature of the mind, can you please clarify what your stance in philosophy of mind is? There are different proposed solutions to the mind-body problem, such as different versions of dualism (interactionism, psycho-physical parallelism, occasionalism, epiphenomenalism, property dualism) and different versions of physicalism (behaviorism, identity theory, functionalism, nonreductive physicalism, eliminative materialism). – Mark Mar 07 '24 at 12:29
  • To me the mind is just the brain's capacity to process information. The mind decides what the body does. I don't see any problem with that and I don't care which philosophical stance it represents. – Pertti Ruismäki Mar 07 '24 at 14:22
  • Re "Knowledge is immaterial just like all information is": That's quite obviously wrong. Information is "Imprinted", sometimes quite literally, on some "physical" medium, even if that medium is bare spacetime and the information is its vibration in the form of gravitational waves. While the specific medium is mostly irrelevant, some medium is indispensable. I'd admit that the issue is less clear with "qualified" or "understood" information, a.k.a. "knowledge". But in the end, there is no reason to believe that this addition is more than just just additional (meta) information. – Peter - Reinstate Monica Mar 09 '24 at 18:30
  • There is an entire field of mathematics concerned with information content, transfer and storage, founded by Claude Shannon. – niels nielsen Mar 09 '24 at 21:24
  • @Peter-ReinstateMonica The fact that information is always "imprinted" on some physical medium does not mean that information itself is material stuff. Information is a description of the physical object it is encoded in. The shape of a radio wave, the configurations of ink on paper, ones and zeroes in a computer. – Pertti Ruismäki Mar 10 '24 at 04:58
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What is knowledge is subjective on the entity that is able to know it. Potentially, everything is knowledge for something.

Knowledge doesn't exist in itself; it's an emergent concept, a shortcut of language and thought, like "temperature", "solid object" or "light".

Given a choosing entity (good luck defining what that is) they will make choices that depend partly on what they "know". What that means in practice is that there are certain arrangements of physical entities, be it ink molecules, light, biological neuron connections, weights in an artificial neural network or whatever, that this entity uses to make choices on what to do (which includes determining what to register as new knowledge to be used for later choices). The criteria on what arrangements count as knowledge is totally dependent on what this entity is.

Note that this definition is necessarily broad. A blank piece of paper might be said to contain no knowledge but it can be used to make decisions or learn facts about what paper is like. Same for a mountain slope that will hold information about itself which can be considered valuable in certain circumstances, such as the objective of a space probe on Mars, which goes there specifically to acquire this knowledge.

If you want to narrow it down you'll have to speak about important or useful knowledge, both concepts that deepen the dependence on evaluations made by the entity that possesses it (or could).

I guess you could define "knowledge" as anything that some entity in some situation would consider as such, but I'm afraid that you'd find that this would encompass the whole Universe and all its component parts.

Rad80
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By definition, knowledge cannot be "physical". Go through a simple logic exercise. One could, in principle, learn something that supports the truth of physicalism. In this case, knowledge COULD be physical. However, one could also learn something that definitively showed that physicalism is untrue of anything in our universe (decisive evidence for idealism, say). In the second case, the knowledge could NOT POSSIBLY be physical. Yet the two postulated bits of knowledge, as a general category, are not fundamentally any different. They should be of the came ontology. So -- knowledge as a category, cannot be physical.

The most useful ontologic framework I have found, is Popper's 3 worlds. See https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/p/popper80.pdf Popper articulated three types of things in this world, those things with time and location properties, those with just time properties, and those with neither. Matter is in world 1, experiences in world 2, and ideas/abstractions in world 3. Knowledge is in the third world, it has no time nor location intrinsic to it.

Dcleve
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  • I would rather suggest that knowledge exists only in World 2, i.e. the human mind. Knowledge is interpreted and understood information with a meaning. Interpretation, understanding and meaning are purely psychological things existing only within a conscious mind. World 3 is the accumulated history of human civilisation, all the actions by all people, all man-made changes to World 1. – Pertti Ruismäki Mar 07 '24 at 07:43
  • Through our senses we input information from and about World 1. In World 2 we process that information, interpret, analyze, understand, assign meanings, turn it into knowledge. Through our muscles we output information to Worlds 3 and 1, – Pertti Ruismäki Mar 07 '24 at 07:49
  • @PerttiRuismäki -- I think that in some cases, we see leakage between Popper's three worlds, and more interaction and "fusion" elements than his thinking suggests we should see. I use his model as a "useful framework" for understanding the world but far from a rigid constraint. Relative to we humans, I agree the primary mode of knowledge is as you describe. BUT - our unconscious System 1 also has knowledge. And unconscious AI gather knowledge, and can act upon it. Generalizing universals from the role of consciousness in our own higher level processing is overgeneralizing. – Dcleve Mar 07 '24 at 14:38
  • I currently have a chat running with Ludwig V and Marco Ocram that has been exploring ontology issues, and has drifted into three worlds and pluralism. There might be a good place to do further discussion: https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/151765/discussion-on-answer-by-dcleve-the-implication-if-we-discovered-that-natural-abi – Dcleve Mar 07 '24 at 14:42
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I believe that knowledge in its absolute sense is not countable. That unique knowledge, then, is nothing but beingness or existence. Again, it is nothing but consciousness. In other words, absolute knowledge is / must be always with consciousness.

One can stick either to these concepts - "no knowledge without consciousness" or "no consciousness without knowledge". Again, from our daily experience, after deep sleep (as if we were dead) we feel like knowledge (even though this is not absolute knowledge) is recollected from somewhere. That is, there must be some connection between knowledge and consciousness. All these show that knowledge and consciousness are synonymous in the absolute sense. So we can say that knowledge transcends physical and non-physical state. A thing that is related to physical as well as non-physical must be something more than these two, isn't it?

If something is non-physical, is it capable to grasp / apprehend / realise / something physical? Similarly, if something is physical, is it capable to grasp / apprehend / realise something non-physical?

SonOfThought
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Sticking my neck out ...

Before experiments demonstrated quantum entanglement to be real (instantaneous "communication" of entangled states that, sadly, can't be exploited), it was easy to test if knowledge/information (are the 2 interchangeable?) was physical/not? If information can achieve Faster Than Light (FTL) speeds, it "has to be" nonphysical (matter is slower than light and the fastest energy is light). What is it that which is neither energy nor matter?

Agent Smith
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    I think this is only one (albeit interesting) way that knowledge could be non-physical. – usul Mar 08 '24 at 21:00
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Yes. Non-physical. Abstract.

Knowledge is understanding, concepts, skills, experiences.

We can store and transfer knowledge using physical medium to capture the concepts. But the knowledge itself is abstract. Requires a host to exist.

If there were no beings to know things, there would be no "knowledge".

It may be worth noting that knowledge is not exclusively a human phenomenon... many animals collect and store some knowledge too.

Alistair Riddoch
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Yes, it is non-physical. But the question is: are intellectual people non-physical? Of course not!

Why is it important?

Many people are just not interested in knowledge, so those who seek it make it physical because knowledge itself can be non-physical but from where we get it becomes tangible; hence, it is non-physical in physical form.

Rabail Anjum
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  • What does mean: knowledge is "non-physical in physical form"? – Jo Wehler Mar 07 '24 at 06:56
  • Well knowledge itself is not physical but the things (people, books, or other tangible things) from where we get knowledge are physical. Here, another question comes. Is knowledge of the human mind physical which is not obtained by any external sources? No, it is non-physical. At least, that's how I think. You may disagree. – Rabail Anjum Mar 07 '24 at 16:01
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    I agree that knowledge in our mind is non-physical. - If I write down my knowledge on a sheet of paper and then burn the paper, the physical carrier of the knowledge, the knowledge still exists. The physical paper was totally irrelevant for the knowledge, it was only a means to communicate knowledge. – Jo Wehler Mar 07 '24 at 16:12
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"What Is Knowledge" - I have to say, this question gave me a pose. After a while, I realized that I didn't have an answer. From the human point of view, we are missing a lot of answers. What is the matter? What is life? What is knowledge?

TheMatrix Equation-balance
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The selected answer seems like the best one, to me. I just want to note that there are more options than non-physical vs physical-state-of-the-brain.

In fact, it is completely uncontroversial that there is no physical state of the brain which is sufficient for being knowledge (with the possible exception of some weird examples). The world outside the brain needs to be in a certain state too -- at the very least, the thing believed needs to be true, which is not typically something guaranteed by the physical state of the brain.

Many philosophers believe the dependence on states outside of the brain goes even further than that -- what it is you believe (and therefore know, when your belief is knowledge) is not just a matter of the physical state of your brain, but also the physical state of the world beyond your brain (again, typically). That view is called "externalism about content", and is maybe the most interesting insight of 20th century philosophy; I recommend you check out the literature on it.

Damien
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  • Since most things past generations considered (sometimes rock-solid) "knowledge" were plain wrong, there is no reason but conceit to assume that our generation is different. Which implies that there is very little, if any, "truly true" knowledge, and, correspondingly, no necessity for anything outside the brain to correspond to it. – Peter - Reinstate Monica Mar 09 '24 at 18:36
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Good question, and one involving the problem of the universals. Ultimately, knowledge, if such a thing can exist at all, must involve intentionality, that is it must be about something. That means that when we know something, it must involve apprehension of the thing known. When I say "Fido is a Dog", I possess a proposition that is about Fido and about "Dogginess" and about Dogginess being true of Fido. Indeed, for this proposition to be true, it must be about something that actually is the case; as the saying goes, "veritas est adaequatio intellectus et rei": truth is the conformity of the intellect with the thing.

Now, how can this kind of intentionality take place? You mentioned physicalism, which is interesting, because intentionality, as as species of telos (aboutness is a species of directedness), is banned from physicalism as an assumed tenet. Indeed, this is one of the decisive blows against physicalism. Others are the so-called problem of qualia and the inability to account for subjective experience (taken to absurd lengths like eliminativism, i.e., the denial of subjective experience), as well as the existence of abstract concepts (take Triangularity as opposed to concrete triangles in the world; you never encounter the first, only the second, but the second are made intelligible by means of the first which are abstracted from those concrete instances).

So, I would say, knowledge is immaterial.

Laurentius Oktavian Zamoyski
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The knowledge argument is the formal way of wording your question that philosophers try to answer. TedEd has a really good video that can help you think about the answer to your question:

Is knowledge physical? Qualia and The Knowledge Argument

Vladimir Andral Jr.
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    It is advised to supply links with a citation or your own explanation to avoid empty answers when those links die. – Johan Mar 09 '24 at 14:00
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The term "knowledge" is used with a lot of different meanings. Here are the first two and main (according to me) definitions from Dictionary.com

1. Acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation; general erudition 2. Familiarity or conversance, as with a particular subject or branch of learning: A knowledge of accounting was necessary for the job.

(You can find the same essential descriptions from most dictionaries.)

Now, in philosophy in particular, we can consult its description by Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (part of which are very similar to the above definitions):

"In introductory classes to epistemology, we are taught to distinguish between three different kinds of knowledge. The first kind is acquaintance knowledge: we know our mothers, our friends, our pets, etc., by being acquainted with them. The second kind is knowledge of facts, propositional knowledge, or knowledge-that: this is the sort of knowledge we acquire when we learn that, say, Ithaca is in New York State or that Turin is located in Italy. It is customary to add to the list a third kind of knowledge that is supposed to be distinct both from acquaintance knowledge and from propositional knowledge. One possesses this knowledge when one can be truly described as knowing how to do something: play the piano, make a pie, walk, speak, create, build, and so on."

In the third kind, we read the word "possess", which might allude to a physical possession only that is isn't.

If something is physical, it can be perceived with our bodily senses. Not only the 5 basic senses but with and of the about 50 senses that are known. E.g. sense of movement (kinesthetic), gravity, balance/equilibrium, orientation, etc.

So, the criterion for anything about whether it is physical or not, is "Can it perceived by our senses?"

If you apply this criterion to all the above mentioned definitions/descriptions of knowledge, you will easily conclude that it is not physical.

Apostolos
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  • If something is physical, it can be perceived with our bodily senses - 1) what's the source of this definition? 2) we cannot perceive neutrinos with our bodily senses, therefore neutrinos are not physical? – Mark Mar 09 '24 at 22:59
  • First of all, my stetement about "senses" was not a definition. It was a logical argument that served my position. A short definition of the term "physical" is "something that is material". Now, about neutrinos and other particles: they are not visible to the naked eye. But they are visible using specialized instruments. See, they are still "perceivable". – Apostolos Mar 10 '24 at 07:59
  • Other counterexamples: 1) we cannot perceive other universes in the multiverse with our bodily senses (if a multiverse exists), therefore, other universes in the multiverse are not physical? 2) We cannot perceive dark matter with our bodily senses, therefore, dark matter is not physical? – Mark Mar 10 '24 at 13:46
  • Another problem: we can experience knowledge in our mind, therefore, we can perceive knowledge. Therefore, knowledge is physical? – Mark Mar 10 '24 at 13:49
  • Before continuing with other examples and problems: if you agree with my stement "If something is physical, it can be perceived with our bodily senses" --which I see that you didn't reject-- wouldn't you like to upvote my answer? – Apostolos Mar 10 '24 at 18:23
  • I don't agree with that statement, because you haven't shown that it is the case. You simply asserted it axiomatically. Moreover, I'm offering counterexamples. Again, please cite the source of that axiom/definition, or show how it is the case. Your claim if something is physical, it can be perceived with our bodily senses just came out of nowhere without any justification whatsoever. – Mark Mar 10 '24 at 18:25
  • How else can you assert that something is physical if not by perceiving it, i.e. using your senses? – Apostolos Mar 10 '24 at 23:06
  • Using dark matter again as an example, dark matter is not perceived with our bodily senses, but its existence is postulated theoretically/hypothetically in order to account for certain astronomical observations. On the other hand, according to certain epistemologies, (some of) our senses may very well reveal a non-physical realm rather than a physical realm. See https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/109913/66156 – Mark Mar 10 '24 at 23:51
  • You reject my realistic and well-grounded answer about the non-physicality of knowledge by countering it with a theoretical/hypothetical model .... I have nothing more to say. (Besides this exchange has reached the limits as I am informed by stackexchange.) – Apostolos Mar 11 '24 at 07:34
  • "In astronomy, dark matter is a hypothetical form of matter that appears not to interact with light or the electromagnetic field. Dark matter is implied by gravitational effects which cannot be explained by general relativity unless more matter is present than can be seen. Such effects occur in the context of formation and evolution of galaxies,[1] gravitational lensing,[2] the observable universe's current structure, mass position in galactic collisions,[3] the motion of galaxies within galaxy clusters, and cosmic microwave background anisotropies." – Mark Mar 11 '24 at 13:44
  • Is your position that dark matter doesn't exist or is not physical? If dark matter is physical, can you perceive dark matter with your bodily senses? – Mark Mar 11 '24 at 13:45
  • I ended up asking this question: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/q/110487/66156 – Mark Mar 11 '24 at 15:22
  • You are abusing this space, @Mark! You have to respect stackexhange policies. – Apostolos Mar 13 '24 at 06:34