The Internet of Us

by Michael P. Lynch

  So, understanding is a kind of knowing that involves grasping relationships—the network, or parts and whole. But crucially, the relationships you grasp when you understand something aren’t just correlations. To truly understand, you also need to know what depends on what—why the spread of a certain disease is related to hand-washing habits, or why having good apples depends on having a certain amount of rainfall.

  The dependency relations we grasp when we understand can come in different forms. Some relations might be about cause and effect. Think of a game of chess: if I move my bishop to a certain square, I cause it to change its position. But they might also be logical: if I move my bishop to this square, it will be vulnerable to your pawn. Or semantic: the bishop can move to that square because the rules define it as being able to move diagonally across the board. In other words, the first important element of understanding is grasping dependency relations: having systematic knowledge of how things both fit together and depend on one another, causally, logically and otherwise.13

  That’s why the person who truly understands something is often the person who can best explain it. In Plato’s famous dialogue Euthyphro, the title character is an unlikable busybody and self-anointed expert in religious matters. Socrates meets him on the steps of the courthouse, where Euthyphro is on his way to prosecute his own father, of all people. As it happens, Socrates is waiting for pre-trial proceedings to begin in his own trial for impiety and blasphemy against the gods. Socrates “innocently” asks Euthyphro to tell him what holiness is—he could use some advice, he says. Euthyphro answers, rather fussily, that holiness is what is loved by the gods.

  No doubt, says Socrates slyly. But which comes first? Do the gods love what is holy because it is so, or is something holy simply because the gods happen to love it? Socrates is pointing out that Euthyphro’s answer is really just expressing a correlation:

  x is holy when, and only when, x is loved by the gods.

  If Euthyphro is right, being holy is perfectly correlated with being loved by the gods. So if you know what the gods love, you can perfectly predict what is holy—and vice versa. But this leaves it open which side of that correlation is really doing the work. It leaves open what depends on what. As such, it really doesn’t offer an explanation of why the gods love what they do. Hence, it also doesn’t offer an explanation of what holiness is.

  Plato’s point is instructive for another reason: it shows that this need for explanation can arise even in cases where the question of how much data (or how little) is moot. Euthyphro’s equation, after all, purports to be a perfect correlation, and as such would be ideal for prediction. But it still doesn’t answer the question. And were you an ancient Greek, it would be a question that would matter for how you conceived of your relationship to the gods. If you think of the gods as discovering what is of ultimate value, then you think ultimate value is more fundamental to the universe. If you think they create it, then you think the gods are more fundamental. Which way you go, as Socrates later hints, can change how you see your relationship not just to the gods but to the universe itself.

  Understanding is the kind of knowledge you need in order to be able to give a good explanation of something. And this is why we think of explanations as involving more than mere correlation. They make us aware of why things hang together, which in turn allows us to see that understanding is a matter of degree—the larger and more coherent the set of information one has about apple trees, etc., and the greater one’s reflective and intuitive awareness of the coherent connections between one’s beliefs about those matters, the greater one’s understanding.14 The greater your grasp of the whole, the better able you are to fully explain the phenomenon in question.

  Knowing How to Chuck

  We’ve talked about Plato. Now let’s go highbrow and talk about Chuck. Chuck is a TV comedy in which the title character downloads a huge amount of secret NSA information from an “Intersect” computer. In the second season, a 2.0 version of the Intersect machine comes out, and Chuck is suddenly able to do more than just download facts. The computer literally drops abilities—like the ability to be super-good at kung fu—right into him. He then becomes (as the show says) the government’s “most valuable asset.” Hilarity ensues.

  Chuck, in short, is imagined as having gained knowledge from something like neuromedia. But the knowledge he supposedly gains isn’t just of the book-learnin’ type. It is know-how. He somehow acquires a skill, or what psychologists call procedural knowledge.

  Understanding has a complex relationship to procedural knowledge, or the knowledge involved in having skills. This relationship is important not only for understanding understanding, but for grasping the extent to which technology like neuromedia can help us truly understand and how it cannot. So let’s think about skills and procedural knowledge for a minute.

  Over the course of the twentieth century, the dominant view of procedural knowledge has been that there is a very sharp difference between knowing how and knowing facts. The Oxford don Gilbert Ryle, in his influential 1949 book The Concept of Mind sets himself against the idea that “the primary exercise of minds consists in finding the answers to questions.”15 Knowing how to do something, Ryle suggests, isn’t a matter of knowing a particular fact. Instead, it is more like having an ability to do something. And the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus has influentially argued that knowing how to do something—like ride a bike—can’t simply be understood as grasping a set of rules or directions. At bottom it involves a type of discernment or acuity that can’t be discursively codified.16

  The idea that there is a sharp difference between knowing how and knowing facts seems to have some empirical support as well. Consider the famous case of the patient HM. HM was an epileptic who had undergone a lobectomy. He was then observed to have severe anterograde amnesia. In other words, he would forget events almost immediately after they happened. In a groundbreaking experiment, the cognitive psychologist Brenda Milner had HM perform a mirror-drawing task in which he had to draw the outline of a star through a mirror while not being able to see his own arm.17 The results were astounding: he was able to improve at the task after several days, even though he had no memory of the event. And that may suggest that acquiring a skill is completely distinct from having knowledge of facts, since he got better at doing something that he could never remember having done before.

  This interpretation—and the sharp difference between practical and theoretical knowledge that goes with it—has been recently challenged. As the philosopher Jason Stanley and neuroscientist John Krakauer point out in a recent paper, HM was given explicit instructions before performing the mirror task. He was able to use that knowledge. Of course, being HM, he later forgot that he had that knowledge. He wasn’t able to articulate it. But that doesn’t mean he didn’t possess the knowledge at any point, and that it didn’t play a causal role in his ability to engage in the drawing. More generally, Stanley and Krakauer argue that motor skill tasks involve not just the manifestation of a motor acuity—the ability to make discriminations—but also the employment of receptive knowledge of facts. Motor skills, in other words, are package deals—they are complex states “requiring both increasing knowledge of required actions, and practice-related improvement in the selection and acuity of these actions.”18 In other words, knowing how to ride a bike, or how to play tennis, involves not just physical acuity but at least some, probably unconscious, discursive knowledge.19

  One lesson we can learn from both perspectives—despite their differences—is that greater mastery of a skill involves more knowledge of the complex sort I’ve been calling understanding. Aristotle and Plato saw the relationship between what the Greeks called epistêmê and technê. For the Greeks, technê meant an organized body of know-how or procedural knowledge—cooking, farming, sailing, knitting, programming and playing jazz are all examples. But for Plato and Aristotle both, really mastering a technê or skill meant that the expert understood—in the sense I’ve been explaining—t
he craft.

  For the Greeks, the true expert—whether that person is a craftsman or a scientist—is someone who understands what they are doing. That understanding is what allows them to say why good apples differ from bad, to explain how a streamlined computer program works, to articulate the difference between the good political policy and the disastrous.20 That’s why mastering a skill, for the Greeks, was not the same as having good habits, or even just having a knack or talent.21 To truly master a skill, you of course need some talent, serious motivation, lots and lots of experience and practice; but you also need to understand how the details fit together, how the parts add up to something greater than themselves.22

  The reciprocal relationship between skills and understanding is partly why experts can seem so baffling to the novice. When I was a young man, I studied martial arts with an instructor who drilled me repeatedly in certain traditional forms of striking and throwing. These forms involved following what were strict rules of movement. But when I saw my teacher spar with more advanced students, he would often deviate from those forms. When I asked him why he was not following the very forms I was being told to learn, he replied that he was following them. I just didn’t know enough yet to understand how various actions fit together, and how the skilled practitioner, to fit the moment, could modify a form. The master of a skill both knows the form, knows how it fits into the big picture, and has a certain acuity—one that, as Dreyfus says, cannot be reduced to a list of discrete discursive knowledge. He has an understanding that allows him, as Aristotle might say, to see how the universal is present in the particular.

  So, one way in which understanding is related to skills is that mastering a skill produces understanding. But understanding of any type—understanding, as such—also essentially involves the manifestation of a particular set of skills.

  Let’s consider another story about Socrates, who was supposedly told by the Oracle of Delphi that he was the wisest man in Athens. Socrates famously replied that he only knew that he knew very little, or what he didn’t know. So what sort of knowledge did he have? Well, consider what he was truly good at. One thing, surely, was asking questions. This came from a combination of facts and the ability to draw connections between them. As a result he had know-which, as it were. He knew which questions to ask.

  Knowing-which is another element of understanding. The person who truly understands, in the philosophical sense, is discerning not only the actual situation, but also why various hypotheses and explanations won’t work as well as how to ask what would. They know why kicking the refrigerator here and not there will help get it working. This is something that Socrates was great at, and it is something that experts in general can do. It also explains why understanding increases the better one is at asking the right questions. Experts—those who understand a given subject best—are often able to increase their understanding even further because they have the ability to know which question they should ask in the face of new information. By so doing, they can not only reveal that Euthyphro knows nothing of piety, but that the good folks at MysticApples.com know hardly anything about apples.

  Being able to ask a good question, however, is not the core point. That’s because the skill of being able to ask good questions itself hinges, at least in part, on a simpler (and less overtly verbally orientated) cognitive capacity: the ability to make inferences and draw out a position’s consequences—and not just the actual consequences of, say, a given position on what causes apples to be tasty, but also the consequences of that position in certain counterfactual situations. This is precisely the skill that a good doctor employs when considering whether to administer a drug, or a lawyer uses when considering an argument. It is also, arguably, the skill a good mechanic employs when considering whether to disassemble a head gasket, or an apple farmer uses when deciding whether another farmer’s advice is reasonable. And those who have the capacity to cognitively engage, should they have the requisite verbal and linguistic abilities, will know which questions they should ask in order to carry their inquiries even further.

  Understanding, then, what the Greeks called epistêmê, is a multifaceted sort of knowledge. It involves knowing why and how but also knowing which—which questions to ask, and where we might go next. As such, it both comes from and involves procedural knowledge—skills.

  Procedural knowledge generally comes from experience. You get skills through practice, through a relationship with the world. That’s not to say you can’t gain theoretical knowledge—knowledge of facts—from direct experience. It is probably the best and fastest way in most cases. It is just that you can also gain knowledge of facts by reading. But acquiring a skill requires at least some experience. You can’t just read about it. You need to do something, to practice, to try things out, to fail, to start again.

  People can be trained to do something they couldn’t do before. That is what we are probably thinking about when we suspend belief about poor Chuck. Drugs, after all, provide a temporary type of programming for one’s body. And drugs can change your abilities—make you stronger, faster, less prone to depressive thoughts. But taking a drug to become faster is fundamentally different from learning how to skillfully run faster. Mastering a skill requires trial and error. Such experimentation is how one develops the perceptual and informational acuity—the ability to discriminate between what works and what doesn’t—that is part of the package deal of knowing how to do something well. And that is why Chuck isn’t (I know you’ll be shocked to hear this) the most coherent of fictions. We might be able to acquire a certain level of skill by downloading—just by acquiring new basic abilities. But downloading knowledge other people have acquired via experience isn’t the same as having that experience yourself, isn’t the same as personal trial and error and creative adaptation in the face of circumstance. Downloading, in short, won’t give you mastery. And it won’t give you the understanding that comes with it.

  To truly understand some things, you need to develop a skill; and skills require experience. Which means that understanding often does as well. That’s a point that many of us already grasp intuitively. One sees this in the wellspring of interest in the last few years in organic foods, home brewing and back-to-the-farm movements, especially amongst those under thirty-five—the very demographic of people most heavily invested in, and used to, information technology. The underlying explanations for such movements are of course complex, but part of the story is a shared recognition that doing something yourself—making or growing something—gives you a type of understanding that you would lack otherwise. That’s also why many parents want their children to participate in activities that require hands-on experience. As one parent expressed it to the New York Times, “My partner and I saw that kids were spending too much time interacting with perfect interfaces. . . . We felt that we needed to provide an experience by which they could understand how perfection is achieved—and, more specifically, how that perfection is achieved by working through problems with your hands.”23

  The relationship between experience and understanding tells us something important about the limits not only of neuromedia but of Google-knowing. Google can give us the world. And the Internet and Web 2.0 can certainly give us the information that we need to learn new skills—gaming skills, skills at Web interfacing. These skills can be useful in certain situations, and not just online. But we kid ourselves if we think that we can learn every skill we need simply by downloading it. We need to interact with the world outside our head to do that.

  Coming to Understand as a Creative Act

  Descartes was a late riser. His habit, when possible, was to stay in bed till around noon—musing. One day, according to legend, he was watching a fly zoom around above his head when, suddenly, he realized that he could track its position by measuring its distance from the walls and the ceiling. He understood how to plot its flight path in space . . . and voilà! We get Cartesian coordinates, or so the story goes.

  The story of Descartes’ fly�
��and others like it, such as those about Newton’s apple or Einstein’s clock—are instructive because they emphasize that the moment of understanding can involve sudden insight. Such moments are often called “aha moments” and, in the psychological literature, are collectively taken to signify the “Eureka effect” (so named after Archimedes, who after a moment of great insight shouted “Eureka!”). Of course, most acts of understanding do not require the sudden novel inspiration that Descartes had. But all of them do involve some level of insight. Having such an insight is part of why understanding is fundamentally a creative act.

  Coming to understand is a mental act in the same way that reflecting or deciding are mental acts. They are activities that your mind engages in. They take effort and increase the total cognitive load. Don’t confuse the state of understanding and the act of coming to understand. One can be in a state of understanding, just as one might be in a state of decision (or indecision, as the case may be), without doing anything in particular, or even being conscious of being in that state. Your understanding in such a case is tacit or implicit. Much of what we understand we understand in this way (consider: you probably understand why the water you put in your freezer turns to ice, but you didn’t think about it until just now). But in order to understand, one must first come to understand, and it is this coming to understand that is an act. It is no coincidence that even the terms we use for it, such as “grasping,” are often active.