Chapter 3

Knowledge

Knowledge is categorically different from information, and is first and foremost an experience. The dead-language book test settles it: information is intrinsic, since the pattern in a book is distinguishable from chaos whether or not anyone can read it, while knowledge is relational and needs a reader with the key. That raises a regress – if the key is itself encoded, it needs a key – and the chapter argues that sensation is not the floor of it. The better word is sampling: digital machines sample, and so do humans. What happens after sampling is inside consciousness and cannot currently be defined; the chapter files that as a boundary of the framework rather than papering over it. Decoders need not be human, which is how to think about agents, and the question of whether they truly decode meaning is left unadjudicated.