The Difference Between Knowledge and Wisdom (and Does IQ Matter?)
Let’s
for a second imagine two very different people, with two very different
backgrounds, studying the same thing in their own unique ways. In this case,
it’s the sea. The first is a university professor, someone who is an expert on
oceanography; the second is an old-fashioned fisherman.
The
professor went out into the world, conquered its many challenges, eventually
finding himself at the most prestigious of universities, learning at the edge
of our collective knowledge. The fisherman, however, did what he was expected:
He graduated from high school — itself
quite an achievement in his community — but then,
he took over from his father, tending to the waters that surrounded them, just
as his own father had taken over from his father before him.
Over
the decades, these men studied exactly the same domain but from different
vantage points, with slightly different purposes. The professor knew all of the
forces governing the bodies of water on Earth, but he spent little time in the
actual sea. The fisherman, naturally, spent all of his time in the sea, but he
knew little of the fancy terminology.
Now,
let’s ask an interesting question: Who out of these men has a deeper
understanding of how the sea works — the
professor or the fisherman?
It’s
a tough question, and it’s also an ambiguous one. If your first urge is to ask
your own question in response to clarify what is meant by “a deeper
understanding,” I’d say that’s a good step. Context here matters. And yet, when
in different forms this question is asked in philosophy (rationalism vs.
empiricism) or in psychology (Do IQ tests measure something meaningful as it
relates to the lived world?) or in terms of the utility of logic (abstractions
vs. reality), many people settle for one side and have a hard time reconciling
the two in a way that does both of them justice.
At
its core, this question is really a question of knowledge: How do we gain
knowledge about the world? Rationalism says that it comes from our thoughts
(from language, reason, and mathematics), whereas empiricism says that it comes
from our senses (from observations, habit-patterns, and intuitions), and once
this distinction has been made, each school carves its path further away from
the other, leading to futile arguments that ignore the possibility that maybe
simple reduction isn’t the best way forward here.
My
own starting point is slightly different. First, I suggest that a better way to
look at this is to distinguish between knowledge and wisdom, and then, I also
suggest that we move away from the rationalist-empiricist dichotomy. In
Buddhism, for example, there is no dichotomy, because in many traditions,
thought itself is considered to be a sense, just a more powerful one — in a way, a secondary one.
Their starting point is consciousness, and from there, they see each of the
capabilities of the human body — sight,
sound, smell, touch, taste, and yes, thought — as a
point of inquiry into the nature of reality.
It’s
very clear that humans don’t experience all that consciousness has to offer.
Snakes, for example, can see things in their field of consciousness that humans
can’t. Similarly, dogs can smell things in their field of consciousness that
humans can’t. This doesn’t mean that these sights and smells don’t exist in
human environments; it just means that humans don’t have the evolutionary
bodies that can tap into these different kinds of experiences. Hypothetically,
if consciousness is an infinite dark field, then each sense can be thought of
as a small bright light that illuminates one part of it to uncover reality. A
dog’s or a snake’s field lights up different parts than that of a human’s field,
but neither captures the whole thing.
The
interesting thing about humans, however, is that we have this capacity for
complex thinking, which allows us to create knowledge. Now, what is knowledge?
Going with the current analogy, knowledge is the ability to reach beyond a
single isolated light into the infinite field of consciousness. You might be
able to refine and train your hearing and your sight to allow you to study more
of reality, but there is still a limit to what you can hear and smell, which
means that the reach of the five senses is limited. The reach of the sixth
sense, the secondary sense — thought — allows us to use language
and mathematics to create abstractions that can predict what
will happen in a galaxy a million light-years away from here. In a way, it
allows us to create additional senses to explore consciousness and the Universe
with. That said, and this is why its a secondary sense, none of this is a
matter of direct experience, and that brings with it occasional problems.
Thought
and knowledge impose abstractions onto reality, and with the right thought and
the right knowledge, they allow us to map this reality fairly well. That said,
no matter how good the map is, it’s still a map and not the actual thing.
Observations and intuitions through the other five senses allow us to directly
experience this reality. There is no map. It’s just a bare, naked experience
that connects to the brain. Now, it’s well-known that these other five senses
can lead us astray (through cognitive biases or poor emotional regulation), but
if adequately trained (as contemplative traditions like Buddhism aim to do),
then they are a far stronger reflection of a particular lived environment than
thought.
It’s
no coincidence that advanced meditators, who have refined their senses to a
higher degree than people less acquainted with the path, are said to possess a
higher degree of wisdom, and that’s because their experience of reality is
truer, less clouded. They have learned to directly interact with their
surroundings in a way that harmonizes their being with that of the being around
them. In this way, we can say that thinking, the secondary sense, is what
allows us to build knowledge (which is both collective — creating science — and individual — learning science), and in
this way, knowledge errs towards rationalism. But the other five senses allow
us to create wisdom, which is only ever individual, and it errs towards
empiricism. Reducing one to the other ignores the fact
that they are interactive in a way that perhaps we don’t have the vocabulary to
fully map.
In
this sense, if we take it back to the professor and the fisherman, we can say
that the professor has knowledge about the sea, whereas the fisherman is wise
in regards to how to act in harmony with the sea. This distinction is important
because one references a secondary sense (thought) and its ability to explain
things far beyond the reaches of the other senses (although only in terms of
hypotheticals because it hasn’t experienced them) and the other references the
five senses that can be refined to understand things well enough to give us
information about how to actually act in the world in front of us.
If
the professor suddenly went out into the sea with only his knowledge and
without any experience, he may have a slightly easier time interacting with the
sea than, say, someone who is completely blank, but there is no way that he
would have the intuition that adequately tells him how to survive a storm or
how to respond to the currents in the right way. Conversely, the fisherman may
be able to navigate all of the harshness that this world throws at him, but he
can’t tell you why in
a way that makes universal sense.
In
the field of psychology, the concept of IQ, which is supposed to roughly
measure general intelligence (mostly hereditary) has a robust history of
research behind it. In fact, it’s one of the most concretely tested measures in
the field and the correlations it shows are comparatively sturdy. Yet, there is
a lot of controversy about whether or not it really plays as big of a role in
the real world as is espoused by some people. Naturally, people have an
incentive to both downplay its role (“It’s not fair that something so out of
our control should dictate so much of what we get out of life”) and to upstage
its role (It’s really hard to accurately measure these things, and some people
have an undue confidence in establishing correlations as if they suggest
something they actually don’t). The question, then, is: How much does IQ matter
as it relates to things like success in the real world?
In
the framework I have laid out, IQ would roughly capture abstract thinking
ability, or the capacity to create and accumulate knowledge. Well, does
knowledge help in navigating the real world? Or better yet, is the professor
more equipped to deal with the harshness of the sea than the average person?
And the answer is clearly yes. That said, a fisherman doesn’t need a high IQ to
dominate in his area of expertise if he has spent time accumulating wisdom in
that particular domain and correcting for errors over time.
Wisdom
can be both contextual (being a great fisherman or being a great soccer player
or being a great copywriter) or it can be general (understanding and dealing
with life in a healthy way as, say, a monk would be better equipped to do), and
both of these kinds of wisdom can be helped with knowledge but knowledge isn’t
a requirement for them to manifest if the empirical capacity of the senses in
the person embodying them has been developed to a high enough level of
competence, and an IQ test has nothing useful to say about that. All it does is tell you that you have the inborn
capacity to accumulate and create knowledge, which is clearly important, but
not important enough, because the real world goes one step beyond theory, and
that is, it requires action — the ability to interact with and adapt to a changing
reality, which is an entirely different ball-game.
When
a fisherman is out in the sea, he moves with the waves, and he dances with the
life-forms beneath him, without thought, without abstractions. He experiences
subtle vibrations of physical matter on his body, and his brain then
contextualizes these vibrations based on prior experience, which has been
earned by prior mistakes and lessons, and it tells him exactly what to do
without actually telling him anything at all. There is no way to entirely
replicate the effect of this process without actually having lived the life he
has lived in relation to the sea — no
knowledge, no IQ test, can save him without this background of having walked
the actual path.
The
professor may do important work in the field of oceanography, and this work may
even tell us something new and important about our relationship to nature,
enhancing our collective knowledge in such a way as to push us towards a
brigher future, but this domain is different from the domain of lived
experience, different from the subtleties of reality.
This
way of thinking has a lot of benefits, but one of the clearer ones, to me, is
that it reaffirms the truth of the old cliche that everybody can teach you
something. As a naturally curious person — at times,
an arrogant person — someone who at a young age
had managed to learn a lot, and then learned to use that
knowledge to disarm people with word-games, I have always been quick to think
that I know more than I do — that if I
can intellectually understand the logic of something, I get it; that I don’t always need to
hear someone out, nor do I need to respect the wisdom of their experience and
what that has taught them.
Now,
time is a generous teacher, and while I’m still not completely beyond this kind
of thinking, I’m getting better at it — I’m more
eager to pause, to listen, to give people space when they
appear to be grasping something they feel is of substance even if they don’t
have the language to fully communicate that substance in a way that naturally
resonates with me.
It’s
easy to take one side of the argument over the other, which we usually do based
on our own unique biases and our own unique predispositions, but the truth is
that, in actuality, things are messy, and people are complex, and the world we
interact with is even more complex. Many different things can be true at the
same time, depending on the interactions that are in play, depending on the
predominant context. The point is never to declare victory for rationalism or
empiricism, or for IQ or no-IQ, but it’s to honestly assess and see what works — why, how, and when.
https://medium.com/personal-growth/the-difference-between-knowledge-and-wisdom-and-does-iq-matter-7e0a48308067?sk=b07e8dcc155e1e407a0ff2771fe7c3c1
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