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The Tree of Knowledge
~ The Sum Total of all Human Understanding ~
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What is different about us that distinguishes us from other life forms on this planet? Is it our opposable thumbs? Is it that we walk upright? Our intelligence? Our soul? Genetically, we are very similar to all the other animals, yet we clearly rule the world. What is it that makes us different? What makes us different is that we have a Tree of Knowledge.
The Tree of Knowledge is the sum total of Human Understanding. It represents the collective knowledge of humanity.
The Tree of Knowledge is the sum total of all human knowledge that can be passed on between individuals. It is everything we have learned as a species. In the broadest sense - it's the totality of everything that everyone knows that is in some sharable form. Printed material - data archives - video - recordings - stories passed on by word of mouth. These all are knowledge that is contained in the Tree of Knowledge. And it is this shared knowledge that is what separates us from the animals. We are different because of the vast amount of knowledge that we as a species share.
The human race can be viewed as a super organism that is made up of individuals. In many ways we are similar to a hive of bees. Bees are far more biologically linked together than humans in that a bee is nothing when taken out of the context of the hive. Just as the cells of our body are individual life forms, we don't look at them as individuals. In the case of humans - and bees - the individual is the human or bee.
What separates humans from animals is our huge amount of collected knowledge that we share as a species.
However - in the case of bees - they are so tightly coupled that one could easily make the argument that it is the hive - not the bee - that is the individual. The hive shares a common mind that the individual bees are but members of the hive mind. These individuals share a common purpose and act as a single organism. And to that extent - it is the hive - not the bee - that acts. Getting stung by a bee is very different that being stung by the hive.
We humans have some hive-like properties. If you take a baby and have a wild animal raise it - is the result more animal than human? I think it is. The individual would only have the knowledge of personal experience. It would not have the knowledge that is available to humans raised by other humans. The vast majority of our personal knowledge is not knowledge we learned on our own - but knowledge we were taught from the collective knowledge of mankind. And it's that collective knowledge that I'm calling the "Tree of Knowledge". |
Most of what animals know is based on instinct. Instinct is best described as knowledge you are born with. Animals know how to eat and avoid being eaten. Perform necessary tasks to stay alive - and to reproduce. in some species - the parents teach certain behaviors to the young who learn mostly through observation. This learned behavior is mostly centered around how to acquire food and how to avoid becoming food for something else. Some animals have a very small tree of knowledge, but human have a vast tree. We know how to build cars, planes, computers, networks, talk on phones, travel through outer space, and split atoms. In every moment of every day we are thinking in words of a language that we were taught to use to communicate. These words, meanings, and our technology all come from our common store of species knowledge which I am calling the Tree of Knowledge.
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Tree of Knowledge depicted
as a Mathematical Fractal
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Many of you are familiar with the "Tree of Knowledge" (knowledge of good and evil) in the Garden of Eden from the Bible stories. Well - that's not what I'm talking about here - except for the issue that I am ripping off the name. In the Church of Reality the use of the word "Tree" has nothing to do with a plant. "Tree" in the Church of Reality is more like a software source code tree that allows thousands of programmers to work together on a common software project. The way directories (folders) are organized on a computer is a tree. Trees are mathematical constructs and are often used to organize data and define the relationships between the data. In the Church of Reality, all knowledge is represented as not only the facts but the relationship between the facts. How the facts are stored and organized.
The Tree of Knowledge includes the way knowledge is structured - accessed - distributed - stored - shared - and the methods that allow it to be built up and maintained. In the Church of Reality the Tree of Knowledge is not a mythical plant but a real data structure that binds society together and allows us to have species knowledge and distribute this knowledge through or technological systems. as an individual - I don't need to learn how to build a car. All I need to do is learn how to drive a car. I rely on the knowledge of millions of other individuals - as well as the stored knowledge of dead people - to create cars for me to drive and planes for me to fly in - and computers for me to surf the web.
Even though I am an individual - almost everything in my life involves interacting with the accumulated knowledge of mankind. What I eat comes out of cans and is raised and killed by other people. All my "stuff" - chairs - desk - TV - bed - car - house - roads - phone - electricity - practically everything provided by other people. We are all totally intertwined with each other in a way that can be viewed as if all of the human species were a single organism - and that we are like cells of that organism - because we share knowledge - the Tree of Knowledge.
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In the beginning ... as the story goes ... there was the big bang. And the universe was created. It was the begining of time and space and the universe was filled with pure energy. The energy then decomposed into matter and the matter formed stars. After billions of years these stars decayed and exploded and the heavier matter formed planets around new stars. one of those planets was our own Earth. Then as the earth cooled and chemical reactions occurred, some of these chemicals had the ability to reproduce themselves out of the chemical soup around them - and primitive life was born.
Then life started to evolve. Survival of the fittest. Early creatures started to adapt - developing better ways to find food and keep from becoming food for something else. Survival consisted of eating - defending - and reproducing. After billions of years - life became more complex. Living creatures developed a nervous system - eyes - ears - touch - smell - taste - life had become smarter. Better eyes for finding food - better camouflage to prevent from becoming food. Better mating skills. Life got smarter - but life was still dumb.
The Bible says, "Thou shalt not eat of the Tree of Knowledge". The Church of Reality says, "Who's hungry?"
Then humans evolved. Just erect apes at first. But apes had already started communication as did many other species of animals. The communication allowed one individual to pass information on to others for the purpose of surviving. Most of this information was limited to hunting, defending, and mating, but individuals who could communicate survived better than those who did not. Humans developed language which allowed them to communicate much more complex ideas. An individual could invent something - like how to start fire - or the wheel - and pass that knowledge on to other individuals. Thus new people could start with the knowledge base of the previous generation and build on that. The process - which started with verbal communication - represents what we call the Tree of Knowledge.
 Eventually humans invented writing. This allowed an individual to write down information that could be communicated to other individuals who were in different locations in both time and space. Writing facilitated communication and allowed more knowledge to be distributed and - for the first time - stored outside the mind of a person. Knowledge could be stored in the form of books.
Then - the printing press was invented. This allowed for mass printing of books, magazines, newspapers, and written knowledge could be spread and stored in huge quantities. More people sharing more knowledge. Then came the telegraph - the telephone - pictures - movies - recorded audio - television - planes - trains - cars - radio. Knowledge exploded. And the knowledge tree continued to grow.
Eventually we invented computers. Computers could not only store information - but could process information. A computer can take a simple thought process - like sorting and choosing - and do it much faster and more accurately than the human brain. Computers became an enhancement to the Tree of Knowledge in that they give the tree itself the ability to think. We are no longer limited to storing information. We can create smart processes to process this information for us and help us understand the reality around us. Now we have the Internet - e-mail - digital video - instant chat - databases - spreadsheets - robots. And it continues to grow. And the more it grows - the further we distinguish ourselves from the other species of life on this planet. |
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 Think back 1000 years ago. Being human was quite different than it is today. They didn't have most everything that surrounds us today. Life was very different. Most people were involved in farming. Most of their energy went into eating and surviving. They didn't have electricity. They had to make their own clothes, their own crude homes, kill their own meat, grow their own crops. They only had the simplest of machines. No significant medical technology. When the plagues came - millions of people died. They didn't even have pain killers. Most people lived half as long then as today, if they were lucky. Most of their social contact was with people in their immediate physical space. They didn't have cars, trains, planes, telephones, radio, the Internet. Very few people then could even read.
Today things are quite different. You're reading about this over the Internet. We have instant world wide communication. Computers are common in households. We travel in outer space. We take pills for diseases that used to kill millions. We can transplant organs from one person to another. We measure time in nanoseconds. We now have massive factories, assembly lines, robots building robots - I could go on forever - but things are very different today than they used to be. Yet - genetically humans today and humans 1000 years ago are virtually identical. So what has changed? Why is humanity so different today than it was 1000 years ago - or even 100 years ago? The difference is in the Tree of Knowledge.
The Tree of Knowledge defines who we are as a species. It is what makes humans what we are today. 100 years from now humanity will be quite different than it is today and there will be a single thing that will make us different - the changes in the Tree of Knowledge. Will we be technologically advanced living in a peaceful and free world? Will the human race continue to grow and prosper? Or will we use our technology to create a horrible oppressive society that is dark and static where knowledge is controlled and reality suppressed? What we become will depend on how we structure our society - and how we structure our society is part of the Tree of Knowledge.
To grow and maintain the Tree of Knowledge is to contribute and improve humanity as a whole. If someone finds a cure for Cancer - that knowledge becomes part of the Tree of Knowledge and the people of the world become cancer free. Strengthening the tree of knowledge also improves humanity. Strengthening involves the removal and updating of false or otherwise outdated and useless information. For example, people used to think the world was flat. The idea that the world was round was a revolutionary idea and people had a hard time accepting it. Even to suggest that the world was round was to invite death or persecution. But what would the world have been like if we stuck to the flat world view? We wouldn't be watching satellite TV - that's for sure.
Even though we see ourselves as scientifically advanced and knowledgeable, we are not. There are a lot of things that a huge number of people believe in that are just plain wrong - obviously wrong - yet these world views continue to exist. For example - a huge number of people still believe that the world was created in 6 days and is about 7000 years old. If this were true - we wouldn't be able to see stars that were more than 7000 light years away. But we are seeing galaxies that are 10 billion light years away clearly proving that the universe is at least that old. But often there's a difference between what we want to believe and the way things really are.
True knowledge often has a price. Take the example of religions that have been around for thousands of years. The Jews (and Jewish derivatives - Christians) are an example of this. Judaism is an ancient religion and culture and Jews are some of the smartest and most successful people on the planet. Yet their religion is frozen in time and clings to the ancient rituals celebrating things that never happened. But if the Jews were to admit that stories like Adam and Eve, Noah and the Ark, and the Tower of Babel never happened, then it would undermine a huge part of their culture.
If the world wasn't created in 6 days for example, (God resting on the 7th) then what is the point of all the Jewish laws relating to the Sabbath? Do they strike it from the Ten Commandments as a mistake? Certainly they should in the spirit of honesty. But to do so would be to give up their ancient culture. And to Jews and Christians - their cultures - their tribes - are more important than experiencing the real world the way it really is. And when other things are more important than reality - then false information is kept in the Tree of Knowledge and we as a species are weakened by that.
For the Jews to grow their tree of knowledge and maintain their religious identity, they would have to have a modern day prophet who would redefine what it is to be a Jew in a modern context. Jews could dedicate their religion to the perfection of ethics and law for example and turn a backward looking religion into a forward looking religion. These religions could be modernized to contribute to the Tree of Knowledge and have a real purpose in the context of reality.
My point is that there are a lot of barriers to the process of correcting old and false information. Much of our culture and heritage is based on ancient world views that are ingrained into the narrative of our culture and not easily given up. It used to be that the entire universe consisted of the area of earth that had been explored and mapped and what a person could see looking up. We now know that this planet is but a spec of dust in a universe of trillions of galaxies. To accept that knowledge - we have to give up a lot of self importance and accept a worldview that maybe we are not as significant as we would like to believe. That is a difficult step - and a step that is still in the process of talking. And although it's obvious - it's a piece of knowledge with a price - and many of us are too proud to accept that. |
 The Tree of Knowledge is our common knowledge base that separates us from the animals. It is like a software source code tree where billions of people contribute to it every day. And like a software source tree, new knowledge is always being added and old knowledge is being reexamined, corrected, and updated. The maintenance, debugging, and growth of the Tree of Knowledge is the dharma of the Church of Reality.
Maintenance and debugging is very important as old beliefs are replaced by new and more accurate information and understanding. Our worldview must be purified by scrutiny and doubt so that we can be confident in our worldview because our worldview has been tested. Most religions are sworn to hold onto their worldview no matter how ridiculous the belief is. The Church of Reality take the opposite view that when information is determined to be inaccurate, it should be replaced by more accurate information. Bad information adds chaos to the Tree of Knowledge and we grow the tree and make it stronger by replacing chaos with understanding.
One of the reasons we chose a fractal to represent the Tree of Knowledge is that a fractal has a finite size and infinite edges. The edges are both in the inner and outer regions symbolizing that the frontier of knowledge includes both new discoveries and exploring what we already know - or think we know. As you zoom in on a fractal image the zoomed image is as complex and intricate as the original image. Fractals have infinite detail and are infinitely complex. Because of this I think that fractals make a good symbolic representation of the concept of a Tree of Knowledge.
Thousands of years ago the concept of "Up" and "Down" were clearly understood. Up was towards the sky and down was towards the ground. We had gravity and straight up and down could be accurately measured. God was up - Satan was down. And when the mythical Tower of Babel was built - it was so high that God got nervous that it would reach heaven and he'd have Jehovah's Witness's knocking at his door trying to leave him copies of the Watchtower. God couldn't have that so he changed the languages so they couldn't communicate. The Tower of Babel was abandoned and God maintained a gated community. And this story was written into the Bible and is still being believed today.
 But we now live in a new world view with a much bigger Tree of Knowledge. The concept of Up and Down are nearly meaningless except in a very local context. We now know that the world is round and that it orbits the sun which orbits the milky way galaxy. Not only have we built far larger buildings that could possibly have been built in ancient times but we have gone to the moon. When we fly in airplanes we go above the clouds and when we look down - there are no cities with golden streets. It is now obvious to free thinking people that this Babel story is just a story and never really happened. But from a more scientific perspective, a concept as absolute as up and down became almost totally meaningless in the context of today's knowledge.
The Tree of Knowledge is very much like software development. There are times when you add new features to allow the program to do new things. Then there are times when you go into the old code and upgrade the core technology, fixing bugs, and finding new and better ways to do things. Debugging and strengthening the core is a necessary part of programming because you often can't add those new features if your core program has flaws. Likewise - if the Tree of Knowledge contains false information, or the information is outdated, then the Tree of Knowledge becomes polluted and it becomes more difficult to explore new knowledge in the context of false information.
For example - people used to believe that there were four elements - earth, air, fire, and water. We now know this isn't true and, with few exceptions, the human species has given up on that description. We now have modern chemistry which could not have been added to the Tree of Knowledge if the four element model hadn't been updated. At some point in the future we will have new knowledge that will replace things we believe to be true today - or will add details to our knowledge in order to build on those principles.
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Newsflash |
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The IRS has approved the 501(C)3 tax exempt status of the Church of Reality. |
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Tree of Knowledge