Is omniscience even possible?

[Copernicus]

Is omnscience even possible? God is defined as an "omniscient" being, which means that he knows everything that can be known. In effect, he can never be surprised at any outcome, nor can he ever learn anything new. What is interesting about the concept of omniscience is that it treats knowledge and belief as inherently quantifiable. That is, you can count the number of things you know, and God knows all of the things anyone possibly could know. Note that words like "idea" and "concept", which describe units of knowledge, are count nouns, not mass nouns. OTOH, "information" is a mass noun in English. In French and Italian, it is a count noun. So you can be given many "informations" in those languages. So the countability of conceptual units is really an artifact of language and does not necessarily reflect their nature.

What is a unit of knowledge/belief? I would propose that it is a linguistic construct. People use language to convey thoughts. (Language as "word-guided mental telepathy" is one of my favorite metaphors.) So, like dipping a glass into water in order to make a unit ("glass") of water, we package information in our head in terms of phrasal groupings of words. We can count linguistic units. Paragraphs contain finite numbers of sentences. Hence, concepts are conceptually countable via the mechanism of language. However, there is no limit on the number of sentences in any language. That is, we can "generate" an infinite number of linguistic constructions, because language is fundamentally recursive (the basic insight of Noam Chomsky's "Generative Grammar"). The same concept can be described with different sentences, and there is no limit to the number of sentences that one could construct to describe that concept. But does that make the knowledge and beliefs that each of us has infinite?

The human mind works on the basis of association. Understanding a new concept takes place when you fit that concept in with other concepts, recognizing similarities and differences. We can see the basis for associative cognition in the structure of the brain. Neurons strengthen or weaken connections to other neurons. Information can be thought of as a web of associations. However, information is not actually limited to the number of neurons in the brain, because associations can loop. You can create positive and negative feedback loops. Information needs to be stored in some kind of static medium (the brain), but it only really comes into being when triggered by brain activity. The mind is a byproduct of brain activity--a train of thought that only ever implements a fraction of what we believe or know, because that is all generated on the fly by the structure of the physical connections between neurons.

Where does it all come from? What is the ground level of our knowledge? Many cognitive scientists have come to believe that direct bodily sensations are the building blocks of human cognition--the embodied mind. If you watch children mature from infancy, you see that they are constantly using all of their senses--touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight--on everything in their environment. (Hence, parents of children must "childproof" their homes and monitor them constantly.) We feel gravity, so it gives us the basis for "up" and "down". We touch things, so that gives us the basis for "in" and "out". We see things, so that gives us "allgone" and "peekaboo". New concepts can become the basis for further concepts, so the ability to abstract grows throughout life. Information and thought is grounded in experience that never stops accumulating.

So let's come back to the original question. Is omniscience even possible? What could it possibly mean? On what basis would God, an immaterial, bodiless being, form knowledge and/or beliefs? Our cognition is dynamic. It grows over a lifetime, but it is theoretically unbounded. An omniscient being would have all possible associations from the very beginning, including all possible abstractions--without actually going through an inductive learning experience to build them up.

 

[YmirGF]

So let's come back to the original question. Is omniscience even possible? What could it possibly mean? On what basis would God, an immaterial, bodiless being, form knowledge and/or beliefs? Our cognition is dynamic. It grows over a lifetime, but it is theoretically unbounded. An omniscient being would have all possible associations from the very beginning, including all possible abstractions--without actually going through an inductive learning experience to build them up.

I think the idea gained traction because human animals were confounded by assumptions they could not disprove. For some reason, human animals forgot that just because an idea cannot be verified, one way or the other, does not make that idea valid. Saying "god" is omniscient is about as meaningful as saying that all unicorns like frolicking with pixies. The point is there is no possible way to discern if a being is omniscient and a lowly naked ape, on a backwater planet, in an unremarkable galaxy, isn't likely to be able to say with any authority.

Side note: Go ahead. Prove unicorns don't like frolicking with pixies. Knock yourselves out, folks.

 

[Valjean]

Sure, why not?
Isn't mysticism, for example, just a futile attempt to describe the experience through a totally inadequate medium?

 

[Copernicus]

... Saying "god" is omniscient is about as meaningful as saying that all unicorns like frolicking with pixies...

Although I cannot prove that unicorns frolic with pixies, I can certainly imagine it. So the expression is meaningful.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

So let's come back to the original question. Is omniscience even possible? What could it possibly mean? On what basis would God, an immaterial, bodiless being, form knowledge and/or beliefs? Our cognition is dynamic. It grows over a lifetime, but it is theoretically unbounded. An omniscient being would have all possible associations from the very beginning, including all possible abstractions--without actually going through an inductive learning experience to build them up.

I think of omniscience as simply being a form of 'perfection,' which concept makes no good sense to me. Omniscience is 'being perfectly right in every truth claim'.

Ask a conservative Christian what the word 'perfect' means and he may have a really hard time explaining it. But ask him if Jesus was perfect, and he'll give you an instinctive Yes. But if Jesus ever belched in public, was that a perfect act? Yes. It must be, since Jesus was perfect. If you or I belched in public, we'd be imperfect, but if Jesus did it, surely that belch fit into the perfect order of things.

What does 'omniscience' mean? I have no idea except that it means we believe in a perfectly knowledgeable God.

But I can't even imagine knowledge without language, so here's the question I would have to settle before I could begin to discuss omniscience:

Is it possible to 'know' stuff without expressing that knowledge in language? Can knowledge exist without language?

 

[jtartar]

Is omnscience even possible? God is defined as an "omniscient" being, which means that he knows everything that can be known. In effect, he can never be surprised at any outcome, nor can he ever learn anything new. What is interesting about the concept of omniscience is that it treats knowledge and belief as inherently quantifiable. That is, you can count the number of things you know, and God knows all of the things anyone possibly could know. Note that words like "idea" and "concept", which describe units of knowledge, are count nouns, not mass nouns. OTOH, "information" is a mass noun in English. In French and Italian, it is a count noun. So you can be given many "informations" in those languages. So the countability of conceptual units is really an artifact of language and does not necessarily reflect their nature.

What is a unit of knowledge/belief? I would propose that it is a linguistic construct. People use language to convey thoughts. (Language as "word-guided mental telepathy" is one of my favorite metaphors.) So, like dipping a glass into water in order to make a unit ("glass") of water, we package information in our head in terms of phrasal groupings of words. We can count linguistic units. Paragraphs contain finite numbers of sentences. Hence, concepts are conceptually countable via the mechanism of language. However, there is no limit on the number of sentences in any language. That is, we can "generate" an infinite number of linguistic constructions, because language is fundamentally recursive (the basic insight of Noam Chomsky's "Generative Grammar"). The same concept can be described with different sentences, and there is no limit to the number of sentences that one could construct to describe that concept. But does that make the knowledge and beliefs that each of us has infinite?

The human mind works on the basis of association. Understanding a new concept takes place when you fit that concept in with other concepts, recognizing similarities and differences. We can see the basis for associative cognition in the structure of the brain. Neurons strengthen or weaken connections to other neurons. Information can be thought of as a web of associations. However, information is not actually limited to the number of neurons in the brain, because associations can loop. You can create positive and negative feedback loops. Information needs to be stored in some kind of static medium (the brain), but it only really comes into being when triggered by brain activity. The mind is a byproduct of brain activity--a train of thought that only ever implements a fraction of what we believe or know, because that is all generated on the fly by the structure of the physical connections between neurons.

Where does it all come from? What is the ground level of our knowledge? Many cognitive scientists have come to believe that direct bodily sensations are the building blocks of human cognition--the embodied mind. If you watch children mature from infancy, you see that they are constantly using all of their senses--touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight--on everything in their environment. (Hence, parents of children must "childproof" their homes and monitor them constantly.) We feel gravity, so it gives us the basis for "up" and "down". We touch things, so that gives us the basis for "in" and "out". We see things, so that gives us "allgone" and "peekaboo". New concepts can become the basis for further concepts, so the ability to abstract grows throughout life. Information and thought is grounded in experience that never stops accumulating.

So let's come back to the original question. Is omniscience even possible? What could it possibly mean? On what basis would God, an immaterial, bodiless being, form knowledge and/or beliefs? Our cognition is dynamic. It grows over a lifetime, but it is theoretically unbounded. An omniscient being would have all possible associations from the very beginning, including all possible abstractions--without actually going through an inductive learning experience to build them up.

copernicus,
Do you understand the term epistemological?? It has to do with knowledge and the limits of the knowledge that man can attain.
Egocentric Perdicament means that every person is very limited in his knowledge, so it is difficult to reason on things that are so very much higher than his brain can conceive. Such is the predicament of all men!!! Isa 55:8,9 tells us that God's thoughts are very, very much higher than our thoughts. Can you expect then, to be able to understand the Almighty God?? Job 42:2, Job 26:14, 36:4, 37:16, 37:5.
Something to think about. It is God's purpose to bring back to life many billions of people who have lived on earth. Do you realize what that means?? It means that God, not only knows all things that have ever been done, but He is going to put back into everyone he resurrects, the entire MEMORY BANK, of that person, everything He ever knew, or thought about during his lifetime. Only in this way will the person tesurrected be able to identify or recognize that it truely is Himself. This seems to me to be even more difficult.
Nothing is difficult to The Almighty God, whose Personal name is Jehovah!!!

 

[Copernicus]

But I can't even imagine knowledge without language, so here's the question I would have to settle before I could begin to discuss omniscience:

Is it possible to 'know' stuff without expressing that knowledge in language? Can knowledge exist without language?

Yes. Animals that lack anything like our linguistic ability still interact intelligently with their environment. People who suffer from various forms of aphasia can still reason and behave logically. Part of what I tried to convey in the OP was the essential difference between meaning and linguistic expression. Cognition is built up out of associations with experiences. Language is word-guided mental telepathy. That is, it is a means of replicating a complex network of associations in another mind. You shouldn't confuse the means of communication with the content communicated.

You said that you had studied linguistics for four years. If you haven't done so, you should read Lakoff and Johnson's seminal work Metaphors We Live By, which established the fundamental tie between linguistic structure and analogies (i.e. metaphors). You might also find Lakoff's Women Fire and Dangerous Things of interest, but it takes some time to wade through it all.

 

[Copernicus]

copernicus,
Do you understand the term epistemological?? It has to do with knowledge and the limits of the knowledge that man can attain.
Egocentric Perdicament means that every person is very limited in his knowledge, so it is difficult to reason on things that are so very much higher than his brain can conceive. Such is the predicament of all men!!! Isa 55:8,9 tells us that God's thoughts are very, very much higher than our thoughts. Can you expect then, to be able to understand the Almighty God?? Job 42:2, Job 26:14, 36:4, 37:16, 37:5.
Something to think about. It is God's purpose to bring back to life many billions of people who have lived on earth. Do you realize what that means?? It means that God, not only knows all things that have ever been done, but He is going to put back into everyone he resurrects, the entire MEMORY BANK, of that person, everything He ever knew, or thought about during his lifetime. Only in this way will the person tesurrected be able to identify or recognize that it truely is Himself. This seems to me to be even more difficult.
Nothing is difficult to The Almighty God, whose Personal name is Jehovah!!!

Jartar, thanks for the attempted response, although I could do without the proselytizing. It is interesting that you have thought about the problem of what cognition would be like in the Christian afterlife. What happens to Alzheimer's victims, who have lost substantial portions of their memory? Is it restored? Are false beliefs corrected? Are irrational prejudices and biases removed? Those are interesting questions that take us beyond the thread subject, so I'd like to stick to just looking at whether omniscience makes sense as a concept. Still, I'm glad to see that you've begun to think about such issues.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

Yes. Animals that lack anything like our linguistic ability still interact intelligently with their environment.

So you would hold that God can 'know everything' even without having language? I just can't imagine that. For example, God could decide/know whether I am either 'greedy' or 'thrifty' without thinking the words 'greedy' or 'thrifty'?

If God is merely a super-animal, reacting with super awareness of every atom in every universe, well... that doesn't seem to me like an all-knowing creature. For a creature to be all knowing, He'd have to answer any question I might ask Him, and accurately. Of course, I'd have no idea if His answers were accurate, so the whole 'omniscience' thing really does seem entirely incoherent to me.

People who suffer from various forms of aphasia can still reason and behave logically.

Yes. It's just that I can't think of such a person as being all-knowing, not so long as he's unable to interact with me linguistically.

Part of what I tried to convey in the OP was the essential difference between meaning and linguistic expression. Cognition is built up out of associations with experiences. Language is word-guided mental telepathy. That is, it is a means of replicating a complex network of associations in another mind. You shouldn't confuse the means of communication with the content communicated.

I'm afraid you've lost me with all of that. You seem to be using words like 'meaning' and 'cognition' in specialized ways. Maybe you could present formal defintions for them as you're using them?

I wouldn't know how to deal with the concept of 'meaning' without the underlying basis of 'linguistic expression.' I don't think of language-lacking animals as even capable of holding any meaning in their minds.

Here's one of your sentences in which I can find no usable meaning. Perhaps you can expand on it: Cognition is built up out of associations with experiences.

What does 'cognition' mean to you in that sentence?

 

[Riverwolf]

It is said that none but the Norns (Nordic equivalent to the Greek Moirai: English Fates) can truly see all things, but seeing as they're personified time, that's just a given.

Considering these are... "beings" (for lack of a better term, since they are higher than the Gods) that may or may not even be conscious in the sense that we understand it, whether this "omniscience" translates into what we might understand as knowing everything is anyone's guess. AFAIK there's nothing in lore that tells of them revealing anything to anyone.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

If something actually exists which would be defined as a god, humans' speculations on what its attributes and abilities were would probably be about as meaningful as some bacteria in my gut speculating on my attributes and abilities. Perhaps, even far less.

 

[Copernicus]

So you would hold that God can 'know everything' even without having language? I just can't imagine that. For example, God could decide/know whether I am either 'greedy' or 'thrifty' without thinking the words 'greedy' or 'thrifty'?

I am saying that we can think and know things even without language. After all, we had to start out thinking at some point in our lives, but we did not come into life with a linguistic system. That is not quite the same as saying that a thinking being can 'know everything' in principle. (That's actually the question here.) We should not confuse information with the method we use to convey it to others. For one thing, language is necessarily linearly structured, because we can only say one word at a time. However, we have the capacity to perform simultaneous actions. Our thinking is not linear.

If God is merely a super-animal, reacting with super awareness of every atom in every universe, well... that doesn't seem to me like an all-knowing creature. For a creature to be all knowing, He'd have to answer any question I might ask Him, and accurately. Of course, I'd have no idea if His answers were accurate, so the whole 'omniscience' thing really does seem entirely incoherent to me.

It seems so to me, as well.

Yes. It's just that I can't think of such a person as being all-knowing, not so long as he's unable to interact with me linguistically.

People with aphasia can make their thoughts and feelings known through a variety of methods that circumvent language. Animals do the same.

I'm afraid you've lost me with all of that. You seem to be using words like 'meaning' and 'cognition' in specialized ways. Maybe you could present formal defintions for them as you're using them?

I started a thread on the definition and meaning of God that you may have seen. That goes into more detail on what I mean by 'meaning'. Cognition is just mental activity. Lakoff is one of the founders of the school of Cognitive Linguistics, which you may have heard of.

I wouldn't know how to deal with the concept of 'meaning' without the underlying basis of 'linguistic expression.' I don't think of language-lacking animals as even capable of holding any meaning in their minds.

It is very hard to describe meaning without language, so semantic theories are heavily biased towards the representation of meaning as linguistic constructs--e.g. symbolic logic. One of my favorite theories, Frame Semantics, represents meaning as sets of interrelated expressions, and it is very useful for building up computer systems that can extract meaning from text. However, its weakness is in its reliance on those linguistic constructs rather than a system of associated experiences. Perhaps we will be able to construct machines that ground thought by 'embodying' it in sensor data. That strikes me as the most promising path towards true artificial intelligence.

Here's one of your sentences in which I can find no usable meaning. Perhaps you can expand on it: Cognition is built up out of associations with experiences.

What does 'cognition' mean to you in that sentence?

I can refer you to the Wikipedia page on Embodied Cognition. It describes the kind of "building up" that I was referring to.

 

[Copernicus]

If something actually exists which would be defined as a god, humans' speculations on what its attributes and abilities were would probably be about as meaningful as some bacteria in my gut speculating on my attributes and abilities. Perhaps, even far less.

Lacking brains, the bacteria in your gut are unable to speculate on anything at all. To the extent that the word 'god' means anything at all, we can speculate on the attributes and abilities of such putative entities. After all, we dreamed them up in the first place, and we cannot think of anything other than what we can think of, can we?

 

[idav]

So let's come back to the original question. Is omniscience even possible? What could it possibly mean? On what basis would God, an immaterial, bodiless being, form knowledge and/or beliefs? Our cognition is dynamic. It grows over a lifetime, but it is theoretically unbounded. An omniscient being would have all possible associations from the very beginning, including all possible abstractions--without actually going through an inductive learning experience to build them up.

I think omniscience is possible based on omnipresence but at that point it would be like having all the data and not really being able to do anything with it. To actively know it takes cognition which likely took the universe a while to attain especially since the beginning of the universe was mainly a state of high energy. I like to think of the beginning of the universe in terms of Wu Wei. Started off with power potential, began doing and still through today.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

Lacking brains, the bacteria in your gut are unable to speculate on anything at all.

From the perspective of god, we may lack the brains sufficient enough to speculate on anything meaningful.

To the extent that the word 'god' means anything at all, we can speculate on the attributes and abilities of such putative entities. After all, we dreamed them up in the first place, and we cannot think of anything other than what we can think of, can we?

We certainly can't. However we can understand that there could be things we do not have the capacity to understand, or even think of.

 

[Copernicus]

From the perspective of god, we may lack the brains sufficient enough to speculate on anything meaningful.

If God were omniscient, then he would know that we had the capacity to speculate on meaningful things, for we do it all the time. Just because a geologist knows things about rocks that you do not know, it does not follow that you are incapable of speculating in a meaningful way about rocks. Meaningfulness does not depend on knowing everything about an object denoted by a word.

We certainly can't. However we can understand that there could be things we do not have the capacity to understand, or even think of.

What are those things that you have in mind? If you can tell me that, then I can tell you that you don't know what you are talking about. We are all ignorant on some level, but that does not mean that there is a type of knowledge out there that we are incapable of possessing.

 

[Kilgore Trout]

If God were omniscient, then he would know that we had the capacity to speculate on meaningful things, for we do it all the time. Just because a geologist knows things about rocks that you do not know, it does not follow that you are incapable of speculating in a meaningful way about rocks. Meaningfulness does not depend on knowing everything about an object denoted by a word.

I think I'm envisioning a god far more advanced beyond humans than you are.

What are those things that you have in mind? If you can tell me that, then I can tell you that you don't know what you are talking about. We are all ignorant on some level, but that does not mean that there is a type of knowledge out there that we are incapable of possessing.

I see no reason to assume that the limited human brain has the capabilities and capacity to understand everything. Nor any particularly compelling reason to believe that we even have the ability to scratch the surface of all there is to know.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

I am saying that we can think and know things even without language.

OK. I can agree with that use of 'think' and 'know' on a most primitive level. The panda may know where the best bamboo grows. He may think that the bamboo tastes yummy. But I guess I can't really see how such usage helps us in discussing God's purported omniscience. I'm pretty sure that those who believe in God's omniscience are imagining a God who can answer all their questions with Perfect Truth -- using human language to do so.

After all, we had to start out thinking at some point in our lives, but we did not come into life with a linguistic system.

I wouldn't know how to imagine that. Thinking without language? Sure, we can claim that bonobos think, but I would find that a stretch of the language. For me, thinking -- at least on any level worth discussing -- necessarily involves the manipulation of language. Personally I didn't begin to think until my early twenties. One day I seemed to wake up, to look around at the strange world in which I found myself, and to begin thinking hard about it, using language to probe into it. I did little to none of that sort of thinking as a child or even teenager. All of that seems to have been primitive, unconscious thought. I was barely even awake. I only really woke up when I began to speak to myself.

Awhile back, I heard about a zoo chimp. His keepers watched with curiosity one day as he went about collecting a pile of stones in front of his perch. Then, when the visitors came, the chimp threw the rocks at them.

Was that thinking? Well, sure, that's a fine way to label it. In fact, it's one of the most complex examples of thinking which I've ever heard about in the animal kingdom. Which is my point. Even an extraordinary example of (wordless) animal thinking is pretty primitive stuff. God's omniscience surely belongs in an entirely different arena -- at least that's how it seems to me.

That is not quite the same as saying that a thinking being can 'know everything' in principle. (That's actually the question here.) We should not confuse information with the method we use to convey it to others.

But we don't just use language to convey info to others. We use it to actually create the info itself. Let's use an easy example like the concept of 'layaway.' Could layaway have been invented or continued to exist without language? I don't think so. And that's a simple one. How about 'enlightenment'. I'm sure you'll agree that a chimp will never think about enlightenment. He would need language to do that. Only by worrying away at the concept of enlightenment, with human words, can we begin to own information about enlightenment. If God has no words, how can He know anything about enlightenment? And if he doesn't know about enlightenment, how can He be omniscient?

Anyway, I don't see information and language as being necessarily separate things, especially at the higher levels of abstraction and concept creation where all the real fun happens.

For one thing, language is necessarily linearly structured, because we can only say one word at a time. However, we have the capacity to perform simultaneous actions. Our thinking is not linear.

I'm not sure if I agree with that or not. Are you talking about a case in which someone is flustered or otherwise upset and cannot express it all, or feels that he cannot express it all, in words? Can you explain a case of someone doing non-linear thinking?

People with aphasia can make their thoughts and feelings known through a variety of methods that circumvent language. Animals do the same.

Aphasiacs are a special case, in my opinion. They have had language and lost it. Their hard drives were once formatted.

As for animals, I can only see their non-linguistic communication as being different in kind from human linguistic communication, and I watch animals and their communications all the time. I've trained animals. They can make only the most rudimentary thoughts and feelings known. Even my best trained dog could not express his broken heart to me when we had to put down his old buddy.

I started a thread on the definition and meaning of God that you may have seen. That goes into more detail on what I ean by 'meaning'.

I don't remember seeing it, but my forum memory isn't great.

Anyway, I'm not sure we've drawn any nearer to an omniscient God, but at least we've made a run in His general direction and made Him go Poof again.

 

[Copernicus]

I see no reason to assume that the limited human brain has the capabilities and capacity to understand everything. Nor any particularly compelling reason to believe that we even have the ability to scratch the surface of all there is to know.

The compelling reason is that we actually do know quite a bit about ourselves and our external environment, so it seems unreasonable to me that you doubt our ability even to "scratch the surface" of knowledge. I am not denying that there are things that we do not know. Quite the contrary. We are ignorant to some degree about everything, but I am speaking of things that are potentially knowable. My claim here is that there is no "everything" to be understood. What we understand is subjective--always relative to some frame of reference that is necessarily limited by the experiences it is grounded in. A potentially omniscient being would need to have every different possible frame of reference in order to "know everything", but does that even make sense? How could a god know whether someone is "thrifty" or "stingy", since that kind of judgment differs according to one's frame of reference.

 

[idav]

The compelling reason is that we actually do know quite a bit about ourselves and our external environment, so it seems unreasonable to me that you doubt our ability even to "scratch the surface" of knowledge. I am not denying that there are things that we do not know. Quite the contrary. We are ignorant to some degree about everything, but I am speaking of things that are potentially knowable. My claim here is that there is no "everything" to be understood. What we understand is subjective--always relative to some frame of reference that is necessarily limited by the experiences it is grounded in. A potentially omniscient being would need to have every different possible frame of reference in order to "know everything", but does that even make sense? How could a god know whether someone is "thrifty" or "stingy", since that kind of judgment differs according to one's frame of reference.

Maybe if the universe is actually a supercomputer or even a virtual one. That's the type of knowledge necessary where the system knows all the aspects of itself. Isn't the attaining of knowledge the big part? Let's say a hard drive contains the library of congress, does it only have that knowledge if its on and being analyzed in conscious memory?