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Zer0pede t1_j9szh15 wrote

I think it depends: What do you consider knowledge? Critical thinking skills for instance are different from facts—those take practice, not information. Arguably all knowledge is more than just information—the process of learning figures into it.

Even with a language: you could download grammar rules maybe, but everybody develops a feel for language that’s intimate, unique, and distinct, and that sense develops because you learn it slowly over time. Could you download the fact that many people find the word “moist” uncomfortable, but only in English? I memorized the case system in German and Russian long before I could use them in conversation correctly and instinctively. Knowing the facts was only part of learning the language.

Scientific insight is often described as coming in a flash after years of familiarization with a subject. That’s more than just the information—that’s years of turning a subject around and around in your head until you feel things about it instinctively, connected with other things in your life. There’s reason to believe dreams forge unique connections between subjects and experiences in your brain, almost like metaphors, and those would be entirely unique to how you learned a subject as opposed to what you learned. That kind of complex learning and interconnecting of subjects as you go is very different from a “download,” but that’s what we mean when we say “knowledge.”

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