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Saturday, January 5th, 2008 03:32 am
The point of this whole zebra exercise is, I think, to see what the meaning of the word "know" is. In the original posting, [livejournal.com profile] rezoner suggested there is a cultural difference between what we can call Eastern and Western approaches. In the comments, I saw more versions. Because I have not studied philosophy for a long time (and before learning anything new here I would have first to forget what I was treated to back when), and because I felt like it, I, together with other, perhaps more enlightened but not less playful, LJ friends engaged in a reductio ad absurdum testing of possible borders of the meaning of "know".

And you know what?
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 06:08 pm (UTC)
Suppose it does converge. Do we know it converged, or does it just happen? I mean, will we be aware that we finally know what it means ("to know")?
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 06:20 pm (UTC)
We will acquire a subconscious awareness (cf.) of it.
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 06:46 pm (UTC)
Aha! So now we can distinguish between awareness and knowledge?
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 06:59 pm (UTC)
Yes we can. There were tests to demonstrate the distinction. A situation was constructed, when the subjects would honestly answer "No" to the question, e.g. "Do you know if there was a circle or a square in the picture you saw?" (e.g. it flashed for single milliseconds between two frames of a movie) but when asked to guess performed statistically better than chance.
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 07:10 pm (UTC)
Good news!

Thus, the word "know" is closely related to the conscious realization of being aware of something.
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 07:16 pm (UTC)
Sure, so what?
Saturday, January 5th, 2008 07:53 pm (UTC)
Well, that's more or less the question in the posting.