@Jeremey – I didn’t deny intuition. I think I alluded to it “you’re probably disregarding the experience and thinking abstractedly valuing your conclusions according to how they make you feel. You just “know” there is something greater than yourself.”

Is the brain a sensory organ?

You had me to the end my friend…

So define for me “greater than yourself”…

Without realizing it (or possibly realizing it), you have defined it (if you understand it then logically it can’t be greater than the self) for people and have made a “logical” conclusion (.i.e. there are no things greater then the Self.) which is actually illogical.

You have simply twisted people up on semantics. You are trying to force people to agree with your logical conclusion when it isn’t logical at all. And I think you know this because you put a winky face.

You my friend are trying to deny the possibility of a 3rd way of taking in information simply because it is not logical to you.

This way would probably be called either intuition or a gut instinct by a lot of people.

You might argue with me that intuition is simply another form of sensing or experiencing, or words and logic, and therefore would not qualify as a third way of taking in information.

Then I would simply cry out “semantics!”, destroy the basis of this argument, and start over from scratch about what we really want to talk about.

cheers,
Jeremy

sensing -> experience, type knowledge
experiencing -> talking -> experience’, type knowledge

Wouldn’t these be considered part of the same continuity for most people? I think that if you look at knowledge where we sense the event based on our five senses, we experience the event according to our own mental perspective (my experience of “sensing” a plane fly-by is different than 15th century English serf), and then we compare our experience with others through communication which could re-frame the experience of the event. I think you’re spot on in your emphasis that talking can cause a person to even “un-experience” something they have sensed -> experienced on their own. Or even that communication can lead to a talking -> experiencing sort of knowledge.

I can vouch for that, especially when it concerns physical know-how. I’ve practised playing a certain piano piece without piano numerous times: just by reading the notes and ‘rehearsing’ in my mind. I often did that in the train. Your body picks up on that.
Visualisation is a very strong means of learning.
There are also studies that have shown that you can actually strengthen your muscles by just thinking about it. So if you think about lifting a weight, you do practise your muscle even if you don’t move your muscle.
But I consider all that ‘abstract learning’ because it involves your mind. You can practise everything in your mind providing you have a good imagination/visualisation.

(1) passive : merely watching how other people do it. Kind of copy/paste.
(2) active : trying it yourself, trial-and-error, learning by your own mistakes
(3) abstract learning : through words as you mentioned, which can be either orally or in writing.

Well, I’m nerdy and lazy enough to prefer quick and easy to put on velcro-strapped shoes A few times, DW gets a bit worried, but it is a long time since I’ve scared anyone on the street by loudly but unconsciously muttering maths, lol (usually during exam cramming). Hmmm… I might have gotten too lazy and complacent to do my work properly anymore

My main point was that I reckon that your description of knowledge and thought processes is a bit too clunky to allow any closer description of these notions. My groove analogy is certainly also only a very rough description but does allow a little more clarity to shine on these notions. I don’t think it really makes much sense to talk about those first two “ways of acquiring knowledge” you mention.

However, your nervous system categories make me think I must have misunderstood your question, which, for some weird reason, I usually do
Reacting to these categories, I don’t think that you can isolate “Knowledge”, “Senses”, “Thinking”, etc. Just to take an example, our senses don’t just relay raw data about the real world to us, as crude 1950-style models would claim. Our ears and eyes, for instance, process data quite thoroughly before relaying it the direction of the brain, and there are probably more intermediate steps on the way to manufacture a nice presentation (or interpretation) of that data. Henry Ford would have applauded. Even more dramatically, the cells in our noses that smell stuff are in fact the same sort of cells as the ones in our brains, and much processing goes on there, probably just to figure out what smells to assign to the smelled chemicals (that is pretty hard and not something that we can do very well with tools, yet). Taste and touch are probably the same story as well, and then you’ve got all the countless other senses that aren’t in the Classic Five collection. At the other end of the scale, you’ve got The Brain, doing all its Thinking. Well, I’m not sure that you need those capital letters either; the story is certainly much more complex than that. Any nervous process is “Thinking”, I reckon, unless you specifically mean “thinking about [something]“. Learning to walk takes far more mental effort than understanding a proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem (maybe I’m biased and, in fact, half of our “Knowledge” is stuff that lies in our DNA already: we don’t know how to breathe or walk or empathise or even conclude scientific observations about distant stars, but all of these skills are given to us by our DNA and our culture (our second set of DNA), as seeds that unfold and grow very pre-determinedly, as long as there is nourishment and other basic conditions to support the growth.

Anyway, given this picture, I have trouble distinguishing between skills, associations, knowledge, neural activity, etc., unless more specific information is given. You can of course label stuff as you want but I don’t quite know how useful that will be

I think there could be room for a third type of “reception” so to speak which is continuous (like our sensations), but not predetermined (ie., not a priori rationalistic dogmatism), and yet might still occur only for us (“in our head” so to speak).

But these are just my own crazy 2 cents. I like Britz’ thoughts about the “sliding scale” of knowledge and the idea of “practicing” a thought. Thinking is definitely a practice.

Thus to answer you question about possible third ways of obtaining knowledge, I would say that

1. Knowledge is a sliding scale, from 0% (those first scratches), to 100% (insanely deep grooves).

2. Sensory data and thought data could be separated if need be but their effect might often be the same.

3. If you practice a thought enough, you can scratch yourself some nice and deep knowledge. This might seem silly but most religions involve lost of this sort of stuff, as do half of the self-help manuals (“You’re smart and pretty! Believe it! [even you're actually stupid and ugly]“). Americans seem especially burdened by myths that that contradicts all other knowledge (usually divorced from other knowledge).

4. Etching your mind with LSD or even alcohol, say, is yet another way of getting new knowledge.

5. Knowledge is often just an experience and doesn’t actually require any real data: ask the average diet freak about anti-oxidants and they will confidently tell you that they are good for you since they fight free radicals. Then ask them what, exactly, a free radical is, or whether they in that case love preservatives (usually the same as anti-oxidants), and they will feel less confident. In fact, they will suddenly have lost knowledge: they feeling of “knowing” something is diminished.

In other words, when I say I like the kettlebell workout I did last night because this and that, I’m changing the experience a little, no matter how accurate my description is.

My point is that even if one is sensing and experiencing learning type, the alternation of experience is inescapable.