Empowerment and Self-Knowledge
A camera can mirror your thoughts.
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Starting Out
The more you know yourself, the better you can deal with your problems. Indeed, the more you know about yourself, the more you know about the world. It works the other way, as well, for the more you know about the world, the more you know about yourself -- what you know tends to reflect who you are.
When you start out you may have potential (what with all those rapidly-connecting neurons in your brain), but not much in the way of skill, and little in the way of understanding. Each new element that opens up requires a reaction, and you oblige in your unique way. You are repelled or attracted, and you are beginning to like or dislike stuff and things. Either way, you learn about yourself as you learn about the others. We live in microworlds of interactions -- of decisions and selections, contexts requiring problem-solving skills. Our responses to the elements say a lot about what makes us tick. It could mean putting on some weight.
So buy a pedometer and get on with your life!
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The issue of self knowledge turns on whether it's true that the more you know about the world, the more you know about yourself. So lets hear from Immanuel Kant. (Samuel J. Todes, Knowledge and the Ego. In Kant: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by R P Wolff.)
As Todes expresses it, knowledge for Kant is:
... a product of our self-activity as thinking subjects spontaneously responding to received sensations. This self-activity takes the form of synthesizing representations (for which sensations provide the ultimate filling); it takes the form of unifying them [the sensations] in accordance with synthetic (non-analytic) rules. The product of this synthesis is what Kant means by "experience." [what I call virtual reality]
The idea is something like this. There are minds in the world and there are objects that affect the minds in certain ways. I.e., the objects bombard our sensors (with energy, say) and affect them with sensations. When received passively, the sensations are meaningless and there is only ignorance, or void -- a lack of distinction, to follow G. Spencer Brown.
But minds can respond actively. Sensations then combine as manifolds in accordance with built-in rules of thought to produce meaningful objects. The product of the combining is our ordinary experience. So experience is sense data in the form of unified objects -- like people, houses, trees, cars, streets, and so on.
The details of Kant's view get very complex, but the objects of experience -- including one's self -- are empirical products and only representations as conditioned by the experiencing agent -- you or me. That's why I refer to experience as virtual reality.
Since the self is active in experiencing, imposing its forms (models, schemata) on raw sensations, what you come to know are the objects with your brand on them -- your concepts. This is what you know. But this is also you, because the objects are your products. So, extended knowledge of the (empirical) world of experience is really extended knowledge of yourself. Therefore, the more you know about the world, the more you know about yourself. Since all knowledge is self-knowledge, the more you know about yourself, the more you also know about the world. So don't let anyone steal your identity
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Think of skills as pattern recognition skills, on the one hand, and motor skills, on the other, as I've developed the ideas here. Both are forms of knowledge.
First, perception skills provide "knowledge" about the world -- they let you "read" what's going on, and let you deal more effectively with it. You engage the world with models, using one or another model type, and extract knowledge about the world. You dig it out perceptually, and by structuring the environment put your own brand on it. In so doing, you also reveal aspects of your self, of the way you function, and thus you acquire self-knowledge.
In a similar way, motor skills define the way you interact with your environment. They constitute your behavior, your way of organizing your bodily processes. They express your way of dealing with the environment and therefore express your own mental characteristics. This is what you do, and this is the way you are. This is who you are. The more skillfully you engage the world, the more capable you become, the more power you have, and the more self-knowledge you acquire -- the more you reveal about yourself to yourself. Together, the sensory and moror processes identify what I call the Read and React processes.
In both cases, therefore, increased personal skills yield heightened self-knowledge and greater personal empowerment. In using our skills to discover the world, we create ourselves and our environment. That is, we not only use our skills; we also develop them and learn new ones, a factor that changes us. As Todes writes:
Our self-activity [in the course of discovering our world] determines us not for the second time, as appearance [that
Kant says happens initially], in recognition of determinations antecedently in us as subjects, but for the first time, as subject who has made himself determinate by his active perception. By self-activity, we do not merely first know who we are by knowing what we are doing; we first become who we are by doing it. For exercise does not merely employ the skills which give us determinacy as subject; it also develops them in the first place.---------------------------------------
