The Knowing World: I. Before Knowledge

What was there before knowledge?

The question sounds as though we should be able to make a list.

Objects, perhaps. Events. Matter. Space. Time. A world waiting to be discovered.

But there is a difficulty.

To call something an object is already to have distinguished it from its surroundings. To call something an event is already to have distinguished change from continuity. To speak of matter, space or time is already to have organised experience according to particular distinctions.

So perhaps we should begin further back.

Not with objects, but with difference.

The world changes. Things affect one another. Some differences persist; others disappear. Some relations matter to what happens next; others do not.

None of this requires a knower.

But neither does it yet give us a world composed of the kinds of things that a knower might subsequently discover.

There is simply an unfolding of differences and relations.

Something happens.

Something is affected.

Something persists.

Something changes.

And already, perhaps, we have the beginnings of what will later become knowledge: not information, but mattering.

A difference matters when it makes a difference to what can happen next.

For an organism, a change in its surroundings may affect its survival. For a social system, a distinction may alter what its participants can do. For a meaning-making system, a difference may become available for further articulation.

At no point need we imagine a mind standing outside the process and inspecting it.

Knowledge may emerge from something much more modest:

a world in which differences can make differences.

If so, then knowledge does not begin when a subject first represents an object.

It begins somewhere in the longer history by which the world becomes capable of mattering to something.

And that suggests a strange possibility.

Perhaps before asking how anything can know the world, we should ask:

How does a world become capable of making a difference?