Knowledge and Being

"We can understand anything only in terms of something else". I came across this line while reading a book and I was completely taken aback by its implication.

It could either mean that all our knowledge is like a collection of information where each concept is related to one another through an intricate web of connections or it could mean that it is a tree like structure where each higher level concept is connecting to a lower level concept and that in turn connected to even lower level concept and so on. If that is the case, then there should be something at the root of all this that is very fundamental. What is that fundamental thing on which all our knowledge and understanding hinges upon? Could it be the being itself?

That may be the reason we will never be able to make a computer truly understand something. With today's technology, we can literally put all human knowledge into a computer and we can even connect all the concepts to one another but we may never be able to make the one thing that is foundational to connect everything with. This could put a limit on how much the artificial intelligence can evolve.

What do we mean when we say "I understand something" as opposed to "I remember something". When we remember something, we just form a memory structure that can be recollected at later point in time. But when we understand something, we transform our-self in the process. We are not the same person before and after the understanding. The extent of this transformation may be intangibly small or significantly life changing depending on how close it is to the root of knowledge. That is, how fundamental the knowledge is related to our being.

Vivekananda once said, "No knowledge can be transferred to another person. It can only come from within. All that we can do is to provide an expression for it"

This insight became more apparent to me when my four year old son asked me what are "opposites" (That was being taught in his school at that time). I tried to explain the concept of "opposites" multiple ways but I utterly failed. He couldn't understand what it is. Then I started giving some examples like "hot-cold", "big-small", "up-down", at one point he suddenly got it. As if the expression that I gave, sparked something that is already withing him.

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