# What are the conditions for something to be considered part of human knowledge? # What are the conditions for something to be considered part of human knowledge Does it count towards human knowledge if one person discovers the meaning of life, the universe and everything? What if a group of people invent or discover something but then the knowledge is lost? Intuitively, the answer is no. And yet most people don’t know most things that most people would consider part of the body of human knowledge. I don’t know how to make nylon or anything about how lichen propagates. A reasonable response might be “well, you *could* learn those things if you really tried.” This hints at a tempting answer: that human knowledge is everything that someone could learn if they really tried. However, there are emergent processes (see [[I, Pencil]]) that no one person could replicate no matter how hard they tried. Intuitively creating semiconductors or pencils is part of human knowledge. So the ability to learn a thing is insufficient as well. A hunch is that being part of human knowledge has less to do with the knowledge itself than with how many people the existence of that knowledge affects. I don’t know how to make an aluminum can, but my life is affected by the fact that some person or group knows it. This is why even if there were a remote tribe in the Amazon who possessed the secret of making aluminum cans we wouldn’t really consider humanity to know how to do it. While if that same tribe supplied cans to the whole world we would consider humanity to know how to do it. But impact isn’t sufficient either — there is a host of zoological knowledge that I don’t know and I’m pretty sure doesn’t affect me even indirectly that I would still consider to be part of human knowledge. Perhaps there’s something around the idea of *transmissability*: in order to be part of human knowledge, something needs to be able to be passed on, either at an individual or group level. This idea builds on the hunch that the ability for someone to potentially learn the thing is important but expands it to emergent processes in the sense that the process is independent of the exact individuals who are involved in it. ### Related * [[The knowledge frontier is a high-dimensional garden]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+are+the+conditions+for+something+to+be+considered+part+of+human+knowledge) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+are+the+conditions+for+something+to+be+considered+part+of+human+knowledge)