Knowledge can be separated into two categories: personal and universal.
- Personal
- Each and every one of us have lived completely unique lives, with experiences that can never be identically replicated. Time is an arrow, and only you can experience what you are experiencing during any moment in time. Only you can see the view that you are seeing at any point and moment in space-time.
- The thoughts and feelings that you experience can be extremely similar to others, and likely are in many cases, but you aren't them. You got to where you are on a specific path no one else has or could have walked.
- The ideas born of your unique lived experiences were made in a way that only you could have made, literally. As a crude example, the experiences of each person in a pair of conjoined twins, is unique to the other.
- Personal ideas can be traced to a single source, a source that is human.
- They can also be lost forever. If all copies of a piece of personal knowledge is lost, it is gone. A very similar story, even with identical words, can be written, by pure chance, but it will be based on another set of unique experiences, different from the former.
- Universal
- Some ideas are based not on personal experiences, but on observations of the natural environment, structured with the human ability to conduct logic and reasoning.
- The laws of the universe, laws that apply at any place in the universe (black holes and the beginning of space-time notwithstanding, but until we can send a human to these places and back, I will disregard this), can always be re-discovered.
- That isn't to say any and all things about the universe can and will be known. Space-time is expanding, and some celestial phenomena will become forever unobservable to us. Any and all observable phenomena can be rediscovered.
All ideas either become public knowledge or die.
- Unique stories become lost, when all copies are forever lost.
- Private knowledge dies with the thinker. Secrets formed of unique experiences belong to the thinker, and die with the thinker. No one can know another's unique ideas without them being shared.
- Knowledge based on the external world can be discovered again.
- How does an idea become public? If they are never hidden, or if the idea cannot be kept hidden forever: it is a universal idea.
- But if not all universal knowledge can be known, are some ideas more valuable than others? Which ones take precedence? Which ideas are most valuable to humans?
- Return to material conditions: what do all humans need? Food, water, shelter, at minimum to survive, but thriving and flourishing requires more. If thriving requires the ability to act freely of our own wills, access to safety, healthcare, transportation, education, and communication (etc.) expand our capacity to act freely.
I'm starting to digress into normative claims of what ought to be most valuable, who gets to decide, etc. and the concepts of positive liberty. Also, personal and universal ideas aren't isolated from each other; both inform our full experiences and ideas, and cannot always be cleanly separated from each other. Personal experiences can lead to universal discoveries, and universal discoveries inform my personal decisions. Hopefully this thread of thought made some sense, and is probably not a unique idea that I was the first to think of! This musing has probably been pondered ad nauseam, but writing it myself helped me understand what's knocking around in my head, and maybe can resonate with another. I hope the framework here is clear, and how it might lead to thoughts of ownership and control over ideas and their applications. Can someone "own" an idea that could be rediscovered by someone else? If universal ideas are inevitably to be public, waiting to be discovered and rediscovered, then what justifies private control over them? Besides a pure money interest, what drives people to innovate and push the boundary of collective knowledge?