The Limits of the Knowledge Generation Systems

Abstract

While CKS constitute the foundation for creativity and knowledge creation, they only capture some universal regularities of the world pivotal for survival and reproductive success. The external world is constantly changing, and evolution cannot economically incorporate unpredictable changes into a brain’s innate structures. Humans and some nonhuman primates have to develop domain-general intelligences to understand a constantly changing fitness landscape.¹ Since these intelligences aim at the generation of knowledge about the changing worlds, I call them the innately grounded knowledge generation systems (KGS).

The art of logic, coming too late to the rescue, and no way able to set matters right again, has had the effect of fixing errors rather than disclosing truth.

—Francis Bacon, 1620, The New Organon