Knowledge, as it exists in persons, is not much like language or representations. It is far stranger and cannot really be said to be static because the ‘material’ and the context in which we experience and work with it are -actively- metareflective.

Multiple constellations of thoughts, memories, feelings, definitions, connotations… linking and encharactering each other in ways ordinarily inaccessible to our consciousness, yet real to the direct experience of our own minds. Knowledge is not a stable artifact, in part because minds are not like pages or computers.

The nature of our minds in activity and even storage is to associate nonordinary domains of identity (much of which remains submerged to our awareness) with streams of phenomenal experience and consciously recognized information regarding identity, meaning, value, and implication.

More ‘organic’ knowledge often contains the powerful connotating imprints of when, where, and with whom it was initially organized and activated. In effect, it has the equivalent of ‘personality’ dimensions (and usually other nonordinary dimensions) which textbooks obviate. Books are a step down from direct contact, and textbooks are most often an abstraction of teachers.

In this downward cascade where identity, humanity, and context are being successively discarded through abstraction, we see part of why the mind must ‘reconstruct’ knowledge into something vital, active, and alive — partly through a process of nonordinary reconnotation — because academic exposure to data and methods and representations… cannot comprise knowledge. It doesn’t happen in books. Or machines. Knowledge is not a spectator sport. You’re either actively involved, directly, intimately, every moment…

… or you’re still playing with artifacts.