Knowing, Learning, Remembering

Throughout my 20s I kept being told that I am too naïve sometimes stupid. We just took it; of course whether or not we agreed was beside the point. All of that changed when I hit 30 this year. Beyond a certain point if you continue to hit your head against a wall you are either playing sheepish or intellectually-challenged. On the receiving end, I started to wonder about the differences and interactions between perceiving, remembering, learning and knowing.

I was born in 1979. It was a year of tracks: that year the Guangzhou-Hong Kong train resumed, and the MTR began service. At the time the resumed China-Hong Kong service was fondly talked about. Some 30 years later the abrasive manner by which the funding request for the Guangzhou-Hong Kong express railway squeezed through the legislative council was met with highly vocal protests by the so-called post-80s. I had just missed the post-80s train by a year, but I do sympathize with them when conservative media dismissed them as naïve. They were entirely under-estimated: of course they knew that the bill would pass in the end, but was it not beautiful that they tried?

That gets us back to the definition of “knowing.” I think Art and Philosophy are similar in that they both share an insistence that is independent of the truth. Somewhat paradoxically both aspire to the truth – whatever that might be. This aspiration is not usually followed by a confirmation. In fact, a pre-condition for this aspiration is a suspension of judgement. I think of it as an “educated failure” (think: “educated guess”).

I was the subject of a RTHK documentary when I was in grade 6. I watched it again for the Third Pixel, and I was thoroughly surprised by how perceptive I was at so tender an age. There was a moment in which I was talking about school, and it is obvious to me now that at grade 6 I already knew that school was a just system that I needed to play, but my heart was elsewhere. What more did I learn between now and then? What more do I know now?

We habitually put perception in front of knowledge, but I think that is exactly the wrong way around. Knowing is an act of low-level awareness which is dependent upon the senses, whereas to perceive is to put forward a framework through which to understand the world – it is a state of mind.