For reader's context, I'm a 22-year-old software engineer with interests in philosophy, software, and music. This article is an attempt to pen my thoughts on a topic I contemplate in my day-to-day life. It's my third piece where I explore ideas that often cross our minds. While most of these thoughts are just noise, a handful are worth sharing.
Information, knowledge, and wisdom are integral parts of everyone's journey in this world. Information is the raw data available globally. Consider a machine learning model as an analogy: information is like a complete chunk of uncleaned dataset. This data can neither be utilized nor used to create something useful on its own. It needs to be refined.
Selective information becomes knowledge. Knowledge is the refined version of information - consider it information without unnecessary data. Knowledge is the second-degree derivative of information, which people utilize. Whenever we're learning something new, we seek knowledge, not just information. To put it simply, information answers "what," while knowledge tries to answer "why."
Knowledge: Why does our mind react to certain situations?
Knowledge: Why do we believe in God?
Knowledge always delves deeper than information in terms of subject vastness. It has the potential to create millionaires and billionaires and crack the code of "luck."
Wisdom, however, is a completely different phenomenon. It's not about the information you collect or the knowledge you have; it comes from within. In my view, wisdom is a byproduct of processing all the information and knowledge accumulated over years, resulting in something extremely pure and visionary.
Wisdom can never be passed on. It can only be created within
Wisdom can never be directly passed on; it can only be created within oneself. Wisdom consumed becomes knowledge, and knowledge consumed becomes information. Whenever a person attempts to impart wisdom to the world, it transforms into knowledge. Wisdom can never be a two-way flow of intellectual energy - only one way. It can only be an outflow of thoughts brewed in your existence.
Returning to the machine learning analogy: information is the raw dataset, knowledge is the cleaned dataset used to train the model, while wisdom represents the predictions and outputs from the model. (This is an extremely simplified example and not entirely accurate, but I think you get the idea.) The catch here is that in the case of real humans, the parameters and variables are in a black box. That's what makes wisdom scarce and unique. Wisdom can never be generated by any transformer models due to this fact - not now, and perhaps never.
food for thought.