Without knowledge of the past we would have no knowledge at all. Do you agree or disagree?

Answer 1

This, of course, depends on what you consider to be 'knowledge' and what you consider to be the past.

Take a common philosophical argument: how do you know that what you remember actually occurred in the past? Simply put, you can't possibly know it for certain. All you can do is see if that knowledge correlates with the present and the future.

Carrying this to an extreme, it is possible to imagine someone with brain damage or who is produced with technology which we do not currently have access to who literally does know absolutely nothing about the past, but is nonetheless an expert in many fields. It would be like a computer given a new program - it doesn't know about anything before the program, yet it can execute the program flawlessly and duplicate or exceed what it would take a learning person years to learn.

Another angle is to attack the question of what knowledge really IS. If knowledge is just to know things, then we know many, many things that we never learned and which required no personal experience with the past whatsoever. These things are generally called instincts. A beaver knows how to build a dam, but nobody ever taught it, and it knew this at birth (a time in which is HAD no past).

There is also sensory information. I look at my TV and I know that it's on. It doesn't require any fancy learning to know this - I percieve it in the present with my senses. Much of what we percieve is filtered and augmented by what he have learned in the past, but much of it is also intrinsically evident on its own. So there, too, is a whole section of knowledge which is available all the time in the present.

We can also get a little metaphysical. How many things to people cite as things that they 'know' that they never learned? For example, "I KNOW my Uncle is alive." "How? You haven't seen him for years." "I just know." People quite often feel that they have knowledge that is not provided by their senses. These come from feelings, inclinations, and the like. The knoledge may be true or not, but even false knowledge is a KIND of knowledge.

So the answer is absolutely yes. There are many ways to have knowledge with no past and have it still considered to be knowledge to all but those who use the most contrived definitions of 'past' and 'knowing'.

Answer 2

According to the way you raised your question, I agree. But we all know that past knowledge is carried over in today's knowledge and with great magnitude than what knowledge was in the past.

Answer 3

Without knowledge from the past we wouldn't have any knowledge of the future...agree..

Answer 4

i partially agree because w/out the past experiences or discoveries we Would have no knowledge to seek but a/out the past we would still know stuff because how did people in the past have knowledge before us.....at 1 point there was no past or at least the past was not revealed

Answer 5

I agree, because if you think back an hour ago, thats like the past, right - you would be essentially in a coma. If you mean the past, like hundreds of years ago, we could still have knowledge, it would just be stuff we came up with in the present

Answer 6

No! To really have knowledge in the context of true wisdom requires one to loose all constructs of past, present and future and contemplate in purity the matter at hand!

This Buddhist concept is not so much that the past does not exist per se but that it is both much more and in certain ways much less than you think! Take hot and cold, they are always relative to the expectation. Coffee at room temperature is cold but a soda at room temperature is warm. The past is a perception that has the same constructed associative qualification!

Answer 7

To some degree yes, knowledge is what we keep and experienced is what we get from that certain knowledge that we gain.

Answer 8

I agree with this statement. It has taken our species millions of years to evolve. Now we have a thought process with separates us from the other animals. This allowed humans to form languages, inventions, etc. But this didn't happen over night it. Think of it like this, if everyone got amnesia today we would not know how to operate machinery or drive vehicle and who would be there to teach us?

Answer 9

I think this is absolutely correct. It is essential to know where we came from and what has taken place before. It helps us understand why certain conflicts happen in the world. History has a habit of repeating itself and it is important that we understand why.It is also vital that we understand what our predecessor went through so we can stop certain things happening again e.g. the holocaust.

Answer 10

Disagree... we would then only have knowledge of the present or an acute short term memory.