Until a few years ago, I always understood cavities as someTHING you can get on your teeth rather then an actual cavity/hole forming on your teeth. So how do I go from knowing a cavity as a word or object to understanding it as what it is, a cavity in my teeth. Is this simply caused by my stupid brain making a new physical connection between neurons or something else perhaps?
In: 2
Basically- Yes.
Or rather, more of the things you know get connected to each other (and the “knowing things” is the connected neurons nets you mentioned).
So at one point the word “cavity” got connected with you hearing an explanation or seeing pictures of it forming or you experiencing and feeling an operation at the dentists or someoen telling you about it and now whenever you hear the word “cavity” those networks in your brain also fire up, giving you the “knowledge” of what it means.
Keep in mind that the word cavity has the same first three letters as the word cave. In fact, they both derive from the Latin word *cavus,* which means hollow.
Knowing something just means that you understand that it is true, not necessarily *WHY* it is true. For instance, if I have a well respected science textbook that says that 2+2=purple, I may know that it is true because a whole bunch of people smarter than me are saying it is and I know that they understand it. However, that doesn’t mean that I understand *why* it is the case.
A more realistic example of this would be gravity. People know gravity is real but a pretty small percentage actually understand how it actually works and thus understand it.
I think this is more an issue of what words mean.
> knowing a cavity as a word
What I think you probably meant here is remember. You remember(or memorized) that there is a word ‘cavity’ and it’s definition.
Knowing has to do with the future. You know that a pencil is going to fall if you let go of it at a height. Or you know you will get a cavity if you don’t brush.
Understanding has to do with physical mechanisms. You understand that bacteria and not brushing leads to a cavity in your tooth.
Understanding is about mental models. Basically, the neural connections in your brain represent a logical structure that your brain can manipulate, inspect and use to predict consequences in the world. Your first mental model was of something on your teeth – you could visualize and discuss cavities and predict that they would damage your teeth; your model was somewhat useful even though it was wrong. Now you learned a better model which allows you to better reason about cavities, and your brain probably had to make a bunch of changes in connections to represent this new model.
This is kind of a deep question about epistemics. As far as I’ve been able to figure, we don’t really ever completely understand anything, all we do is remove our ignorance to a degree.
You can observe how something works and, once you’re able to predict how it will behave based on the relevant circumstances, you would say you “understand” that thing. But do you *really* understand it all the way down to its most base level just because you can predict its behavior? Sure you know that if a, b, c are true then it will do x, y, z … but *why* do those circumstances give rise to that result?
Well then you dive down a level deeper and figure all that out and now you can predict how specific components of the thing will behave that make the outcome like it is. But it’s just the same thing repeated at a finer scale, and you can progressively figure out at deeper and deeper levels *what* will happen based on the circumstances, but *why* remains elusive. So, in a sense, you’re just removing your ignorance down to finer and finer scales of resolution.
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