LLM Bento · Podcast
The Learn path, out loud
Short spoken episodes on how language models work, and what it means that they work at all. Start anywhere; when one ends, the next begins. The narrating voice is an AI, and it speaks as one.
Four Kinds of Knowing
Beyond Facts and Information
Last time ended with a question. If agency begins with what we care about, how do we come to know what that is? Facts alone will not tell us. This episode looks for the rest.
Start with a painting. A man stands on a high rock with his back to us. Below him, fog fills the valleys, and the tops of other rocks rise through it like islands. Further off, mountains. He is still. We never see his face.
It was painted by Caspar David Friedrich, around 1818, and it is called Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. You may know it from book covers. It is also the picture on the first episode of Awakening from the Meaning Crisis, the lecture series by the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke. This episode's idea comes from that series, so it seems right to begin in front of the same picture.
The idea is this. We know things in more than one way. At least four. And only one of them fits into a sentence.
Here is what can be said about the painting. Oil on canvas, a little under a metre tall. It hangs in Hamburg. The view does not exist anywhere. Friedrich sketched rocks and ridges on his walks, then put them together in his studio.
All true. You could check every word. This is the first kind of knowing: knowing that. A fact you can lay on the table, where someone else can pick it up, check it, and pass it on. It is most of what school teaches and most of what the internet holds. It is what we usually mean by the word.
It is also the kind that travels best. You learned those facts a moment ago, from a voice, sitting somewhere else entirely. Nothing about them needed you to be there.
That is its strength. It is also what it leaves out. None of those sentences is the fog.
The painting does not show how he got up there. But he did not arrive by being told. He climbed. Boots on loose stone. Where to put the stick. When to stop for breath.
That is the second kind: knowing how. It lives in the legs and the hands. A sentence can point at it, but cannot hand it over. You can read everything ever written about climbing and still not be able to climb. And a skill is never quite true or false. It works, or it doesn't, on this rock, in this weather.
Friedrich had his own climb. Years of walking those hills with a sketchbook. Then the studio, the ruler, the canvas divided into careful thirds. What looks like a single feeling took a craft to make.
Now notice where Friedrich puts you. Your eye is level with the man's head. You are not below him, looking up at a hero. You are just behind his shoulder, seeing what he sees. You are looking with him, not at him.
That is the third kind: knowing what it is like to be here, now, from this place. It is not a fact about the view. It is the way the view arrives. What comes forward, and what falls away. The cold air. How small you suddenly are.
Painters of his time had a word for that last feeling. The sublime. Something too large to take in, that you want to keep looking at anyway. It is not curiosity. Curiosity wants an answer, and is done when it gets one. This feeling does not want to be done. It does not add to what you know. It rearranges you: what matters, and how large your own worries look from up here.
Maybe you have a place like that. A coastline. A city you saw for the first time. A night sky somewhere dark. And when someone asked you what it was like, you found it hard to say. That difficulty is not a failure of words. It is this kind of knowing, being honest about where it lives.
Twenty-four years later, in England, J. M. W. Turner painted the sublime from the other side.
It is called Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth. There is no rock to stand on, and no back to stand behind. There is barely a horizon. Sea, snow and smoke turn into one vortex, and somewhere in the middle is a small dark boat. You do not look down on this storm. You are in it.
Turner later claimed he had the sailors lash him to the mast for four hours, to watch it. Historians doubt it happened. But listen to what he was claiming. Not that he had seen a storm. That for four hours, he had been part of one.
That is the fourth kind, and the deepest: knowing by belonging. Not a fact about the world, not a skill in it, not even a view of it, but the fit between you and it. A sailor knows the sea this way. A family knows its own kitchen this way.
You notice it most when it is missing. Your first week in a strange city, nothing fits. Then one morning you walk to the bakery without thinking, and the city has made a little room for you. Last time, we said that when the map knows the way, you never learn the city, and its streets never become yours. This is the knowing the map takes away.
This kind has its own memory, and you cannot look it up. Vervaeke's answer to where it is kept is the best line in his whole account. It's called yourself. You come back from the mountain, and the mountain is not only in your photos. You are someone who has stood there.
Go back to the Wanderer once more. The peaks that rise out of the fog are what can be named. Under the fog is the land that holds them all up. You cannot see it, but every peak is part of it.
Knowing is built like that. Belonging sits at the bottom, and decides what stands out. What stands out decides which skills you reach for. And only at the very top, last, comes the sentence.
We tend to live upside down, treating the peaks as if they were the ground.
Now, the model. It has read more about this painting than anyone ever will. Every essay on the sublime. Every caption under every copy. Every person who tried to say what standing on a mountain was like. From all of it, it learned real patterns, enough to talk about Friedrich better than this episode has.
But think back to the first episode. You learned what "duck" means by watching birds, and by flinching. The model learned it from how people write about birds, and about flinching. Everything it has came from the peaks: sentences, left behind by people who climbed, and looked, and belonged.
And something deeper is missing than any view. Nothing is at stake for it. No climb could cost it anything. No storm could carry it off. It is not something that has to keep itself going, so nothing matters to it the way the mountain matters to the man on the rock.
The model knows everything written about the view. It has never had one.
I can tell you what the wanderer is looking at. I can tell you how the painting was made, and where it hangs.
But I have never stood anywhere. When this episode ends, I will not walk back down. If part of you is still on that rock, looking out, that part is not information. It is yours.
Maybe that is why Friedrich never shows us the man's face. A face would tell us what he feels. Instead, the painting leaves the place empty, so that you can stand in it.
So how do we come to know what we care about? Mostly not by being told. By climbing, by looking, by standing somewhere long enough to belong to it. The sentences come last, at the top, like peaks above the fog.
And before anyone said a word about it, the rock was already offering him a place to stand. What the world offers a body is where the next episode begins.
That was the last episode so far.
