How Do We Structure the Knowledge We Accumulate?

How Do We Structure the Knowledge We Accumulate?

A friend recently suggested to me, "I believe most of us have given thought to how we structure the knowledge we accumulate." [1]
For those of you who, like me, have a bent for living Socrates' examined life, that certainly is true. 
A so-called tree structure of layers of increasing specificity is employed to store information contained in a computer or found online. For example, a computer folder named Time Plans may contain folders for a range of years and within that folder may be folders for each year, and so on, ending at a plan for a particular week. Without this simple and intuitive tree structure, most of the information entered in our computers would, for practical purposes, be lost since each access to information would require a probably lengthy search.[2] 
The database of the mind is vastly larger and includes kinds of information that cannot be stored in a computer database or online. Consider a computer plan for the week a person meets a significant other. This plan typically will contain little of the information stored in the mind such as the sensations and emotions experienced during that week. That this type of information is very important is evidenced by the recent discovery that positive emotions can trigger the "good medicine" of nostalgia. 
http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/50/10/861.full
Do some of you share the following view? If not, how do you structure information?  
I organize what I know in successively more abstract layers in what seems to me a continual, largely subconscious, search for meaning. I have a great deal of very specific concrete information of a factual nature in my mind. This concrete information is collected within more abstract concepts that make sense of some of this concrete information. I then discover even more abstract ideas that pull these second tier ideas together and provide meaning for them, and so on. 
This way of viewing my accumulated information has served me well, leading to insights that I could not otherwise have experienced. One such example is this: In my early life in rural America, It seemed to me that the cows, geese, and other animals owned by my family displayed affection for their young in much the same way that humans do.[3] This observation worked for me, as a way to understand much animal behavior and saved me from many a flogging as a young child that would have been occasioned by straying too close to a goose protecting her goslings. Later, I came to see this anthropomorphic view of animals as just one application of a principle: accept a theory if, and only if, it helps to understand and predict events in your world. 
Exactly how do we add those layers of abstraction? Unlike the layers of specificity mentioned earlier, which tend to be built, at least in large part, from the top down, layers of abstraction are built by a process of discovery from the bottom up. We collect extensive information and one day, in an "aha" moment of insight, we discover an abstract idea that assigns meaning to some of our accumulated knowledge. A later moment of discovery may occur when we discover an even more abstract idea that assigns meaning to several of these second tier layers of abstraction. Einstein and Infeld described these discoveries as "free creations of the human mind."[4]
An interesting and important point concerning these layers of abstraction is that successive layers of more abstract information are successively less complex. Einstein and Infeld suggested this relationship in connection with their story of a man who is trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch:
In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of such a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. … But he certainly believes that, as his knowledge increases, his picture of reality will become simpler and simpler and will explain a wider and wider range of his sensuous impressions. He may also believe in the existence of the ideal limit of knowledge and that it is approached by the human mind. He may call this ideal limit the objective truth.[5]
Where do these ever-more abstract discoveries end? As Einstein and Infeld suggest in the above quotation, inquiring minds ultimately approach discovery of the first principles of thought: being, meaning, reality, and truth. These first-principle ideas are the highest tier of abstraction possible for the human mind.

Notes:
1. Much of the information contained in this post is from Donald W. Jarrell, At the Edge of Time; Reality, Time, And Meaning in a Virtual Everyday World (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2012, rev. 2014.) See At the Edge of Time.
2. We also use this tree structure to store much of the information in our minds. The information stored in this manner plays a relatively minor role in furthering advances in our knowledge. 
3. That animals have emotions such as love is now a widely accepted view in science.) 
4. Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics; The Growth of Ideas from Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1961) (Original copyright, 1938), 31.
5. Einstein and Infeld, 31.

Next post on a four-week schedule: December 18, 2015.



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