More Apple-y Thoughts

When I used the Hebrew for apple in my username, people kept imagining that I was referring to the biblical story of Adam and Eve. I'm not sure why the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is commonly depicted as an apple. According to Wikipedia, it comes from a confusion around the Latin word malus which means evil as an adjective, and apple as a noun. The Hebrew bible states simply the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad. The nature of the fruit is unspecified. This confusion reminds me that as a very young child, when I was learning to speak, I used to think that the expression 'by mistake' which I quickly learned to use when I did something wrong, was related to steak. I would imagine accidentally dropping a piece of steak on the floor. I didn't much like steak.

Knowledge is like a tree, it has stems and branches. It grows outward exponentially, as in the biblical 'be fruitful and multiply.' Think of all the articles published in scientific journals these days. So much knowledge, so much easier to access.

A few years ago when my grandmother was dying I went to the public library in the neighborhood of London where I grew up. The hallways were filled with crateloads and carts of books for sale or for free. The emptying shelves were being replaced by rows of computers. There was a line of people waiting for their 15 minutes free time on the public computers. When we want to know something new, or even remember something we once knew and forgot, we tend to look it up on Wikipedia. Wikipedia isn't like the thousands of articles spreading out from the tree of knowledge, it's like one branch or one web being whittled away by thousands of people. I wonder where all the rest of the knowledge goes? Maybe some of it keeps being rediscovered, like the bedframe I stub my toe on every morning. Douglas Adams wrote that there is a planet where the lost biros end up. Maybe there is a planet for lost knowledge. Maybe the lost knowledge goes like shooting stars to rejoin the Kabbalistic glow at the end of the universe, where it is all of one piece with the knowledge that remains found.

But what about the knowledge that simply is false, or at least very human? Like mistaking malus = apple for malus = evil, or the steak in 'by mistake'? Sometimes it becomes part of culture, and sometimes it remains only a funny image in a small child's mind.

I agree with the biblical story that knowledge of right and wrong is the most primitive kind, a binary representation of the branching structure itself. Aristotle held that knowledge stems from experience via reasoning, and he was the first to codify logic. But logic requires there to exist right and wrong thoughts.