Procedural Knowledge

Say you want to learn how to bake a cake. Let's follow what happens and look for the knowledge. First your eyes collected type SE data from looking at the pages. The SE data converted to temporary knowledge of the shapes of the letters and the words they form. Next the brain processes the words of the language it understands. Finally after understanding the language text, the instructions for baking the cake are stored in memory as knowledge.

If you were to actually use the recipe instructions you read to bake a cake your new cake creation would now exist in MEST. You could look at the cake and see its shape and color. You could pickup the cake and feel how much it weighed. In doing this you would be gaining knowledge about the actual cake that you baked. Now the point here is that the knowledge of how to bake a cake is fundamentally different from knowledge of the existence of the cake itself that we get from looking at it and feeling its weight. This should give you a clue that there are fundamentally different types of knowledge in our brain. In one case there is procedural knowledge as in the recipe that then becomes direct knowledge in looking at the cake. In fact there are quite a number of fundamentally different types of knowledge much like there are different types of data. Living things must instinctively know what type of knowledge they are dealing with before they proceed to use it. Here is a quick rundown of some different knowledge types: