Wan Nes Stan shook his head with annoyance as the machine remained mute. For three days he had been working on it with all of his mind-capacity. In the empty crevasses of his capable mind, Wan Nes Stan was packing enormous quantities of information and education gained on the spot. With perfect memory, he stored the details away and reviewed them with perfection before he tried another change in the circuits of his machine. Sheer reasoning power had failed to solve his problem, not even unreal mathematics served. There was no solution to the problem of how to transfer knowledge from brain to brain.
What is knowledge? he asked himself again and again.
Knowledge is a matter of know-how. It is, in a sense, experience whether original or vicarious. A schoolboy need not perform the generation of calculus in order to study it; the myriad of false trails have been weeded out. Thus schooling can pack a lifetime of learning into a few short weeks by merely pointing the way instead of letting the schoolboy follow all the red-herring trails that the original thinker did. In semantics, the student is offered problems and if he fails to solve them properly, he is immediately prevented from basing other solutions on this false premise—pyramiding his illogic.
So Wan Nes Stan answered himself.
To trace the life-patterns of one brain onto another should not be hard. Yet no theory would permit it.
And a thought came to the governor-select. What is philosophy?
Philosophy is a man's personal evaluation of data.
Based upon what?
Evaluation of data based upon experience and knowledge and reason.