                           20050624.01

     The assimilation and/or adaptation to which we humans are
subject and of which we humans are capable is the key, perhaps
the only key, or at any rate, the only key which I have found, to
the manner in which we learn.  It is therefore the key to (all)
our knowledge and as such it is the key to such understanding of
the world, to such understanding of reality of which we are
capable.

     The manner in which the forces and influences of the
physical world affect, modify, alter the structure and function
of our bodies and minds is so obvious and ubiquitous that we have
become accustomed to ignore it.  (The how and why of the suppression
of our awareness of the metamorphoses which we continuingly undergo
is a separate subject; it is the topic of a meta-epistemology.)

     A most obvious of such environmentally induced modifications
is the darkening of the skin, the proliferation or enlargemenet of
melanocytes, I don't know which, that occurs in response to
irradiation by the rays of the sun. The ubiquitously observable
dependence of speech, of vocalization, on the ability to hear
is another persuasive example. The deaf person is mute, because
his spirit, mind, nervous system, brain, neurons, glial cells,
synapses, consider these items of neurology as nouns in a poem,
has been deprived of that environmental stimulation which is
indispensable for its development. Note also that the specifics
of the development, e.g. the language spoken, is a direct 
consequence and is in fact a mirror image of the specifics of
the stimulus.

     One can cite numerous other examples. The ability to interpret
details of visual images, e.g. to read, is the consequence of
exposure to structure and pattern before age four or five. Thereafter
visual acuity can be acquired only imperfectly. Similarly, the
accent and intonation of a language can be acquired only by hearing
it while the nervous sytem still retains its youthful plasticity.
These example serve to illustrate the process and the mechanism of
learning, and by the same token, they reveal not only how a human
being learns, but in what that learning, or knowledge consists:
Knowledge is a functioning image of the environment. The validity
or "truth" of knowledge, then, refers to the accuracy and reliability
with which the individual's mental processes reflect the forces
that have shaped them.

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