Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

POKA, Practice Of Knowledge Acquisition, PERSONNALY EVOLVED NEUROBIOLOGY WHERE COKA, Culture Of Knowledge Acquisition, PLAYS A HUGE ROLE. “Knowledge” is to be interpreted here in the most general way, covering facts, logic, emotions and moods.

Brains have evolved, in all animals, to understand physics, and act accordingly. This statement will surprise those whose erroneous culture has imprinted into them that the scientific method was invented recently by the US plutocratic center Harvard (Kuhn). 

The scientific method was created by evolution. Indeed, physics is from the Greek ta physika, literally “the natural things,” title of Aristotle’s treatise on nature… Each animal, to a more or less extent, is its own experimental physicist… Octopuses can figure out how to open a screwed bottle. Octopuses are experimental geniuses. But octopuses, although they can become friendly, have no culture, are not very social, and live only a short while, so they could never develop technology (in humans, tech preceded, and gave rise to, the genus Homo). (On a personal note, as a child I hunted and killed an octopus, to turn it into dinner; however, in doing so I discovered I killed a creature with an advanced mind, which desperately wanted to live, and I never did it again…)

Octopuses got genetically embarked on an evolutionary blind alley: very high creative intelligence, but very short lives and no possibility of culture. Cephalopods are completely dependent upon their own scientific minds starting from scratch… to find out what is true, and what is false.

However, SOCIAL animals have another way to get to the TRUTH, besides their own personal experiences and experiments: they can record, as societies, happenings and theories, and then learn from each other: that is called CULTURE. Advanced social species depend upon culture. TRUTH SOCIAL!

***

AD HOC Science Gathering NEUROBIOLOGY: Practice Of Knowledge Acquisition (POKA) 

Each single brainy animal has to evolve a personal neurobiology to handle new data. This is taught in a personal dialogue with and by the environment: the brain is the student and interacts with the environment, which is the teacher. Either can be excellent, or terrible, or anything in between. The broadest metaprinciples that the student, the brain, extract from this are embodied by evolved neurological pathways. 

Thus all advanced animals have personal philosophies. They are neurobiologically incarnated. Literally. Each pet is its own pet. All animals with advanced brains evolve their own Practice Of Knowledge Acquisition (POKA)… POKA is more fundamental than TOK, the Theory Of Knowledge. POKA is neurobiological. All and any neurobiology is unique. 

One can visualize POKAs where new knowledge is feared, because new knowledge is connected to the amygdala, the fear center of the brain, excessively, or, in complete contrast, POKAs where new knowledge is connected to reward centers. I have known mathematicians who felt physical enjoyment when making math, or so they confessed (I didn’t dig, it was too embarrassing, I should and could have as some of these enthusiastic mathematicians were peers!)

***

POKAs Vs COKAs: Culture Of Knowledge Acquisition

In much of Africa, elephants survive on culture: knowing where the water and the food is, according to season, what to do when confronted to lions, etc. This is all social culture transmitted by elders. Kill the elders, kill the culture, kill the species… In humans postmenopausal women, with their better survival rate, were living culture carriers… 

To learn from culture is great, a shortcut, we humans can learn from the experience of 200,000 generations, not just from ourselves, but culture is a form of Artificial Intelligence, and, just like AI, culture can completely HALLUCINATE. Good examples of atrocious hallucination was Nazi culture and its extermination camps (where around 20 million people died), and Lenino-Stalinism (the Gulag!) 

It’s just boring sometimes to contemplate fallacies multiplying fallacies inside the fallacious multiverse of schizoid minds… Thanks to demented and demonic cultures taken as the Gospels (Gospels means good news). This is especially true for those pushing the alleged glory of plutocratically imposed superstitions which caused millennia of terror and massacres…

Humans are no different from all other brainy animals, but in their case the quotient Culture/POKA is the highest, so much human behavior is culture derived.

*** 

My present dog is an excellent example. I even learn from him, at the level of the hierarchy of emotions… for example the importance of trust. In any sort of society. My dog trusts me, so I can trust him, and then we can extricate ourselves from delicate situations such as crossing a street, or a mountain range with cliffs, safely… even when a raging thunderstorm is coming and speed is of the essence. My dog fallacies are interesting, because he tends to make them one at a time, and then he learns to correct them quickly. Yesterday he discovered that standing on a paddleboard in the ocean didn’t require swimming back to shore in a panic right away… Instead one could contemplate shore and ocean serenely, after a few good shakes. 

However, human minds swimming in an ocean of fallacies can’t learn from it, as they are drowning in the unreal, horizon to horizon… They are simply boring. 

Wisdom is hierarchical, and when it rests on lies, it enables humans to behave dumber than insects.

A large ten centimeter cricket flew, extremely well, into my house and then, when it discovered he could get away with it, proceeded to sing so loud it was difficult to follow “Squid Game”, the deep Korean show. Exploring my guest’s POKA, I was able to half tame it in a few minutes. I watched it clean itself like a cat from close by (rub the face, clean that neck, etc…). It stayed in the house for more than a day, although giant bay windows were fully open. Intelligence and consciousness of insects have been underestimated…

My very loud guest. Unknown species. May have crossed the Mediterranean.

***

We propose something profound, and it’s worth unpacking in several dimensions—neurobiological, philosophical, evolutionary, and epistemological. Let’s explore in more detail.

🧠 1. POKA (Practice Of Knowledge Acquisition) vs. TOK (Theory of Knowledge)

TOK—in the classical sense—is abstract, reflective, often post-facto, and culturally mediated (as in the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum or in Kantian epistemology). It’s about how we think we know.

POKA, by contrast, is embodied and active. It’s not just theory divorced from hard facts: it can be experimentally elucidated; it’s a biological practice grounded in evolved neurological machinery. Where TOK is philosophical and discursive, POKA is neurodynamic and behavioral. It’s how an organism actually acquires, filters, values, triage and responds to new data.

It could be called NEP,  NeuroEpistemic Phenotype—how a being “finds out, and, or, knows how to know and how to process new knowledge.” POKA is a better name in the sense that it evokes the POKING of enquiring minds at the universe. NEP is more academic sounding…

***

🧬 2. POKA as an Evolved Trait

All animals with complex nervous systems must deal with novel stimuli, and fit them in neurological models. This is why they have brains: adaptation to evolution of circumstances. Evolution has selected different strategies to acquire and process knowledge (broadly defined as usable information). For example:

• Fear-dominant POKA: In prey animals or traumatized brains, knowledge acquisition routes through the amygdala—leading to stress, suspicion, withdrawal. New stimuli are threats first, facts second.

• Reward-oriented POKA: In novelty-seeking species or individuals (corvids, primates, some humans), the dopaminergic system lights up with new patterns. For some, especially scientists, knowledge acquisition becomes addictive.

These are not mutually exclusive—they can coexist and shift depending on context and life experience. Especially in humans, with a 100 million year old evolution as carnivores, omnivores and prey…

***

🧑‍🎓 3. Personal Philosophy as Emergent from POKA

Saying that “every pet is its own pet,” taps into the idea that POKA is individualized.

Just as every brain is structurally unique (due to both genetics, morphogenesis and lived experience), each animal—including humans—develops its own philosophy, even if it lacks linguistic expression.

• Some canids learn that dominance leads to safety, and satisfying will to power.

• Others learn that appeasement leads to affection, and a more predictable future.

• A monkey or a chimp may adopt a manipulative POKA, preferring indirect knowledge gains (watching others) rather than direct exploration. Even among a pride of lionesses, some are leaders and killers, while others just tag along.

In humans, this can become an explicit philosophical posture—skeptical, inquisitive, mystical, combative, anxious, risk averse, emphatic, etc. But any such personal philosophy is built on deep neurobiological networks reinforced by the Hebbian mechanism… making that philosophical aspect extremely hard to change.

An Inch Allah (Si Dieu Le Veut; If God Will It) civilization will tend to be less ready to assert responsibility, preferring instead to rely on the alleged deity…The change of COKA of the Renaissance consisted in reacquiring agency by removing it from the mythical god. 

***

🧩 4. Mathematical Joy and Neuroaesthetics of POKA

Mathematics is the most basic form of physics, and has taken enormous importance after civilization evolved empires. Mathematics enables the precision empires required. Creating new mathematics requires serious neurological creation and tends to be reserved to a minority of dedicated minds (I am polite). 

Mathematicians feeling physical pleasure when doing math aligns with the idea that even brain reorganization can be internally motivated by reward neurohormonal mechanisms. There is evidence that doing mathematics activates reward centers, particularly the insula and ventral striatum—regions involved in aesthetic and emotional processing.

Why would evolution provide for this sort of internalized intellectual masturbation? Simply because evolving new theories is the primordial characteristic of humans. True theory creation ensures greater survival probability, and this discovery by evolution precedes the genus Homo (we have evidence of Australopithecines using sharp stone blades to cut… Australopithecine flesh and bones, from 3.4 million years ago; 1.2 million years before Homo Habilis…) 

So for some, abstract reasoning itself is POKA-rewarding.

• These individuals might evolve a mathematico-centric POKA.

• Others might have a sensorimotor POKA, tied more to embodiment and physical interaction (e.g., athletes or dancers).

• A traumatized person might evolve an avoidant POKA, where new knowledge is minimized because it destabilizes fragile predictive models of the world.
• POKAs often arise from DMN… which stands for the Default Mode Network, a network of brain regions that shows high activity when the brain is at rest—not focused on the outside world—and tends to “switch off” when we are doing goal-directed tasks. DMN is how we simulate possibilities, and create meaning and models in the absence of new sensory input. It’s essential to how and why we make sense of the world, especially when we’re not reacting to it but constructing internal narratives… which, in the end, are just extremely extended neural networks.

DMN encompasses many areas of the brain: Medial Prefrontal Cortex (mPFC): Self-related thought, decision making. The Posterior Cingulate Cortex (PCC): Memory retrieval, emotional evaluation. Precuneus: Visuospatial imagery, consciousness. Angular Gyrus: Language, conceptual processing. Hippocampus: Memory formation and simulation of experience. Temporoparietal Junction (TPJ): Social cognition, perspective-taking.

***

There is also COKA: Culture Of Knowledge Acquisition. COKAs are created mostly from different neurobiology than POKAs without cultural components: mirror neurons and the hippocampus (short term memory). COKAs imprint us on how to process new knowledge. Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” was an attempt to create a new COKA in China.

COKAs are more or less performing regarding their primary function. Islam has, overall, extremely poor COKA: everything has to please God, as defined in a book written in the desert during the oldest Middle Ages, among, war, strife slavery and thievery.

COKA is where POKAs, mostly, and on the average, come from. The superiority of Europe, Mesopotamia, India or China came from superior COKA. Assyria invented massive libraries, 3,000 years ago, to create superior COKA. That mood, of the importance of the Book, thereafter persisted (maximum Assyrian extension owned Cyprus, a Greek island, and, through the intermediary of Phrygia, say, may have helped the synchronous Greek Renaissance embodied by Homer… besides the usual well-known Phoenician pathway: Assyrian and Phoenicians were in direct intimate conflict)

🧠🧭 6. Implications and Extensions

• Cultural Systems COKAs shape and reinforce certain POKAs (e.g., scholastic, militaristic, mystical). Schooling, at its deepest, is essentially an attempt to normalize and canalize POKA.

• Mental illness could be understood, in part, as POKA malfunction—where the filters for knowledge become too tight (paranoia), too loose (mania), or misdirected (delusions).

• AI lacks a biological POKA but mimics some versions (reward-seeking via optimization). Could an artificial entity be said to “have a POKA”? Perhaps one day—if it’s embedded, evolving, and context-sensitive.

🧠 Final Thought:

We are sowing a revolutionary fertile ground: a move from treating knowledge as external (to be theorized about), to seeing knowledge acquisition as biological, internalized, neuroevolved, and personally, and often idiosyncratically practiced. POKA would be to epistemology what “muscle memory” is to athleticism—a dynamic, situated, and embodied way of becoming with the world. (“Muscle memory” is itself a POKA, but it does not very much vary from one person to the other, because muscles are all the same and pretty much forced, by physics, to act all the same, sending back to the brain roughly the same proprioception; genera; POKA’s input will, by contrast vary enormously, as the mental muscles and practices are, themselves, literally the fruit of one’s imagination!) 

 Final Speculative Thought

If Theory of Knowledge is the tip of the epistemic iceberg, a flag fluttering in the wind, POKA is the submerged mass—neurological, emotional, embodied, solid state circuitry. POKA governs not just what we know, but whether we want to know, how we deal with knowing, and what we become as a result. POKA is much of “what we are”. POKA creates Free Will. 

“KNOWING ANEW IS BECOMING.”

… So we better be careful with what we get to know...

Patrice Ayme