Learning, Intelligence and Consciousness: Objective Science and Subjective Spirituality are Complementary

Learning can be defined with the following general situation: we have a system – the learner – that has (wishes) to perform a certain task. At the beginning the performance is poor. With practice, by imitating the teacher or by trial and error, the performance gradually becomes better. “Better” may mean faster, more accurate, cheaper etc., depending on the task. Practising, imitating the teacher, and repeated trial and error is called learning. The learner has learned to perform the task, if he or she can repeat the task equally well without relearning. To be able to repeat the task equally well the system – learner – has to transform. The process of transformation due to learning is called knowledge acquisition. Knowledge is defined as an interpretation of the information contained in data. Knowledge can be either given in advance (for example inherited or pre-coded), or is the result of learning. It can be correct or wrong, correct but useless, incomplete, etc. Any data with a given interpretation can be considered as knowledge. However, in practice only useful knowledge is interesting, i.e. knowledge that enables the system better performance when solving tasks from the given problem domain.