Knowledge.

We move now to the fourth level in the hierarchy, knowledge. Defining knowledge is even more problematic than defining doctrine, despite thousands of years of study by philosophers. At the risk of severe oversimplification, I would define knowledge as doctrine that has been used in an autonomous fashion. For example, when someone makes a decision on the basis of some doctrine, the doctrine becomes knowledge.

It may seem curious that, under this definition, apparent nonsense can be the basis of knowledge. For example, if we watch a person turn to the right after pausing to flip a coin, we may well have witnessed the following entropic transformations. Some entropy (disordered matter, in the form of a coin) may have been converted to a bit of information, in this case, ``heads'' versus ``tails''. This information may have been converted to a doctrinal item, giving the person an answer to the question ``Which way should I go?'' This doctrine produces knowledge, if the person took heed of the doctrine in deciding which way to go. We ourselves, as observers, have also created knowledge merely by engaging in a cognitive process which results in thinking that ``I'm pretty sure I saw someone make a navigational decision by coin-flip.'' As indicated in the foregoing statement, I would classify a human's cognitive process as an autonomous use of knowledge.

Of course, we may question the wisdom of the decision processes of the coin-flipper and observer. This leads us to the fifth and final entropic category.