Only a tiny fraction of human knowledge is transmitted through knowledge. Humans can't describe the wiring of their visual cortex, or the intuitions they feel. Expert chess players find it impossible to explain why they make the moves they do. Mathematicians can make proofs and explanations, but they still find it very difficult to transmit their underlying mathematical intuition. Even the purest fields of math can only really be learned through experience and practice, not just following a few proofs mechanically.
Language allows us to communicate abstractions, which are then of course subject to interpretation. This is much better than other animals, which lack language facilities as far as we can tell. The entirety of human knowledge cannot be passed, but enough information is communicated that we can rebuild much of it in every generation.
That is very true. Transmittable knowledge doesn't capture the wirings that was required to produce the knowledge. I was watching the film on the Indian mathematician Ramanujan who had an immense intuition of mathematics, and really wondering how mathematical intuition, or intuition in general develops, and what intuition even means.
I am still not sure but after seeing Schmidhuber's talk last week, I think it is being able to find regularities/patterns, resulting in a compressed representation that allows to understand and compress some aspect of the world, and building layers (abstractions) of those compressed representations. This allows you to navigate through very large search spaces much much faster.
It's a fascinating subject, and at the core of what we are. I recommend the film.
That doesn't contradict anything I said, see my first paragraph. The core point is that you don't need to have full metacognition in order to build a culture that learns over time by explaining things and transmitting concepts.
You don't need to explain every dendritic cluster in order to extract core, composable and generative abstractions useful enough to shorten time to understanding by orders of magnitude (discovery of zero vs how quickly it can be taught).
