From crystallography to Babette's Feast

Model of myoglobin (Source: Wikipedia) - with inverted colours

In biochemistry, one studies molecular structure by first preparing a crystal of the pure substance.

This is not always easy.

I knew a scientist, who was really good at making crystals.

She was also a good cook.

When we ask her how she makes crystals, she would say: you know, as we work in the kitchen, so we follow a recipe in the lab.

We follow procedures throughout our life. Eating, washing face, putting on shoes, typing words on a computer, are all procedures.

This kind of procedural knowledge (knowing how) is different from  referential knowledge (knowing what).

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Babette's feast <https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTgyNDY0OTA1Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMDkyNDcyNA@@._V1_.jpg>

A secret recipe is available with someone to prepare a meal.

Follow protocol, step 1, then step 2, ... up to step n, and one gets a good meal prepared.

One knows how, but does one know what is it that is being prepared? You may say: Of course, it is a meal.

But what exactly is a meal? Something one eats? Or, an opportunity to transform a person. The aesthetics or the gestalt of that meal, the relationship of different components that combine to create perfection.

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I program computer in my research.

Learn a language, issue an instruction with proper syntax, and the computer does your task.

I know how to write the program.

But knowing what of program is to know the spirit of simulating a world within the computer.

Knowing what strives to reach the spirit of the thing at the deepest level. 

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Procedural knowledge (knowing how) helps to get a task done.

Referential knowledge (knowing what) helps to conceptualize the world around us, ultimately at the deepest level.

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Why is it that knowing how comes easily to us, compared to knowing what?

I think, it started in our childhood, when we were told how to do basic stuff.

Teachers helped us learn how to survive classrooms and  examinations.

We learnt to avoid failure by practice, until we do things correctly.

Our social interactions also helped us modulate our action, but not our thoughts.

Thinking is at the core of knowing what.

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Scientific process asks to identify a gap in knowledge.

Start the process of discovery through experimentation and observation, perform unbiased data interpretation (knowing how) and then infer the conclusion based on of data (knowing what - first version).

Next version of knowing what involves identification with the truth of the discovery.

This is what has been called knowledge by identification.

One can only know a thing by becoming that thing.

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Whatever one  knows, it is always in the context of oneself.

Thus any knowledge is also transformed to a self-reference, and ultimately knowledge of existence and awareness.

Knowing a specific thing, knowing self, one knows all, the truth of existence. From the particle to the cosmos, it is the same existence transformed to awareness, a bright point of light.

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What am I? Someone too shy and hiding inside a room, and looking out the window into the rain, when one could simply open the door, go out, be drenched, play in the mud and laugh with the rainbows.