The Problem of Knowledge Part 1: The Veil

Adjoining The Keystone is the next stone to be mortared into the archway. The problem of knowledge. At face value, we all appreciate the function of knowledge in practical affairs, but there is a more covert role it plays in shaping experience and perception. The degree to which we live within the web of knowledge places a hard cap on our ability to understand the world around us. This will be meta, like a mirror room for the mind.


“There was a young man who said though, it seems that I know that I know, but what I would like to see is the I that knows me when I know that I know that I know” — Alan Watts


This delightful little limerick points to the profound ability of human minds to reflect on their own reflections. A mental echo, reverberating and reinforced so long as a thread of thought is re-iterated. Much like intermittent rivers, where one flush of rain (thinking) erodes into the substrate, causing the next deluge to flow more readily along the same path.

Arguably it is this particular capacity that most thoroughly distinguishes us as human, for other animals, even with the most charitable interpretation of their behaviour, live mostly moment to moment with little to no rumination. This makes the human experience markedly different. It makes humans creatures of time. The mental pulse, a metronome, perpetuating a sense of continuous identity, shoring up a life story that we incrementally renew and refine. We also use this mental imprint to project into the future. As we have an intuitive sense of what we know today and that tomorrow we may subsume new knowledge from the unknown.

These grooves in the psyche splinter an otherwise single and undifferentiated soup of experience into a conceptually known past, understandable present, and unknown, but seemingly predictable future. Our body of knowledge is chiefly a product of the past, and functions as the scaffolding from which we structure our actions and life choices. This is one reason why building a robust baseline of knowledge matters, as doing so can circumvent years of misdirected effort. Still, this is just the first floor. We’re headed right to the boiler room of philosophy. One which eternally begs the question, how do we know what we know?


The Search for Certainty

What can I be sure of? What is fundamentally true? By what means can I arrive there? It’s questions like these that have been the grist for the mill of philosophical and scientific enquiry since their inception, and the shadows of Plato’s cave still ensnare our minds today, under new guises of noumena and phenomena, realism and idealism.

And where better to start than Plato? Where, in his allegory of the cave, he posits fallibility in perception, by imagining how one might, in specific conditions, mistake someone's shadow for the actuality of a person. Stating that our condition too might be one of perpetual ignorance. Our immediate experience amounting to nothing more than a limited representation of a deeper reality, existing forever outside the confines of human observation.

Plato’s mark on western analytical philosophy was indelible. By doubting our most primary and direct means of understanding the world he set in motion a system of intellectual humility that has affected us ever since. Nevertheless, to only be able to say with certainty that something whatsoever exists, as Descartes famously noted, is something of a non-starter. The zeitgeist of our civilization is one of abundant information. Information we seldom mistrust, as it's used to build the world we know, including the technologies which enable our modern lives. Not only is knowledge the basis of our day-to-day lives, but so too are our systems of justice, morality, science, belief and opinion. Moreover, it’s not merely that we implicitly subscribe to these facts and bodies of knowledge, we also desire that some things be unambiguously true. Search your mind. There are likely many beliefs you hold as true and haven’t dared question. For instance, that other people exist outside your own mind, which if you weren’t sure about, could provoke anxiety or even insanity.

So how did we get where we are? Until recently, the process of knowledge acquisition has been a case of what has worked for survival purposes. When our ancestors first began to use tools, a sharp rock attached to the end of a stick was rapidly translated into a concept, associated with fresh meat over the fire. And when the concept was applied and learned by others, it brought about the desired outcome time and time again.

A simplified chain of reasoning follows:

Survival (Good) → Food → Hunting → Tools → Concept → knowledge (Good)

Today, the chains of reasoning we use to justify our actions are more nuanced and abstract, but if we trace them back honestly and openly, there is still more often than not a connection to survival, or that which could be considered insurance of survival, like thriving, comfort and certainty.

It should be no surprise that we find ourselves in a world in which our knowledge “works” since it’s naturally selected, but this should by no means be conflated with any absolute ideas.

Regardless, most of us see sense in disregarding notions of truth, since we can only live in the world as it appears to us, and if Plato is correct, we should have no means to access this truth even if we tried. A concession the current scientific paradigm is reluctantly aligned with. Science is therefore confined to creating and refining models that describe reality as it appears to be. Of course, the trouble is that reality often appears different to different people, causing no end of contention and polarization. The scientific process seeks to quash such relativity through 3rd person objective principles based on empirically verified observation. It doesn’t matter how much you believe your phone will start without a battery, it won't. This is because we have developed technologies with respect to independently verifiable universal laws. The mathematics of which is considered immutable across all observers. This system of observation-based consensus emits a spectrum of confidence based on the weight of substantive evidence behind each claim. This is what permits us to say that some things are truer than others.

A simplified scientific chain of reasoning follows:

The world as it appears (True?) → Observation → Theory → Model → Experiment → Peer review → knowledge (True?)

Science is more sophisticated than the survival model since the starting point itself can be undermined by the very models and experiments which attempt to describe it. This is why science has undergone many paradigm shifts where square one was redefined (germ theory), and the subsequent models remade to more faithfully describe observation. The result is an evolving web of knowledge where new theories are built on previous structures, in which some fundamental axioms are more fixed than others. Consider quantum physics (open) vs conservation of energy (fixed).

So if our descriptions of the relative world accurately assess and predict our experience, where's the problem? The answer is lying between the cracks in the foundations of knowledge. Deconstructionism originates from Jacques Derrida. It refers to how all words are irreducibly relative and only make sense via reference to correlative and contrasting language. There is no stand-alone meaning to any word. For example, ‘safe’ is inextricably tied to ‘secure’, ‘danger’, and ‘precarious’, among others, such that if we remove all contrasting words and referents, it ceases to be functional. Each word linked to ‘safe’ also has its own set of contrasting words that provide its meaning. The meaning of any single word depends on the existence of all other words. You can test this by looking up the definition of a word and then looking up the definitions of the words that define it. You’ll notice how the definitions either circle back on themselves or lead to the most umbrella synonym possible, at which point the definition becomes a tautology. The real profundity here is that deconstructionism applies not only to words but to everything.

That’s right, all symbolic human knowledge is a house of cards, held together only by itself, floating on nothing. Simply take a basic idea, fact or moral stance and incessantly ask why it's true. I’m seeing the colour blue right now because the cones in my eyes are receiving a wavelength of light from its surface and the brain is converting the data into an image… which is true because of the existence of the sun and biological processes that select for colour vision in a dangerous world…. which is true because everyone agrees about the existence of the sun, earth and natural selection and can observe and study them…. which is true because of sensory apparatus relaying information to our brains… which is true because of biological processes… which is true because of evidence-based research… which is true because of sensory apparatus relaying information to our brains… which is true because..?

Apply this to anything. Observe how the chain of reasoning appears solid at first, but becomes increasingly tenuous and circular the deeper you question, until you arrive at some fundamental assumption where progress seems impossible. This remains the case if you ask experts on the cutting edge of their respective fields. In cosmology, inflation remains a stubborn enigma. This is because science is a set of descriptions where deconstructionism applies. Science doesn’t promulgate any basic self-determining ‘stuff’ from which everything originates because this would be ‘magic’ that doesn’t integrate with the rest of the system.

The current paradigm of science is inescapably self-frustrating since its method of validation ‘expects’ reality to exhibit testable causal behaviour. We understand how the sun works because it’s powered by thermodynamic mechanisms that politely dovetail with the rest of physics, but what if you want to comprehend that which begets all other mechanisms, the big bang? Is this also a causal mechanism? If not, it’s magic. If so, what drives it? A deeper mechanism? And then another? Oops, infinite regression! So suppose we handle it by adapting our theories such that reality runs on infinite mechanisms all the way down. See how this is essentially the same as saying that there are no mechanisms? We never arrive at ground zero.

From a meta-perspective, cosmology is a subset of reality attempting to understand the totality of itself, and therefore also involves modelling the processes that produce the system of logic called cosmology. Complete models of reality must include themselves, but this is impossible due to infinite regression. This is the fundamental limitation of models. They necessarily warp our perspective through their limited interpretive lens. Staring at calculus won’t help you throw a dart. A lot more is happening than the maths would have you believe. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems formally prove that models cannot demonstrate their own consistency.

Such deep enquiry requires honesty and open-mindedness. Not all of us are keen to discover that our cherished beliefs and ideas about the world float upon fragile assumptions. Most of us cut short our lines of questioning due to practicality, sanity and cultural influence.

However, this does not mean to say that we should cast aside all of our trusted ways of living with immediate effect. To say that the base of the house of cards floats on thin air, does not mean the reasoning and logic that structures the rest cannot function. Mathematics and technology work for the most part, and so do some of the more nebulous aphorisms about life. The Buddha's insight that desire is the root of suffering holds truth within the practical framework of human affairs, despite the presumptive axioms which bind the system together.

We have now circled back to the question of truth, bearing a stronger feeling of its weight. Imagine humanity as a blindfolded child. Darkness is all we know, yet through trial and error, we begin building robust predictions about our surroundings. We throw a stone. Three seconds later, a sound. With time, position and sound we have enough information to calculate some simple laws of motion. These laws work even when we walk to new positions. Eventually, we compile enough of these principles to form a mental map so reliable we navigate with near-unfaltering precision. This provides us with enough confidence to feel we understand our reality. None of this prepares us for the moment the blindfold slips. The light flooding into our eyes is the ultimate Occam's razor. Our mental maps are instantly burned away by visceral reality. Water is not the sound of water or the feeling of water it’s… water... This is the power of context. Cultural arrogance is like the blindfold that closes our minds to radically new ways of knowing and living.

What if we are wrong about the very things which are most unquestionable? What would it mean for your life? Through the ages, the works of Aristotle, Freud, Galileo, Sartre, Newton and countless others have trickled into the collective consciousness. Software passively absorbed across the cultural fabric, running in the background, percolating into our behaviour. Imagine life without concepts of virtue and sin.

We accept all of this knowledge because it is intimidating. We feel justified in deferring our meagre minds to the authority of hundreds of years of painstakingly curated research and literature. Despite this, the bottleneck for everything you know is your perception. Any information you encounter has to be accepted or rejected by your discernment (or lack thereof) to become integrated into your worldview. Meaning the only authority for what you believe is you, no matter how much you refer to external sources. Herein lies the importance of critically examining our beliefs. Knowledge doesn’t exist independently, up in the ivory towers of academia. It's intimate, and it shapes who we are.

I hope you can intuit something valuable in this segment and read between the lines. Rather than clarifying matters, I have effectively reversed off a cliff. Everything is up in the air, including my own reasoning. Wonderful. This paves the way for part 2: Learning to Unlearn.