The Problem of Knowledge Part 2: Learning to Unlearn

Having wrenched at the door of perception with some abandon in part 1, it’s time to peek our heads out the door like a timid cat. Tackling an unavoidably reflective topic like epistemology begs of me a refutation of every word preceding the current; a mess not unlike cleaning a leaking pen with ink-stained hands.

The preceding article appears to trace a linear path to a Socratic standpoint. A view not without merit. Nonetheless, it is still a position derived from opposing views. It is still a philosophical datum, a standpoint held, remembered and safeguarded. It's natural to ask: is there anything that does not depend on a hook to hang a conceptual frame? If you are looking for a fresh outlook, look no further than the mind of a newborn child. On the surface, it may seem that the Socratic not-knowing embodies the same spirit of an unassuming child. However, that one is assumed, and the other unavoidable makes every bit of difference.

The child cannot confess to holding a not-knowing epistemological position; it cannot even begin to conceive of one. It affords an advantage we may now recollect as adults as a kind of effortless, unselfconscious availability; like wet paper blown in the wind, the child's mind sticks and melds with the object of attention without any notion of resistance.

If effortless, then of what use is the adult mind? The adult mind can answer that certain lines must be drawn and alliances made for the practical sake of orienting oneself in the world, in a manner reliably palatable to oneself and others; Pruning availability in favour of personal fortitude. Arguably one can only remain a child when concerns of survival and status are not at hand.

One way of conceiving how the adult mind develops is to think of the mind as a distinction machine. Psychoanalysts sometimes refer to a baby’s inner state as oceanic consciousness. Perception is an undivided soup where the ingredients for labelling and dividing experience have yet to crystallise. The argument goes that such a state persists until the mother acts noticeably differently to the baby’s desire and expectation. This moment is the first opening for the baby to differentiate itself from its mother and begin a process of identifying with the body. Once the principle of division is birthed, it has no limits, and so more and more distinctions are made to manipulate and gain traction on the world with finer and finer fidelity. This swathe of distinctions becomes so large that meta distinctions are made to sort and categorise labels and memories for efficiency of access. Even these can be nested in other structures in an abstract and largely subconscious hierarchy.



The systemic robustness of an adult mind could be described as a memory enforced network of models, that updates in both an unconscious and consciously vetted manner. Imagine the mind as self-adapting scaffolding, where the purpose of adapting is to accurately enclose a perceivable aspect of reality. The perceived aspect, also no more than a blueprint housed within the scaffolding. Here we run into the issues encountered in part 1; It’s scaffolding all the way down, and even if the scaffolding provides some temporary foothold, the base is rather shaky; In constant need of reinforcement. Through a kind of entrancement with our scaffolding, we have come to see our descriptions of phenomena as greater descriptions than the phenomena is a descriptor of itself. Moreover, we have put a scaffolder amongst the scaffolding! We have defined the one who defines, and in doing so, lost ourselves.

The self we think we are is a false inference. It arises when a process of thinking identifies itself as an entity. In other words, the scaffolder is made of scaffolding. You can only “see it” like you can “see” ice cubes in water by applying dye to the water. Applying dye is equivalent to turning the mind in on itself, paradoxically, to see that it isn’t there. The mind is just another thought.

Because this false inference is built on deception, it is guaranteed to be neurotic. This neurotic self-deception is a coping mechanism that seeps into all activities. In the same way that a crystal develops a flaw in its structure and continues to grow, the flaw magnifies and warps the growth of the crystal all the way through.

From a child’s perspective, it's blissfully oblivious to the fact that this high-wire act has commenced. Indeed, its archive of memory is too small to sustain "sensible" sensemaking. Neither is there enough emotionally salient experience to act as condensation nuclei around which thought can be marshalled and pruned.

I’m will reiterate, like the Buddhists and mystics, that all psychological suffering is caused by inaccuracy in perception, and inaccuracy of perception is the fruit of a biased mind. This is not just a thought experiment along the lines of; does a man who sees the sunset and knows it is the earth spinning actually see it differently from someone who thinks it moves across the sky? Interesting, but not liberating. Imagine another scenario. You are walking in a forest, you pause to look at the time, but on looking down something strange happens, the wristwatch and your arm feel as external to you as the trees. Not only that, but you cannot feel any sense of being a centre of experience in a forest, there is only forest/body in a single seamless happening, and none of it is personal. In both scenarios nothing changed, only perspective shifted, but put yourself in their shoes, can you feel the difference? The first scenario is simply weighing the cash value of information, whereas the second is a falling away of a partition held on the level of being.

Building on prior elaboration, there are two implications I will temporarily conceive, logic fencing and logic leaping; but first some housekeeping. It cannot be denied that this article is a scaffolding process, although it differs singularly in its aim to collapse itself. As such, if you are intent on learning anything, you must first subscribe to an insufficient rationale and see its unravelling through to the point of completion. The purpose of deconstruction is to break down presuppositions until they resolve along the entire logic chain in a recontextualising cascade. The result is a closer approximation of the target of enquiry, but here we are not content to merely approximate. Instead of painting an accurate sun on the curtains, why not pull them open to let the real light through? The message revealing itself, not just in this article, but through all forms, is that perception is wrought in the clear light of itself, but this truth is veiled by what we think we know.

By tiling the world in symbolic concepts the world becomes static and dead. When the mind labels a fox, it sees a fox and not what it really is. It does so to move on to what it considers more important, but if it never lives in the non-symbolic world it will never enjoy the moment when it arrives. When a baby sees a tree, it does so in wide-eyed wonderment, because the adults have not yet taught it to put it in a conceptual box, so that it can be dismissed for other priorities. Children are certainly wiser than adults in their inherent recognition that nothing is more or less important than anything else. A pile of leaves may as well be a pile of banknotes, although putting these on a par is an indignity to the design of a leaf.

Knowledge is an illusion; a conflation of pattern recognition disguised as something substantial. Take an oil painting for example. If an onlooker was to contrast one part of the painting to another they might claim knowledge of the subjects of the painting. However, this emergent reality is delineated by an apparent witness, and it can only be delineated in the manner our catalogue of experience recognises. If I have never seen a sheep, there are just white blobs on the canvas. Everything is infinitely interconnected to the point of oneness, but we see a handful of connections and conflate those particular connections with the way the world is. When the painting is seen as a whole, and there is nothing but the painting, including the onlooker, nothing can be said about it, because things can only be said when one “thing” is in relation to another.

Notice that you cannot speak about something without referring to something else. If you talk about your friend, you are not actually talking about them, you are talking about what they like and do. To truly speak of your friend is to say nothing at all! They are whatever they are; something too fundamental to speak. Language wraps the truth in a thousand lies because the truth is the whole picture and language is limited and dualistic. In this way, words are a snare to be seen beyond with the power of awareness.

The difference between absolute and emergent knowledge is similar to a book and its contents. The framework of the book does not allow the recreation of the book through writing alone. The best we can do is to write 'These are words in a book'. This is what the mystic does when he refers to being. Science amounts to blind faith at the bottom level when it attempts to explain its ontology. Truth is too fundamental to explain since the explanation is created by it. Existence is the book that writes itself into being; it has no explanation. If we pursue explanation we will forever be looking behind our looking behind our looking behind… and we will always come up short.

How does this relate to logic fencing? There are many or perhaps infinite modes of logic; emotional, visual, mathematical, intuitive and so on, and it is fair to say that different people use different smorgasbords of logic towards their aims. In that case, what is the particular function of consciously explicated deliberation? Why are we not philosophical zombies? Good question. Putting aside why, the price for the freedom we have is the possibility of becoming lost and ensnared in the world, but it is not the freedom we have, it is the freedom that is.

According to various mystic traditions, the path to a perfect state of mind is to progressively unstick itself from itself so that what remains is the flawless reflection of reality. It’s not that the clouds of the mind need to part, indeed the clouds are the need! To quote a Zen poem:


‘The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection; The water has no mind to retain their image’


Rather than being zombies, we realise our innate freedom, or to paraphrase Wittgenstein, ‘philosophy is to show the fly out of the bottle'. Doubtless, thoughts can create the reality we inhabit in a tangible sense. The same event can send one person spiralling into depression and the other on a path to recovery. Part of reality is in the way it is seen, or is it only the way it is seen? Where does seer and seen start and end?

And so because the mind cannot arise without environment and environment cannot take shape unless interpreted by the mind, so our interpretations of the world create feelings, and those feelings go on to create interpretations. It is immediately clear that such a system isn’t a system of two elements, but a doing of a single mutually interdependent process, like poles of a single magnet. Although framing it in this light makes it easy to see how virtuous or vicious feedback loops occur (no matter how rational 'in a vacuum' we believe we are). These are only possible with the type of compulsive thinking most humans are familiar with.

A catch 22 is that you surely must already entertain the type of logic used in this article to see the value of running with it to begin with. The most challenging part of discovery is no less than taking the first step over the line and into the new paradigm. In this case, I recommend hitching a ride without expectation and making a clean departure at the end. In conclusion, logic fencing is an illusory barrier to entry created when one is comfortable within the pre-existing boundaries of their understanding and this presents a homoeostatic filter to “foreign” logic or experience.

For instance, someone who has yet to incite the ignominy of downing an alarming quantity of alcohol is apt to question the sanity of those who have, especially when in their company. However, the mind of the same individual when under the influence of said quantity of alcohol may well find former considerations laughable, and on meeting with a person of similar character, perceives that person as highly strung and pretentious. To the dismay of the rapidly sobering self, it might well be true! Thus the sober state tutors the inebriated state and vice versa, but one cannot know the true context of either without experiencing the other. Knowing two states confers an expansion of logic beyond thinking within the confines of a single state. We are blind to our own blindness because we are too close to ourselves to see ourselves from another perspective.

A child, however, in its discovery phase, is always logic leaping; bounding into new domains of experience without restraint; primarily because they have little choice. Experience has yet to calcify what to value, protect, reject or uphold, and so for a time, they remain open; unknowingly unrestrained, palatable to society or otherwise. Little memories exist to destructively interfere with learning, and the ego is nebulous. As we grow older the values derived from our emotional palette begins to harden, and we become wary of changing a comfortable, hard-thought locus of identity. Imagine if a friend who was a committed atheist or vegan flipped their opinion on a dime. You might say, “are you feeling alright?” Perhaps tragically, a turn of heart that is effortless for a child is seen as outlandish for an adult.

If we accept there is no possibility of knowing anything for sure, as described in part 1, it may appear that the state of the child, although undeveloped, is an epistemologically superior one. Given that it is immersed in processes it has yet to firmly conclude anything about, no spurious conclusions exist. Note that without imparting any meaning construct, we cannot argue that one position supersedes another as both are ongoing processes; like weaving a braid with the ends of its strands, even our conclusions become intertwined with the thread.

The argument is not an excuse to sit on the fence and fall prey to the balance fallacy. A burden or not, we are stuck with our adult minds, but developing this faculty has not been a waste. Though the child cannot help but be free, by the same token, they are susceptible to years of being led by the nose down rabbit holes of attachment and delusion. A man or woman of 25 years or more has seen enough of the world to touch upon the major cornerstones of life. Exhausting a panoply of beliefs and practices is a brutal sharpening block. Once something new does crop up to arouse our interest, we have the strength of calloused hands to cut cleaner and deeper into the pith.

So how is this collapse of conceptual thinking possible, why would we want it, and what's on the other side? If we will never find a perfect blueprint that explains everything, the only mirror left to what is, is what is. Any desire to know in terms of benefit, explanation, reason and analysis must fray and fall away. Anything less would veil with expectation and desire. Once our the pockets of the mind have been turned out, all that’s left is to turn inward, back to the inscrutable source beyond all understanding —Ourselves— but that will have to wait for part 3: A Peg in the Sky