14 October 2011

Filed under:   knowledge   love

The Human Condition of Knowledge

A casual introduction to practical epistemology, or "How you're ignorant and almost totally clueless":

Cluelessness

Ignorance_diagram

Most people have some conception of their ignorance; but as the saying goes, "the more you know, the more you know you don't know" - as your circle of knowledge (the dot in diagram) grows, your circle of ignorance grows even faster. It's not that you're actually becoming more ignorant: things in your circle of cluelessness are now in your circle of ignorance - you're now aware that they exist, but you don't understand them. Cluelessness includes all those things we're completely unaware of; we don't even know to ask questions about them.

Cluelessness, the set of "unknown unknowns" only includes things you could know; it does not include unknowable unknowns, which would be a vastly larger (probably infinite) set. These are things our human brains - or even enhanced human brains (if you believe that may one day be possible) - cannot know, despite their being true. For instance, the knowledge of the state of every impulse in your own brain at the present time - a brain cannot fully know itself (the "paradox of self-study", more on that below). Examples of things mainstream science believes to be unknowable include quantum uncertainty, knowledge of things beyond the cosmological horizon, and certainty in the future of anything beyond the simplest isolated systems (chaos theory demonstrates how complex systems quickly become totally unpredictable - even if you understand how every element operates).

Resolving details

To me, the modern computer, being the most complex tool ever created by man, is a great example of straightforward, knowable knowledge. Everyone who has heard of a computer is aware that they're ignorant of how they work (even world experts don't know the details of parts beyond their specialty). For most people, "how computers work" is almost entirely in their circle of ignorance. To most, a computer is a magic box which takes input (eg. via mouse & keyboard) at one end, and emits a picture at the other, and they have no conception of how the box works beyond it using electricity. They're aware of their ignorance; they're unaware of all the details, which are in their circle of cluelessness. For instance, they can't ask a single question about why their computer sometimes stops working for no apparent reason, beyond "Why?". Their circle of knowledge can be increased by believing a statement like "some of the electrical power in your computer is used to spin a 3.5 inch metal disc at 7200rpm". Knowledge creates knowledge, and they are now able to link this new fact with previous knowledge, perhaps realising that "drilling a hole in my laptop while it's on may be dangerous, even if I'm protected from electrical current". It also moves information from their cluelessness circle into their ignorance circle: if their laptop stops working, they might now ask a relevant question "Was the spinning of the disc disturbed (perhaps because I was dancing while holding my laptop)?" All this despite being ignorant about what the disc does (apart from spin and use power), and clueless about the details.

Interestingly, even in entirely man-made systems like computers, there are things humanity is clueless about - as circuits gets smaller they get closer to the limits of our knowledge about how particles interact on a nanoscopic scale, and surprising behaviours emerge. So yes there exist truly inexplicable computer bugs (they're mostly compensated for through redundancy).

Resolving details is the easiest kind of cluelessness reduction. More important kinds of cluelessness are less straightforward; for example, grasping the fact that other people have different ways of thinking and feeling. The evidence of how well a person knows that is their ability to communicate.

Self-deception

The above diagram represents the set of knowable truths: the best we can discover with our capabilities (mostly defined by being human, but capabilities also differ between people). This best is an absolute ideal, not relative - given who we are.

Our failure to reach that ideal isn't because we don't know enough stuff, it's more because we're unable to tell fact from fiction: most of what's in our circle of knowledge isn't actually true. We decide what knowledge to investigate, and what to accept, on the basis of our belief system, which is extremely biased. Here's a close-up of the previous diagram:

Knowledge_diagram_closeup

The self-deception circle may seem too big, but that's because it's unconscious (or semi-conscious). We're aware we have some self-deception, but we're clueless about the details. As Freud pointed out, the facts we grasp are often cherry-picked by our emotions (conscious and unconscious), which are often echoes from our early childhood - false impressions of ourselves and the world that we adopted, not having enough knowledge to correctly interpret what was going on. Another example of how knowledge enables more knowledge - the wise get wiser in the same way that the rich get richer (but more powerfully since wisdom is harder to lose than money).

The only way to shuffle these circles in such a way as to increase your set of true knowledge is to compare your sets with those of knowledgeable people and adjust accordingly. The trivial increase is to reduce your ignorance - Google is handy for that. You can also learn new ways of thinking (reducing your unknown unknowns), and become more self-aware (reducing your self-deception) - but these are much more difficult as they push against your habits and ego. These latter, along with your base assumptions and ultimate authorities of truth, determine your ability to recognize truth. Knowledge about knowledge, and the ways you compare your knowledge, is therefore of the utmost importance.

An example of some ways people mis-compare knowledge is the Dunning–Kruger effect, where highly competent people are likely to assume others are similarly competent, therefore underrating their own ability (illusory inferiority), while the incompetent are unable to recognize their own mistakes, thereby being much more confident than their abilities warrant (illusory superiority). Interestingly, this phenomenon is much less common in East Asia, often even reversed.

Going back to the example of computers, I've provided IT support to people since my pre-teen years, and have experienced first-hand how the people who are the most impatient with computer technicians, are the people who are the most ignorant about computers. People with a bit of a clue get less frustrated when something goes wrong because a) they don't expect computers to never fail, b) they realise they may have unknowingly contributed to the problem, and c) they don't assume the solution is simple. The most ignorant people don't realise any of that, because they don't even know they're ignorant, and the knowledge of the expert threatens their self-deception: that they understand their world. It doesn't help that young computer experts are notorious for underestimating the ignorance of non-experts (the other side of the Dunning-Kruger effect).

We can reduce and compensate somewhat for our biases by developing our awareness of them. Hence the ancient Greek maxim "Know yourself". When we're unaware of our inherent biases, we're vulnerable to making all sorts of unfair judgements, and to being manipulated, whether we're being sold a product, a religion, or an idea. Mostly we develop self-awareness by the feedback of wise friends, but some theory is useful too. Some of my favourite teachers of psychological patterns include:

Epistemology

The framework within which we compare knowledge is called epistemology. In order to know anything at all, you must have a framework (sometimes called a world-view) by which to judge knowledge - and that framework cannot judge itself. This is the paradox of self-study, provable by inductive logic: if you have a framework for judging truth, and make a judgment about the framework itself, your framework has now grown to include that judgment. Thus you need to judge the new framework with another judgment, making it grow again - repeat ad nauseum.

As an aside, this also applies to math - a more precise version of the paradox is stated in some of Gödel's theorems about the foundations of math, especially the undefinability theorem: arithmetical truth cannot be defined in arithmetic, or more generally, no sufficiently rich interpreted language can represent its own semantics.

All this means that you cannot prove your epistemology, you can only assume it. You have to place trust in it.

Knowledge about knowledge, or meta-knowledge, involves trust in the ability of a discipline to discover reality, whether that discipline be scientific method (truth about the physical world), historical method (truth about the past - by the strictest definition, science must be repeatable, and thus doesn't cover historical events), or some other philosophy like rationalism, post-modernism, pantheism or theology.

There are even less conscious kinds of knowing - for instance, animals (and human infants) may know how to eat, without being aware of that knowledge, and without having language. Similarly, physical knowledge is semi-conscious, like walking, smelling, or general bodily co-ordination. Humour, aesthetics and sex are clearly not the careful, considered knowing of other frameworks. They beg the question - just how conscious is can any epistemology hope to be? Is philosophy itself a self-deceptive endeavour pretending to be something arrived at carefully and rationally, when in reality it is rationalized after being adopted?

There are other kinds of trust, for instance trust in a person or a god. These may be closer to the common idea of faith, and are a part of love. In many ways they are opposite to other epistemologies, being explicitly non-careful yet consciously chosen.

Faith makes possible the acceptance of unknowns, or unknowable unknowns (mystery and wonder).

Human love embodies an implicit understanding of the human condition of knowledge, being humble enough to recognize the limitations of knowledge, enabling the celebration of the other despite not understanding them, creating the desire for more love - to know others despite their differences.

 


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Inspired by a five-part series from the New York Times about anosognosia (the unawareness or denial of disability), and chapter 4 of Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright.