Chapter 15
The
Truth about Knowledge; Our Knowledge of Truth
For this chapter, I will ask
you to put on both your philosopher’s robe and your neurologist’s gown.
Knowledge
The success of our species can be largely attributed to our knowledge. It certainly wasn’t brute strength that allowed us to slay Mastodons. And it wasn’t simply our opposable thumbs that enabled us to build great civilizations. It has been knowledge gained by individuals from experiences and cognition, shared with contemporaries, and then passed on to the many generations that followed. We have every right to feel pride in our accumulated human knowledge. And yet I claim we know almost nothing with certainty. So, what’s it to be? Pride or Humility?
Let’s spend a little time considering the nature of knowledge and truth and then examine my assertion of “ignorance” (ours, not just mine, thank you) For the sake of this book, we won’t entangle ourselves in debates between Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, William James, John Dewey, Richard Feynman, Hegel, and Marx about definitions of Knowledge and Truth. Instead, we will use the following concise definitions. Truth = “What is” (as in Reality). Knowledge = justified awareness of “what is” (as in our Belief of Reality). For practical reasons, the focus of this chapter is Knowledge.
There are many ways of categorizing knowledge. For our current discussion, I will describe three types that are popular with educators and psychologists – Declarative, Procedural, and Conditional. Understanding each type helps us grasp how we learn, problem-solve and apply what we’ve learned in real time.
Declarative Knowledge
Declarative
knowledge is “Knowing That” or “What is”. These are all the facts and
information we retain. Think of the journalist’s pursuit of Who, What, Where,
and When. We know, for example, that Tokyo is the capital of Japan, that our
hearts pump blood through our bodies, and that the Earth orbits the Sun.
Declarative knowledge is as reliable as the source from which we acquired it (primarily
Influencers). Neurologically, declarative knowledge relies heavily on the
Hippocampus (initial encoding), the Medial temporal lobe, and distributed
cortical storage. It overlaps with episodic and semantic memory systems.
Declarative knowledge is most
vulnerable to uncertainty because it depends on perception, testimony, memory,
interpretation, language, and induction (our assumption that the future will
resemble the past). Even strong scientific claims are model-based, probabilistic,
and open to revision. For example, Newton’s laws were “certain” - until
relativity. Ulcers were caused by stress - until bacteria were discovered. Social
or moral claims are even more unstable. So, declarative knowledge is rarely
absolute. It is better described as a highly justified belief under current
evidence.
How do we acquire Declarative knowledge?
Before the advent of the written word, our knowledge came from observation and
word of mouth. Writing emerged less than six thousand years ago – the theory
goes - as a means of tracking grain inventories when humans became agrarian. Consequently, our means of sharing
Declarative knowledge expanded. Fast forward to the present day, when we have
easy access to an infinite amount of information. But can we trust all of it to
be accurate? Of course not.
Procedural
Knowledge
The next kind of knowledge is Procedural or “Knowing How”. This is knowing how to do something. It involves skills and methods. Examples include playing a musical instrument, driving a car, and writing a book. We can get so proficient in this knowledge that it feels innate – even though, in most cases, we were taught. Procedural knowledge is stable over time and not prone to distortion. Neurologically, it relies more on the Basal ganglia, Cerebellum, and Motor cortex. You can lose declarative memory and still retain procedural skills. That tells us knowledge is not unitary.
Humans have extraordinary Procedural knowledge. Consider your own. Perhaps it is a job you’ve been doing for many years. Maybe it’s a hobby. Whatever it is, I’m sure I would be impressed and not be able to rival your expertise in that area. Yet we would both be humbled by the hunter-gatherer humans who roamed the earth 70,000 years ago. They had superb survival skills and vast know-how knowledge of the natural world. Our present-day how-to knowledge is relatively narrow. Our advantage over our ancient ancestors is a limitless library of information available at our fingertips. So, collectively, we know far more, but individually, far less. For example, while I am relatively “handy” at maintaining my house by today’s standards, I would often be lost without the instructional videos on YouTube. Human knowledge is a collaborative, cumulative endeavor that has evolved “rapidly” over the last couple of hundred thousand years. Some refer to that kind of knowledge as Dispersed or Distributed Knowledge.
Conditional Knowledge
The final kind of knowledge is called Conditional. It bridges Declarative and Procedural knowledge. It is about “Knowing When, Where, and Why” to apply the first two types. If you are considered an expert in your field – say, as an orthopedic surgeon or as a barista, you will know the necessary facts required, will be adept at the procedures involved, and know, as a surgeon, for example, when to recommend Ibuprofen instead of amputation. It also helps tell us when to trust someone (like our barista). Conditional knowledge relies on our Prefrontal cortex (executive integration), emotional memory systems (amygdala), and social cognition networks. This is memory integrated with prediction and context evaluation.
The understanding of where, when, and why to apply our Declarative and Procedural knowledge helps guide us through complex decisions and adapt to new situations. It is our superpower when applied correctly. The businessperson adeptly selects the most effective advertising campaign for their new product. The gamer knows which tactic to use to reach the next level. The parent knows the appropriate discipline to apply when their child misbehaves. You know when to throw your red sweater into the wash with the tighty whities (just kidding). In the first three examples, conditional knowledge is the key to smart, flexible action that goes beyond rote behavior.
Conditional knowledge is usually developed through trial-and-error experience, logical reasoning, and education. As you can guess, this type of knowledge tends to improve with age, but not always. Sometimes old habits persist even as new conditions arise. So, people of my generation (boomers) can at times appear wise and other times foolish.
Knowledge and Memory
All
knowledge depends on memory systems. Without memory, you cannot accumulate facts,
refine skills, build conceptual models, or recognize
patterns. If, for example, your hippocampus is damaged, your ability to form
new knowledge collapses.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Memory
is not a recording device. It is compressed, reconstructed, emotionally
modulated, and context-sensitive. Every recalled event slightly rewrites the
memory trace (reconsolidation). Therefore, knowledge is never a perfect copy of
past experience - it is a continually updated model built from reconstructed
memory. This is why certainty is fragile. Raw memory becomes knowledge when it
is abstracted (patterns extracted), integrated with other memories, stabilized
through repetition, and reinforced socially. In other words, memory is stored experience, and Knowledge is structured, generalized memory networks.
Because memory is reconstructive, biased,
and context-sensitive, knowledge inherits those limits. We feel certain because
memory feels coherent, neural networks stabilize through repetition, and familiarity
produces confidence. But confidence isn’t certainty.
Modern neuroscience increasingly sees
the brain as a prediction machine. Memory serves prediction. The brain
stores patterns from past experience. It uses those patterns to anticipate the
future. Knowledge is essentially compressed predictive models. In this sense, knowledge is memory optimized for prediction.
The
Closing Case for: “We Know Almost Nothing with Certainty”
The
claim that we know almost nothing with certainty is not nihilism. It is an
observation about the limits of human cognition, perception, and reasoning.
1. All knowledge passes through
fallible perception.
Everything we “know” begins with
perception - sight, sound, memory, inference. But perception is not a direct
recording of reality. It is an interpretive construction. If the raw data
entering consciousness is filtered, predictive, and error-prone, then certainty
about the external world becomes fragile.
2. Language compresses and distorts
reality
We
do not access the world directly - we access descriptions of it. As stated in
the preface, words are abstract. They simplify, omit nuance, and freeze dynamic
processes into static labels. Every statement about reality is a model - and
models are approximations. Approximation is not certainty.
3. Reasoning evolved for survival, not
truth
Human
cognition evolved to detect threats quickly, maintain group cohesion, and justify
actions socially. It did not evolve to maximize objective accuracy. Cognitive
biases are not occasional glitches - they are structural features of how we
think. Confirmation bias, availability bias, overconfidence, and motivated
reasoning all systematically distort belief formation. If our reasoning
apparatus is optimized for fitness rather than truth, then certainty becomes
suspect.
4. Scientific knowledge is provisional
Science
is our most reliable method of inquiry - yet even science does not claim
certainty. Scientific claims are probabilistic, revisable, and open to
falsification. What we “know” often becomes what we once thought.
5. The problem of induction
We
assume the future will resemble the past, physical laws will remain stable, and
patterns will persist. But this assumption cannot be proven without circular
reasoning. Induction works - but its reliability cannot be established with
certainty.
6. Consciousness itself is opaque
As discussed before, we do not fully understand what consciousness is, how subjective experience arises,
or the nature of selfhood. Even the most immediate thing - our own awareness -
is partially mysterious. If we cannot fully explain the experiencer, certainty
about experienced reality becomes even more limited.
What remains?
There are a few possible candidates
for certainty. Logical tautologies (e.g., A = A) and the existence of present
experience (“something is happening”) are two. But there aren’t many more. Everything
else - physics, history, identity, morality, social reality - is held with
degrees of confidence, not absolute certainty.
To
accept the claim, we know almost nothing shouldn't lead to despair. It is
intellectually honest. It does not eliminate knowledge - it reframes knowledge
as approximation, confidence levels, and continually updated models. After all,
the level of knowledge we are capable of allows us not only to survive the curveballs of most days, but also to build empires, and may
be sufficient to survive the challenges of the future.
At the risk of beating a dead drum (sic) about the fallibility of human knowledge, I next
present a model I call “The Proximity Factor”.