How Do We Know What We Know?

I will quote from Jill LePore's After The Fact (The New Yorker, March 21, 2016 issue). She's talking about the views of Michael Lynch, who is introduced in this quote.

Most of what is written about truth is the work of philosophers, who explain their ideas by telling little stories about experiments they conduct in their heads, like the time Descartes tried to convince himself that he didn’t exist, and found that he couldn’t, thereby proving that he did.

Michael P. Lynch is a philosopher of truth. His fascinating new book, “The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data,” begins with a thought experiment: “Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person’s brain.” As thought experiments go, this one isn’t much of a stretch. (“Eventually, you’ll have an implant,” Google’s Larry Page has promised, “where if you think about a fact it will just tell you the answer.”)

Now imagine that, after living with these implants for generations, people grow to rely on them, to know what they know and forget how people used to learn—by observation, inquiry, and reason. Then picture this: overnight, an environmental disaster destroys so much of the planet’s electronic-communications grid that everyone’s implant crashes.

It would be, Lynch says, as if the whole world had suddenly gone blind. There would be no immediate basis on which to establish the truth of a fact. No one would really know anything anymore, because no one would know how to know.

I Google, therefore I am not.

Lynch thinks we are frighteningly close to this point: blind to proof, no longer able to know. After all, we’re already no longer able to agree about how to know. (See: climate change, above.) Lynch isn’t terribly interested in how we got here. He begins at the arrival gate. But altering the flight plan would seem to require going back to the gate of departure.

My Flatland model is the gate of departure.

How do we know what we know? Lynch is saying that people "know" things based on what Google tells them. Without Google to tell them things, they would know nothing. But that is simplistic nonsense.

The Flatland model as laid out in the three essays (and an unfinished fourth) yields a deceptively simple answer to the knowing question. The abstract model of how the brain "works" pictured below is included in that unpublished fourth essay. In that essay I called the brain a "reducing valve." This text introduced the term.

In a New Yorker article on the therapeutic uses of psychedelic drugs, writer Michael Pollan quotes Aldous Huxley, who wrote The Doors Of Perception in 1954.

In “The Doors of Perception,” Aldous Huxley concluded from his psychedelic experience that the conscious mind is less a window on reality than a furious editor of it.

The mind is a “reducing valve,” he wrote, eliminating far more reality than it admits to our conscious awareness, lest we be overwhelmed. “What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive.” Psychedelics open the valve wide, removing the filter that hides much of reality, as well as dimensions of our own minds, from ordinary consciousness...

Here's a brief explanation of what the pictured model says—

Confirmation bias filters what we attend to. Roughly speaking, humans selectively attend to information which confirms what they already "know" (top, left).

Information which 1) contradicts what people "know"; and 2) is threatening in some way is filtered such that it never gets into memory, or becomes distorted in memory (top, center).

Compromised memory, along with the entire unconscious and innate suite of Flatland biases, instincts, defenses, filters, etc. serve as inputs to a "Gatekeeper" (akin to Michael Gazzaniga's interpreter) which reduces that information down to what I call a congruent output (lower left).

Necessarily, a congruent output is 1) an outcome which satisfies—is in agreement or harmony with—all of the constraints Flatland imposes; and 2) is in harmony with what resides in (already compromised) associated memory (middle).

Congruent outputs appear after the fact (post-hoc)  in consciousness (lowest left and right). Consciousness itself is epiphenomenal, meaning that there is no conscious "mind" separate from the physical brain. Consciousness, however implemented  in the brain, merely reinforces the congruent inputs the Gatekeeper gives it. Thus you are almost always absolutely sure about what you "think" you know.

Oversimplifying, "congruent outputs" are what the "external self" knows. That's the answer to the title question. As the diagram indicates, we are always dealing with an external self when we deal with other persons—that person can be at various times the bullshitter, the actor, the publicist, the defendant, the prosecutor, etc., just as other people deal with your external self.

Humans don't arbitrarily download information from the internet. The vast majority of them don't use the Google portal to learn things. That's very rare, at least among non-scientists. Humans establish a social identity on the internet which pretty much assures that any information they get through their self-selected ("chosen") portals will be congruent with their internal self as shown above.

Those who live and breath politics go to political websites. Progressives go to progressive websites. Doomers go to doomer websites. Environmentalists go to environmentalist websites. And so on. Social apps like Facebook and Twitter, in so far as they are generic, cater to all human social groups and facilitate the formation of social subgroups (likes, dislikes, etc.). Very often, a person's self-selected portal is simple texting, which is purely social and personal.

Thus the subdivided structure of the internet implements the Flatland model pictured above, for the most important Flatland instincts are by far our social instincts, as I wrote about in the third essay. Although I have a left a great deal out of this summary, still, you are in a position to evaluate this text describing "philosopher of truth" Michael Lynch's views—

Then came the Internet. The era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by “facts” is being taken over by “data”...

"Data" in the sense intended here ("information on the internet") is usually human bias writ large. There never was an "era of the fact"

This is making for more epistemological mayhem, not least because the collection and weighing of facts require investigation, discernment, and judgment, while the collection and analysis of data are outsourced to machines. “Most knowing now is Google-knowing—knowledge acquired online,” Lynch writes in “The Internet of Us” (his title is a riff on the ballyhooed and bewildering “Internet of Things”).

Google-knowing? The Flatland model exposes this as specious nonsense.

We now only rarely discover facts, Lynch observes; instead, we download them. Of course, we also upload them: with each click and keystroke, we hack off tiny bits of ourselves and glom them on to a data Leviathan.

That "data Leviathan" humans create (downloading, uploading) mostly reflects Flatland instincts at work (social instincts, confirmation bias, "bad news' filtering, etc.). On the other hand, when NASA and others tell you Feburary, 2016 demolished all previous single-month temperature anomalies, you can believe it.

“The Internet didn’t create this problem, but it is exaggerating it,” Lynch writes, and it’s an important and understated point. Blaming the Internet is shooting fish in a barrel—a barrel that is floating in the sea of history.

That barrel is floating in a sea of Human Nature, as history amply demonstrates

It’s not that you don’t hit a fish; it’s that the issue is the ocean. No matter the bigness of the data, the vastness of the Web, the free-ness of speech, nothing could be less well settled in the twenty-first century than whether people know what they know from faith or from facts, or whether anything, in the end, can really be said to be fully proved.

Faith? Facts? Can anything be fully proved? Well, obviously religious instincts are part of the answer, but most of this is silly nonsense, mere Flatland confusion (lack of self-knowledge).

As far as I'm concerned, to a good enough first-order approximation, the Flatland model above explains where human "knowledge" comes from, and it ain't a pretty sight. A second-order approximation might discover what is actually implemented in the physical brain, thus augmenting or even supplanting the Flatland model. I am confident that most (if not all) of the fundamental unconscious processes the Flatland model captures would be retained in or follow from a model which detailed how unconscious processes are implemented.

Obviously I will have more to say about this in the future. If you have questions about this model in the comments, I will do my best to answer them.

Comments

[Ken Barrows]

If one were to draw a Venn diagram of fact and value, would it be two circles of the same size, the second on top of the first?

[colinc]

Absolutely fascinating post, Dave. The New Yorker piece on Lynch seemed a bit convoluted but the "money quotes," for me, were...

Their consequences, [Lynch] believes, are dire: “Without a common background of standards against which we measure what counts as a reliable source of information, or a reliable method of inquiry, and what doesn’t, we won’t be able to agree on the facts, let alone values. Indeed, this is precisely the situation we seem to be headed toward in the United States.”
...
When we Google-know, Lynch argues, we no longer take responsibility for our own beliefs, and we lack the capacity to see how bits of facts fit into a larger whole. Essentially, we forfeit our reason and, in a republic, our citizenship.

I'm looking forward to reading some of Lynch's papers at his UConn site and have downloaded his "Intellectual Humility in Public Discourse" PDF which I'll peruse over the next couple of days.

Many thanks, too, for the links to the New Yorker article on psychedelics used for therapy (though I've not finished reading it yet) and The Guardian review(?) of Huxley's "Doors..." (and the links contained therein). I'm also looking forward to exploring the Stanford epiphenomenalism treatise. Alas, where you write "Michael Gazzinga's interpreter," the link seems to be broken.

More importantly, though, I'm genuinely curious about how you "arrived" at your flow-chart/model of the brain as a "Reducing valve." (Note, I am, to a large extent, in agreement with that perspective.) How much was inferred by reflection and self-awareness and how much from observation of "our" fellow humans? How did you assess the connections between the inputs, memory, "Gatekeeper," etc. and decide to describe them in the manner shown? To what extent did inductive or deductive reasoning processes come into play? Do you perceive a difference between "belief" and the faculty of "reason?" Do you think empiricism is "valued" by "too many" or "too few" members of "our" species... or given too much or too little credence in general? Oh, I have so many more questions but, at the moment, they all seem to battling between my ears for primacy and will have to wait until that's sorted out! :)

I realize that answering such queries in a comment might be "difficult," so I'm anxiously awaiting what more you will say about this in the future. Again, kudos, this is wonderful food for thought!!

[Dave Cohen]

@colinc

That Gazzaniga interpreter link is working now.

-- Dave

[Jacob Horner]

Really fabulous Dave. Thanks. For someone with my history - the last half of the sixties were an "overdose" on psychedelics, Huxley, etc - Pollan's article is a feast. Although, I think he left out MKUltra which included Ken Kesey and Robert Hunter.

Funny thought... Trump on Hyahuasca...unsupervised.

You posted Flatland Parts II and III while I was away. They are part of that "shitload of catching up to do." I'll get there...10 year old computer notwithstanding.

As Always..Muy Agradecido

[Dave Cohen]

I'm sorry to tell you guys this, but the only thing I took from Aldous Huxley (psychedelics, etc.) was the name reducing valve.

Otherwise, that stuff had nothing to do with the pictured model, which captures all the observations I made in the first three essays and much more.

-- Dave

[Katherine]

Thanks Dave, this gives me a lot to think about.

It substantiates my poorly articulated intuition that the human brain, civilization and technology are all similar engines not of "intelligence" as complexity but of violent simplification (reduction; cartooning of reality?) I wish I knew more about physics because there's a clear thermodynamic tie-in here. Humans seem to be engines that process complex, chaotic reality and ecosystems to wastelands of simplicity, both metaphorically and literally, internally and externally.

Just look at the way Earth's diverse, complex, free-formed landscapes have gradually reduced to simple Cartesian grids under our management. We specialize in converting territory to maps. This doesn't bode well for our planet. Similarly, as your model describes, our brains specialize in converting information into social maps, which doesn't bode well for knowledge.

I like the way you've placed the "Flatland" filter before the Gatekeeper, so we know information is already distorted even before it makes it to the cognitive filtering stage. Human perception and thought "boils down" reality quite a few times before it reaches awareness. It's like homeopathy...once you've diluted it enough, what is left, the essence of the matter or nothing at all?

I do have a few questions about your placement of consciousness within the external self, and the definition of this "external self." I'll try to be as clear and brief as possible.

While I agree consciousness is epiphenomenal, is there any specific reason you link it only with the external self? If we interpret your "external self" as the social self, this could allow the conclusion that socially isolated people are not conscious. On a related note, are you suggesting that the internal representation of the self is unconscious? Where does the classic internal "sense of self" fit into this--would you consider it external? For me this model might work better if "internal" and "external" were replaced with pre- and post-, or something else. Not sure, just speculating.

As I'm sure you know well, for those of us who have experienced isolation and intense self-examination the external self is drastically reduced, filters may be damaged and the normal input/output ratio is thrown off. So we don't fit into society. Perhaps you're entirely correct to use the internal/external schematic because the default human isn't conscious outside of his social functioning. In this case I'd guess there's a continuum starting with the average person who rarely thinks beyond social identity, and the unfortunate few who've become marginally conscious of normally opaque processes.

I've noticed that there is a telling divide between neuroscience realists and ecological realists, with few exceptions (mainly you). Those who are able to face the truth about our brains can't face the truth about the limits to our growth, and vice-versa. Some of the most insightful neuroscientists are lost in dreams of singularity and silicon utopias. Carbon is the problem. Maybe they need to try Ayahuasca. Or lay off it. Does it matter when we're all hallucinating anyway?

[Andy]

What we know, comes from our subconcious, which decides what we take in, how we interpret things, and then what we 'know' controls how we act in front of others. Truth has nothing to do with it, unless it conforms to the will of the subconcious, in which case it has equal value with all our biases.
Thats how I understand it anyway.

[Dave Cohen]

@Katherine

Re: the self (internal and external)

I meant to distinguish between the "self" in the brain and "self" we present to the world.

Regarding the former, neuroscience tells us that bundle theory is the right way to think about it. So-called ego theory (there is a soul of some kind) is a story without foundation. The internal self is a narrative self, i.e., a story. That story gets updated over time.

Here's Paul Broks on the subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXyFw-BYzbE

I'll post on this.

best,

-- Dave

[mikeroberts2013]

Thanks. Makes me wonder if the reducing valve model varies a little for a (good) scientist? And don't we gain real knowledge from their work (in general).