The Root of Knowledge

I used the word 'obsequious' in conversation with someone today and they asked me what it meant, I told them and they asked me where I learned that and for a moment I stumbled because I didn't immediately know the answer. Even now, hours later, I still can't answer definitively because I genuinely can't remember where I read or heard it for the first time. I'm not going to lie, I had a momentary existential crisis where I actually looked up the meaning to make sure I was right which was reassuring in the first instance but still left me feeling more than a little lost.

In Computer Science there's a field of study called Information Science that deals with the theoretical side of information as a concept. In its simplest terms, Information can be defined as data with meaning. Knowledge on the other hand is a little more complex and harder to pin down because it is less of a scientific concept and more of a social construct. Knowledge is perhaps best loosely defined as a collection of information, sometimes related and interconnected, sometimes disconnected and isolated.

When you spend a lot of time reflecting on yourself through introspection like I do, trying to unpack trauma and find the root of your belief systems and the things that you held true for so long without digging down to understand why, it's inevitable that you come across beliefs you hold that don't actually have a root - in other words you believe X because you believe Y and you believe Y because you believe Z, but never stopped to question why you believed Z in the first place. In those moments you often find that Z was an assumption, or a conclusion from some misplaced belief that you long abandoned but the whole belief system didn't update to reflect that change.

Santa Claus is a great example of this type of belief; Santa Claus teaches young children about morality and ethics in an abstract way that instils the belief that if you are a good person, good things come to you, and if you are a bad person, then bad things come to you. As you grow older and abandon your belief in Santa you still hold onto that belief in morality being rewarded, despite the wealth of evidence that would objectively lead you to the opposite assertion. If you step back and trace this belief system back to its roots you also realise that "Santa" never actually punished bad behaviour because no parent actually follows through on the threat of coal.

Tracing the roots of knowledge however is a lot more complex, just as knowledge itself is complex. There are sources of learning that we identify in our lives, mainly academia, as authoritative sources where what we learn is directed by some authority figure. There are elective sources of learning that we can also identify in the media that we choose to consume, the books we read, the shows we watch, the music we listen to and so on - in these instances we passively consume information and when we don't understand something we either explicitly seek its meaning or we implicitly infer its meaning through the context in which it is presented.

It's easy to pin down "1 + 1 = 2" as something you learned in Maths class in school; easy to pin down the name like "Phoebe" to characters like Phoebe Buffey in Friends as the first place you likely heard the name; it's a lot harder to pin down the word 'obsequious' to a piece of media where you first came across the word being used. As for academia as an explanation, I personally did not learn lists of vocabulary in English class at any level of my education, beyond simple words at a very young age in Primary School perhaps.

The comedian David Mitchell once said on an episode of Would I Lie To You [S01E02 (2007)] when asked how he knew something "If I knew how I knew everything I knew, then I'd only be able to know half as much, because it would all be clogged up with where I know it from" - as funny as the quote may be, it's not ageing quite well. 18 years ago when he said it, there was little consequence of the disregard, but today with the rise of AI and need for veracity we're coming to a point in society where if we still value truth we need to know where we learned what we know and whether we trust that source.

The alternative, to carry on with disregard means blind faith in your accumulation of knowledge and an arrogant belief that you can effectively judge when you are told something that is true and something that is not - the problem with such arrogance is that human beings have a particular proclivity to assert things as impossible if those things are not agreeable. The best example of this is probability bias, or to put it another way, our ability to judge improbability. You have the same odds of winning the lottery with the numbers 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, and 06 as you do with any six numbers chosen at random yet the human mind rejects this truth asserting that 1 to 6 being drawn has to be less likely because it stands out as something recognisable to us. That's the same problem we have acquiring knowledge, veracity cannot depend alone on linking new information to what we already know or what we already believe, we have to be able to trace that knowledge back to its root.