What do you know?

"How do we know what we know?" was a question posed by psychologist and Palo Alto Mental Research Institute member Paul Watzlawick (working with such prestigious alumnus as Gregory Bateson, Virginia Satir and Jay Haley) in a book he edited with a similar title.

So, how do we separate inferences and biases from our map-making or ideation of the world?

Consider an artist meeting a group of people. One works as an electrician, another as an accountant, the third a graphic designer. Introducing himself as well as his occupation, the abstraction process begins almost instantly. The electrician and the accountant, unfamiliar with art figure he is a painter of portraits. The designer, however, cannot accept his abstraction so easily and make a reversal of order and thus probes further. Suddenly, it is revealed that the artist sculpts figures from stone. What we seldom achieve is the self-awareness to ask ourselves how we arrive at our conclusions. Is it intensional assumption or extensional reasoning by way of evidence and testing?

If the accountant and electrician had not gone further in their inquiry they would only have partial knowledge of the artist's extensional occupation - they would have the word the artist used to describe himself and no other real, concrete knowledge. Their maps would be incomplete, shaded by unconscious biases and internal referential indexes based on what they had encountered previously, not in the present moment. Of course, artist₁ is not artist₂, yet it seems awfully convenient to coddle together all artists into an indeterminate class to save on time and mental energy.

I ask the question; does a culture that demands instant gratification inevitably demand the dissolution of knowledge into the manageable and familiar, possibly restricting the range and probity of thought and inquiry?

If expediency breeds increased probability for error, as has been demonstrated in so many cases, could the same lust for rapidity erode maps, distorting them to such a degree that it impairs sane and rational judgment? We are all guilty of this and oftentimes it leads us into despair and ruin. I would implore all people to use their nature's gift of self-reflection and self-awareness to avoid such semantic and symbolic traps and to use their nervous systems and the nervous systems of others for the greatest outcome. How? By routinely asking questions and (almost) never staying satisfied with the first answer you get.

In the words of Robert Anton Wilson: "Doubt. Doubt that you have doubted enough. Doubt your doubts." Never take anything on its face value; the world is infinitely complex and in constant flux; those that attempt to answer simply and definitely we should be especially skeptical of.