The Need to Know

Yep, another radical non-duality exploration.

 New Yorker cartoon by the late Charles Barsotti

Many times on this blog I’ve concluded my article with the rhetorical question: Even if there’s nothing we can do about it, isn’t it at least better to know?

As an incurable asker of “why”, I have started thinking about my seemingly insatiable need to know: How the world really works. What’s really going on. Why things are that way.

Why do I want, so badly, to know?

The non-dualist’s answer might be that this is the essence of human nature. Our brains are pattern-recognizers, sense-makers, driven to assign meaning to everything, presumably because that might make us safer, and better prepared for foreseeable eventualities. But, the non-dualist would probably add, there is actually no meaning to anything. We can find patterns and meaning in what appears to be happening, perhaps even lay claim to some apparent predictability. But if the underpinnings of that understanding depend on time and causality and free will, none of which, the non-dualist would assert, actually exist, then we’re finding patterns and meaning where there actually are none.

That raises two obvious questions: Why are we so sure that the patterns and meaning we conceive to be accurate, are actually correct interpretations? And If they’re not true, why have we evolved to believe falsehoods?

One explanation that neuroscientists and others have proffered is that our brains are not particularly interested in or oriented towards the truth, but rather have evolved to enable us to make quick decisions in the absence of complete information (since complete information is rarely available). We’re going to prepare to fight, flee or freeze in the presence of that fast-moving orange thing we perceive out of the corner of our eyes, even if it turns out to be a balloon and not a tiger. We don’t actually need to know whether or not it was a tiger; what’s important for our survival is that we perceived it might be, and took appropriate, instinctive action.

The non-dualist would likely say that that’s just a story invented to try to make sense of what apparently happened, or what apparently might happen. It’s an invention, a fiction. Orange balloons or tigers may seemingly appear, and may or may not seemingly attack us, resulting in apparently real pain or even apparent death. But, they would likely assert that these are all just appearances, outside of time and without causality or any exercise of free will over the ‘decisions’ seemingly made. That’s not to make light of apparent death. It is what apparently happens. But nothing ‘we’ do changes that in any way. ‘We’ do not make decisions, merely rationalize them after the fact. Decisions are apparently made by the body. Sometimes the apparent result is death.

For a wild creature, say a bonobo, there is the seeming appearance of something fast-moving and orange, and the seeming instinctive reaction to fight, flee or freeze. That is what is apparently happening, and layering a time sequence, a sense of causality, and a decision-making process serves only one purpose — to enable the human to make sense of those apparent happenings. The bonobo needs none of it. It doesn’t need to ‘know’ anything. Even its apparent conditioning is just a story, a story that the bonobo almost certainly doesn’t care about, and doesn’t have to understand.

Of course the bonobo may, apparently, discover that using a stick to probe rotten wood sometimes unearths some delicious snacks, and to that extent we might say the bonobo ‘learns’ or ‘knows’ how to use tools. But actually, it has just been (apparently) conditioned to poke handy sticks into rotten wood. It does not need to ‘learn’ or ‘know’ or ‘reason’ any of it. It needs no conceptualization of cause and effect, and no conceptualization of time being a linear dimension in which it lives, in order to react to its conditioning. Rotten wood, handy stick -> poke. If treat happens, yay, apparent conditioning is strengthened. If not, apparent conditioning is weakened.

Encumbered as we are with wildly complex, imaginative and insatiably conceptualizing brains, we humans have come to believe that we have to know — that the cost of not knowing is severe — death, pain, suffering, loss, entrapment, or something else we label as ‘bad’. We have come to believe in time, in our selves as real, separate things, in free will, and in causality. To some extent, that is also our conditioning. But it is also the result of furious sense-and-meaning-making in our hyperactive brains, reinforced by other humans, to the point our species has created an entire ‘meaningful’ world that no other creature has any sense of or need for, and which is, arguably, a complete and mostly useless fiction.

Still, ‘I’ think it’s better to know, even if I have a strong intuitive sense that my knowledge is useless. Why? Because that is how I have been conditioned. I have been conditioned to feel anxious if there are screaming headlines and I know nothing about what is allegedly happening and what supposedly was behind it, its ’cause’. I have been conditioned to feel proud at imparting knowledge to others, and ashamed to be caught ‘ignorant’ of the ‘facts’. I have been conditioned, when dealing with people who are angry, to try to understand the cause of their anger so that at least it doesn’t threaten me, even if I cannot help defuse it. And when people I know and care about are overcome with grief, I have been conditioned to try to understand its cause so that I can be compassionate, if not empathetic.

I have been conditioned to equate knowledge with competence, and hence with reputation, reliability, status, ‘worthiness’ and even moral ‘character’. And to equate ignorance with stupidity, gullibility, and laziness.

What is seemingly loosening this desperate want/need to know in me is not so much the realization that I don’t ‘need’ to know all these things, but rather the very slow realization that I don’t and cannot know — anything. Of course I can know how to fix some of my possessions, or how to create a set of financial statements. But that ‘know how‘ is skill; it is not ‘know what‘ knowledge. It is simple or complicated conditioning through trial and error and practice and study and repetition with mostly inanimate things. All creatures acquire skills, know-how.

Our supposed knowledge — knowing what is happening, and what is true, and why (ie what led up to it, its history and context) — is likewise conditioned, and we tend to conflate and equate the two ‘knowings’. But knowing what is almost invariably complex. Complexity theorists at least admit that complex situations and systems (and almost all social and ecological systems are complex) cannot be completely known, and that what is apparently known is highly subjective. 

And there’s the rub. Only human creatures have subjective knowledge, because only our species has the bizarre conception, thanks to our imaginative and easily-conditioned brains, that there are any separate subjects and objects in the world. Other creatures have no need for this conceptual conceit. They ‘know how’ the same way we do. They have no capacity, and no need, to ‘know what‘.

And neither do we. We only think and believe we know (and need to know) what is happening and what is true. It’s just opinion, conditioned entirely by others, a making-sense in our heads that may be agreed upon with others and reinforced or re-conditioned by others. It’s a model of reality that is not reality, any more than a map is the territory. Although we humans are conditioned to believe, from an early age, that this model of a separate world with separate things, in time and space, centred around our ‘conscious’ selves, with free will and choice and control, is reality. When it’s all a fiction, make-believe, a consensus of know-nothings.

So we actually have no need to know what is happening or what is true. I certainly don’t expect anyone to be convinced of this, of course; I’m not convinced of it myself. But I now know enough people for whom it’s obvious, not just an intriguing theory, that I am inclined to believe it, at least tentatively. Meanwhile, conditioned as I am, I continue to search to know what is happening and what is true and why. Cognitive dissonance to the max.

What would I do with myself if this was seen, was suddenly obvious? Well, for a start, there wouldn’t be a ‘myself’ left to presume to do anything. Those I’ve come to know, for whom this is obvious, don’t seem to ‘do’ very much, or ‘do’ anything much differently than ‘before’ it was obvious. In that sense they seem to me a little like wild creatures, their bodies moving, mostly, between states of equanimity and enthusiasm, and doing what ‘must’ be done. Wild creatures, like us.

As this body I presume to inhabit is already lazy enough, what would it do in the case of ‘my’ seeming absence, and in the absence of the need to know stuff? My guess is that it would become even more hedonistic in its behaviour than it already is. It would pursue its ikigai pleasures — music and theatre, play, sensual pleasures, beautiful sights, clever people, creative work — even more. It would write and read for fun, not to acquire or impart knowledge. Not even to acquire know-how to equip me better for accelerating collapse, I’m afraid. Too hard; no fun. Told you I was lazy.

All this knowledge, acquired over a lifetime! The word was even in my job title at one point. Just opinion, useless sense-making, complicated models and maps pretending and presuming, absurdly, to represent reality. Make-believe.

But there’s no letting go. Even as I write this I am occasionally stopping to read ‘news’ and ‘essays’ that supposedly will make me more knowledgeable. Only when the ‘one’ holding on desperately, pretending and needing to know, disappears, will the wonderful, terrible spell of humanity’s illusory, self-made ‘reality’, and our ludicrous, arrogant sense of ‘consciousness’, be broken and fall away.

Leaving nothing. And everything. And nothing changed. And nothing known or knowable. Just what is, in free fall. Terrifying, tantalizing, impossible.

I don’t know.