Seeing is believing, but not knowing

I contend that everything we know, except for what we define by fiat, is really just a collection of beliefs, and not “knowledge” at all. Here is an example.

One winter evening, I took my dog for her pre-bed walk.

It was dark and cloudy, and the only light came from the streetlights and from inside other houses. As I came round the back of the house, I saw someone in our driveway, wearing dark trousers and a beige parka with the hood up, stooped at the driver’s side door of my son’s car, as if they were trying to break into it.

But as I stepped forward, the slight change in my position suddenly changed what I saw completely.

What I was actually seeing was only the streetlights reflecting off the salt-and-mud-streaked door panel and window of the car.

The change from car thief to reflection was a purely cognitive one. During the transition, what I was seeing didn’t change at all. There was no change in the light entering my eyes. The change was in how my brain processed it.

I do not suffer any cognitive or visual disorders (short of needing reading glasses); I’m completely “normal” for my age in this regard.

Yet I believed I saw one thing, when in fact I was seeing something else entirely.

What I experienced was pareidolia: the misinterpretation of perception.

Pareidolia is a mundane cognitive fault. Much more interesting to me is the question: Why did I decide that the second version — the reflection of streetlights — was the better interpretation, the correct interpretation, the knowledgeable interpretation? Why might I reasonably tell someone that I believed I saw a thief but knew that it was just a trick of the light?

It’s a question of evidence.

1. I have a lifetime of evidence that my vision is pretty good, and I have no history of hallucination. It is therefore reasonable for me to presume that there was nothing wrong with my vision that evening and that I was not hallucinating.
2. If there had been a person by my son’s car, they would have reacted to my appearance, because that’s what people do. They would have turned, or started, or… something! Instead, they just… vanished.
3. If there had been a person by my son’s car, I would have continued to recognize them as such even as I moved forward and my perspective changed.
4. Pareidolia is a well-documented phenomenon that I have experienced before and know how to recognize.
5. I have 61 years of personal experience and an excellent education in general science that supports points 1–4 very strongly.
6. I am aware of no reliable evidence that can provide an alternative explanation of my perceptions.

So, it’s not a question of knowing versus believing; it’s a question of accepting the most well-evidenced belief and rejecting the alternatives. Because the evidence for one belief is overwhelmingly stronger than the evidence for the other belief, I am compelled to accept the one as true, and the other as false — at least, until the available evidence changes.

In other words, I must accept that even after the moment of clarity, I only had a belief. It was a more well-founded belief than the original one, but still just a belief.

I’m not even going to try to connect this back to conventional philosophy. Philosophers themselves can’t decide what “knowledge” is, but there’s pretty good agreement on “belief”. In my experience, if you and a thousand others beat your heads against a wall for millennia and can’t solve a problem — in this case, the nature of “knowledge” — well, maybe there’s something wrong with the problem.

I think it’s far better to recognize that my “knowledge” is really just a collection of strongly evidenced beliefs, any one of which may nonetheless be wrong. And since my actions are based on my beliefs, the best way for me to become a better person is to continually revise my beliefs in light of the best available evidence.

The danger of thinking that one has knowledge is that one holds some immutable truths, and that it would be foolish to reject them — because they’re immutable and they’re true. But, honestly, are they really? All swans are white, till you find a black one. And even the most robust deductive arguments are based on premises at least some of which are only inductively justified; if one of those premises fails to hold, the entire argument fails.

Oddly, I find that this approach, of severely limiting what counts as real “knowledge”, much better suited to evaluate claims. For instance, I don’t have to find proof that there are no gods; I just have to rank the belief in whatever god is under discussion against competing beliefs based on the available evidence.

Unfortunately, the assessment of evidence is a difficult and complex task. I am privileged with an excellent education; not everyone is. The lack of education can seriously hinder the reflection each of us my perform to assess out beliefs. …but that’s a topic for another day.