What do we really know?

Cannibal pizza parlours, killer robots and misinformation

Two questions from my university entrance exam have always stuck with me.

Does free will exist?

Can we know anything for certain?

I explore concepts of free will and destiny in my novel The Other Side of Night, and will come back to the topic many times, but let’s park it for now, because I want to talk about knowledge.

The short answer is we can’t know anything for certain. Cogito ergo sum. ‘I think therefore I am’ was Descartes’ attempt to prove self-existence, that the thinking entity could doubt all else but the ability to think was proof enough of its existence. Current conceptions of consciousness and intelligence means we can conceive of a thinking machine we programme to hallucinate a human existence. We could manufacture a thinking entity that inhabited a false reality and yet was capable of thought. In such an instance thinking would not be proof of existence in any meaningful sense. Subjectively, the artificial intelligence would be living in a hallucination, and objectively, we would have created the illusion of an existence.

We rarely need to consider such abstract concepts when we acquire and use knowledge in our daily lives, and I believe there is an important element that’s missing when we consider whether we can trust what we know, and that is application. How are we going to use our knowledge?

If we consider application, we can know things for certain, or at least to a degree of certainty required to fulfil the application. For instance, I know enough about aerodynamics and physics to be certain a well-maintained aircraft will remain in the air. This could all be a simulation and the grand programmer might decide to turn air to custard or suspend physical laws, but my experience of the reality suggests this is unlikely to happen and that I can trust my knowledge of the reality to hold true.

Why am I talking about artificial realities and air turning to custard? Because knowledge is at the heart of how we navigate the world and if we don’t test the knowledge we acquire, we run the risk of making mistakes.

An extreme example of this is the case of Edgar Welch, a father of two, who became convinced Hilary Clinton and members of her inner circle were running a cannibal paedophile ring from the basement of a Washington DC pizza parlour. Armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, pistol and hunting knife, Welch raided the restaurant to rescue the children held captive there, much to the consternation of customers and staff. The restaurant didn’t even have a basement. You can read about Welch’s disastrous experience here and here.

We can talk about the sources that steered Welch wrong – InfoWars and various conspiracy websites and social media accounts – but we should also talk about application. I like to think about primary and secondary application. Primary application is whether knowledge is relevant to my daily life – job, family, pastimes. If Welch was in law enforcement, he might have had interest in the information because it would have been relevant to his primary application. If he worked in law enforcement, he would likely have been given the training required to discern fact from fiction. The expertise that comes with primary application would likely have prevented the disinformation being taken seriously.

Sometimes we act beyond the remit of a primary application. I’ve saved two children – one from drowning in a lake and another from a cliffside fall during a snowstorm in the Alps. Both situations were well outside my primary application, particularly as neither child was mine.

Unforeseen circumstances can force us to take action. In Welch’s case, the action he had planned was to enter the pizza parlour prepared for violence, a crime that saw him sentenced to four years in prison. Arguably the standard of truth, the quality of knowledge we need for secondary applications, should be higher than what’s required for primary application because we are stepping into unfamiliar territory.

Imagine if Welch had visited the place without guns, asked about a basement, watched to see if there were children being smuggled out in giant pizza boxes. He could have saved himself and the people he terrorised a great deal of anguish.

Welch is an extreme example, but social media means people are being exposed to disinformation and misinformation every single day. An intelligent, well-educated friend recently told me 29 people had been slaughtered by a robot in Japan. I’d seen the meme circulating on social media and knew it was false, based on an unfounded allegation made by a ufologist in 2018. You can read more about the origins here.

A quick internet search is usually all it takes to confirm the quality of information, and when one is stepping outside one’s primary applications, take greater care. I have a general rule of requiring three different sources before considering knowledge reliable and the sources have to come from a different root. The root of information is important, because as this interview with former CIA agent Frank Snepp demonstrates, purveyors of disinformation seed it in multiple places to give the illusion of accuracy. 

If information, true or false, is not relevant to your primary applications, be very aware it is relevant to someone else’s. The pizzagate conspiracy served to create the impression the Clinton campaign was involved in hideous evil, and for every one person willing to walk into a restaurant with a couple of guns and a knife, there will be a million quietly thinking, “no smoke without fire.”

Social media has handed hostile states, unscrupulous governments, and other dishonest actors a wonderful platform to divide and conquer. Whether it’s the environment, COVID-19, trans rights, the war on woke, feminism, men’s rights, racism, conservatism, radicalism, liberalism, socialism - there is a dividing line that splits people into tribes and keeps them fighting each other. Amid the noise and conflict, hostile actors can further their true agendas, and unscrupulous governments can avoid being held to account for their failings.

I research my novels thoroughly, and often they are grounded in real events or experiences. As we take this Substack journey together, I will try to provide sources for as much as possible, so you can assess the validity of any information for yourself. If knowledge is power, accurate knowledge is the most powerful of all. And we can only anticipate future events and trends if we truly understand the present.