Inadequacy of Knowledge

'You know, you don't know enough right?' 

A voice lingered in my head as I was strolling on my terrace on an evening.

Me: "I know. We've never disagreed on this. I don't know why you keep bringing this up every time I'm trying to think about something deeply" 

The voice: "Perhaps you don't understand why I keep parroting this to you. I thought you'd have become wiser all these years later"

Me: "I suppose we'll always have some blind-spots. Anyhow, why do you keep on saying this?"

TV: "First you need to understand something fundamental about your brain, which is that it is a master trickster. It makes you believe things that are untrue, distorts reality to suit your insecurities and molds perception to tailor-fit your preconceived ideas. This is a relic from the time when knowledge and information wasn't as abundant and freely available as it is now - a prehistoric relic if you like. But the world has changed now. Knowledge abounds every corner of your life and internet".

Me: "Sometimes I wish I spoke like that, but sure carry on - I still don't see where you're getting at"

TV: "Your brain wants to minimize the time and energy you spend on things. It's quite interesting you see - the brain has a primordial hierarchy according to which it decides when and how much energy to allocate to what tasks. We still have mating as our primary goal which is why you (and I know you sometimes don't want to, or don't see a point to) spend considerable time talking to women. Your brain has decided that finding a mate is a priority and you're simply doing that. In the hierarchy, accumulating knowledge ranks a bit lower - and acquiring expert knowledge ranks even lower. You see when it comes to trying to become an export or deeply knowledgeable in a field - you're stacked up against the force of evolution acting through a brain that has evolved its tactics through thousands of years which doesn't want you to spend the time and energy required to accumulate that level of knowledge".

Me: "Geez, it does sound crazy when you frame it like that. But go on, I'm listening"

TV: "One of the tricks the mind uses to minimize the energy it has to spend on (knowledge) pursuits is to trick you into believing that you already know enough. Because if you feel content with what you know, or feel like you've learned most of what there is to know - you're less likely to neither actively think about knowledge pursuits nor act on them. That saves a lot of energy, which then ideally the brain wants you to utilize at tasks it considers more important in its hierarchy"

Me: "But wait a second, before you arrive at your conclusion - I have a couple of questions. First, if you say that we trick ourselves into thinking we already know enough in order to save time - then what are we using that saved time for? I don't see people trying to always build relationships with the other sex in order to mate, or even gather food, or work out and have a healthy body - assuming all these activities occupy a higher rank in the mental hierarchy. So, what's the deal?"

TV: "Ah, glad to see that mind of yours isn't just filled with memes and vines. Good question. You see that's what it should've been ideally. But modernity brought with itself inventions and innovations that in a span of short time, made all such hardships vanish. You no longer need to fight wild animals and thus don't need to train yourself. You no longer need to hunt and gather - which is why people can get by without having close familial ties because they no longer need to work in close social groups in order to sustain themselves. Essentially modernity eliminated the need to engage in such tasks and replaced such hardships with much easier and simpler ways. But for establishing relationships - that's bit of an outlier. Because when it comes to food, modernity eliminated the need to seek food in the wilderness for hours with a small walk in the grocery store. It made it significantly easier. But the same cannot be said for establishing relationships. Technology has surely expanded the scale and range of potential relationships by messaging apps, dating apps etc. (in the sense that now you can date and marry someone who lives half a world away, but could only chose from the 5 females in your hunting group earlier). But the core work of actually talking to people and spending that initial time with them has more or less been the same. Technology just gave us more options."

Me: "I think we're going a bit off topic here. Could you answer why our brain still tries to minimize on acquiring niche knowledge to spend it on more important tasks when it doesn't need to anymore?"

TV: "You've always been impatient. Learn to listen first. You should know that a man who speaks when not required to is a man who is not at peace"

Me: "........"

TV: "Anyhow, the second thing you should understand when talking about the brain and the primordial counter that it runs on - is that it hasn't gotten a system update yet. Its OS is still pretty much the same as your ancestors when they were attacking a wild buffalo in Sub-Saharan Africa. Evolution is a conversation that happens over a period longer for any human to comprehend. This is not to say that we behave in a similar fashion to our ancestors on a day to day basis. Of course modernity has changed that. But our intuitions and our anxieties are still similar. We still fear the dark, we still fear loud noises, we still over eat even though we don't need to - because we now have refrigerators that will store it for us (because earlier you weren't sure of whether that specific fruit or plant will remain there the next time you visited it, humans were incentivized to eat as much they could whenever they found stores of food to combat the uncertainty). The brain still functions on the same hierarchy for allocating energy and efforts. But modernity suddenly eliminated the need to do many things and we were left with plenty of time which we now utilize for other evolutionarily unimportant things - playing video games, scrolling through social media, consumerism - scrolling through websites, watching pointless videos on Youtube and Instagram. The important thing to remember is that the primordial counter is still the same, we still make decisions based on it, but we eliminate decisions we no longer need to take (hunting gathering etc). The default setting changed only when an easier approach presented itself. In a way only those habits have changed that required us to do more rather than less. Those habits that have required us to do less already still remain the same. Which is why modernity hasn't brought with itself a change in how we think about knowledge accumulation. The brain is a energy minimization master. It will never allocate more energy to something it doesn't need to, and if the default has been to allocate less, it will keep continuing to allocate less. I know you understand concepts better through memes, so here's a meme for you to understand this concept -

Your brain when it comes to allocating minimum resources for amassing more knowledge:

Me: "Hahahaha, alright I see what you're getting at."

TV: "So now going back to where I started. Because your brain is an expert at tricking you, and the primordial mandate is to allocate minimal resources to significant knowledge accumulation - the brain is likely to make you feel like you know enough. It alternatively might also try to convince you that since there is so much knowledge out there, you cannot possibly try to attempt to accumulate all of it, and if you can't know all of it and will always be short, what is the point of trying anyway".

Me: "People often tell me that I shouldn't beat myself up or feeling like I don't know enough. I'm sure it is the primordial counter making them believe the same as well".

TV: "You're correct. You see the impossibility of acquiring all knowledge does not justify giving up on the relentless pursuit of knowledge. And my argument isn't that the pursuit is meaningful in its own, no. My argument is that the relentless pursuit will at least reassure you that for the time that you had in this world, you did what you could to know about as many things as you could. That to me is a far better life than a life in which you give in to the tyranny of impossibility".

Me: "I understand all that. But why do you keep telling me that I don't know enough. Why the constant reminder?"

TV: "Having established what I've said before - to oppose a brain that actively wants you to not spend more time on accumulation knowledge, wants you to not think about your inadequacy of knowledge and wants you feel that you know enough, there is no other way but to constantly keep reminding oneself that we're being tricked and that we simply don't know enough. It's a sine qua non for being a more knowledgeable individual. An indispensable attribute.

Me: "Ah! Now it all ties together. So whenever a voice in my head tells me that I don't know enough, I should not look at it as imposter syndrome and try to reassure myself about my knowledge but should rather accept that as a fact and be thankful for the reminder as it helps me to escape the intellectual stagnation that my mind is tricking me into?" 

TV: "Absolutely. That's the right way to think about it. Knowledge will always derive authority, but a false assurance of knowledge will lead you to nowhere".

Me: "This has been a rather fruitful discourse".

TV: "You don't need to thank me, I'm just a figment of your consciousness. Just the better one"

 - Said the voice in my head as the far placed noises of children playing resurfaced and I was again alone with myself. I thought about the benefit of spending some time alone with my thoughts and then went on to do my usual work.