All human knowledge is uncertain, inexact and partial. To this doctrine we have not found any limitation whatever.
-- philosopher Bertrand Russell
To learn more about reality, people built up a mountain of knowledge with science. Instead of making us more certain, science's discoveries challenge our most basic notions of reality, leaving us wanting to learn more about knowledge itself.
What we find is that we don't know nearly as much as we first thought:
All our ideas are fallible.
We know our senses sometimes mislead us; it is at least theoretically possible that they always mislead us. Our knowledge of past and future is equally subject to uncertainty. Even ideas such as logic and mathematics do not necessarily correspond to anything beyond themselves.
Direct experience exists; all other knowledge is patterns noticed within experience.
Even with the most extreme of doubt, the direct awareness of sensory experience is fundamental and not subject to truth or falsehood. Any ideas beyond that are "built-up" knowledge: theories of how experience will behave based on patterns noticed in that experience. "Truth" and "reality," while pretending to be something absolute and outside knowledge, are actually ideas -- theories.
Built-up knowledge is based on many questionable assumptions.
Underlying much built-up knowledge are a set of assumptions rarely examined but of questionable accuracy. These include the idea that experience can be separated into individual, distinct, persistent "things;" that earlier events "cause" later events; that experiences occur within a fixed latticework of space and time; that human reasoning corresponds to how the world actually works; and that there is a self.
There is knowledge beyond consciousness.
Built-up knowledge is not the only type. Some knowledge is instinctive; some knowledge is stored unconsciously as habit; some knowledge comes from the subconscious.
Knowledge is fallible but useful.
The quantity of our knowledge can be increased by learning, but the quality of our knowledge can be increased by unlearning.
Unlearning false ideas and eliminating unnecessary assumptions can streamline our thought processes and open doors that had been closed by misconception.
Next: Toolset #2