How do we live without knowing how our brain uses knowledge?

We don’t need to know evolutionarily speaking. We got along just fine surviving and passing our genes down to the next generation for all of human history. Even now with the advent of science we do not need to know how the brain works. There are some benefits to doing so, such as better medical intervention, computer science applications, and for sheer curiosity. However most people, the vast majority, do not need to know a single thing about how the brain works to survive and reproduce.

Knowledge is something that is stored in our brains. Specific neural networks. We remember what we gain knowledge of. This is handy in evolution as it obviously aids our survival. Why this evolved in the way that it did is perhaps a mystery. Why did the brain evolve to have such specific functions?

Philosophers, before modern science, used to, or some still do, that the mind is separate from the brain or body. Something immaterial. How this would work nobody could really explain. Perhaps a supernatural explanation could be put forth. But now we know that the brain is physical in nature. However consciousness may have non-physical properties or mental properties. Even if these supervene on the physical.

I suspect before the age of neuroscience, humans knew roughly that their mind, wherever it was seated — some used to think the heart, could gain knowledge that was justified and true. This somehow was stored for later use. The application of knowledge is intelligence. Something that most non-human animals possess, but do not have the same awareness that we have about metacognition. So I wouldn’t say we have no awareness around how we store and use knowledge. We just sort of put the process into a black box and say yeah the brain is just doing its thing. Some however may know a bit about neurons, axons, neurotransmitters, action potentials, neural nets, brain regions, etc.

Sometimes one can think to themself: what caused me to think about this piece of obscure knowledge I’ve got in my brain? It has to be two options. Either something happened in your sensory environment, or you were thinking about something else that led to that. But what about in the morning when you wake up and you’re thinking about something, maybe from the night before. It’s strange how your mind remembers that. Even if you weren’t dreaming about that. I guess this may be some type of long range working memory. Like you remembered what you spoke about the day before, and nothing prompted you to have that thought, it just flashed into your mind. But most thoughts are either triggered by the environment or by another thought. Could there be some that just appear seemingly randomly? I think so. I think this happens all the time. So why does the brain choose that thought? It’s a mystery if you think about it. But one perhaps science can definitively solve.

The brain is so complex, maybe even irreducibly. If it weren’t we’d be able to make one artificially. Perhaps one day we will.

What’s interesting is that all our knowledge of anything originated from our senses. It may have been expanded into the pure realm of formal science and mathematics. But all of that came from our sense perception, so we need our senses to know anything at all. The brain is “perfectly” suited then to our environment. We need sense data because we live in an empirical world. So it makes sense that our knowledge is about empirical reality, or at least originates from it, i.e. mathematics and logic.

Therefore, we don’t need to know how knowledge is used by the brain to survive and make babies. We have however seen the benefits of understanding this process scientifically. We still don’t understand exactly how it all works, but we’ve got a good idea.