The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone by Steven Sloman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Challenging Power

The Knowledge Illusion is a demonstration of the thesis it articulates: "Our intelligence resides not in individual brains but in the collective mind...the hive mind." Each of us, as the 18th century philosopher Frederick Leibniz proposed, contributes to what we perceive and conceive as reality. In fact everyone who has ever existed contributes to that reality. We each contribute but none of us can know all that is known. Human knowledge floats in a world beyond human understanding.

Plato implies this same idea in the earliest Western philosophy. His eternal Forms are one way to express the inscrutable reality that is shared but not controlled by conscious beings. There is more than a hint of divinity in the potentially infinite power of this shared knowledge. We can only define it in the way that Anselm devised in the 12th Century, as that of which nothing greater can be conceived.

This reality is not necessarily true. In fact, it cannot be true because it is continuously changing as new minds emerge and affect other minds through communication. But the idea of an ultimate reality, truth, is essential in order for conscious beings to function in the world without going mad. Truth is that reality which has been constructed, or revealed if one happens to be religiously oriented, by the collective mind at the end of time. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce proposed just this definition of truth in the mid-19th Century.

In the 20th Century, Ludwig Wittgenstein recognised that language itself is the carrier of reality. We are born into it and cannot escape its independent power. Language manipulates us every time we use it. Through language, we progress (or not) but as Wittgenstein's contemporary, Martin Heidegger, quipped "Language speaks man" as much as man speaks language.

Sloman and Fernbach have given a modern sociological voice to this ancient philosophy. In an age of increasingly ideological politics, this voice is crucial. It is a voice that reminds us that no one has the right to claim a privileged view of reality, much less truth. It undercuts both the individualists by insisting on the social foundation of our existence and the collectivists by pointing out the necessity of individual experience. Taken seriously, this is a voice that continuously exposes power of any sort for what it is - coercion - and calls it into question.

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