I want to spend some time taking about the concept of anosognosia--not knowing something you should know--developed most fully in part 4 of Morris's essay. I think this is the first place that Morris really falls down and fails to give us any kind of answer to the question of how anosognosia works in what I'd guess is an effort to make his topic seem more interesting. But I think as you actually approach an answer, the topic only gets more interesting.
To start, if we're going to talk about not knowing something we should know, we need first to think about what it means to know something. The average person knows at a minimum tens of thousands of things. Most illustrative, to me, is proper names, perhaps because I am so bad with them. Names of friends, names of relatives, names of actors, names of movies, names of books. In my experience, not infrequently in the course of conversations people want to refer to someone or something but can't remember what that thing is called. Surely this, too, is a case of anosognosia. All the more because often the name that we are searching for comes to us at some later indeterminate time, when we have no use for the name at all.
This raises the question, how do we know things at all? What is going on with these simple memory omissions? Is our brain like a computer, with each fact stored in a discrete location? If so, then when we fail to remember something, have we either forgotten where to find that location or has that location been corrupted? Both of these errors, after all, happen in computers. But neither of those seems an adequate explanation. If the location of the fact is corrupted, then how could we remember that fact later? If we've simply forgotten where that information is stored, then how do we find that location later? The latest research suggests that memories are connections between neurons and that the connections grow stronger with repetition. But to me that doesn't really address the issue. First, it is obvious. Our brain is nothing more than a bunch of connections of neurons, so of course memories have to be connections too. But further, how does the fact that a memory is a connection of neurons really explain how we know facts? What kind of connections of neurons are necessary to remember the name of my Aunt Bea? What kinds are necessary for me to remember that I like the actress Renee Zellweger and the fact that along with remembering her name a mental image of her face comes to mind. And don't even get me started on what connections are necessary to remember how to spell her name. For me, who can't spell, the answer is no connections would ever be sufficient. For me, this is the first interesting aspect of anosognosia: for all our science, picturing how memory works is still a very hazy endeavor.
So anosognosia, actually, is nothing special at all. Almost every fact in our brain is dormant for the majority of our waking moments. And it quickly gets more complicated when you start to add in all the psychological biases we display. We tend not to remember things which we don't want to remember. As much as I might rack my brain to give you some personal examples, I'm a bit too busy not remembering them now. I will assure you, though, that there are many things I've done which I'd rather not remember doing, and there are many things I'm not good at that I've long forgotten the myriad cues and signals that might indicate to me, if I chose to pay attention to them in the first place, that I wasn't good at those tasks. There are positive aspects of people I hate which I will never recall. And there's absolutely no way you could prove whether or not I know these things. In many cases if I've done a good job at repressing a memory so that there are neural connections for that memory but the memory could never ever get into my consciousness, we would really need to define a bit more clearly what we mean by "know".
But where it again starts to get really interesting is when you start to look into areas where the beliefs one holds are complicated. I believe I am a trifle on the lazy side (just a trifle), yet I've always gotten good reviews at every job I've ever worked. Somehow I have to reconcile those two contrary pieces of information. I believe that people ought to earn the lifestyle they want to lead, but I believe that we ought to make some basic provisions for those people who are not equipped by either genetics or society to earn their way, and I'm also aware that many people who do have money have done very little to earn it whether because they obtained the money illicitly, inherited it, or, perhaps, won the lottery. These competing ideas and hundreds if not thousands more are all in my head, in essence vying for dominance.
Is it really any surprise, given all this, that there are people who display varying levels of awareness, indifference, and denial regarding the fact that they've lost the use of their left arm? I don't think so, and I think in trying to persuade us that this is where the big mystery is, Morris does us a disservice.
To me, the big mystery is tied up in these complex net of beliefs. And reading, conversation and writing really bring out how tenuous our knowledge and beliefs are, really illustrate their fluidity. In the course of verbal debates, in the course of trying to present my thoughts in writing, I've often discovered that I don't believe the things I thought I believed. Sometimes I find that I don't believe something which I was going to write a passionate essay in support of, sometimes I find in writing that two ideas I thought were compatible are not, sometimes I find that I actually end up disproving the thesis of my paper. Sometimes in a debate I say something and realize how silly it sounds. Sometimes I read something that just completely and irrefutably contradicts something I had believed.
It's hard for me to describe, especially to someone who might not have occasion to write or debate a lot. Writing and debating have always seemed to me like trials. You have an idea, you need to play with it some, give it a spin, explore it. You believe an author of a book was trying to say one thing, but on talking to others who read the book, on looking more closely at the text, you see you were entirely wrong. There seems something permanently makeshift about my ideas, my beliefs, my mind. And I think that is the way it has to be. We are creatures of the moment. Our mental capacities are extremely limited. We can really only hold one thing in our mind at any time to look at it and think about it. If this is the kind of creature we are and the limitations our mind works under, then how could our beliefs and our knowledge behave any differently?
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