There are actually people who devote their lives and careers to addressing just one facet of the questions you are raising here, @King.
(@Malkuth then proceeds to try to address these questions despite the fact that he is not one of those people)
You’re standing at the crossroads of philosophy and psychology. Epistemology.
Personally, I imagine ‘knowings’ as patterns of sensations, or narratives that are generated by minds (in concert with various processes in the internal and external environments).
We can take your example:
The seven-day week apparently arose out of some of our ancestors observing the changing phases of the moon and dividing them into four equal periods. These became ‘weeks’. And of course when combined with that most intuitive unit of time passage here on earth, the day, we ended up with 4 7-day weeks in a month. (With a day or two thrown in to keep things properly synchronized.) The Sumerians were the first ones to historically document and codify that system. But that’s just what’s observable through historical documents. Prior to Netflix (and electricity), the skies were probably the best show that there was. People may have come up with that 7-day week system long before it was ever officially written down.
But the point is that it is a system that human beings made up. Like everything else we do.
We just make it up out of our imaginations. Add it to the narrative. And now it becomes a ‘fact’ to be ‘known’.
So then you end up with jokes like:
A: The 7-day week was invented by the Ancient Sumerians 4300 years ago.
B: Damn! So how did people know what day it was before then?
I like to think of so-called ‘knowing’ as the human equivalent of a spider’s web.
We spin and craft these structures around us in order to give ourselves a sense of security, fixity, and a place to live. Of course, they work much better if we never acknowledge that we were the ones who made them. More effective to imagine that they somehow just arose out of nature, or floated down out of the skies. Why? They seem more real and legit that way.
As Groucho Marx said, ‘I’d never want to belong to any club that would accept someone like me as a member!’ So, instead, we have a long history of creating FACTS and then projecting their origins out to some mysterious far away source. It’s a very human thing to do.
Anyway, as we look at the history of knowledge and ideas, it often begins to seem like this:
(OFTEN)
It is not that we know things because they are true;
It is, rather, often the case that things are true because we know them.
