Knowing, our last and most general level of re-entry in the Spencer-Brown form http://homepage.mac.com/baecker/handouts/SocialChoice.pdf, means to be able to watch the distinction between the system that promises to guarantee the iteration of your choices, on one hand, and the outside of the form (as part of the entire content of the form), which is unmarked on the other. Choice is social if and when that kind of operational closure is part of the game, an operational closure which means, as Heinz von Foerster had it, that the system looses one degree of freedom in exchange with a wealth of possibilities to explore. The removal of this degree of freedom means that any end, in any domain, must coincide with a beginning.

It is evident that only such a condition turns choice into a social one. If reproduction is the law, then networks and budgets, talk and action are guaranteed to be looked at in terms of their maintenance, even if in the form of their change, variation, revolution, and subversion. If there is any one condition that guarantees that there is something to be known, and a basis for the appropriate knowledge, it is this one.

Knowing means that any switching is a switching not only from, but also to something or someone. It means that any tying is done with respect to both causal independence and communicative interdependence. Tying generates a knowledge, and it profits from knowledge. And knowing means that gaming and mating generate their knowledge as well, as you cannot avoid making your experiences as you choose what you choose and whom.

Knowledge, therefore, is a very basic category of process, a product of the system reproducing and re-entering, while reproducing, the distinction between itself and its environment, into the system. That knowledge must not be a true one for any external observer operating under the very same conditions. But it is the knowledge of a system generated by its own choices, and its a knowledge without which no choice would be possible since it re-enters the ignorance of the unmarked state into the form such that any knowledge is recognized as a exploratory one, not until further notice, but in principle.

Knowledge means competence. And competence means use and control of doubt. System One here again seems to be the right choice. In using it you are at any one point of time in the necessary situation to have to check on your own knowledge in order to be able to evaluate the knowledge the system (one, this time) is presenting to you. And that is what brings knowledge forth, in the first place.