This chapter poses the book’s guiding question: how did human beings come to know that they know? It argues that self-knowledge hinges on normative self-regulation, the capacity to align one’s beliefs with epistemic standards such as justification and truth. Central to this account are noetic feelings (e.g., confidence, doubt, cognitive fluency), affectively valenced signals that steer attention, information-seeking, memory retrieval, and decision-making. Yet treating noetic feelings as the interface between basic metacognition and sophisticated epistemic practice faces a two-pronged objection, the Twin Triviality Problem. The first prong, cognitive triviality, claims these feelings are just low-level feedback signals akin to generic error-correction or reinforcement learning; if so, calling them “metacognitive” adds little. The second, epistemic triviality, doubts that such signals can ground our capacity to treat beliefs as beliefs: states that can be false, require reasons, and must track truth. The chapter sets the agenda for the book: to show how an embodied and embedded account of noetic feelings explains both their distinct cognitive role and their transformation into ingredients in normative self-knowledge through social scaffolding. It also previews the strategy: defend a strong brain–body basis for noetic feelings, embed them in practices of accountability and justification, situate them within predictive processing without collapse into mere error-minimization, and extend the analysis to contemporary AI systems and to the possibility of socially embedded artificial agents.