Intuiting the Great Unknown
Imagining the Unimaginable
“The locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic efforts.” Maria Popova, Figuring
We seem to be uniquely capable of understanding our world. GI Joe was right (who cares if he stole it from Francis Bacon) — knowledge is power, and we have wielded it to dominate life on Earth.
The disharmony sowed in our dominion over our home planet reflects humanity’s in-bred arrogance, which has time and again permitted us to ignore our own ignorance. We ignore how much we know that we don’t know, and cheerfully mock the relative ignorance of “simple minded” ancestors who knew incrementally less than we do.
This arrogance threatens our ability to advance our understanding of our universe and of our potential within it. It threatens to disable our knowledge discovering process, preventing our descendants from a more knowledgeable existence in which they too enjoy the privilege of mocking the relative ignorance of our present. Our arrogance threatens to make our current ignorance absolute.
Our discovering does not have to end with us. I suspect it need not end at all. Our potential to understand our universe affords us the opportunity to inform an increasingly harmonious coexistence with an increasingly understood universe. I believe our potential to understand is not understood, and that we do not realize what this understanding could enable us to achieve.
This ignorance is understandable, since we have never before had the ability to actually utilize this discovering potential. For the first time in our species’ history, we know how to take advantage of the traits that make us life’s greatest discoverers of nature’s secrets. Like never before, we are now capable of realizing the power of our potential.
I fear that arrogance will prevent our realization of this possibility by disabling our ability to dream of knowing what is today, in our ignorance, “unknowable.” It threatens to stall our collective progression of knowledge at precisely the moment in which our survival depends critically upon it.
Our future requires us to change worldviews, not worlds. Humble curiosity will lead us on an infinite journey of discovering nature’s secrets and coexisting in a rich, informed harmony.
This path requires that we allow intuition to encourage us to ask questions we cannot rationally justify as answerable and pursue knowledge we don’t know to be knowable. It requires that we allow intuition to guide us where rational thinking cannot.
Knowing How to Behave
Our evolution selected for the ability to understand. The capabilities of inspection and introspection enable us to peer upward and inward in wonder. These gifts permit us to not only perceive what our environment is, but to also guess as to why nature is as we find it.
Communication enables us to share our personal guesses with other curious minds. In so doing we introduce a new explanation into a network of explanatory judges. Each person engaged in the network uses their unique mind, a makeup of inherited predispositions and experientially gained perspective, to weigh the accuracy of new explanations. Stretching across time and space, this network rejects useless explanations while adopting and iterating upon useful ones to increase their accuracy and utility.
The evolution of explanations toward increasing utility underlies our species’ behavioral evolution. The discovery of explanations that more accurately explain the functioning of our environment creates an opportunity for enhanced survival. We can extract greater utility from a better understood universe by adopting these explanations and adapting how we interact with and within our environment.
Our ability to wonder and collectively evolve explanations has enabled our physically unfit species to rise from ecological insignificance to planetary dominance. We have improved our species’ standing through the cumulative advance of our collective understanding.
We must evolve further. Life, as Daniel Pinchbeck highlights in How Soon is Now?, either “flourishes and blooms, evolves and transforms, or it stagnates and dies.” We have at hand the knowledge permitting us to wreak harmony instead of havoc. We must consciously adopt this knowledge and allow it to guide our adaptation toward a more harmonious coexistence with a better understood universe.
A (Scientific) Method to (Mitigate) Our Madness
The recent and remarkable advance of our understanding can be attributed to the organization of our search for better explanations by the scientific method. This process of wondering, guessing, and experimenting has accelerated our path toward utilizing nature with greater efficacy by increasing the accuracy of our perception.
The scientific method relies upon observable and measurable data (so-called “empirical”, deriving from the Greek word for “experience”), to draw conclusions from experiments. Only conclusions based on replicable methods that create measurable results are verifiable and therefore scientifically valid. We seek answers by observing what can be seen and touching what can be felt.
Experiments designed in this manner mitigate subjectivity by reducing the skewing of cognitive biases on our perception. Results that can be verified by others provide us confidence that we are gaining knowledge of the object of observation rather than the subject observing it.
Prioritizing objectivity in this manner has enabled us to counter ingrained biases that seek fit reality into the fantasies of an ego-blinded mind. Experimentation has allowed us to perceive nature with greater precision, accelerating our iteration of increasing accurate and useful explanations.
This focus has also led us to discover methods and create tools that vastly enhance our innate gifts for observing and understanding. We can observe and measure details of our universe hidden from our raw senses, secrets of nature never before quantifiable. The discoveries we have unearthed have enabled new means of collaborating in the evolutionary advance of explanations toward more exact ones.
These explanatory advances have provided us deeper knowledge of the natural forces organizing the world around us. This knowledge has freed us from mythical notions of emotional deities by introducing us to predictable cause and effect relationships, the foundational elements of our surprisingly orderly universe.
In coming to better understand our universe, we have uncovered the prospect for newfound potential within it. Our knowledge permits our cultural evolution toward this potential, informing how we might change our behavior to exist in deeper harmony with a more deeply understood universe.
Doing so requires we overcome our arrogance to confront our own relative ignorance.
Reasons for Doubt
Arrogance and ignorance are a lethal combination. Like Narcissus, who took his life upon realizing his reflection’s inability to return his affection, we find ourselves confronting an arrogant ignorance that threatens to be our undoing.
Misunderstanding the process by which we understand, and mistakenly loving the understanding rather than the process itself, we tread a path toward throttling the process that we should rightly revere. We allow ourselves to limit our curiosity, prevent our utilization of our discovering potential, and impede our behavioral evolution toward a prolonged, harmonious existence.
In But What if We’re Wrong, Chuck Klosterman argues that our modern way of thinking is shaped by a perspective of “naïve realism.” This lens on reality encourages us to (a) dismiss information that is not quantifiable and objectively verifiable data, and (b) assume that the information that we currently have is all that we ever will. I identify strongly with these two presumptions, which has started to feel problematic.
I suspect the relative successes of our experimentally-driven searching have encouraged us to value only what we quantify. Our arrogance allows us to ignore that our scientific discoveries have vastly enhanced our ability to quantify our universe beyond what our ancestors reasoned possible. We ignore that our ability to objectively understand will continue to grow should we continue pursuing an ever-expanding potential to know.
Our ignorance should be astounding relative to our offspring’s. To prevent our ignorance from becoming absolute, we must recognize that way in which our perspective on rationality, and on reasoning itself, threatens our discovering by restricting our curiosity.
Throughout humanity’s history, curious humans have reasoned that our ability to reason distinguishes us from the brutes and divine or “suprahuman” beings. Such thinkers have considered reasoning to take several distinct forms.
Aristotle was among the first and most influential in his categorization. He distinguished between “discursive” reasoning, a process that works along a path of intermediate premises to reach conclusions, and intuitive reasoning, which provides immediate knowledge of truths.
Eastern philosophies, ancient and modern alike, view intuition as a metaphysical force. For these schools of thought, it is by way of intuition that we may obtain knowledge of reality (the “Absolute” or “Ultimate Ground of Being”).
In a similar fashion, Aquinas and the medieval theologians degraded mankind’s capabilities. Man must combine sensation with intuition in order to know, while suprahuman beings might apprehend “universal natures” with intuition alone.
Klosterman’s arguments highlight our implicit adoption of discursive reasoning as “rational reasoning” or “reasoning proper”, at the cost of dismissing from rational consideration knowledge gained via intuition.
I suspect the inadmissibility of intuited information in our empiric experimentation has led us to dismiss intuition as a form of knowledge, much less as a useful form of reasoning. What does a future of seeking new knowledge armed only with discursive reasoning look like?
The Restrictions of a Strict Rationality
The logic of rational reasoning is too restricting to provide both the means and ends of our discovering. Such reasoning demands that we dismiss information that we currently do not understand.
Our journey toward greater understanding traverses a landscape marred by deep canyons of unknowns.
A strict confinement to rationality restricts our journeying by dismissing as “unanswerable” any questions that we don’t currently know how to answer with objective data. By believing quantified information to represent all that we will ever quantify, we rationally justify a belief that some questions are forever unanswerable via our rational methods. We write off asking these questions as “unscientific” and therefore fail to engage our powerful tools of rational inquiry to the task of ever answering them.
Standing a safe distance from the edge of our understanding, discursive reasoning requires that a visible path of empirical data be available to begin even considering crossing these chasms. It limits the canyons that we seek to cross to those that we know from the outset to be imminently crossable.
This is a path of incrementalism. We limit what we will ever know by limiting what we believe to be knowable.
Intuition is not a leap to conclusions, but a leap to the conclusion that questions are answerable. Intuitions beckon to us from across deep canyons of unknowns, encouraging us that a path exists for those that seek it.
Intuition is our Indiana Jones. Guided by belief in our potential to know, “Inty” leaps into chasms from which rationality necessarily retreats. Intuition scatters stones across an otherwise invisible path, encouraging our rational seeking on the journey toward distant unknowns.
What we don’t know about what we know
We cannot ignore intuition’s footprints guiding our own when we retrace the ambling path taken toward our present understanding. The knowledge that informed and enabled our modern way of life has been built up by ancestral explorers guided by intuition toward unknowns that, in the relative ignorance of their day, were rationally unknowable.
Some of science’s greatest minds argue against such strict and restricting rationality as they reflect on their own contributions to the advance of our collective understanding.
In The Accidental Universe , the late physicist Alan Lightman considers himself among the “great majority of scientists [who] believe that a complete and final set of laws governing all physical phenomena exists and that we are making continual progress toward discovery of these laws.” He, and his fellow believers, have rationally sought irrationally defined ends, guided by a faith he describes as a “willingness to give ourselves over, at times, to things we do not fully understand.”
Lightman here echoes the sentiment of one of science’s most celebrated and least understood minds. Writing as the second of our world wars turned nations toward science as the ultimate weapon, Einstein remained reverential of science’s ultimate pursuit — an understanding of a universe he believed to be unified by elegant, underlying forces. Scientists who devote their lives to advancing our understanding of this unity are rewarded, as he was, with “a profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence” (Philosophy and Religion, 1941).
Einstein believed that science and religion were complementary rather than opposing forces. By discovering knowledge that deepens our connection with a better-known universe, science “contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.” In an essay titled “Science and Religion” (1941), he argues:
Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments of the achievement of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source…
Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and final ends…to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man…
The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to true religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.
Einstein’s search for the unity he believed hid beneath our limited perception of reality lead him to discover secrets of the universe. Discoverers informed and inspired by his findings have built upon them, creating tools that permit us to communicate at the speed of light to interconnect our species’ unique minds to a degree never before achievable. Einstein’s discoveries shattered our perception of ourselves and our potential to understand, but the path to their realization is in many ways emblematic of how this process always works.
The lucid and eloquent Carl Sagan’s understanding of our discovering process is captured in The Varieties of Scientific Experience, a transcript of the thoroughly illuminating lectures in which he expounds on his personal search for knowledge of the sacred. In the Q&A following one lecture, Sagan argues that science progresses by way of a balance between two impulses, “a synthetic, holistic, hypothesis-spinning capability” and an “analytic, skeptical, scrutinizing capability.”
While often thought to be contradictory, Sagan argues that
It is only the mix of these two, the generating of creative hypotheses and the scrupulous rejection of those that do not correspond to the facts, that permits science or any other human activity, I believe, to make progress.
Maria Popova corroborates the role of Sagan’s contradictory impulses in Figuring, a wonderful and poetic embrace of trailblazing discoverers of knowledge. Even the most intrepid explorers of unknowns “can’t bend their gaze beyond their era’s horizon of possibility,” relying upon the evolution of this horizon by way of the progressive human mind, which “peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens.”
As Richard Feynman famously quipped, we humans are capable of easily fooling ourselves. The organization of our inquiry around verifiable data has reduced the ability of our many cognitive biases to lead us to misapprehend the reality we seek to understand through experimentation.
Yet, in our pursuit of reducing the impact of emotional reasoning in our decision making, we have prevented irrational ends from guiding our rational seeking. We have traded a slew of cognitive biases that skew our powers of observation for a status quo bias that threatens to leave us observing the same mess for the brief extent of our disharmonious future.
Dreaming of Unknowns
And so, guided by irrational dreams of understanding what we cannot know to be knowable, our species has rationally sought, discovered, and accumulated knowledge over our brief history.
The figuring of imaginers of the unimaginable is converted into collective discovering power when shared with and iterated upon by a network of curious minds. The brilliance of our species is less a function of individuals standing on the shoulders of individual “giants” than it is in our ability to stand upon the shoulders of the collective giantess of humanity’s diverse and distributed intelligence.
This brilliance shines brighter with the engagement of more unique minds with the accumulated knowledge of our kind. Engagement increases with the freedom of diverse minds to learn the contributions of past explorers and to iterate thereupon with the addition of their own unique contributions. Increased engagement increases our network’s ability to discover better explanations.
Over the course of our history, few of us have been freed from physical scarcity, freed to wonder as to the nature of nature, freed to learn the explanations of our the fewer prior wonderers, and freed to share our (often contentious) contributions for future wonderers to build upon.
The disharmony sowed in humanity’s domination of our planet is perhaps best explained by the control of our seeking and discovering by a privileged and power-hungry minority. Discovering and reorienting around knowledge that permits a more harmonious coexistence might only be possible via a diverse network of minds seeking inclusive progress for its contributors — those currently engaged and with unrealized potential, both living and yet to be.
For the first time in our creative species’ brief history, we know how to free the diverse living intelligence of humanity to engage with and build upon the cumulative intelligence of our privileged predecessors. We have discovered knowledge that has enabled us to become increasingly interconnected, with another and with the accumulated knowledge of our ancestors. We now have the means to engage the decentralized intelligence of humanity in a collaborative knowledge-seeking network.
Our discoveries provide us a choice. We can choose not to adapt to this new knowledge. We can willfully subject billions of our kin to the ignorance of our ancestors, robbing them of the opportunity to create both new knowledge and meaning in their lives through their seeking. We can choose to deprive all of us, alive and yet to come, of their unique contributions.
Imagine we choose instead to adopt our newfound knowledge, to adapt to pursue the new horizons of our discovering potential as unearthed by our discoveries. Imagine we reinvest the tools and wealth generated through the utilization of our understanding to free the diverse living intelligence of humanity to engage in our collective search for deeper understanding.
Imagine we invest our knowledge into establishing a species-wide mind-meld that spans continents and millennia, as we now know to be possible. We will discover a discovering power that our precursors would have been crazy to dream of achieving. Dreaming of these ends enables us to confront the circular dilemma posed by a restricting rationality.
The guidance of intuition allows us to imagine the unimaginable by believing that unknowns are not unknowable. We will only ever dream of knowing what we believe knowable, only ever pursue what we dream of knowing, and only ever know what we pursue.
Rational reasoning cannot guide us to unknowable ends. It disables dreams of rationally unknowable ends from guiding our methods of rational seeking. It justifies contentment with incremental, rationally achievable gains, all but ensuring a future depressingly predictable from the present.
Imagine that we engage our billions of unique living minds with the ideas of our ancestors, enabling them to create and contribute to collaboratively developing unique ideas for solving the challenges of today and creating a better world of tomorrow. Empowered with the discovering capacity unlocked in a network leveraging our species’ cognitive diversity, how can we imagine anything presently unknowable as forever so?
We stand poised to achieve an intellectual renaissance that promises to render our present understanding ridiculously incomplete. We will seek answers to questions we dare to ask and pursue goals we dare to dream.
Acknowledging our ignorance relative to what we might soon achieve, how can we justify writing off any question as “unanswerable” and restricting our dreaming to what we think to be knowable? How can we justify any perspective but humble and daring curiosity?
What Else is Here?
We have never actually found ourselves at the end of knowledge, always merely at the edge of what we know. Every skeptic has been wrong to believe that we had reached an insurmountable barrier to what more we might achieve.
And so today we too are wrong in dismissing what we as yet fail to understand. We too allow arrogance to blind us to our ignorance by choosing to believe that what is known is all that is knowable.
The penduluming cycle of human stasis and progress relies on wonder to propel us from low-entropy implosion toward dynamic progression. The curiosity that has driven us toward a deeper understanding of our universe relies on guidance from intuition to rationally discover what we cannot rationally justify seeking.
How we know anything, and how we are conscious of knowing, remain front and center of what we don’t yet know. We may find that intuition is an ultimately quantifiable process of subconscious pattern recognition.
It’s also possible intuition is but one of many functions of consciousness of which we remain largely ignorant, relegated to the realm of mysticism until we develop the means of understanding what today we feel but fail to objectively “know” as rational inquiry demands we must. In this vein it may follow meditation, whose practitioners were rationally written off as mystics until neuroscience could objectively quantify their subjectively experienced benefits.
Perhaps intuition is a glimpse of something more super than human, more meta than physical. Perhaps it is something that we cannot ever truly know.
Intuition is required of us to ask, and stands to be better understood by the pursuit to answer, the last unanswerable question we can ever ask ourselves: is anything unknowable?
I believe this question will guide us into a new age of discovery. Beckoned by intuition to an answer we believe to be within our potential, the pursuit will lead us to realize our collective discovering power.
Our pursuit will introduce many unknowns to our increasingly engaged network of diverse minds, challenging our ability to collectively theorize of and rationally inspect nature to prove them knowable. We will advance our understanding and our ability to collectively understand.
I suspect we will come to understand our universe’s interconnected elegance to a degree which I am today crazy to believe is within our capability. I suspect we will lovingly transcend the cognitive blinders to humanity’s humble immersion within interwoven space and time. We will grow to become the seekers of T.S. Eliot’s vision:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
(“Little Gidding.” Four Quartets, 1943)
Only so informed will we culturally adapt, driven by self-knowledge to seek a more harmonious coexistence with a better understood universe.
Knowing Ourselves
It is possible that we are not alone among life in our ability to understand. If not, such intelligent creatures must either be as yet ignorant to the imperils of human ignorance, purely indifferent to our potential to extinguish much of life on Earth, or positioned to benefit from such an outcome (such life could be biding its time nearby — looking at you, decomposers).
If we are alone among life in our ability to knowingly destroy life, perhaps we alone are also capable of knowing enough to save it. If we can prevent ourselves from taking an unknowing biosphere down with its self-appointed captains, might we provide a foundation from which our relatively brilliant children can save life from a future, as yet unforeseeable death?
It seems life arose within an otherwise dead universe. We seem to be life’s greatest discoverer of the universe’s secrets. Might our discovering lead us to an understanding of the universe that allows us to enable its perpetuation?
Might we be an essential element in a grand cycle of universal self-perpetuation?
[shrug]
Might as well find out.
