The explicitly relational nature of cognition, and of “reality”, the involvement of two partners both of whom must have a degree of opacity, raises questions about the idea of absolute, or even real, progress of intelligibility towards a final goal. It is to these questions that our inquiry will be directed in the final stage of our reflection on the sense-making animal.
CHAPTER 8
Towards a complete comprehension of the world?
We should not look down on the standpoint of theory as make-believe, for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of one theory or another.
W. V. O. Quine1
We began with Einstein’s awestruck observation that the comprehensibility of the world is “an eternal mystery”. The reach of our understanding seems to be incomprehensible, especially in the light of what we know about ourselves. Attempts to eliminate the mystery by closing the gap between the comprehending mind and the world it comprehends proved unsatisfactory. Locating the world inside the mind (Chapter 3) and making the mind part of the material world (Chapter 4) were equally unconvincing. Indeed, the latter approach, which treated us as a piece of nature, and consequently an object of scientific knowledge, made even everyday knowledge, never mind higher-level understanding of the world, entirely incomprehensible. Our scientific image of the world and of our place in it does not seem to be able to accommodate the very faculties that we must have to form such an image.
In subsequent chapters, we identified reasons why we might expect the comprehensibility of the world, however impressive, to remain only partial, although it still exceeds what we might reasonably expect. The knowing subject proved to be a necessary condition of, as well as a constraint on, objective knowledge. Disinfecting cognition of the contamination of the subject (Chapter 5) would be close to being self-contradictory. Knowledge requires to be known by someone – an embodied someone: it is impossible to envisage what-is as having a subjectless view on itself. That someone, however, would always have access to the body of knowledge arrived at, and held in trust by, a vast community of minds. What is more, sense-making, and more specifically, knowing-that – “thatter” – requires a distance between mind and the world it comprehends (Chapter 6). Given that knowledge is a relationship between two independent relata – the knower and the known – the conformity of the latter to the former is deeply problematic. Indeed, the standing of the object of knowledge as an object – distinct from what is known – implies that it should have a residual, irreducible opacity; that there should be something senseless at its heart compounding the opacity of the embodied subject (Chapter 7). When it came to letting his piéce de résistance in on the secrets of his Creation, God seemed to have said “Let there be half-light”. He sent his best beloved on a long, still unfinished, journey of enlightenment.
Unfinished – but unfinishable? Our knowledge is incomplete and our sense-making a work in progress. Must this be the case forever? If so, the very idea of cognitive progress is problematic, even illusory. Surely every little step – and of these there appears to be no shortage – contributes to overall advance. The judgement of absolute progress, however, presupposes a benchmark of complete understanding against which it can be measured. While I can acknowledge that A is bigger than B, even if I cannot envisage a maximally large object, such comparisons cannot be made in the case of overall understanding. Can we make sense of the very idea of rounding off the sense of the world, such that inquiry is concluded and there is no more sense to be made? This seems doubtful, given the story so far. But there is more to be said about this, if only to highlight the extraordinary nature of the sense that – despite everything – we have collectively made of ourselves and the world in which we live out our brief lives. What follows picks up the story we left incompletely told in Chapter 1.
There are several compelling models of apparent cognitive progress in individual lives and in the history of humanity. I most certainly knew and understood more when I was 30 than when I was a toddler. I made more sense of a much bigger world: the longer I was at large, the larger the large got. And it was possible for me actively to pursue the goal of cognitive advance by seeking out sources of information, undergoing training, struggling to master various disciplines, and so on.
There is a tempting analogy between personal development (which includes development into a person) and the cognitive growth of the human race. Successive epochs are associated with an ever-expanding body of knowledge and, possibly, bandwidth of understanding. Such growth, what is more, is driven by a willed sense of our ignorance, by cultivated doubt, by active uncertainty, by the feeling, based on previous experience, that our objectivity has serious limits. The latter is in part fuelled by what objective knowledge tells us about our insignificant place in the universe. Increasingly powerful techniques of inquiry, enhanced by qualitative and quantitative methodologies, proliferating concepts, and the thousand ingenious instruments to enhance the power and precision of direct and indirect perception, accelerate the rate of cognitive growth. Horizons expand and the skies are no longer the limit.
This Whiggish history of inexorable advance might be challenged by the worry that modes of understanding, modes of consciousness, have been lost even as others have been gained. Perhaps the insights and intuitions of early philosophers and poets and novelists have not been surpassed; perhaps they seem to know and understand less only because we do not really know what it was they knew and the nature of their understanding. Natural science – particularly physics and biology – however, seems to provide incontrovertible evidence of some kind of objective and possibly absolute progress, building on, rather than being captive to, its own history. The convergence of ever more precise scientific theories, that have increasing generality, and tested incessantly in their practical applications, in the gadgetry that surrounds us, seems to provide irrefutable evidence of advance towards ever more complete and ever more robust truths regarding what is, was, and shall be the case.
Even science looks vulnerable, however. The history of the most spectacularly successful disciplines is a story of successive theories being vanquished by other theories, either because the latter encompass more of the data or, more focally, because critical observations predicted by the new theory are not accommodated by the one it has superseded. The permanence of its revolutions is, of course, the source of the strength of science. But the process does not seem likely to be coming to an end; with so much unfinished business, stability would amount to impasse. Every phase of science therefore looks like part of its history, a step in an unfinished and unfinishable journey. What is thought now already looks, from an imagined future standpoint, simply what “they” (that’s us) thought “then” (our now). As has often been pointed out, the most powerful theories currently on offer – general relativity and quantum mechanics – are not only incomplete, being unable to explain certain phenomena, but also conflict with one another. We consequently have no idea of what a Theory of Everything would look like, even if it were confined to being a Theory of Everything Physical and the world of physicists were identical with the physical world and the latter with Everything.
Given this, we are in no position to claim that our present theories are closer to complete understanding of the natural world than those of previous centuries. We have always been wrong in the past (that is implicit in the very idea of continuing progress in science), so why should we imagine that the present is a cognitive vantage point on the universe, on the All (including ourselves), or is en route to such a viewpoint?
Structural realists have argued that something is conserved, as theories are replaced by other theories: namely structures that are (ultimately) mathematical. In fact, this is too modest. Many of the discoveries, techniques and applications of science still hold up, even when the theoretical framework changes fundamentally. The underlying point, however, is upheld: previous theories, if not actually misconceived, are clearly incomplete. The structure that is conserved across successive scientific revol
utions is remote from anything that looks or feels like complete understanding. And much is lost en route to individual theories, before their reduction to structures they have in common with their predecessors and successors.2
A quick glance at what is shed en route to any high-level scientific theory should put paid to the notion of natural science being a path to a complete understanding of the world. Its theories are quantitative, typically taking the form of equations, correlating the sizes of abstractions – parameters – with the sizes of other abstractions. The scope of a theory such as F = ma – Newton’s second law of motion – is vast; but its content is not proportionate to this scope. Indeed, science gains scope at the price of specific content: it spreads wide because it spreads thin. The key inputs to these theories are measurements. We discussed the passage from experiences to measurements in earlier chapters. Measurement drains objects of their qualitative characteristics and, of course, of their human significance. While measurements require experience, they are ultimately empty of experience; of sense-making infused with sense experience. The extraordinary precision and scope of (say) E = mc2 distracts from the fact that it relegates most of the world to an invisible background. The sharpness of its sharp edges is the consequence of the winnowing away of the fluff of particularity – the variety, multiplicity and dynamism of the world. We can seem to see everything because we overlook almost everything, forgetting that we may lose (important aspects of) the measure of things because we measure them. Knowledge at the highest level of natural science seems to be a form of sense-making void of many important aspects of understanding. The constants of nature, which we discussed in the previous chapter, are a scotoma or floater in our intellectual gaze. We shall return to these issues presently but let us examine the more basic constraints on the advance of understanding.
We have discussed the (necessary) contamination by the subject in even the most abstract knowledge, arising out of the fact that knowledge has to be experienced by someone. We can never know “reality” independently of the means by which we know it, so that what-is, or more precisely the sum total of things other than the knower, directly intimates itself. Knowledge from no perspective – without the visible or invisible constraints of bodily being, of sense experience, of culture, and of history – is in danger of becoming blankness or darkness as the variousness of people, places and things converges to theoretical, mind portable, generality. This applies not only to individual subjects but to the collective subject who defines what is available to be known – and shapes the received ideas of the time. Knowledge falls within schemata, defined by concepts. Kant identified some very broad categories of understanding such as “causation” or “unity versus multiplicity”. Our concern here is with the constraint of schemata that apply at a less fundamental level than Kant envisaged. Without the accidents of culture and history, there would be a featureless terrain. It is only within a highly formatted, prescribed cognitive field that the effortful advance of our understanding can take place. Each generation picks up the story where it has been left by the previous generation. Inquiry is visibly or invisibly framed by assumptions that give the concepts that guide or prompt inquiry, and the techniques that assist them, their intuitive validity, which allows them to provide a jumping-off point of “the taken for granted”.
The most visible, if not necessarily the most limiting, constraints are those that come from the history, the customs and practice, of the specialty within which the pursuit of knowledge takes place. There are two opposing tendencies: the convergence of principles and explanatory paradigms from different disciplines (particularly evident in natural sciences); and the splitting off of disciplines and sub-disciplines with their own languages, techniques and areas of interest. The tendency to division is driven in part by the increasing numbers of individuals involved in advancing knowledge – or at least having to seem to do so – and by the multiplication of the institutions supporting cognitive advance within the sciences and the humanities.
Fission can occur in the most surprising places. While we might expect a division of labour in intrinsically discursive empirical fields such as the study of literature or history and the special sciences, it is perhaps less to be expected in philosophy or mathematics. Even so, expertise in partial differential equations, topology, algebra, geometry, algebraic geometry, logic(s), probability theory, numerical analysis, is scattered over many (often non-communicating) minds. Beyond these more explicit constraints are the elective limits of scholars, paradoxically most evident in the humanities, where it is entirely acceptable to devote one’s entire life to a minor poet or a particular dialect and to know remarkably little about adjacent fields of inquiry. Even so-called “polymaths” are merely individuals who are slightly less “oligomathic” than the run of scholars – just as those who are deemed to be “well-read” are merely a little less ill-read than their fellows – though we imagine that we have got a sufficient inkling, even a measure – of what we have not read “personally”.3
Ahmed Alkhateeb has pointed out that there were 1.2 million papers published in the biomedical sciences alone in 2016, although “the average scientist reads only about 250 papers a year”:
Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction of our collective knowledge and consequently, more and more, asking the wrong questions, or asking ones that have already been answered. Also, human creativity seems to depend increasingly on the stochasticity of previous experiences – particular life events that allow a researcher to notice something others do not. Although chance has always been a factor in scientific discovery, it is currently playing a much larger role than it should.4
Alkhateeb believes he has a solution to this problem when it comes to facilitating scientific advance. The point, however, remains: we individually know little of what is known. We are less aware of this than we should be because what we do “know of” are often summaries of summaries of summaries. Or results that are the end of a multitude of intellectual journeys of which we know little or nothing. By such means we also imagine we can encompass histories – of the novel, of science, of England – at a glance. We are too easily satisfied with inklings.
Behind this is a larger truth: that, while we develop ideas collectively, they must still be known individually. We often overlook this because our collective knowledge and understanding is “out there”, being collected, or at least simultaneously present, on paper, magnetic media and the internet. This is deceptive, of course, because we cannot outsource knowing to insentient paper, hard discs, or the electronic bearers of data that have boundless capacity – although the careless use of the word “information” conceals this. Only a minute fraction of what humanity has come to know or understand is captured in any individual human mind – in whom alone knowledge is known and understanding is understood.
How knowledge actually lives in a token mind – as opposed to that illusory collective “humanity” or “the human mind” – is not entirely reassuring. Even the cognoscenti make inattentive, frequently inhospitable hosts. The consciousness of a busy (and who is not busy?) and distracted (and who is not distracted?) individual is a poor receptacle for a large idea. Understanding ideas is at best intermittent and, in being understood, they are often diminished, shrink-wrapped by our narrow and intermittent hearkening. The general theory of relativity lives a wretched life in the Wednesdays even of a physicist. Its magnificence glimmers only intermittently – or not at all if it is reduced from a Himalayan view of the world of motion to a set of equations that can be used to make calculations. As for the rest of us, who are not physicists, though we live in a world in part created by Einstein, the theory presents itself as opaque chains of symbols, clumsily and inaccurately translated into words we can understand just about or not at all.
If we add to this standing disability, fluctuations of awareness and interest, misting and demisting of consciousness, tiredness, confusion, and boredom, dozens of rival preoccupations, quotidian co
ncerns that appropriate our thoughts, we can see what a precarious existence the major cognitive advances of any time have in the life of those very few who are aware of them. Even the torch-bearers of the cognitive advances of the age tend the flame intermittently. The higher level of sense for the most part sleeps in us and the knowledge known to the race is unknown to the greater part of humanity, even those who benefit from it.
This may sound rather pessimistic but we have hardly begun to take the measure of the chaos of the token mind where, ultimately, collective cognitive advance has to be experienced. Yes, we are structured or at least stitched together by memory and responsibility and the standing conditions of our lives. Within this informal trellis, however, we are a scattering of occasions. Things of the mind are always in competition with more compelling attractions and repulsions. And our moments hold only a minute portion of our cognitive sum. What we are at any given time reflects little of what we have passed through; our active knowledge reflects little of our passive knowledge; and our passive knowledge, available on prompting, is dwarfed by what has been returned by forgetfulness to the huge realm of those things of which we are ignorant. There is no moment at which we can access the sum of what we have known or understood.
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