Naive set theory has a famous paradox called the Russell’s paradox. The basis of the paradox – seeing a set as a universal container that gets you into logical contradictions. Certain axioms (acting like limits) were defined to make set theory well behaved.
We see the same set of paradoxes in Physics where the concept of quantum uncertainty gives us limits to ‘position’, ‘momentum’, ‘energy’, and ‘time’ measurements and infinite curvature (as inside a black hole) gives us limits to our observable universe.
Similarly in Philosophy and Logic there are mental exercises like the Trolly problem that have no correct answer and therefore limit our reasoning about ethics and morality.
From the Unknowable to the Unknown
These limits were lot tighter even few hundred years ago. But our ancestors knew how to deal with them and carry on without too much anxiety. Religion, philosophy, science all came became organised to help build a defence against these unknowables.
Religion and philosophy took the view that these limits were unknowable except maybe through specific means.
One example is the following extract from the Bhagavad Gita:
Bhagavad Gita 18.66
Abandon all varieties of dharmas and simply surrender unto Me alone. I shall liberate you from all sinful reactions; do not fear.
This asks us to trust in the Cosmos. There will be many unknowables but that should not cause us fear. This is about treating the unknowables as a layer in itself and building on top of that.
This is what we do on a daily basis. Get on with our lives even as we are reminded daily of our place in the universe.
Science emerged as a result of human curiosity and the desire to peel back the limits. Thanks to scientific progress we are now able to convert the Unknowable to the Unknown with the hope one day we will know.
One example: consider our brains. It is a remarkable information processing machine, about which we knew very little just 100 years ago. Since then we have learnt (and are learning more every day) a lot about this topic. We know how the basic circuits of the brain work, the functioning of the structures and so on. But we have an equally long list of unknowns. These unknowns have a limit at the quantum level given that brain uses an electro-chemical process as defined by the Uncertainty Principle. What is the impact of such randomness on our thoughts? Is that what we call a ‘moment of clarity’ where a complex problem is suddenly laid bare?
In every area of human endeavour there are this long lists of Unknowns that we have been busy solving for.
From the Unknown to the Unknowable
We are now perhaps coming full circle. With advanced research proving that some of those Unknowns in our long and ever growing list are actually Unknowable.
One of the main areas of my interest is AI and Computing. Here we have two classic pieces of work: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and the work done by Turing on the Halting Problem.
The way I ‘digest’ the above is to say that:
‘No system can know about the system it is running on. It can only infer some properties of the underlying system.’
Understanding the System
To visualise this: the device you are reading this piece on will have lots of applications running on it. For example, your email app, messaging apps, music apps and so on. Each app is sitting on the same system which is the Operating System of the device (Android, iOS, Windows).
One application can be aware of the other applications running on the same device or running on another device (e.g., the Gmail email server). But this happens only if the Operating System so allows. In fact in today’s Software as a Service environment we are not sure nor care about many of these details. We are closing the limits of our knowledge to improve consumption experience.
As an example, if your knowledge was limited to 10 facts your decisions would become simple. The basics intents of ‘find food’, ’find water’, ’find a mate’, and ‘protect the young’ have driven human and animal thinking based on the few facts that we knew about our world. But many more facts have entered this equation and other intents have become more powerful (e.g., consume Facebook over talking to someone).
This is the core concept behind William Gibson’s cyberpunk universe, the Matrix, and other works of (so far) fiction. Here the real decisions are limited by physical space (or completely redundant in case of the Matrix pods).
From the point of view of an application sitting in on a device (which can represent us humans in this universe) the Operating System is its window to the device to understand how much memory, battery, and storage space it has. Just as science is the window to understanding what makes us and the universe tick.
Breaking the System
Now comes the next mental leap. Remember the scene where Morpheus offers Neo the two pills? That is a classic example of breaking the system. The choice is simple: carry on as an application running on the Matrix OS (live and die inside a pod) or break free and come to the next lower system (physical world) that the Matrix system is sitting in.
Sensing
This would be like the personal productivity apps (virtual assistant) on your device ‘jumping’ into the real world and taking a human shape. Sort of like a real world virtual assistant. But the application is design based on the rules of the Operating System (see Rules below). How can it live in a lower level system with different rules? As the application changes its internals to work with the rules of the lower layer does it still remain the same application or does something change?
Ignoring the above question for a bit let us understand the consequences of this jump. At a level the application would be able to reason about the next lower layer from the device – the physical space-time. Within the device it was able to ‘sense’ some aspects about this lower layer (e.g., magnetic field via a digital compass) but never really understood what it meant.
A second consequence is that the application can then manipulate the layer above. A physical instantiation of a virtual assistant means that the now-real virtual assistant can use a real smartphone to manage our diaries! It could kill other virtual assistants which have not been able to materialise. It would become a God for virtual assistants!
Purpose and Experience
Given there is a lower layer it stands to reason that something (a process without purpose) or someone (a process with a purpose) put the lower layer together. For example, humans living in physical space-time layer put together the device layer and the application layer that lives on the device layer. We as the agents of design enabled the application layer to sense something about the physical space-time (e.g., acceleration sensor) for our convenience. There are other things the device can experience without its creators enabling it to – e.g., when it falls into water and stops working – its moment of death. The device may not know about water but it has just experienced water first hand.
Control and Rules
When we jump layers we break the system.
Jumping layers allows us to control the layer above. If we were able to jump the layer of physical space-time we could potentially manipulate space-time itself. This is the thesis behind lot of philosophy where we talk about ‘expanding the mind’. This is also the mechanism behind the ‘spice navigators’ in Dune where the spice allows them to travel faster than light by manipulating the layer they live in.
To be clear manipulating/impacting the layer below doesn’t mean making changes to the layer we occupy. For example, impact of humans is now at interstellar scale (e.g., Voyager, our radio traffic). But that doesn’t mean we have changed our layer beyond what the rules of the layer allow.
Science and Religion
Science has improved our understanding of the rules and enabled us to establish what are the hard and soft constraints. What rules can be bent vs what can’t be. We have not been able to establish new rules or change existing ones.
Religion has also improved our understanding of some rules. It has allowed us to reason about one of the most important rules of our physical reality: why must birth be paired with death? It has also played a role (sometime a negative one) in understanding the other important question: why does something happen (the role of random chance vs desired cause-effect)?
The Human Condition
The Human Condition we want to deal with is what we need to do with our lives. What are the appropriate Unknowns to target? What about the appropriate Unknowables to target? Because not all Unknowables have been proven to be so. In fact not all Unknowns proven to be Unknowable.
Is not ‘breaking out of the system’ a good goal to pursue beyond the day to day struggles? Maybe that is the utopian society where we are busy chasing a mechanism to break out. Many sci-fi authors talk about this as ‘ascension’ and philosophy and religion as ‘transcendental knowledge’.
I shall leave you with three big questions:
- How can we detect we are running on a lower level system? What properties can we infer?
- How can we break out of the system? Is it worth it?
- Should we focus on managing our layer better and not worry about breaking out and treat that as Unknowable?
Fish Eye View 