Omar Claflin

‘If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn’t.’

There are literally hundreds of these seemingly benign, brain-teasing quotes I could have picked. Thousands of pithy sounding wisdoms taking stabs at poorly unpacked concepts that are given transcendent reverence because of their ethereal nature. Quotes on the sublime, consciousness, justice, mystery of life. These wouldn’t seem to be related but the superficial connection is they are reflections of how we see the world. These thoughts can be quotes, phrases or unspoken assumptions. I would like to introduce the idea that many of these ideas and words carry a spirit-assassinating pessimism specifically in the form of implied limitations of what we can grasp mentally. The quote I picked is a more apparent example of this.

The symmetrical wordplay of this statement credited to a self-labeled ‘supernaturalist’ feigns for being a self-evident fact; perhaps the reason why it has established its meme-like viral presence on the bottom of email signatures and as openings into books about the brain. Vagueries about the inaccessibility of certain concepts delivered with mock humility are intellectually offensive. The suggestion that we cannot understand a biological machine capable of comprehension, implies that we should end it here and send everyone on their way. Besides being offensive to my, and perhaps your, sense of optimistic defiance that all around us can eventually be conquered by the human spirit, even the rather dull mystery that enshrouds ourselves, it is a self-contained logical seppuku. Although I’m not discounting the potential underlying genius of removing yourself from a discussion purported to be beyond you. Perhaps I didn’t give him enough credit.

Consider, for a moment, an analogous statement about the eyeball and how it could see everything except itself. After all, you consider in the first second after reading that, you cannot turn an eye on itself.

Well, not until you consider a mirror. Or anything reflective. How metaphorically appropriate. A form of intellectual outrage over this isn’t without reason. Reflexive outrage serves as a mild inoculant against insidious forms of defeatism. Other forms of this sentiment turn it into a piety:

“Sin of arrogance is that we think we know everything. Sin of ignorance is that we don’t know we don’t know anything.”

Statements like these have a wisdom-sounding way about it coupled with pious humility. Who could have an objection to that?

I do. Poison pill statements such as these offend me to my core. This is surreptitious resignation slipped into our wisdom to sedate our sense of defiance. Smiling pessimism handed to us in the form of zingy sayings posing as wisdom.

If statements such as these were intended with a high level of irony, I’ll take it all back. But only after I’ve exhaustively clarified the layers of this idea into the ground so it’s absolutely clear how awful these statements are. Once you understand that, then go ahead and chuckle at how something so terrible could be said.

Irony is disingenuous if your listener is unaware of the layers. If people laugh at a concept but thoughtfully nod at it without discarding it, then it’s just nervous ignorance accepting horrible ideas at face value.

The statement about sin has theological roots but similar defiance-killing ideas are found in new age spiritualism as well. Attempts by new ageists at defining god as some obscuring acronym (G.O.D.) meaning only ‘general organizing design’ insidiously sneak the idea of infinity hidden in it. Infinite creativity, infinite intelligence. Call it “potential” with a capital “p”. It doesn’t matter. The same self-defeating implication of infinity is the same.

We can never hope to match infinity and might as well quit. We would be chasing the horizon forever, the infinity carrot never in reach. I don’t even mean you or I personally. I mean the whole species. The entire human project. Supposedly, apparent evidence is all around us in the form of nature and our minds for why we should cognitively and collectively capitulate. Sentiments about why we ought to just gawk at the infinity carrot in awe are captured as ethereal concepts in old language, mysteries of the human condition or tiny interlocking philosophic logics and presented to us as another example of our comprehensive finiteness dwarfed by the infinite and permanently unknowable. We are supposed to carry cognitive dissonance about the futility of our reach. Implied is a pessimism. We cannot comprehend the physical or metaphysical infinite.

This attitude silences the core of what we are. Sentiments about the hopeless limitations of our understanding, in my opinion, stands as the worst kind of human self-defeatism.

When we talk about the physical universe, the metaphysical conjuring of our imagination, or how our minds work, we ought to carry a knowing confidence in our collective ability to eventually understand it. It’s an inevitability. This ought to be our spirit. None of these things are unfathomable phenomena.

Our indomitable comprehension, working subconsciously within us and pervasively manifesting itself in the external world we shape, makes us who we are. This is an ultimate defiant resilience in the form of an adaptability and optimism so fundamental it’s nearly invisible. The obvious fragility of old concepts and explanations that attempted to explain the world and ourselves in the past have little do with our actual spirit other than a developmental phase we went through long ago.

The premise is that anything that can understand can never be understood, has no logical basis. The shoddiness of the assertions of statements such as these may seem self-evident. Others may rely on an intuition that causes you to groan, rub your eyes and shake it off. To others, the circular wordplay may cause a slight sense of bewonderment as you contemplate the unstoppable force that is comprehension, conquering all before it with the only singular exception being, in the vein of a great literary tragedy, itself. Wow, indeed.

Well, whichever one you are, stick with me. Intuition can be wrong. Language can trip over itself. That confusion or wonder is a brain response attempting to understand something. Depending on the depth of mismatch your brain is experiencing, the differences between what you’ve already seen or known in your life and what someone says or writes, it may feel an attractive curiosity or a head-shaking rejection or just lose interest altogether. These are reactions of your comprehension organ at work. Perhaps your comprehension organ requires an aspirin now.

Putting aside the unrelenting incremental progress of all the brain sciences and skipping a dry contextless logical dismantlement, consider a potentially more comfortable scenario. Consider for example, how you psychologically can understand another person, especially one that you know intimately well. How one brain can understand another. How you can guess what they are going to do, what makes them feel more comfortable, what pisses them off.

The argument would be the only reason this works, the only reason empathy works, is because your brain is more complex than their brain.

If you seriously consider that as the actual reason, then consider how well you understand yourself. Perhaps you don’t understand yourself completely but some level of accurate self-description and prediction of your behaviors is there.

Are you familiar with your thinking? Sure. Do you have a complete working understanding of it? No but this isn’t true of anything. The crux of this pessimism of understanding is not realizing what it means to understand something. Understanding is not as vague or ethereal as some kind of infinite cognitive grasp. Simply having more than one way to think about something is enough to imbue you with the confident sense of understanding. Simply having a pattern that tells you what will roughly happen next is understanding.

At the core of all these overreaches is the concept that understanding is complete and all encompassing. It is not. A bad analogy that conveys some incremental value over the previous is understanding. Now, which narratives and metaphors contain more explanatory and clarifying value is at the core of this book. I argue that many old ideas still lurk in our language that are no longer needed.

Understanding is a couple things. It’s the progression from being unaware of something to growing levels of familiarity. Its generalizations, clever patterns, ones that you’ve figured out from your own experiences, or that were given to you to be confirmed for yourself. It’s the categorization and representation of stuff and behavior, which allows us to refer to things impossibly large and complicated as the universe.

Older, less useful explanations and generalizations are tossed aside for more elegant and more useful ideas. This is an ongoing process.

Civilization thrives on an optimistic assumption about future ingenuity and future discovery. Labeling things incomprehensible is a profoundly arrogant assessment of the potential intelligence of the collective future best efforts of our species. A sore lack of creativity. Pointing to the horizon labeling phenomena unfathomable.  

Yeah. Maybe not yet. And by others that aren’t them.

There is a great deal of reason to be optimistic about the possibilities of our understanding. Rightly assume that we can turn a metaphorical mirror on ourselves, and with the leveraging power of scientific knowledge and reflective insight we can understand our brains. Let’s ignore the pessimism from the smiling new-age mystics, over-formalized philosophers, the authority-wielding theologians. These forms of pessimism come at us in many forms — remove these to make room the project of human progress. We should endeavor to be conscious of specific limitations in order to maneuver around them and continue forward.

Dismissing our ability to understand our own minds pushes a great deal of things off the table. It deals a direct blow to improving almost everything, and limits our thinking on breakthroughs in fields like education and training as well as intrapersonal relationships. Determinations to understand our mind is relevant to the limitations in our language, concepts and discussions.

The problem with these statements and rhetorical questions about certain concepts being untouchable by clear understanding is that it extends to other areas in the form of pessimism of our future. The metaphysics of what they try to insert onto how the mind works (consciousness, willpower, sentience, etc), specifically that is an unreachable phenomena that can’t, in fact, be made into a clear almost boring comprehension, implies all sorts of very real things in world unrelated to spirituality. Besides retarding any quest for building intelligent systems, understanding others becomes a deeply limited quest. They try to make themselves unassailable by asserting what they have to say has no implications on technology or civilizing progress and only serves as an aid for human happiness. That simply isn’t true.

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