Omar Claflin

The primary objectors of the idea that we have permanent limitations of comprehension of the universe and ourselves include the misinformed or confused who seem to be betting short on humanity. They do this by using a honed skillset to obscure and create wonder (that maybe an unintentionally evolved skillset by them, but one that is identifiable and capable of being understood by us). Second, arguing against processes of clarification as being limited by pointing out supposed failures (consciousness, sentience, complexity, emergence, intuition, free will, morality, etc) are failures of their definitions and not inherent limitations of us.

These concepts are an approximation, a shortcut of limited usefulness; the alternative explanations as covered contain more accurate descriptions.

Our need to explain, my need to explain, all comes from this compulsion of our information machine to master the environment around it (at least a theoretical understanding). An extension of survival. Or a noble quest if you prefer that narrative.

These questions are attempts at the absolute. Really a psycho-informational drive for information completeness. You can respond by erecting permanent conceptual fences and saying there’s no more beyond these fences. Or you can engage the struggle of comprehension.

Keeping comprehension confined in old conceptual pens, chained by limited scope, sedated by dazzling majesty is unbecoming of us. A culling of our potential.

One response will be vague notions about this taking something significant away from us. I’m suggesting we discard the incoherent concepts and that they are in fact not significant to us. The mysteries of the humanities, the first attempts at patterns by our infantile race, the old definitions fossilized in our language are not that vital to what we actually are. They will say that’s akin to throwing away our humanness. It’s not. Our humanness is more than a collection of old conflated concepts. In fact, these fragile concepts have hardly anything to do with us.

We need to strive for higher acuity on identifying these old ideas. They are not just harmlessly lying around. Many other concepts in our language connect to them. Its seeps into our conversations. It mucks up our progress.

Consider our future attempts to improve on the human form, removing our susceptibility to cancer, repairing incidental organ damage or improving our metabolic limitations. Are we hitting our heads against a design of infinite intelligence, with no hope to make any dents in this at all? Or are we merely up against a design of billions of years of trial and error, with an ever-gaining possibility of mastering and improving upon it one day? Consider how right now, one human brain contains more intelligence than all the computers in the world. What will be our specialness in one generation’s time when one device contains more intelligence than a human brain? Or all the human brains on the planet combined? Clinging to the concepts of souls and consciousness will not be a useful way to think about ourselves at that point. Our sense of self had better be more robust than that.

Peeling the cover off of subjectivity and being unimpressed by its primitive machinations and rejecting the smiling-faced pessimism of the peddlers of superficial happiness, bring up worries that if we look too hard at the house of cards of our minds, it will collapse into a dysfunctional depression. My optimism in civilizing evolution of our understanding is exceeded only by the confidence I have in our psychological resilience.

Instead of explicit positivity, manufactured grand purpose and expectations of the daily sublime, allow me to suggest existential aimlessness punctuated by distracted amusement at the absurd. I assume this is familiar to some of you. I can’t imagine contentedness, evolutionarily, would be very accessible to any of us. Not without significant spiritual depreciation at least. Drive, not having to be on any level of grand ambition, thrives on the psychological mismatch of where you are and a potentially more optimal level. Minus this, you would be dead in days from dehydration. You can structure life to more or less take care of these drives but not perfectly and they will still rear their head constantly. This isn’t to be avoided in my opinion.

Remember that language, thoughts, feelings, are all shortcuts working good-enough for many situations. These are evolved tools, grown in complexity from simplicity, carrying many limitations. We can improve our language and increase awareness of our own minds with refinement of these tools.

The relativism of our reality and language and systems exist as such. Assuming absolutes, psychoinformational search of our information processing organ would finally be completely satiated, and trying to project them onto the relativistic world and seeing them fail, shouldn’t lead to wacky conclusions about reality and meta-realities.  It’s understandable why our brain searches for absolutes as an information system. It makes sense that it would look for the pattern in the patterns in the patterns. The ‘grand invariant’. But don’t be so self-unaware as to not see it as a mental lens and as the reality you think is there.

“Intent”, “motives”, “purpose”, “autonomy”, “divinity”, “infinity”, “nothingness”, “sentience”, “souls”, “morality”, “understanding” are all imprecise narratives we use. I’m not advocating crassness or reductionism. I’m saying that our apparent limitations aren’t there. Dispassionate clarity and refined communication dissolves the sacred cows. By shattering old definitions of humanity, we can transcend the sum of the pieces.

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