Recently, I’ve become more and more aware of the limitations of conscious thought and formal models of entities and systems. We don’t understand how political systems make decisions, how world events occur, or even how we choose what to wear on any particular day. Cause and effect doesn’t exist in the form it is commonly imagined. We do not know what our bodies are capable of. We certainly don’t understand the basis of biology or DNA. Aside from the fact that there are so many phenomena we cannot explain yet, the models of chemistry and physics are an artificial mesh that is superimposed upon a much messier world. They work within reason, up to and including the phenomena that they can predict, but to confuse them with reality is insanity. In this vein it is interesting to also contemplate, for instance, that we don’t understand all the capabilities that a computer might have. Its CPU and hardware, while highly predictable, are fashioned out of the sub-conceptual and non-understood stuff that the world is made of. One day we may stumble upon software that makes them do something highly unexpected.
What’s the purpose of all this negative arguing then? What I want to get at when I say that we don’t understand this and we don’t understand that is a new, deeper intellectual honesty and a willingness to face the phenomena anew, raw, fresh, as they really appear to us. There’s a world of overlooked stuff out there.
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