Are there things that our current mind cannot comprehend, understand or even imagine no matter what?
A civilization hundreds of millions of years in front of us would be something that we simply cannot understand it? If an animal doesn’t have the notion of consciousness, that civilization would have a ,,super-consciousness” that we simply cannot literally comprehend or even imagine its functions and purposes? Going farther with this logic, a civilization hundreds of millions of years more advanced than a civilization hundreds of millions of years more advanced than us would be incomprehensible for the second one and so on? Or there might be a ultimate state from which things are understandable and could be imagined even if technology is much more advanced? I would like arguments please.
Thank you!
Thank you!
Comments (57)
I don't think the mere passing of time would prevent us from understanding what a civilization is like in the future. Do you know of something that would prevent it?
A civilization is
Quoting Eugen
It seems fairly clear that most animals can identify whether others are conscious or unconscious (e.g. asleep or dead). In this sense animals are both conscious and have the notion of consciousness.
Quoting Eugen
Would a large number of years make things incomprehensible or unimaginable? How?
Quoting Eugen
The "ultimate state" from which things are possible to understand and imagine is, obviously, the state of having the capacity, which is biological. Human as well as non-human animals have it; it enables us to identify what our current environment is like, and what it might be like in the near future. That's how we can adapt to our environment, improve it even, build homes, buildings, cities, organize our knowledge, use symbols, predict things, imagine alternative things, or fiction, and construct a civilization which is sustainable enough for future generations.
I find it relatively easy to imagine possible civilizations in a distant future, there is a literary genre for it, science fiction, in which some are more or less convincingly described.
Your average person struggles with advanced concepts in math, science and philosophy. So, isn't it obvious that there exists things that are incomprehensible?
One thing preventing it could be the lack of knowledge and experience to be accumulated between now and the future. The ancient Greek mathematicians would not have been able to conceive differential calculus but not for any lack of imagination or intelligence, simply for the lack of centuries of mathematical endeavour.
Your final quote is in contradiction with what you said. Actually the ancient Greeks (and the firsts homo sapiens for that matter) had the capacity to understand everything we do today if they would had had sufficient information like you said. Furthermore, they had concepts like flying, going to space, exploring the Universe, instant communication and even virtual reality. My question goes farther than ,,we can't understand because the lack of information". My question is about ,,we can't understand because we don't have the capacity to" and this capacity is given by the biological or even scientific/technological evolution.
Being blind or lack the capacity to see shapes, for instance, does not mean that shapes would somehow become inaccessible, unimaginable, or impossible to understand. Being deprived of sensory stimulation or imagination does not imply that the world or the future civilization would suddenly disappear. Dolphins don't use the word 'philosophy', but they might still do what the word refers to, say, have a notion of a life worth living; some of them commit suicide, recall.
Quoting Eugen
Let's say you had 100 more sense organs, or that your body had been the result of another 100.000 years of evolution, or have some artificial enhancements etc.. Would that make you somehow better at understanding the world, and imagining future civilizations? How? What would you be able to know that you can't already know?
Quoting Eugen
A worm encounters shapes and behaves accordingly, a blind man can feel or imagine shapes by touch or hearing descriptions from those who can see them. Astronomers deduce the presence of dark matter, a sea urchin does not have a brain even, yet it can identify the presence of predators, scoop up gravel to camouflage itself and so on. We are in many ways part of our environment; its past, present, and future.
I don't believe that life is just about shapes and surviving and I believe that we're fundamentally different from a worm in many aspects and evolution plays a major role here. So my answer to your question "What would you be able to know that you can't already know?" is that maybe evolution will enlarge our potential and same as a worm cannot think at philosophy, they will have things that we're not capable thinking of, maybe they will invent other economic policies, other sciences, maybe they will have more personality traits than we have now, or like animals have no sense of humor, maybe they will possess things that we don't have, etc..
Do you think it is possible that we're the worm in this moment or we already reached all paradigms in the terms of senses, personality traits, political systems, the potential of understanding etc. and from now on we will just evolve technologically?
But one of the things that we can not understand (I can't, I don't think 'we' can) is what an elapse of 1,000,000 years would be like. We can't "feel" what so long is like. We toss around terms like "The Jurassic Period" easily, but the time scale -- 201 million years ago to 143 million years ago is an unfathomable period of time for us to understand--we who live maybe 100 years (and most of us will be dead well before we get to 100). I can "feel" and "understand" today, this year, the last 7 years, a decade... But the coming century (2117) is too long to think clearly about. 500 years might as well be 5,000.
We can sort of grasp our collective demise--maybe our own death, the death of our beloved. Even that can be very difficult to grasp and resolve. It is difficult--maybe impossible--for us to feel our species demise. That in 2517 there would be no human life on earth -- or anywhere else -- is just not very imaginable (from our POV). And if in 2517 there is much human life here, and elsewhere, that is just as difficult to feel, grasp, "grok".
What can you personally make of the 4 billion years of life on earth, "emotionally", which is the way in which we must grasp time. 4 billion, 8, billion, 1 billion, 1 million years -- it's all outside of human experience. 1000 might be outside our experience. (Like, think: how big a pile is 1,000,000 1 dollar bills? (New unwrinkled ones)
'Deep time' and 'big history' are good ones. Sure, we have the concepts but we can't even begin to grasp reality at those scales. Another would be the hypercomplexity of nature or global civilization, we can only understand it by breaking it down into subsystems and not even remotely as a holistic totality.
We actually grasp reality at those scales when we're watching into the deep Universe :)
Yes, of course we can. I can understand a million bacteria on my tongue without any difficulty; I can deal with 250,000 miles to the moon just fine. I sort of grasp our multi-trillion dollar economy.
"Feel" might not be the best word; maybe "experience" is better -- we don't have lived experience with time beyond our own age, whatever that happens to be -- never much more than 100 years, and mostly less. 50 years have elapsed since I graduated from college; I can understand 50 years because I lived those 50 years as an adult. 500 years, which takes us back to the time of Luther and Gutenberg, is more difficult to project one's self into -- I can learn about the major episodes of European societies in the last 500 or 1000 years, but I can't "process" that much time through my own lived life. My life is too short, history is too long.
A million years ago, "we" didn't exist yet. It's hard to think about all of the generations that led up to "us" coming into existence.
Super advanced intelligences might inhabit virtual worlds with more than three dimensions where the virtual structures of time and space are very different. There could also be hive minds created through synthetic telepathy that are both one and many simultaneously, that's pretty hard to imagine. There may even be ways of traveling to or even engineering whole universes where the laws of physics are completely alien to what we know and can understand. Not much has really been ruled out at this point so right now as far as we know the possibilities are endless.
And that's just on a purely physicalist account of reality, if there are supernatural dimensions, I'm not saying there are, but if there are then there really is no limit to the sorts of worlds and phenomenon that are possible.
In my opinion, the hard problem of consciousness is indeed a problem, and one that we will never solve. I do not think we will ever know why there is something rather than nothing, for even if we prove God exists, we are still left wondering why he created what he did. The question of Being is so mysterious and abstract that we have to resort to almost poetic words to articulate it.
So those are examples of things that I think are metaphysically impossible for us to figure out. But there's also things that we will not be able to figure out simply because we lack the means to. We will never have a genealogy of every single organism on earth. We will never find out what the king of England had for lunch before he was assassinated. We will never discover every single possible process or configuration in the world. We just don't have the time, energy or need to. Also nobody really cares either, because actually most of the world is extremely dull and repetitive, and if it's not it's usually only because it's ultimately disturbing.
The question is, are there things we don't even know we can't imagine?
I think we are in desperate need of a very, very good epistemological "theory of all". Or at least of a very good series of questions. We don't know what it means "to be", "to know", etc. Until we get a damn good definition/explanation of those things we're bound to not be able to wrap our heads around some questions.
1)When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2)The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3)Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Of course, you are assuming that we will continue to evolve along the direction we followed in the previous million years. It isn't necessarily the case that we will be all that different. Evolution doesn't always work like a smoothly operating conveyor belt. Sometimes the belt slows down, or sometimes it jerks forward.
It's possible, were we able to travel in time, that "we" will be recognizably "us" in 1,000,000 years. Language will have changed, certainly. We won't be able to ask them a question with out learning their language first.
IF, and it's a big IF, they have been able to preserve technology from age to age, they might have very advanced tech. However, in a million years the technology of their past may have been lost several times, requiring them to start over again and again. The day we visit our successors, 1 million years hence, we may find them moving stuff around in carts pulled by animal power--horses, slaves, dogs--whatever they've got.
You know, if we aren't careful, we could run out of oil and experience some wars which would leave us without our presently functioning technology and knowhow. The time it takes to lose technology is a hell of a lot shorter than the time it takes to acquire it. Without electricity, for instance, a vast amount of what we know about the world would disappear. A regression to an earlier stage would ensue. In 2 generations without literacy and technology savvy, we would be in a very poor position to catch up to where we were before.
By saying this you prove that you actually imagine it, or better say you associate something with notions that we already have in present : time, space, telepathy. That is actually not hard to imagine, you just did it. I'm talking about totally new concepts (like we have now time and space they will have ,,bimb" and ,,bamb") but we now can't simply understand concepts like ,,bimb" and ,,bamb" right now, not because we didn't discovered them yet, but because we need to evolve more in the terms of intelligence (natural or technological) to have those notions. PS: I exclude supernatural from my question.
"I do not think we will ever know why there is something rather than nothing, for even if we prove God exists, we are still left wondering why he created what he did."
You're close, I'm not talking necesarry about finding out if there's a God, but I'm talking about more if such an advanced civilisation will be able for example to totally understand ,,infinite" because they will be much more intelligent than us, or that we don't currently understand ,,infinite" because it is simply not understandable no matter how intelligent we'll become. If they will be able to fully understand notions like ,,infinite", or they'll invent another social model totallly different than our current minds can invent, they'll sure be on another level. If not, they will be just much more advanced, but at the core level, there's no ,,next level".
"3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It may be, but the pure fact is that at the level of concept, we already have these magical purposes in our minds and we have been having them since the beginning. Of course they didn't had the means or the names for the technologies like ,,transistor" or ,,computer", but there's nothing that today's technology does and that our ancients didn't thought of it - flying; communicate instantly across large distances; build high; travel into the universe or even other universes etc.. So at the core conceptual level, there's nothing new under the sun in the last 2 million years.
Off topic: I see that you ask yourself if evolution is linear of humanity's history will be repetitive. Well, regarding evolution I have a big feeling that is limited, meaning that we'll not get farther than a certain point not because we will not have the capacity, but because after a certain point the notion of evolution dissapeares. E.g: learning how to conserve food for 1 billion years would not be considered evolution compaerd with consereving food for just a million years. If you're really into this (or anyone else here for that matter) you can send me a private message and we can talk about it. :)
Homo Sapiens experienced some sort of evolutionary innovation sometime after a million years ago. I'm not sure precisely what it was -- density of neurons, number of neurons, organization of neurons, something to do with neurons, anyway. Whatever it was, it hasn't repeated itself. It may not be able to, since the body is a package deal, and an even larger brain requires changes elsewhere in the body; in the female pelvis, for example, and a larger brain requires changes in metabolism, too. The brain soaks up a lot of the energy we take in.
Our technology can evolve to an unbelievable level ONLY IF we can maintain cultural continuity for a million years. So far we have been able to do that for maybe 1000 years. After the Roman Empire collapsed, it took a long time for the western empire to begin recovery. Cultural continuity pretty much requires no breaks. Three generations of cultural discontinuity is enough to set us back for hundreds of years. The higher the level of technology, the more discontinuity damages the state of techno-practice.
I'm not talking about duration and continuity. For the sake of the argument, let's presume we will keep our cultural and technological advance. I'll use the same analogy: a barbaric tribe doesn't have the notion of smartphone, but if someone would explain Konan that is ,,something that makes instant communication possible" he would understand. A lizard has no concept of music for example or that of humor. It is simply out of its limits and it could not understand these concepts. So, again, if everything will be fine and technology will evolve forever, we, the ones in the present times will be to the future civilisation like the lizards to us or like Konan would be to us?
If we can't imagine it, then the speculation has reached a brick wall, a dead end.
I love to speculate about the future, but we can only speculate about that which we can and have imagined. People have already imagined multiverses, time travel, very advanced civilizations, etc. We can speculate about what we, or others, have imagined and communicated. We can not go further.
We don't have to be capable of building a time travel system to imagine it. H. G. Wells imagined a time machine in 1895 that is quite serviceable as science fiction. Wells didn't offer any explanation about how it worked, why it work, how it worked; the main character just got in and pressed the start button, followed by a moderately interesting (and short) tale.
We can educate a chimpanzee to use a great many things in our world. They lack brain capacity to understand complexity, but they can be taught rudimentary skills and may even become quite proficient. Arguably it could be said that chimps are 100,000 - 1,000,000 years behind us in brain capacity (depending on which expert we listen to).
I should think humans are more adaptable than chimps, so if properly educated and familiarised with a functional piece of advanced alien technology, we could begin to comprehend the basics.
I do see your point though.
For example the chimp is unable to understand even intermediate level philosophical concepts and will likely never see the true purpose of poetry. They may develop a taste for the way words are spoken, but that is only due to an appreciation for sound or a connection with the person.
As for whether there really are concepts, technologies or natural phenomena that we are unable to understand, I cannot provide a definitive answer, purely because the specifics wouldn't be ready to avail themselves to our brain.
I think it's reasonable to extrapolate that this scenario is possible, perhaps even likely." - Salubrious proclivity
What a useless question.
So, presumably, any answer, either 'yes' or 'no' would be equally useless? What about any and all discussion stimulated by the question; also useless? Absolutely void of any possible interest at all?
No, not really; it merely entails that we imagined, not the unimaginable, which would be a contradiction, but that there might be the unimaginable, despite our obvious inability to imagine what it could be.
It's a rather clear example of banging your head on the walls of our world, the walls of our language. Part of imagining is that it is without limit; anything can be imagined. But then, asking if there are things we cannot imagine introduces a contradiction.
We can imagine a zero, a big fat nothing. Yes, that imagining may be rather fuzzy on closer examination, but so is our conception of everything, or even something.
It is simply the constraints-based logic of speech and thought that means all acts of imagining are in the same boat. What we take as enumerately imagined - some set of concrete objects conceived - is never in fact as concrete as we pretend. So whatever hasn't or couldn't be imagined is merely the same general thing, just at the other end of the spectrum in terms of it apparent (in)definiteness.
But. "imagining the unimaginable", that is simply a contradiction, isn't it? I think the problem does lie in the different senses in which imagining the unimaginable can be parsed. In one sense it is a contradiction, and hence impossible; and in the other it is not a contradiction, and hence possible. That's why I drew the distinction between 'imaging the unimaginable' in the sense of positively imagining it (a contradiction) and 'imagining the unimaginable' in the sense of 'imagining that there might be the unimaginable', and I can't see how this latter is contradictory.
To put it another way, we can't imagine what the unimaginable is like in a positive sense, because that would be a contradiction in terms, but can only imagine it in the negative sense of what it is not, i.e. it is not imaginable.
This is a nice way of thinking about it that puts it on a continuum from totally unimaginable to totally imaginable; the extremes of which are never actually realized.
But it is trivially true that discoveries have an effect on one's capacity to understand or imagine the world. Proto-human monkeys had no human language, nor a theory of evolution, with which they could understand or imagine what a future civilization is. Once we have language etc. it is easy to imagine future humans having discovered new features of the world that we don't understand yet.
We can't imagine the unimaginable, nor comprehend the incomprehensible, for the obvious reason that it has nothing to imagine nor to comprehend. We might, however, have the capacity at time t1 to understand what we will discover at t2, but obviously don't since it is yet to be discovered.
Banno needs to make up his mind whether he believes in epistemological absolutism or not. He hankers after some form of pragmatism or knowledge relativism but keeps getting in his own way with experience-transcending claims.
Possibly. It has in the past, so it's reasonable to expect that it might in the future.
An observation regarding human incomprehensibility:
Unique to the Animal Kingdom, the faculty of language in the genus Homo evolved from a strictly communication function to include a verbal modelling function. With this new functionality came new potential. Homo sapiens accurately models its environment, adding to its knowledge base to an extent not possible in Homo erectus or Homo habilis (due to less brain capacity), and enabling the development of technology which radically changes its environment. Changes in environment cause new adaptations, and the cycle repeats itself.
So, the acquisition of a verbal mode of thought is a point of concentration in human evolution. Einstein's mode of thought seems to have been mostly iconic. What type of enhanced functionality will the next evolutionary point of concentration bring? Absolute mutual comprehension? And what will be its consequences? It's a bit like asking Homo habilis what it will do with language.
I wasn't talking about imagining the unimaginable, because if there is something unimaginable by its nature, than nobody would be able to imagine it, regardless of how evolved s/he is. I will give you the same example: if you would get back in time and would meet a barbarian you would be able to explain him about a smartphone and he would be able to understand: you could tell him that is a tool used to communicate with others instantly on large distances, to listen music or to access information. He would have all these concepts. But if you want to do the same thing with an animal, it would be simply impossible. Are we a barbarian or an animal compared with a much much more advanced civilisation?
Unimaginable by its nature or by our brains' capacity?
Maybe a more advanced civilisation would be able to understand things like nothing or infinite?
Humanity has the same basic set of wishes over time: to travel on ground, under ground, on water, on air, in space, other universes; to obtain and access information; to read other minds; to communicate instantaneously with other people from other corners of the world; etc.. So cell-phones, computers, satellites, robots are nothing more than direct accomplishments of these wishes. There can be indirect accomplishments, and here I'm referring to more detailed pieces of technology that doesn't serve as solutions for our ancient wishes, but as solutions for the technologies used to satisfy our ancient wishes (e.g. antennas). There is actually nothing that we're doing today and that its final purpose was not in our ancestors' minds in the form of desire, therefore nothing unimaginable or uncomprehensible for the ancient Romans.
I totally agree with the fact that language and communication was a huge step, but no more than in the sense of giving us the capacity to express in a more clear manner thoughts that had been already present in our minds until we found words. I believe that notions like gods, universe, other universes, immortality have been here since humans were humans. On the other hand, animals don't think about gods and parallel universes.
Agreed.
There is a difference between interpretation and verbal modelling. Interpretation produces concepts, but verbal modelling constructs a set of related concepts, arranged to represent a composite concept or system. Whether the concepts you mentioned are simple concepts or mental models probably determines when they appeared in the evolutionary process.
Agreed. They sense, interpret, and nonverbally model their environment. But without language, they cannot verbally model their environment.
Imagination couldn't function unless vagueness was its basic feature. That is how we can be impressed when by contrast it seems we are pretty definitely conceiving of various things in "exhaustive enough to be useful" fashion.
So in terms of your OP, the question would be whether this civilisation a million years hence is still using language in much the same way (as well as being neurologically much the same in the way in which they are biologically conscious of the world).
Already - because we can use the language of maths - we do conceive of the infinite and nothing in ways that constrain their meaning in more definite fashion.
So the question may be how much more could language evolve as a tool of precise thought in the next million years? Maybe not a lot if we just extrapolate from the speech and math we have - could their grammar or syntax become much more flexible or universal?
So in some ways, the answer to your OP is trivial. We already know - from basic epistemological argument - that we should expect there to be known unknowns and unknown unknowns. But my point is that then - for speech acts - speech has the further power of counterfactuality. We can speak even of the unknown unknowns and say something about them in a way that is humanly meaningful. We can talk in ways that constrain them in ways we regard as useful.
Indeed; that is exactly what I said.
Quoting John
So your claim is that we can imagine a class of things, such that we cannot imagine any element of that class?
Meh. Maybe. I'd be confident that one could show an ape how to use a phone.
AS for imagining a culture I don't understand, all I have to do is look at the USA. Trump and guns - WTF?
Well yes, as you just did. :)
The problem is John is already imagining them. He knows the set of the unknown is not empty. In his mind, he knows not only there is a set of the unknown, but that it contains unknown things.
Rather than beyond his imagination, these things have a clear presence within it, even if knows none of their details.We know it false John cannot imagine them; he just did talking about how he didn't know who or what they were.
Yes, but 'imagine' here has the negative sense of 'allow for the possible existence of', rather than the positive sense of 'forming a definite image of'; we can allow for the possibility of things we cannot imagine.
They're essentially the same thing, aren't they? Take the idea of the warping or curving of spacetime due to mass in GR. To enable a simulated visualization of what is happening, an image of a two-dimensional
space (a plane) curved by a sphere is usually presented. We can easily imagine a two-dimensional surface warped into a third dimension. However we cannot even begin to imagine (in the sense of form a definite image of) a three dimensional space warping into a fourth dimension. But we can imagine (in the sense of allow for the possibility of, or even assert the actuality of) a three dimensional space warping into a fourth dimension. Our inability to imagine this in the first sense is due both to the nature of the purported phenomenon and the nature of our brains (the brain's capacity).