Exploring Some Tenets of Epistemology
This article from Dan Foster caught my attention several months ago and still lingers on the back of my mind. Foster is talking about matters related to religious faith and different philosophical and spiritual perspectives. But his points can relate to countless other domains. One of the most striking passages from the article for me was the following:
Although a person possesses only a tiny fraction of all the knowledge that could be known and therefore knows nothing about most things, some are happy to act and speak as if they have the answers and others are lost and stupid.
A real dialogue consists of two people reciprocally sharing. One speaks. The other listens. They take turns. However, a dialogue is utterly impossible with someone who believes that they are right and you are wrong. Because this kind of person already understands and knows everything, they can debate and discuss, but they can never dialogue with you. After all, whatever you might share with them is merely an opportunity for them to tell you how stupid you are and to help you know what they know
Ah, what wonderful insights about one of the most perplexing, multifaceted, and even controversial of topics — human knowledge(and the limits to human knowledge). Now, I am not going to use this piece to elaborate on matters Foster or others are tackling(those unboundedly mysterious topics are beyond the scope here). I shall just take a little time to expound a little more on the question of human knowledge.
How Little Humans Know
Foster’s profound points about knowing(or more rather, unknowing) have been elaborated on by humans throughout the ages. We could delve into unboundedly multifaceted frameworks such as Kant’s transcendental idealism that posited an unknowable dimension of noumena at the background of all experienced phenomena. Or we could explore the Johari window, developed by psychologists as a mapping of what individuals and groups know vs. don’t know about themselves and one another. But to break it down more simply, I will modify a graph from this insightful Medium article by Andrea Montovani.
Setting Up a Framework
The “known and unknown” framework has been applied in matters of national intelligence, psychology, business, and leadership. But it can also serve as a general overview of human epistemology itself — what humans can know about themselves and existence in general. If we modify the term known and unknown above to knowable and unknowable, this can allow for a more encompassing framework to the larger philosophical and spiritual questions of knowing.
There are known knownables, or things humans are both capable of understanding and have ascertained knowledge about. This would include anything from procedures and actions like swimming or air-flight to general facts and principles about the world such as elements or different types of subatomic particles. These are knowable things that humanity has ascertained some level of knowledge about, even if the knowledge is only piecemeal.
Adjacent to the known knowables are unknown knowables, or things humans are capable of understanding but have not yet ascertained any knowledge about(and for the most part, will really never be able to develop any knowledge or understanding of). This really includes the vast majority of matters in any subject imaginable — including knowledge of humanity itself. The vast majority of human history is not recorded. Nor is most of the Earth’s multi-billion year history understood to an advanced degree or even the vast majority of its current life forms yet discovered. And even the most sophisticated of telescopes, probes, and supercomputers could hardly ever begin to grasp even a small fraction of the planets and stars in just a few of the trillions of galaxies in the observable universe.
The movement of human knowledge from the known knowables to unknown knowables is constant as humanity is making new discoveries in countless domains every day. Every time a new star system in the Milky Way is mapped or a new pharmaceutical drug comes out, or every time a historical documents is interpreted in a new way or a new song is written the island of human knowledge gets a little bigger. But that island of knowledge always remains a small grain of land compared to vast shoreline of wonder and unknowing extending to the boundless and grand world of worlds beyond. One of my favorite Quora write-ups ever is this Q & A :
Of all there is to know, what percentage does humanity know right now and why?
Practically close to 0% (and it will always be practically close to 0%)
As a simple example, take all the ways to arrange a pack of cards (all of which are technically things to know). Then…
There are 52 cards in a standard pack of playing cards.
The total number of ways of arranging such a pack of cards=52!
52! ~ 8.06582 x 10⁶⁷
The Unknowables
Here would be enough to recognize that humans would never know the vast majority of things. But we still have the unknowable catergories. These are realities or problems for which human beings could simply never know or understand. This includes the known unknowables, things that we at some point that we are incapable of directly understanding but have an awareness of those limits. Many of these things exist directly in the world around us(though often esoteric) such as humans’ inability to perceive through echolocation like bats or countless problems in advanced mathematics. But many of these matters are also transcendent yet of highest human value, relating to the deepest of human convictions and spiritual viewpoints. For instance, people who believe in angels generally understand they cannot know for sure one way or the other about angels’ existence. However, they place strong faith in their existence being true and base many of their life’s actions on that faith. As many philosophers(such as Aristotle) have postulated, any possible non-physical or spiritual dimensions or realities may ultimately lie beyond the reach of any means of human inquiry, including the sciences and even reason. Many of the major religions have constantly gone to great lengths to bring the point home that what is at the heart of reality itself is essentially beyond human comprehension. For instance, in the Christian tradition(as well as other religious traditions) the Bible speaks of how the Divine is infinitely beyond even heaven itself: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee” (1 Kings 8:27).
And the last domain would unknown unknowables. These are things that are beyond human comprehension and understanding for which humans have no awareness about altogether. This is either because, unlike the known unknowables, they are not aware of them yet or will never be capable of even being aware of them. To expound on this domain, we have to contrast with the known unknowables. For instance, the irrational numbers like pi can never be exactly represented with a finite number of decimal places or repeating decimals. Our awareness of our inability to even calculate a small portion of the decimal places of one irrational number is an example of such a known unknowable. What might some unknowables in mathematics be? This spans to other parts of our direct world and also to possible other metaphysical parts of reality. Someday, our most advanced scientific breakthroughs might give us irrefutable evidence for multiple universes that shows their existence to be more than just a theoretical possibility. What other possible dimensions or facets to reality may be beyond any sort of detection or fathoming at all? There is no way we could ever even be aware of such unknowables. But we can at least be aware of our permanent incognizance.
Hardly Scratching the Surface
After a brief exploration of human knowledge, we are hardly scratching from the surface of things here. The proposed framework itself is just one of numerous such epistemological frameworks. Some people hold to philosophical and even spiritual perspectives that march far away from considering things unknowable to humans. Others may embrace additional domains altogether. Each of these frameworks has relational value and pertinence, even though they can be contrary to one another.
One thing for certain is that even on the side of things in our vast and unbounded universe of things humans can understand, it is true that we are hardly even beginning to know only a small fraction(close to nothing, as Quora answers explore). Foster’s points certainly hit the nail right on the head! One strategy we humans have in our favor is to develop tools and systems to perform work or process information more proficiently and many times faster than our natural ability. Our supercomputers today are so unfathomably super-wondrous, able to perform 442 quadrillion FLOPS(floating per operations per second)! For comparison, the human record for mental calculation is 12 numbers per second. (Of course, human minds are doing countless other marvelous amazing things that supercomputers are not even able to do).
But even these supercomputers are hardly scratching away from the surface of things. In fact, using basic figures of human genetics we reach the insight that each human person has 3 billion base pairs in their human genome, with each of their 37 trillion cells having a full copy of this genome. So this is 3 billion times 37 trillion base pairs of DNA in each of us!! So if we do the math for how long the greatest supercomputer would take to read, process, or map all of the DNA cells within just one person, we get to a rough estimate of about 100,000 years! (I reached this by figuring roughly 10²² from base pairs times cells divided by roughly 10¹⁷ total opeartions per second the supercomputer can do). Yeah, supercomputers are also hardly beginning to know anything at all!
Note: This, I anticipate may be just the first article relating to topics of human knowledge, understanding, and learning. Another piece I would like to write inspired by Dan Foster would be about human dialogue as it relates to knowledge. Expect more soon!
