Self-development, science, and other cool stuff!

In virtually every culture and society on earth we can find the desire for knowledge, and the ongoing search for answers.

A search for answers not only to philosophical and existential questions, but also to the more basic questions of how our reality practically functions. Humankind wanted to know why the sun came up, what the thousands of tiny lights were in the night sky, and where all this came from. We wanted to know what drove the forces of nature. We wanted to understand.

Today that understanding is greater than it has ever been.

We don’t just assume that a cosmic event like the Big Bang must have happened, we can find evidence for it by looking at our expanding universe, at the relative amount of various elements in it, and at the cosmic background radiation that we can still observe as an echo of our awesome cosmic birth.

We don’t just know that our solar system formed from a coalescing cloud of hydrogen gas and dust, we can see it happening to other solar systems throughout the cosmos. We can witness the deaths of stars and planets in the sky with our modern telescopes, as well as the births of new ones in their magnificent stellar nurseries.

We have mapped out the solar system and its cosmic neighborhood, we have worked out the laws of our reality to a point that we can make astonishingly accurate predictions, and invent amazing new technology.

But our understanding of reality has its limits, and perhaps even intrinsically so.
As we venture into the realm of the extremely large, or the extremely small, many of our otherwise consistent and reliable models of the world don’t hold up.

Research in quantum electrodynamics shows that tiny particles seem to pop in and out of existence without apparent explanation. There are things about our universe that we can’t explain, such as what happens inside black holes, or why 96% of our universe is apparently “missing”.

Our understanding of reality seems to be a provisional one. We understand the world around us only provided that we do not stray too far from the familiar size and scale of things. In a sense we could be compared to a goldfish circling in its bowl. We can map out all the fundamental laws and forces of the reality within our bowl, but any questions concerning the world outside ultimately seem to break our current models and maps.

Perhaps this is the case. Perhaps we’re limited in much the same way. Or perhaps, we’re limited in a much more fundamental, and ironic sense.

Our first small steps into developing a model of the world was to designate labels and concepts to things around us. If we were to develop a common understanding, we first needed a system that would allow us to structure and reference things clearly, both for ourselves and for others, a language.

Understanding something, the way we do, is necessarily preceded by conceptualizing it. We need to have a concept of what a rock is before we can actually communicate it or form further concrete ideas about it. This marvelous step in our evolution - while initially a practical one, allowing us to work together more efficiently and ultimately develop into a civilized society, has by now allowed us to draw entire linguistic ‘maps’ of reality that can reference and structure concepts accurately. Words that have precise relations to reality that the sender can easily convey without failure.

But this is remarkable evolution might today ironically also be science’s greatest limitation.

If our entire understanding of reality is fundamentally based on the conceptualizing of shared, familiar or empirical experiences, and ideas that stray not too far from them, then trying to understand aspects of reality that are dramatically different from our own easily observable world might be almost entirely impossible in our existing cognitive system for understanding the world.

And the further we venture into these fields, the more our understanding seems to gradually fail.

We can for instance conceptualize an atom as a spherical object, a tiny ball of matter, but as all scientists know an atom isn’t a ball, we can’t even be sure of its shape. We can picture the electrons around it as a cloud, or a miniature planetary system perhaps, but we know that isn’t really what it looks like. In fact, it might not ‘look’ like anything we know.

Through experimentation and mathematical formulas we can actually grasp most of the workings of the atom at least on a practical level and make predictions that prove accurate, but our very vocabulary and inventory of concepts might be fundamentally lacking for us to clearly understand the atomic and subatomic world - and consequently perhaps the very nature of reality - in an intuitive sense.

It’s no coincidence that our mathematical understanding and models, which by all means are a more universal and basic ‘language’ than any other at our disposal, hold up where our words and concepts of reality fail us. Physics teachers often struggle with this problem on a university level. They can often perfectly present the formulas and maths behind for instance the famous double slit experiment, in which scientists have proven that on a quantum level matter can act as if it were a wave and vice versa; but they struggle tremendously with putting this into words for their students.

Our language it seems is too limiting a system, in that on topics such as this it inevitably runs into its own paradoxes. Paradoxes that might not exist in reality, but do exist in the way we conceptualize things. We conceptualize matter as matter and waves as waves, things can’t both, my coffee table for instance is obviously not a wave. This understanding of things works for us on a day to day basis, but inevitably breaks in deeper scientific research, where there seems to be no such clear distinction.

It might sound like a rather surmountable problem at first, and one might suggest “Why not invent a new language then? One that can conceptualize these matters accurately,” but the problem is that our entire understanding of reality is based on the type of languages that we have. I’ll leave it up to smarter people to figure out if it’s at all possible to fundamentally change our way of thinking, and use our neurological facilities to develop a language system that is scientifically accurate and grants an intuitive understanding of for instance the quantum world, but what is obvious is that (even if this would be possible in theory,) it sounds like an extremely difficult, and unlikely solution.

On the other hand we do seem to have a form of ‘language’ that can cope with most if not all of our findings. We call it maths. But the problem with maths is that it isn’t an intuitive system, and we can’t use it to think and communicate as clearly as we do in plain English, for obvious reasons.

So ultimately it seems that our understanding of reality might be a provisional and a practical one. We can work together, communicate clearly, share concepts and ideas intuitively, but we might perhaps never be able to use this practical system to actually gain a true understanding of how things function.

Which, in my opinion, is also precisely the problem with disciplines like philosophy. We design concepts that work for practical and communicative purposes, but then expect of those designed concepts to work in all contexts even when pushed to an extreme. We expect of them to intrinsically hold the meaning and provide the answers we’re looking for.
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?
We dream up the concept of an unstoppable force - which doesn’t per se need to exist at all in the physical universe, and we do the same for the concept of an immovable object. These two man-made concepts put together form an obvious paradox (just like our wave-matter paradox,) because one wouldn’t be stopped and the other wouldn’t be moved if the two collide. However this is a linguistic paradox, and not one that has any definite relation to reality. The paradox itself probably didn’t exist before we invented it.

Our words and concepts are like metaphors, they serve their purpose in explaining and communicating what they represent,but when pushed too far they seem to always have a breaking point.

So we can understand things in the sense of sharing a common notion of them, or in the sense of figuring out their causal relationships with other things, but as long as we see reality through the fish bowl of our language, we perhaps can’t expect there to be a definite and accurate relationship between the real world and the human concepts that we have of it.