Are We Humans Even Smart Enough To Understand The Nature of Reality?
The other day, while browsing randomly on YouTube, I came across an interview of Neil deGrasse Tyson where he was talking about the various concepts in his book, "Astrophysics for people in a hurry". As always, I was fascinated by how he explained really complicated ideas and theories in simple words.
I could literally sit for hours listening to this guy, not only because I love astrophysics but because Tyson makes it easy and quite fun to understand so much about science and in a short time. It's also entertaining to see him constantly cut people off, not out of arrogance but out of passion for the subject!
Anyways, at the end of the interview, Tyson said something that really had me pondering for hours. He said that he sometimes wonders whether we human beings are even smart enough to understand the nature of our reality.
I mean think about that for a second. The ultimate goal of science is to make sense of our reality, to answer how everything came to be, and how everything works. But could it actually be that our brains just aren't capable of understanding it all?
Intelligent Enough?
In the video, Tyson points out one very interesting idea. We humans consider ourselves intelligent because we've defined ourselves that way. We compare ourselves with the other species of the world and come to that conclusion. But we don't have another intelligent species to actually compare intelligence.
This is very thought provoking. There is only 1% difference in the DNA of humans and chimps and look at how much difference that has made in the two species. Imagine an alien species that has DNA that is 1% or even more different than ours and what that could mean for their intelligence levels?
The ideas and theories that the most brilliant minds of our planet can think, they could probably think all of that when they are little children. The point is that we don't have a point of reference to our own intelligence and so we might not know whether it is enough to understand some of the most complex, mind-bending theories that might explain the universe.
For example, as soon as we start thinking about dimensions higher than our third dimension, we just get a brain freeze and we just can't visualise how these higher dimensions might look like or function.
What if we're just not intelligent enough to answer all the questions about universe and reality that we have? I know this is kind of a pessimistic view but it's possible nonetheless. I hope this is not actually the case!
On top of what you have to say, how can we ever come to a point at which we are certain that we know all there is to know? Or that even a single thing that we think we know (to be true about the nature of reality) is really true?
We might get to a point where we can predict everything that will ever happen (from the most micro to macro events) with a complex mathematical formula, which one might think proves that we've reached the point of knowing how everything works, only to later discover that we were living in a virtual reality and have effectively only managed to reverse-engineer the math that operates that illusory world.
The problem with "absolute knowledge" is that we have no reference point as to what is "absolutely real", as opposed to what we induce and/or deduce to be real, based on some starting assumptions that are, quite frankly, not provable.
Even waking up from something akin to the Matrix (as depicted in the famous movie with that title) isn't sufficient to prove that we're at the "real layer" (reality), as it's possible that there are multiple, or even endless, such layers (Matrices within Matrices, if you will).
It seems as though the best we can do is concede that we do not know if we're experiencing the "ultimate reality", and whether it's even possible to have such an experience, and try to focus on understanding what appears to be real, which, I suppose, is what we're already doing.
In other words, it's a scientist's nightmare and a philosopher's heaven ;)
Luckily for me, I'm a lover of philosophizing.
This is such a great comment and I totally agree with everything you've said. There is indeed a real possibility that we might just never "know" and just have to live with that fact. As you say, it would be a scientist's nightmare but certainly a philosopher's heaven :D
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