Experiment 1 – Confounded

Note: This post won’t make sense until you read the introductory post here.

listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door; let’s go.
E E Cummings

The Scenario

Think of something, anything – an object, an organism, an event, an emotion or sensation; anything, fictional or real. Got something? Now, find a way to describe it without using something you already know. Find a way to define something whose definition does not depend on something you already know. In other words, try to think of something that is absolutely new, that no one has ever thought of, but isn’t a fiction of (or a branching of) something that is known. Another way to put this: have an experience that is so far outside our known reality that it defies explanation. Let’s try a couple of ideas, see what sticks to the wall.

You can’t say, ‘I saw a Unicorn chewing the moon’, because these are references we understand and know – we know unicorn, chewing and moon. We also know ‘saw’. We know what those words mean. You also can’t say ‘the krtysdwd is a specie of bifungal jelly corals that have a V12 axiomated heart valves’ because, however far-fetched, there is a thread of understanding and recognition throughout that sentence, and by following that thread, we understand more about krtysdwds. What I’m asking you to do through this thought experiment is to tell me something new; tell me something whose telling doesn’t require, depend on, or share characteristics of things we already know.

This is a good place to define a few things, for the sake of this experiment. Let’s call the ‘things we already know’, local knowledge. We are using those two words to represent all the knowledge humanity possesses. Think of it as a large tree with wild branches. This is the sum of all human knowledge.

Similarly, a being or a community of beings from another reality, or indeed that reality itself, possess their own knowledge tree, stitched together from eons of exploration, both empirical and accidental. This we shall call, simply, the alternate knowledge tree.

Returning to our experiment we realize that at first, it sounds doable. But working backwards from these rules, this experiment gets deep, fast. You start out thinking of ostentatious things, bizarre creations, animals that have wings in their mouths, cats that care, flying dogs that hug you every time you greet them (which, by god, should be real). But all of these fail to meet the standards of this experiment because they have local connections, local to our knowledge of the world; because they are birthed by local knowledge. Another way to put this is to say that all of the wildly imaginative statements made above are, you will agree, subsets of our local knowledge.

Now that we know this, the tendency is to eliminate everything that will help define this thing we’re supposed to be defining. Language won’t help you solve this conundrum, because all known languages are local. Music? Musicians create new melodies all the time. Isn’t that something new? No, not according to the rules of our thought experiment. Music uses the same set of notes in varying permutations to generate something new, yes, but that new melody is still a subset of our existing musical knowledge.

And if you think about it, math can’t help us either, which as the universal language, we might have leveraged. But we know math. We may not know all of math, but when we stumble across new math we understand it because we’re already standing on the shoulders of currently-known math.

This begs another question – can we ever create something, think of something, or discover something that has no relation whatsoever to the knowledge we currently possess? Can we really think that far outside the box? Could we measure the far-out-ness of an idea or thought? What would be the criteria of such a measurement? A primary criteria would be how untethered this idea is from anything we already know. For example, for a 19th century human being, the idea of a black hole, or quantum entanglement would have been completely novel ideas, only loosely tethered to their local knowledge tree, and having the barest of connections to it.

As your mind burrows deeper into this rabbit hole, you realize you can’t solve this experiment, because you cannot use anything you know. This is a strange conundrum. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig called this the ‘platform problem’. You don’t have a platform on which to stand on to argue your case because even if you do think of something new, you can’t translate it into something relatable. If you are able to translate it, then by the conditions of our thought experiment, it is likely not new – it is just a new permutation of words and ideas that we already know.

The first argument might arise here, and you may say that the condition of the experiment – that we are not allowed to use local knowledge to articulate the experience – is self-defeating. You’re asking me to describe something new, and when I do, you tell me I can’t use words. But that condition underlines the core of this thought experiment – we’re trying to identify if there are experiences out there in the vastness of our reality that defy explanation. We’re trying to understand if we can come up with something totally new, something so radically different and unexpected and unseen that it cannot be defined by anything that exists in our local knowledge tree.

“What I’m asking…through this thought experiment is to tell me something whose telling doesn’t require, depend on, or share characteristics of things we already know.“

There’s no real solution to this, and if there is, I don’t know how to tell you (and remember, I am not promising any answers – I am promising questions). I can’t just walk up to you and say, ‘nkuj kjdsbckjdsn kjn2897nd289und 291514/chdbsch &&’, and expect you to believe any of that, nor can I use English or Math, or alphanumeric symbols. To be clear, I am not saying we cannot use English or Swahili or Music or Math to describe our new experiences. We can definitely use these mediums for explaining something post-understanding because that’s the only way to slot this new experience into its rightful place in our knowledge tree.

The Gist

What this experiment is trying to unravel is whether or not we can:

1. create or imagine an experience that has no connection to the local knowledge tree. If we can, this experience/thought would rate high on the far out-ness scale. Our ability/inability to think that far outside the box will become a ceiling, a hard limit that may determine our ability to understand wildly new things,

2. recognize and understand an experience that has no connection to local knowledge. I expect an entire spectrum of experiences that would fall into this category, something just outside our understanding to so far outside it that it doesn’t even register on our radar. This is not that crazy an idea. Just a hundred years ago, we were ignorant of the fact that our Universe is expanding, of black holes, of the entire quantum phenomena, to name a few new things we are now familiar with, things that we have now understood > related > described,

3. decode every new experience or fact because they are already encoded in our language and knowledge, that we have all the basic parameters in place, the permutations of which can make known all existence.

4. understand everything?

The deepest description of the universe should not require concepts whose meaning relies on human experience or interpretation. Reality transcends our existence and so shouldn’t, in any fundamental way, depend on ideas of our making.
Brian Greene

Casting a Wider Net

Think about it.

Are there things out there that defy our definitions, our language? Or aren’t there? If there are, then how do we understand them? How do we grapple with them? Granted, we have been really good in dealing with and explaining new paradigms of thoughts, from Newton to Darwin to Planck & Einstein. We haven’t just explained them, we have used them as tools to dig further into the mysteries of reality. But is there knowledge out there that cannot be defined, cannot be known? And if we can’t define it, does it also mean we can’t understand it? If something is indefinable, immeasurable, inexplicable, does it exist? And if something like that does exist, does it belong to an alternate tree of knowledge, whose roots are so foreign to our own knowledge tree that we can never describe or repeat it?

Let’s step outside for a moment. Let us visit another universe. Maybe the one next door, or the one around the corner. What do you expect to find? More of the same thing? Or an entirely different world filled with talking planets and suns spewing out cold and dark instead of heat and light? Anything is possible, really, because outside this pocket of universe that we inhabit, in this bubble bath of a multiverse, the universe we visit may be made of different fundamental constants, or constants with different values. It’s like running the same video game with an alternate set of parameters, and the consequences are bound to be unpredictable.

To flesh out this idea a little more, let me tell you how this idea formed. This thought first occurred to me organically as I wrote ‘Foot of the Centaur’, a sci-fi novel I’ve been working on. It occurred to me because I was asking myself what would a being, who got an opportunity to visit another Universe, experience and witness?

Why should such a thought occur to me? Well, one big reason is that the value of physical constants in that other universe might be way different from our own. Pi might not be 3.1416… it might just as randomly be 11.1. And if that’s the case, everything about that universe will be different. Similarly, Planck’s constant might be different, in which case, to give just one example, the behavior of the whole electromagnetic spectrum will be different. Remember, these are fundamental constants, and changing them even slightly will have a cascading effect on the nature of reality in that universe.

Now imagine if this person returned to our Universe, would they be able to paint a picture of what they had seen? In the novel, the Interstellar Union, a council of intergalactic civilizations, test adventurers that claim the feat of inter-universe travel by asking them this very question (think of it as a ‘Kobayashi Maru‘ of sorts, or a koan). Within the canon, the IU has declared only four travelers to have authentically visited other universes. The rest are faking it. Which means the IU has found a way to validate the claims of would-be inter-universal hikers. In other words, they have found a way to resolve our conundrum here – how do we explain and define an experience that lies outside our understanding? Would we be able to find enough parallels with our local knowledge, little bridges that help us translate, and share the story of that experience? Would we be shaken straight by mute, paralyzing incomprehension? Or would we simply fly past extraordinary events, so far outside our ken as the sight of a rocket launch is to an ant?

While the IU might have solved the issue, I haven’t, which is why work on my novel is hamstrung.

We cannot enter any world for which we do not have the language.
Ludwig Wittgenstein

What we are talking about has connotations to the semi-mythical Tower of Babel. In the Bible, the Book of Genesis describes how the post-flood generations of humanity came together under a single language in an attempt to build a tower so tall it would reach the heavens. The Gods, always strangely fearful of humanity in such stories, confound their speech so humans can no longer understand each other. Divided by language, work on the tower comes to a tragic halt.

Now, to me, this story is only half finished. If we can take it forward to its logical conclusion (which is the motto of this series – taking things forward to their logical conclusions), then irrespective of the differences in language, the post-flood humans had a single, ‘pre-confounded’ motivation – build a tower that would touch the sky. It would have taken them a few months, even a couple of years to figure it out, but they could have, with time, come up with a common language of Babel (babelonian, if you will, or babelgaggle for the funny ones), which need only contain enough words to complete their mission.

If alternate branches of knowledge exist (which is a short way to say that experiences exist that are outside our comprehension), we can assume our position to be similar to the confounded would-be skyscraper builders. If they could get together to build a frame of reference that united their confounded languages, provided a platform of translation, then perhaps we could, over time, build a bridge across two disparate trees of knowledge, because our goal, ultimately, is to understand.

Perhaps this need to understand and know the world will be our redemption. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if we don’t yet have a common underlying universal language, a language that will help us build those bridges of translation. But what we do have is a method of creating that language, which we call science. Science, at its core, is observation, and taking those observations to their logical conclusions. Scientists begin with an unknown, and they keep picking at it and picking around it, until the unknown begins to take shape (almost inversely). And in this way observers begin to spiral into the core of the unknown, just like we, through these thought experiments, are spiraling into things we know nothing about.

The Logical Conclusions

In the spirit of taking things forward to their logical conclusions, from here on, one of two things will happen:

a. The first conclusion is that humanity will never understand certain things that are part of our reality.

While this idea is anxiety-inducing, the possibility of such an idea is a testament to the richness of the existence we inhabit. We will just never understand all of it, define all of it, and witness all of it. Poignantly (and ironically) there are a couple of words to describe this condition. Let’s take a look at them just to further shore up our understanding of this whole white-space of non-understanding.

The awareness of how little of the world you will experience is called Onism. It is a big word, and when you begin to understand it more, a word soaked in melancholy. In my lifetime, in-spite of my best efforts, I will only get to visit a few countries. And within those few countries, I will only cover a small percentage; most likely, the popular, touristy percentage. The rest of the world will lie taut in darkness. If you’ve ever played the video game Age of Empires, there’s a character, a ‘scout’, whom you can send across the undiscovered land. The land that he walks on, or ‘scouts’, immediately shows up on your game’s world map, uncovering resources and other nations, either friend or foe. And the places that he doesn’t explore remain dark. If you’ve ever stared longingly at that dark patch of land on your map, you’ve felt a strong bout of onism.

And this is already happening. When we look up at the night sky with our naked eyes, or with our telescopes, the millions of points of lights that we see are stars and galaxies that make up what is known as the ‘observable’ universe. The rest of the universe has already slipped away into a place from where even light cannot reach us. The expansion of the universe is accelerating, and the farther something is from us, the faster it is moving away from us, until a point comes where the light from that region cannot move fast enough to overcome the acceleration of the expansion. Beyond a certain point in our universe, things simply fall away from sight and knowledge, never to be seen again. This is happening as we speak, and the boundary of our observable universe is shrinking. If you just felt a deep despair in your tummy, that’s onism.

The other word, which describes the process of measuring things you know that you do not know is lygometry, which is Latin for ‘measurement of shadows’. Lygometry is the questioning of knowledge that you do not have. While ‘onism’ captures the emotional weight of conclusion#1 of this thought experiment, our reason for conducting these experiments is denoted by lygometry. We know that we do not know, and we are trying to measure what we don’t know, and trying to see if we will ever know.

b. In our hopeful scenario of the workers of Babel uniting and re-codifying their language in order to complete their mission, we touched upon conclusion #2. We will eventually understand things that we initially do not understand through a careful process of elimination and assimilation, through the crafting of similes and metaphors, and create a translator of knowledge trees (a Babelfish!) for every new encounter with the unspeakable. This is how our mathematics evolve, how our sciences evolve. We continue to build castles on the shoulders of giants. In this way we will answer all questions, solve all riddles, know everything there is to be known. Indirectly, this conclusion hints that all knowledge that can ever be known is a permutation (or a subset) of what we already know.

While this conclusion solves one quandary, it will lead us down another intriguing rabbit hole.

The Learning

We’ve learnt that we don’t know much about the things we know nothing about.
We’ve learnt that the universe doesn’t have to be understandable, which, although a scary thought, is a most logical possibility. We must get rid of this anthropic notion that just because we exist and understand parts of the universe it automatically entitles us to an explanation of everything the universe contains, or the universe itself.
We’ve learnt, or created, a few terms that we may find handy in the next experiments. We call all the knowledge humanity currently possesses – local knowledge. Anything not related to this body of facts and experiences we named ‘alternate knowledge‘. The farthermost statements in the faroutness scale are closer to alternate knowledge trees than our own.

If God created the world, his primary concern was certainly not to make its understanding easy for us.
Albert Einstein.

Rohit Nalluri

WHERE ART MEETS SCIENCE
& LOVE MEETS LOGIC