Some of What We Cannot Know
I formulated the following axiom as a result of working on practical ways of thinking about, describing and criticizing the ways in which claims of superior understanding are often accompanied by claims of superior wisdom and the right, or even the obligation, to tell others what they should do and believe. I suspected that the things about which one may legitimately claim to have superior understanding are not in general controversial: how best to design an electric circuit, build a house, construct a chain of distribution, arrange shelves in a supermarket, build a motor, analyze a chemical reaction or predict the way a set of molecules will react together under a given set of conditions, etc. Whereas the things that are the most controversial are those concerning which it is nigh on impossible to claim superior understanding: how to build a just society, best educate one’s child, promote virtue, instill resilience, provide for ample participation in decisions while avoiding total paralysis, regulate an economy for the “common good”, mitigate suffering, say what is good, beautiful, evil, when is it necessary to use violence, how much a life is worth, how to “save” the world, etc. Paradoxically, in the present era it is common to insist that the approach to this latter large and enormously important group of issues be deferred to experts and resolved by expertise, or that “all of these problems” will be solved as a necessary consequence of implementing and submitting to a program or a vision elaborated by said experts.
After thinking in rather great detail about how these individual programs and visions have proved, and continue to prove, less than adequate and even shockingly counter-productive, often in direct proportion to their ambition and claimed universality, the following axiom came to me like an annoying hitch in my stride that I simply had to work out. Although I am surely not the first one to arrive at this type of formulation about what is actually knowable, I confess that I arrived at it from my own peculiar first principals and preoccupations. I’m afraid it may be a pretty hard slog, although thankfully a short one.
The current state of a complex living system cannot be deduced from any prior state. This is true even if we could fully elaborate and understand all of the elements and forces which determined that prior state. I believe this to be axiomatic. Human Society is such a system, as is, obviously, the natural world on all its many levels.
Living systems are self-modifying on a radically distributed level. The current state of a living system is the result of mostly known, although not entirely predictable and identifiable, external inputs such as solar power, the planetary orbit, solar storms, etc. and the unpredictable and largely unidentified actions of all of the organisms that compose it. In the case of very simple organisms those actions may only be driven by simple tropisms such as climbing or descending the gradients of light, temperature, oxygen, beneficial or dangerous molecules, as well as the actions of other organisms, chance and factors unknown. For more complex organisms with consciousness their actions are the manifestation of the choices they make in response to external conditions, their genetic predispositions, their current internal state and physical condition, the results of past choices, the decisions that are being made by other organisms, chance and even more unknown factors having to do with the nature of consciousness, which we do not understand. Complex, social, and self-aware organisms, such as humans, are further influenced by their personalities, which may or may not be fully reducible to genetics and experience, social constraints and opportunities which are the results of the actions of others, meaning, ideas, and a multitude of other unknown factors all of which are individually and collectively instantiated and rearranged from one moment to the next. Each action is the momentary expression of the organism’s apprehension and assessment of all of the inputs appropriate to it. Each actions affect the actions of other organisms and the results affect the organism’s own future actions as well. Each instant is a new constellation of forces and conditions which each organism must assess and then act upon. The state of the system is the result of all of these factors.
The reason that the current state can not be determined from the preceding state does not result from the vast number of elements, forces and conditions which influence the external conditions and actions that determine it. As long as that number is less than infinite it could be at least theoretically possible to understand them all, even if highly unlikely. Rather it is because those elements, forces and conditions are not merely changing but are also being changed by the ways in which each organism is assessing and weighing them in each moment as it acts, and the results of those actions in turn affect the current conditions as well the organism’s assessment of them. In short, the elements, forces and conditions are not infinite but they are constantly changing and transforming according to processes and actions that are themselves constantly changing and transforming. I believe this is very likely true of all complex systems that are not dominated by entropy, at least for as long as they can maintain themselves. However, since Life is the only such system I am aware of, that is pure speculation.
This axiom has important implications for what we can and cannot know about living systems, including our own societies, as well as how we may be able to arrive at a more effective understanding of them. I am only going to explore one of these implications here which I call the principle of Locality. This simply states that the more removed we are from a system, or an aspect of it, the less likely we are to be able to understand it. We may be removed in space, scale, time, perceptive capacity, evolutionarily and, in the case of other humans, culturally and linguistically. Humans may also be removed from the natural and social systems they occupy through levels of abstraction.
The principle of Locality suggests that the scalability and applicability of the observations we make about a system that is local to us become increasingly unknown and unreliable as they are applied to systems from which those observations are more and more removed. In other words, the more distant we are from a system the less reliable our knowledge of it necessarily is. The highest quality and most detailed information can only be obtained locally and understood in the local context. The best information about such systems, including human society, is always, therefore, anecdotal. All attempts to abstract and generalize such information in an effort to apply it outside of the locality in which it emerged, was experienced and observed will necessarily degrade it. With sufficient abstraction and degradation this information becomes meaningless and can serve only as a vehicle to express opinions and desires about how such highly abstracted systems should be, rather than observations about how the actual, material systems actually are.
So, rather than pursue greater generalization in an effort to understand these systems, the principal of Locality suggests that we accept the necessarily distributed nature of our understandings, as well as the fact that our understandings are generally expressed through experience rather than through knowledge. What all of these understandings have in common, however, is that each is an active adaptation to constraints that are largely shared, even if those constraints are experienced, combined, and in the case of humans, conceived of differently.
Furthermore, in the case of Human Societies, facilitating and embracing an ample exchange and competition among these understandings, adaptations and adaptive strategies may prove far more useful and result in a more truthful evaluation of them while necessarily incentivizing the self-corrective processes that exchange and competition require. All attempts to reduce the multitude of understandings, adaptations and adaptive strategies to general principals in order to construct a universal understanding of Human Society as a whole, or, even worse, a prescriptive vision of what Human Society should be, in addition to being inevitably distorted and resistant to correction since they necessarily exclude or minimize the importance of experience and knowledge to which they have no or very limited access, have resulted in tremendous suffering and waste of human potential and life with little benefit in direct proportion to the extent to which they have been realized in actual societies.
The inherently limited knowledge we can have about the world in which we live may appear to many far less attractive and compelling than the far more detailed knowledge we may have about our own visions and understanding of that world. However, in the former there is the possibility of positive change even if we don’t understand it, whereas in the latter we may only find the melancholy satisfaction of bemoaning a world that does not correspond to our dreams.