Quotes / You Cannot Grasp the True Form

Film

"Silly boy. You still think you can "see" me? Heh, heh, heh. You'll never see me. You'll see only what your little mind can allow. GO! NOW."

—Pennywise, It (1990)

"Human beings have neither the aural nor the psychological capacity to withstand the awesome power of God's true voice. Were you to hear it, your mind would cave in and your heart would explode within your chest. (We went through five Adams before we figured that one out.)"

— Dogma

Merlin: Shall I tell you what's out there?
Arthur: Yes, please.
Merlin: The Dragon. A beast of such power that if you were to see it whole and all complete in a single glance, it would burn you to cinders.

— Excalibur

Literature

I wasn't about to open my inner eye and have an eyeball-to-eyeball look at the void by way of a third opinion, but I was pretty sure that if I did I'd see something so wrong that it wouldn't even be visible at all, except as a sucking blind-spot distortion in my visual field, dragging everything around it together at the edges like a detached retina.

Bob Howard, The Rhesus Chart

A figure of white-hot fire sat on a throne at the center of the tower top. Blazing light sketched the shape of bare limbs and smooth muscle. Its left hand held a sceptre of black iron capped with a globe which swirled with blackness and starlight. A single blood-red eye sat at the center of its face beneath a crown of curled horns. It was a vision of the divine and the terrible, and it was a lie. Knekku knew that each of the sorcerers kneeling with him would be seeing a different vision, and that none of them were true.

—Ahriman: Unchanged

Imagine that you’re in a boat and you see some fish in the water. You reach your hand into the water to grab one of the fish. From the fish’s point of view, this weird thing with a flat body and five tentacles and a weird thick tail that reaches out into nowhere, but no eyes, mouth or fins, just appeared in a shower of bubbles. It moves around in ways that have nothing to do with swishing its tail or moving fins in any way. Then this thing which shouldn’t be any stronger than the fish is, and has no eyes with which to see, wraps itself around one of the other fish, and suddenly that fish disappears from the first fish’s plane of reference. The hand is utterly alien to the fish, and it operates in ways that would seem magical to it, if fish had the brains to encompass the notion of magic. I think that your Headhunter is like that: it has much, but not all of the power of the demon at its disposal, and it has a perspective that most mortals can’t have, and it operates on very different principles and motives.

— Nacht, Whateley Universe, "Silent Nacht"

Quentin: I suppose you're going to say that that is a being of sublime beauty and power, and he only looks like that because my fallen mortal eyes are are incapable of perceiving his true magnificence.

Penny: No. We think that's actually pretty much it.

Poppy: Come on. He is pretty impressive: he's big. And silvery.

Quentin: A big silvery janitor. Penny, this can't be how the universe works.

Penny: In the Order, we call it 'inverse profundity.' We've observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.

—The Magician King

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

Time past and time future

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

—T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (1935)

Live-Action TV

Kim: So, what's it like out there in Galactic Cluster III?

Seven: Beyond your comprehension.

Kim: Try me.

Seven: Galactic Cluster III is a transmaterial energy plane intersecting twenty-two billion omnicordial lifeforms.

Kim: Ah...interesting.

— Star Trek: Voyager, "The Gift"

Manga

"You don't perceive our true appearance. Your existence and ours are different. My form, and what you think you are seeing, are not necessarily the same."

— Mokkurkalfi, Ah! My Goddess

Tabletop Games

"I am confident that if anyone actually penetrates our facades, even the most perceptive would still be fundamentally unprepared for the truth of House Dimir."

—Szadek, flavor text for Magic: The Gathering card "Glimpse the Unthinkable"

Video Games

"...the Mildly Disturbing Halloween Hats—moldering, eldritch veils of such manifold depravity, the human eye will not process the sheer enormity of their malevolence, and out of self-preservation will merely show you paper bags with faces on them. These faces are still moderately scary, though, so brace yourselves for mild terror!"

— Team Fortress 2

The form of Giegue's attack was inexplicable!

—EarthBound Beginnings

"You cannot grasp the true form of Giygas's attack!"

— EarthBound (1994)

?! ...What did Porky do?!

—Mother 3

We can't be sure what kind of beings a divine being would be. The only certain thing is that their plans of consciousness would be well beyond our own, and any human mind trying to comprehend it would be damaged to the point of implosion. There's no way for us to sustain enough damage to reach a similar level of consciousness. You could say that the existence of those beings would be a catastrophe for humanity itself.

— About the great one 1, Savior Of The Abyss

Attempting to perceive: Cognition algorithms fail to prove a negative. Something touches me. Impossible.

— Cephalon Cy, upon interacting with the Reliquary Drive, Warframe

Web Original

This is a response. Like a reaction. Nature doesn't abhor a vacuum, but people do. Your minds aren't made for this, right? You stare at the stars and see things, because that's what you do. Making sense of it. Order is a man-made concept.

—D-124/unformed Pattern Screamer, SCP Foundation file for SCP-3930

Q: You asked me to show you me. My real form. It was a challenge. You were daring me to reveal myself, to give you a glimpse behind the curtain. And I couldn't help but rise to the challenge. I brought you there, out into the depths of space, and I let you look up at me. Or at least, what parts of me are visible to your puny human eyes.
Picard: What happened?
Q: You were amazed. It was the first time I've ever seen you ... pleased ... by anything I've done. You said I was ... beautiful. And you were beautiful, too, glowing in the light from my stars and nebulas. I've never seen you like that before. And I - forgot myself. You seemed so brilliant, so alive, that I forgot you weren't - a real person. A Q. I forgot myself. And I reached out to touch you with one of my - limbs, I suppose you'd call it. And you broke. You were dead, Jean-Luc. One minute you were a person and one minute you weren't and you were gone.
Picard: You killed me. And then you regretted it.
Q: I never meant to hurt you! It's not my fault you humans are so fragile.

—Fragility

"You couldn't fathom my real appearance; your calamari brain's pan frying."

—Cthulhu to The Kraken, Freshy Kanal

Western Animation

Anne: And you look like my cat because...?
The Guardian: My true form would make your human brain explode.
Anne: I don't know, I've seen some pretty crazy-
(The Guardian momentarily transforms into its true form of a cosmic Energy Being, causing Anne to Freak Out)

— "The Hardest Thing", Amphibia

Real Life

Wasn’t it John Maynard Keynes who famously remarked to a group of fellow economists dithering about the long-term[?]... Our brains are really not equipped to process events on the geologic scale—at least in reference to how we choose to live, or what we choose to do in the here and now. Five hundred million years is a long time, but how about the mad rush of events in just the past 2,000 years [of written history] starring the human race? Rather action-packed, wouldn’t you say? Everything from The Roman Empire to the Twin Towers, with a cast of billions—emperors, slaves, saviors, popes, kings, queens, armies, navies, rabbles, conquest, murder, famine, art, science, revolution, comedy, tragedy, genocide, and Michael Jackson. Enough going on in a mere 2,000 years to divert anyone’s attention from the ultimate fate of the earth, you would think. Just reflecting on the events of The 20th Century alone could take your breath away, so why get bent out of shape about the ultimate fate of the earth? Yet I was not soothed by these thoughts... because I couldn’t shake the recognition that in the short term, we are in pretty serious trouble, too.

— James Howard Kunstler, The Long Emergency (2005), p. 148.

It’s one thing to know the facts about geological time — how long it is, how we measure it, how we divide it up, and what we call the various periods and epochs — but it is quite another to really understand geological time. The problem is that our lives are short and our memories are even shorter. Our experiences span only a few decades, so we really don’t have a way of knowing what 11,700 years means. What’s more, it’s hard for us to understand how 11,700 years differs from 65.5 Ma, or even from 1.8 Ga. It’s not that we can’t comprehend what the numbers mean — we can all get that figured out with a bit of practice — but even if we do know the numerical meaning of 65.5 Ma, we can’t really appreciate how long ago it was.

—Steven Earle, Physical Geology (2015)

The "hard problem" in cognitive science of explaining how a brain can give rise to consciousness is largely a problem of comprehension. The understanding of brain function is now very great-though far from complete. The collection of all the data that would explain mechanistically how I decide which item to order from a lunch menu is as yet impossible to obtain at the level of knowing how many and which neurons were involved, which synapses were active, at what strength, and in what order from millisecond to millisecond, the direction of signal movement along those many different neuronal circuits, and how those signals were "summed" into the final decision. But even if we magically had all this information written down and charted in detail, it would be so lengthy and complicated that no one could take it in and exclaim "oh, now I comprehend how that process works." Some processes that can be understood in their details are still beyond human comprehension as a whole due to their sheer complexity. The human brain did not evolve to comprehend such vast numbers, distances, or complexities.

—David Zeigler, "An incomprehensible universe: why the human brain is ill-equipped to grasp the true nature of nature." Skeptic [Altadena, CA], vol. 16, no. 2, winter 2011, pp. 31+.

One prominent theory proposes that the brain relies on an inexact method whereby it represents approximate quantities through a sort of mental number line. This line, imagined in our mind’s eye, organizes small to large numbers from left to right (though this orientation depends on cultural convention). People tend to make consistent errors when using this internal number line, often underestimating extremely large quantities and overestimating relatively smaller quantities. For example, research has shown that college students in geology and biology courses commonly underestimate the time between the appearance of the first life on Earth and the dinosaurs – which is billions of years – but overestimate how long dinosaurs actually lived on Earth – millions of years.

—Lindsey Hasak, "Brains are bad at big numbers, making it impossible to grasp what a million COVID-19 deaths really means", The Conversation (March 31, 2022)

We managed to get better at counting (again, shoutout to the people buying those watermelons, couldn’t have done it without you) but big numbers still baffle us.
Despite this cognitive setback, we are surrounded by ginormous numbers every day and are expected to make sense of it. Be it the latest pandemic figures, budget proposals by your government, the latest news, scientific research and other things that we pretend to read and understand to sound smart.
Now, this would be a great and useful post if it was about how to really understand big numbers.
But it’s not.
It’s to help you realise how much you suck at understanding big numbers.

—Shreyas Kamath, "A Small Problem With Big Numbers", Towards Data Science (October 4, 2020)

Certainly, we humans experience time subjectively: time flies when you’re having fun, a day of boredom seems an eternity, weeks flicker past in maturity while for a child the summer holidays last forever. Threescore and ten seems like several centuries to a teenager, but it’s a blink of an eye to those who have that figure in the rear-view mirror. It’s hard to get a handle on the real meaning of time.
Freud claimed that science has provided three great breakthroughs in human understanding: when Copernicus showed us that the earth is not the centre of the universe but a planet orbiting the sun, when Darwin made clear our ancestry, and when Freud himself (the modesty of the man!) showed that we are not the rational beings we always thought.
But he missed one. The paleontologist and writer Stephen Jay Gould claims that the fourth great breakthrough is the discovery of Deep Time. This was first spelt out in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833. The biblical age of the earth is around 6,000 years: Lyell replaced this with a calendar reckoned in hundreds of millions.
This revelation of Deep Time still provides every child with one of the first and perhaps the[ir] greatest experience [...] : when we learn that the world was once full of dinosaurs, and they all perished 65m [65 million] years ago.
Our minds are not capable of grasping time on such a scale. We struggle even to grasp the extent of human history. We fall back on metaphor: comparing, say, the history of the earth to the old measure of the English yard: the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. Gould writes: “One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history.”
But that stroke of the nail file is what we humans think of as A Very Long Time. Agriculture began in several places and more or less simultaneously about 12,000 years ago and we have been modifying the planet for our convenience ever since. It was the biggest event in human history, and it was the biggest event in the history of the world since the meteor fell in the Gulf of Mexico and wiped out the dinosaurs.

—Simon Barnes, "Rooted in history: What ancient trees tell us about time and life", The New European (August 11, 2022)

...the limits of human knowledge should curb our hubris. Human knowledge has expanded dramatically since The Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, especially during the high-energy industrial era. Not all of that knowledge has been destructive, and much of it has enriched our lives. But what we don’t know still far outstrips what we do know, and always will.

—Wes Jackson, Robert Jensen, An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (2022)

Despite huge advances in science over the past century, our understanding of nature is still far from complete. Not only have scientists failed to find the Holy Grail of physics – unifying the very large (general relativity) with the very small (quantum mechanics) – they still don’t know what the vast majority of the universe is made up of. The sought-after Theory of Everything continues to elude us. And there are other outstanding puzzles, too, such as how consciousness arises from mere matter.
Will science ever be able to provide all the answers? Human brains are the product of blind and unguided evolution. They were designed to solve practical problems impinging on our survival and reproduction, not to unravel the fabric of the universe. This realisation has led some philosophers to embrace a curious form of pessimism, arguing there are bound to be things we will never understand. Human science will therefore one day hit a hard limit – and may already have done so.

—Maarten Boudry, "Human intelligence: have we reached the limit of knowledge?", The Conversation (October 11, 2019)

There is absolutely no a priori reason to expect that what we can know is what we most need to know. Science uses disciplinary organization to recognize and focus on questions that can be answered. Disciplines, in turn, are separated by methodology, terminology, sociology, and disparate bodies of fact that resist synthesis. Although disciplinary specialization has been the key to scientific success, such specialization simultaneously takes us away from any knowledge of the whole.
Today the whole encompasses six billion people with the collective capability of altering the biogeochemical cycles on which we depend for our survival. Can science generate the knowledge necessary to govern the world that science has made? Do we even know what such knowledge might be? Producing 70,000 synthetic chemicals is easy compared to the challenge of understanding and dealing with their effects. Despite the billions we have spent studying our interference with the planet’s biogeochemical cycles, we really do not have a clue about what the long-term result will be. And we have even less knowledge about how to organize and govern ourselves to confront this challenge.
The intrinsic difficulties of creating a transdisciplinary synthesis are compounded dramatically by a dangerous scientific and technological illiteracy among senior policy-makers and elected officials. An ironic effect of technology-created wealth is the growth of an affluent class that prizes individualism over civic engagement and that feels insulated from the need to understand and confront complex technology-related social issues.
The scientific and philosophical intellectuals of “the academy” remain focused on the relatively simple question of understanding nature. The much more complicated and challenging—and meaningful— quest is to understand nature with a purpose, with an objective, with an end. What is the purpose of our effort to understand nature: to learn how to live in harmony with nature or to exploit it more efficiently? For thousands of years, philosophical inquiry has been guided by such fundamental questions as “Why are we here?” and “How should we behave?” Such questions were difficult enough to confront meaningfully when our communities were small, our mobility limited, and our impact restricted. In today’s hyperkinetic world, how can we possibly hope to find meaning? The literal answers provided by science amount to mockery: We are here because an expanding cloud of gas some 15 billion years ago eventually led to the accretion of planets, the formation of primordial nucleotides and amino acids, the evolution of complex organisms, the growth of complex social structures in primates, and the dramatic expansion of cognitive and analytical capabilities made possible by the rapid evolution of neocortical brain structures. Such explanation is entirely insufficient to promote the commonality of purpose necessary for planetary stewardship. We lack a unified or unifiable metaphysical basis for action, just when we need it most.

—Michael M. Crow "None Dare Call It Hubris: The Limits of Knowledge." Issues in Science and Technology 23, no. 2 (Winter 2007)

Human knowledge is limited to the rational/empirical evidence & it’s limited to the natural world.

—Rostam Ferdowsi, "What Are the Limits to Human Knowledge" Answered in Quora.

It’s no secret that there is a seemingly endless string of problems to address in the world. You don’t have to look hard to find people suffering from all sorts of maladies: from illness to injustice, from war to famine, from poverty to pollution. There are some major problems facing humanity in the 21st century, and they’re all going to require an enormous investment of our collective resources if we want to solve them. From climate change to global pandemics to the energy and water crises and more, none of these problems are going to solve themselves. If they’re to be solved at all, it’s going to come down to humanity’s collective actions.
But where does that leave the scientific research that doesn’t directly relate to these crises? As beautiful and enlightening as the recent James Webb Space Telescope pictures are, astronomy and astrophysics aren’t going to keep the seas from rising.

—Ethan Siegel "Why bother exploring the Universe at all?." Big Think (July 29, 2022)

I have been forced to the conclusion that an overemphasis of science weakens human character and upsets life's essential balance. Science breeds technology. Technology leads to infinite complication. Examples are everywhere: in the intricacy of government and in that of business corporations: in automation and labor relations; in war, diplomacy, taxation, legislation, in almost every field of modern man's routine. From the growth of cities to that of military power, from medical requirements to social-welfare benefits, when progress is plotted against time, exponential curves result with which we cannot long conform. But what action should scientific man prescribe as a result of the curves he plots? How is their direction to be changed without another breakdown and return to wildness? Suppose technologists conclude theoretically that they are destroying their own culture. Are they capable of taking effective action to prevent such destruction?
The failures of previous civilizations, and the crises existing for our own, show that man has not evolved the ability to cope with limitless complication. He has not discovered how to control his sciences' parabolas. Here I believe the human intellect can learn from primitive nature, for nature was conceived in cosmic power and thrives on infinite complication. No problem has been too difficult for it to solve. From the dynamics of an atom, nature produces the tranquility of a flower, the joy of a porpoise, the intellect of man–the miracle of life.

—Charles Lindbergh, "The Wisdom of Wilderness." Life (December 22, 1967)

For vast stretches of time, the highest level of intelligence on Earth seems to have increased very slowly, at best. Even now, our brains process sensory-motor information using all kinds of algorithmic shenanigans that allow us to do as little actual thinking as possible. This suggests that the costs associated with intelligence are high. It turns out that brains are extraordinarily expensive metabolically on a per-unit-mass basis, far more than almost all other organs (the heart and liver being the exceptions). So, the smarter an organism is, the more food it needs, or it dies. Evolutionarily speaking, it is stupid to be smart.
We do not have a good understanding of exactly how our neural hardware grants us abstract intelligence. We do not understand how ‘brain makes mind’. But given that more intelligence requires more brain mass, which results in more metabolic costs, one would expect us to have the lowest possible level of abstract intelligence required for surviving in the precise ecological niche in which Homo sapiens developed: the barest minimum intelligence needed to scrape through a few million years of hunting and gathering until we got lucky and stumbled into the Neolithic Revolution.
Is this conclusion correct? To gain insight into the question of whether we’re smart or stupid, note that there are multiple types of intelligence. The ability to sense the external world is one such type of cognitive capability; the ability to remember past events is another; the ability to plan a future sequence of actions is another. And there are myriad cognitive capabilities that other organisms have but that we lack. This is true even if we consider only intelligences that we have created: modern digital computers vastly outperform us computationally in myriad ways. Moreover, the small set of those cognitive tasks that we can still perform better than our digital computers is substantially shrinking from year to year.
This will continue to change. The capabilities of future terrestrial organisms will likely exceed the current level of our digitally augmented intelligence. This sense of cognitive expansion is not unique to our current moment in history. Think about the collective cognitive capability of all organisms living on Earth. Imagine a graph showing this collective capability changing over billions of years. Arguably, no matter what precise time-series analysis technique we use, and no matter how we formalise ‘cognitive capability’, we will conclude that the trend line has a strictly positive slope. After all, in no period has the highest level of some specific cognitive capability held by any entity in the terrestrial biosphere shrunk; the entire biosphere has never lost the ability to engage in certain kinds of cognitive capability. Also, there is not just growth over time in the degree of each cognitive capability among all terrestrial species, but a growth in the kinds of cognitive capability. Life has become only smarter, and smarter in different ways. If we simply extrapolate this trend into the future, we’re forced to conclude that some future organisms will have cognitive capabilities that no currently living Terran species has – including us.
Despite preening in front of our collective mirror about how smart we are, it seems that we have highly limited cognitive abilities compared with those that we (or other Terran organisms) will have in the future.
However, before getting too comfortable with this conclusion, we need to look a little closer at our graph of collective capability. Up until around 50,000 years ago, the collective intelligence on Earth was increasing gradually and smoothly. But then there was a major jump as modern Homo sapiens started on a trajectory that would ultimately produce modern science, art, and philosophy. It may appear as though we are still part of this ‘major jump’, this vast cognitive acceleration, and that our kinds of intelligence far exceed those of our hominin ancestors.

—David Wolpert, "What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?" (2022)

The special human traits [...] which enabled us to diversify culturally and occupationally while remaining biologically one species, did cause human beings to become increasingly interdependent. On that point [Émile] Durkheim was right, but in the final decade of the 19th century, he was unable to foresee how far this interdependence would have been carried by the beginning of the 21st century. Homo sapiens' powers of foresight may be greater than those of pre-human species, but they are not unlimited. Like all other species, because of the very nature of natural selection, we tend to be preoccupied with the here and near.

—William R. Catton, Bottleneck (2009), p. 212

The human mind has limits and catastrophic human caused environmental change exceeds those limits; or, at least, exceeds those limits for most people. A second factor, though specific to western cultures, is that this subject raises the specter of death, which is one from which westerners have learnt to hide.

— Ian Cook, The Politics of the Final Hundred Years of Humanity (2030-2130) (2020), p. 48

…the universe lies beyond the grasp of any intellect, no matter how powerful, that could exist within the universe.

—Graham P. Collins, "Within Any Possible Universe, No Intellect Can Ever Know It All." Scientific American (March 1, 2009)

So, why have many people become obsessed with either denying or overcoming limits, to the point where they appear to feel that life can have meaning only if it’s tied to some limitless thing, quality, or substance? Humanity’s obsession with limitlessness probably began with the origin of language, which enables the asking of questions. People tens of thousands of years ago began to ask, “What happens to our essential sense of self when we die?” Their efforts to manage existential terror likely led them to tell stories about a boundless otherworld in which the dead live forever. Looking up at the night sky, they saw a realm of blackness punctuated by moving points of light; upon this screen they projected their wants, needs, and fears. Our lives and those of all the creatures around us may be brief, these early people must have thought, but there is another dimension that lies beyond—a dimension without endings. We’ve been searching for a path to infinity ever since.

—Richard Heinberg, "Why Understanding Limits Is the Key to Humanity’s Future." Resilience (January 19, 2023)

From our best observations, we know that the Universe is an awful lot bigger than the part we can observe. Beyond what we can see, we strongly suspect that there’s plenty more Universe out there just like ours, with the same laws of physics, the same types of physical, cosmic structures, and the same chances at complex life. But as inconceivably large as that entire Universe — or Multiverse, if you prefer — may be, it might not be infinite. In fact, unless inflation went on for a truly infinite amount of time, or the Universe was born infinitely large, the Universe ought to be finite in extent.
The biggest problem of all, though? It’s that we don’t have enough information to definitively answer the question. We only know how to access the information available inside our observable Universe: those 46 billion light years in all directions. The answer to the biggest of all questions, of whether the Universe is finite or infinite, might be encoded in the Universe itself, but we can’t access enough of it to know. Until we either figure it out, or come up with a clever scheme to expand what we know physics is capable of, all we’ll have are the possibilities.

—Ethan Siegel, “Is the Universe infinite?” Big Think, April 13, 2022.

Science is the culmination of humanity’s attempts to reason about the world. It produces knowledge in a reliable way, and it has done so with great success. It has revealed many of nature’s secrets, from the molecular machinery inside cells to the grand scheme of how the universe began and evolved to what we see today. But for all their undoubted achievements, science and reason have their constraints.

—"Why it is important to explore the outer limits of knowledge." New Scientist, January 11, 2023.

Although the past century witnessed an unprecedented expansion of scientific and technological knowledge, there are concerns that innovative activity is slowing. Studies document declining research productivity in semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, and other fields. Papers, patents, and even grant applications have become less novel relative to prior work and less likely to connect disparate areas of knowledge, both of which are precursors of innovation. The gap between the year of discovery and the awarding of a Nobel Prize has also increased, suggesting that today’s contributions do not measure up to the past. These trends have attracted increasing attention from policymakers, as they pose substantial threats to economic growth, human health and wellbeing, and national security, along with global efforts to combat grand challenges such as climate change.

—Michael Park, Erin Leahey & Russel J. Funk, "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time." Nature 613, 138–144 (January 4, 2023).

We live in an age in which science enjoys remarkable success. We have mapped out a grand scheme of how the physical universe works on scales from quarks to galactic clusters, and of the living world from the molecular machinery of cells to the biosphere. There are gaps, of course, but many of them are narrowing. The scientific endeavour has proved remarkably fruitful, especially when you consider that our brains evolved for survival on the African savannah, not to ponder life, the universe, and everything. So, having come this far, is there any stopping us?

—Michael Brooks, "The limits of knowledge: Things we'll never understand." New Scientist, May 4, 2011.

Humanity has two old, profound questions. The first question concerns the origin of all that exists, the cosmos itself. The second question asks how a lifeless world could spontaneously generate self-replicating organisms that go on to conquer the planet. These two questions of origins share a thin set of connections.
The first involves Einstein’s grand General Theory of Relativity, describing the fundamental nature of space and time, and the Standard Model of particle physics, which offers ornate descriptions of the quantum fields emerging from the Big Bang. The second question focuses on the geobiochemistry of RNA replication in hydrothermal vents, as well as information-theoretic concerns about error correction in such replication.
As different as these topics seem, they both push scientists to the very edge of creative thought.
The origin of life and the Universe are both trapped by the problem of horizons.
On Earth, on a clear day and from relatively flat terrain, the horizon is simply the farthest distance you can see before the curvature of the planet bends out of view. (That comes to about 3 miles away for the average person). The horizon thus represents a fundamental limit, imposed by physical circumstances, to how far you can see. Cosmology and the origin of life are each subject to a kind of horizon, and those horizons shape how researchers must address their most fundamental questions.
[...]
What’s cool about all this is how it reveals something fundamental about science. Horizons exist because evidence comes with constraints we don’t know how to break. That means that not every direct question can find a direct answer. The trail can simply grow cold or disappear. At that point, the most interesting question of all arises: What do you do next?

—Adam Frank, "Why the origin of life and the Universe itself might be forever unknowable," Big Think (January 26, 2023).

…we don’t have all the answers and perhaps collectively lack the wisdom to refrain from doing things simply because we can. It is time to focus instead on what we should do, in line with the rest of nature.

—Thomas W. Murphy, "Human Exceptionalism." Do the Math (February 16, 2022).

Science is a pursuit of luxury, borne by the citizenry out of a sense of goodwill, curiosity, and promise. It has served as a catalyst to economic growth not only by paving the way to a world full of gizmos and new capabilities but also through the development of sophisticated methods for locating underground resources in the form of energy and materials. As long as science keeps it up, everyone is happy. But as the century wears on, the words “can’t,” “won’t,” and “shouldn’t” will likely appear more often in connection with science. Not so popular with the people.
Will funding for science wither as a result? Will we decide to stop paying for more bad news? Will scientists feel political pressure to stay away from “downer” topics after people get fed up or the dire news is deemed to be bad for morale and therefore a psychological impediment to economic growth? I hope we will always keep the door open to truth, even when it’s not music to our ears. But I am not so certain this will be the case—especially when money is on the line.

—Thomas W. Murphy, "When Science Is a Conveyor of Bad News." Do the Math (October 16, 2012).

A common reaction is: can’t we use our big brains to solve this problem? Extending civilization for even another 1,000 years will surely give us time to think of something, our faith tells us. What if that “something” is the realization that civilization is inherently unsustainable and must be replaced with alternate, simpler (but richly meaningful) approaches to life on Earth? Maybe we can use our brains to save ourselves some time, agony, and further devastation by reaching this conclusion sooner.
Implicit in the leading question above is usually the notion of a technological solution. My viewpoint has become that technology is not the right tool to solve a predicament caused by a technological approach. But yes, we can (and should) use our big brains. It’s just that the task at hand is to figure out how to adopt a whole new way of living on this planet and how to dismantle civilization in a way that is least destructive to biodiversity and to humans. We need to relinquish our hubristic (and illusory) grip on control and our naive ambition of total mastery. We fall into the trap of thinking: “if we just learn a little more, we’ll finally have it.” But it’s never enough, and never can be. We have barely scratched the surface of understanding the machinery of Earth's ecosystems, and it’s a fool’s quest to imagine we can achieve the requisite omniscience to maintain a successful reign—especially as the biophysical clock ticks more and more urgently.
What we need to learn instead is how to live with the long-term constraints of the natural world as it is presented to us—not take it upon ourselves to shape it to our unrealistic wants and whims, which is a proposition certain to fail. It’s about responding and adapting in an attitude of humility, not solving, mastering, exerting, defining, and dictating. Our brains are nowhere near big enough to pull off complete wizardry over nature, but maybe they are big enough to make this leap of intentional humility. We’ve been there before. I hope we still have what it takes.

—Thomas W. Murphy, "The Simple Story of Civilization." Do the Math (December 19, 2022).

...fossil energy has subsidised a tremendous amount of science and art, expanding dramatically what we know about the world and building an expansive trove of stories about it. But rather than imagining how we might use that energy to build a sustainable future, we have rushed to use it in ways that enriched some quickly, impoverished others slowly, and left us facing a future that is speculative, not guaranteed. As we come to the end of the fossil-fuel epoch, as a species we seem to lack the collective imagination to break free.

—West Jackson and Robert Jensen, "Let's get "creaturely": A new worldview can help us face our ecological crises." Australian Broadcasting Corporation (April 23, 2019).

Science is a luxury of highly functional societies. It is no coincidence that scientific advance is most rapid in this day and age when surplus energy is at its peak. How many computer records, tapes, CD-ROMs, etc., risk destruction or degradation in a collapse—even if it lasts only a century? In the more dismal collapse scenarios, how many science journals are burned for warmth?

—Thomas W. Murphy, "The Way Is Shut." Do the Math (February 21, 2012).

In promoting the cut-and-dried, dissected, abstracted, tidy realm of science, we can lose the ability to celebrate the wonder, mystery, and awe of complexity and relationship that defy simple frameworks. The artificial, rectilinear, ordered, Cartesian world we construct around ourselves alienates us from more durable but messy realities. We infantilize ourselves by insisting on unambiguous truth. What is the one right way to: live; eat; exercise; socialize; earn; recycle; energize; travel? What’s the right solution to climate change? What is the right set of human rights? What’s the right approach to the Israel/Palestine situation? Science has trained us to expect correct, repeatable solutions that can be confirmed by a peek at the back of the book. Complex relationships often have no right answer, in which case it is counterproductive to cast around seeking one. We are conditioned to be attracted to authoritative answers, and might as a whole lack the poise to admit that many real-world situations will never be reduced to black and white; right and wrong.
Science’s success has produced an expectation of unlimited understanding. A sort-of fetishism arises. It’s intoxicating to think that we’re on the path to knowing everything, like gods. Yet, the best answer to almost any question a six-year-old will ask is: we don’t really know. Why do we sleep? What do dreams do? Do all animals have feelings? Do chickadees ever laugh, in their way? What is it like to be a kelp plant? Why is there a universe at all? Are there aliens kind of like us? Why do tears accompany crying? If sneezing and coughing don’t happen during sleep, are they ever really necessary? What is time?
We might know some relevant things around the margins of such questions, but not the full story. Not only do we not know it all, I would say we never will. Science has limits. We won’t know why things exist, and will never prove there are no aliens across the vast stretches of space and time, no matter how long we search without detecting signs. Science is a fantastically sharp tool for some jobs, but won’t be able to cut through every complexity—nor should it try. Science is a way to get at a truth (or a part thereof), which is something. But it should not be mistaken as the way to get at the truth.
Science, being both a powerful tool and itself unconcerned with the intractable whole, has to be tempered by something bigger than itself. It plays a role, but ideally not as the master.

—Thomas W. Murphy, "Putting Science in Its Place". Do the Math (November 28, 2023).

...we will never master all knowledge and will inevitably create unintended consequences.

—Thomas W. Murphy, "Confessions of a Disillusioned Scientist". Do the Math (December 5, 2023).

Science has never been as unbiased as it would like to be — how could it? Skewing results is easily noticed and rightfully condemned—as happened with such forgeries as Piltdown Man. Much more insidious is a lack of curiosity. We do not question received wisdom, and what we do not question we cannot understand.

—Jason Godesky, Thirty Theses (2006)

... we simply don’t know. We don’t know. Let that sink in. We don’t know.

—Thomas W. Murphy, "Let's Make a Deal". Do the Math (March 5, 2024)