Beyond the Consumer’s Dream of Ultimate Knowledge

Why the human pursuit of knowledge is endless

In a McDonalds or Amazon world, in which we consumers feel we have the right to be promptly delivered whatever we want, wrapped up in a convenient package (that ends up in a landfill somewhere), we might like to think science and knowledge in general can be completed. We imagine there could be a neat final theory that wraps up the universe in its models and equations, leaving nothing significant left over.

Physicists speak of a “theory of everything” (TOE), of a “final theory, ultimate theory, theory of the world or master theory,” which would be “a hypothetical, singular, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe.” And from finished physics you could derive everything else as just the construction of complexities, from chemistry to biology to economics.

Let’s see, though, whether this conception of ultimate knowledge makes much sense.

Ultimate Knowledge as the Seed of All Predictions

First, what is a scientific theory? It’s a well-tested explanation that enables the knower to predict how the known thing works, including what it would do under various conditions. The explanation can be encoded in a model, such as a doctor’s representation of the human body or a computer simulation of a weather system. Or the explanation can consist of precise generalizations such as equations that exchange the subjectivity of natural language for the rigour of mathematics.

What, then, would it be like to have the ultimate, finished theory of the universe? Suppose you had a simulation of the entire universe running on a supercomputer. Of course, a duplicate of the universe wouldn’t count as knowledge of our universe. Knowing something isn’t the same as reproducing it, so a theory must simplify. The theorist breaks down that which is to be explained into its essence or its most relevant or interesting factors. This is the analytical method of explaining a whole in terms of the relations between its parts.

Thus, a useful simulation of the universe would be much less than a second universe. Nevertheless, the simulation would contain enough meaning to enable you to infer how the real universe originated or how it would unfold, given your understanding of the model. In the same way as a diagram or a model of a hair follicle might show the hair’s various parts and how the follicle is rooted in the skin, the ultimate physical representation of the universe would be analogous to all of nature.

Again, the simulation would leave out much detail and might focus on the universe’s structure or its elementary particles or forces. Although the ultimate theory itself would be much less complex than all of reality, the theory would amount to the potential to utter all the possible true statements. Just as the universe unfolds from its simpler beginning or constituents, the theory would entail all knowledge.

But would the simulation by itself do so? Objectively, the computer simulation would consist of physical states in the computer that might show up as flickering pictures on a screen. Objectively, then, they would entail nothing because they would have no inherent meanings.

The simulation would have to be interpreted by an interested party. A squirrel looking at the ultimate simulation or the TOE’s equations on a blackboard wouldn’t give either a second glance. Deriving the total body of knowledge would require not just many background assumptions, interpretive principles, and human experiences, but the interest in having all that knowledge.

Human Character and the Causal Role of Knowledge

The question this raises is what such knowledge would be for. An animal couldn’t make use of a TOE, but neither could we in anything like our current technological and social states. Presumably the TOE would include something like the recipe for creating a universe, but theoretical knowledge is different from practical know-how.

Why, then, are we humans interested in ultimate knowledge we couldn’t apply? Partly, it’s because we suspect we might one day be able to apply it, just as technological innovations often came after scientific discoveries. We shoot first and ask questions later. But why would we want to apply ultimate knowledge?

You see, there’s this underlying question of the causal role of knowledge. Inherently, knowledge is a brain state, some squiggles on a chalkboard, or a series of ones and zeroes in computer code. A TOE wouldn’t be a magical philosopher’s stone. The universe wouldn’t shatter were a scientist to write down the ultimate, most elementary equations. Yet a long journey begins with a single step, so potentially the TOE could be a necessary condition of some apocalyptic transition.

But if we ask what it would mean to have a TOE in our possession, we must include some understanding of that causal role. The TOE wouldn’t exist by itself, but would be a tool at our species’ disposal, subject therefore to our collective character, political vicissitudes, yearnings, prejudices, delusions, and the like. Indeed, what could be done with ultimate knowledge would be fit for a moral, existential, or otherwise value-driven assessment.

This is why I suggested at the outset that the fetishization of ultimate knowledge belongs to a McDonald’s, consumerist mentality. We think of the finished product, nicely packaged. There’s the Big Mack sandwich swaddled in the paper wrapper, like a framed painting on a wall that seems to exist apart from the artist’s labours. Likewise, with the convenient packaging, we can pretend the Big Mack isn’t the result of Big Agra’s horrendous machinations and that the consumer lifestyle won’t likely end in tears for the planet.

A physicist may one day boast that some handy set of equations encodes the roots of all the knowledge anyone could hope to have. But the equations by themselves would be meaningless. They would amount to total knowledge only when they’re joined with an elite intelligence. This shifts the question to that which is externalized by the consumer’s fetishization of commodities.

We wouldn’t know what ultimate knowledge would amount to unless we could answer this follow-up question: What would be the ultimate use of that knowledge? To answer that, we’d have to know what the ultimate species would be like. What culture would drive the applications of its knowledge? And if the universe is objectively meaningless and pointless, those evaluative questions about the completability of the people and cultures involved would be open-ended.

There is no single correct answer to the practical, externalized question. Therefore, there’s no such thing as ultimate, final knowledge, given the variability of the psychological and social contexts needed to make sense of the concepts of semantic meaning, explanation, understanding, and knowledge.

To be sure, the equation, diagram, or simulation may one day exist as what will be called “the theory of everything.” But those squiggles on the blackboard or lights on the computer screen would be as inherently meaningless as everything else in nature. Only when combined with minds and cultures could the squiggles or pixel patterns be decoded as a meaningful theory, and minds and cultures aren’t so obviously completable.

The so-called TOE may one day answer all the questions people at that time could want to ask. But give that generation more time to develop and those people’s questions will change, prompting the need for a modification of the theory.

Instrumentalism and the Endless Hunt for Weaknesses

This evaluative (moral or cultural) side of the question comes to the fore when we reflect on why we settle for the simplifications we produce. Why do we analyze wholes into parts? Why do we focus on some variables rather than others? We speak of our interests in that case, which means that all our knowledge — from our very concepts which likewise stereotype reality, to theories, laws, and models — are techniques for humanizing nature’s inhuman indifference to everything that transpires.

We think what we do because we are what we are. We break wholes down into parts because, unlike a supercomputer, we have limited attention spans and can’t perform millions of calculations at once. Moreover, we prefer to explain things naturalistically, which means that we posit more and more conditions, deeper elements, and simpler forces because that’s how we establish our bestial advantage over nature.

Finding bedrock reality would mean finding something with no weaknesses. Once we know what something is made of or how it’s at the mercy of initial conditions, its elementary constituents, or its environmental backdrop, we know how that thing could theoretically be controlled. But if in the bedrock’s case, X = X and there’s nothing more to be said about it, no deeper facts to discover, the bedrock X would be inexplicable, or to use the whitewasher’s euphemism, the bedrock would be “self-evident.”

That’s to say the bedrock would be as supernatural as God. To naturalize something is largely to analyze it, to construe it as a whole that’s made up of simpler parts. The search for a TOE is thus a search for the deepest simplicity. But that search seems either endless or destined to disappoint. If at the end of the search we find some purely simple, inexplicable bedrock, all scientific progress would have led to that rude comedic punchline, to that yanking of the rug out from under the entire endeavour.

Even if nature ran out of layers to be explained, we would add imaginary ones or abstracta because we’re primates. When a computer’s algorithm runs its course, the computer might be programmed to shut down. But because we’re vulnerable, fearful, curious, selfish, gullible, and patriarchal mammals, we’d rather imagine abstract levels of ontology to ponder than admit that all of reality is ultimately gratuitous, inexplicable, and forever invulnerable to us.

And because we’re inclined not to let anything be, but to attempt to dominate it, we posit weaknesses even when there are none. Consequently, when we fail to dominate, we rationalize our failure to preserve our pride.

The Faustian Purpose of Civilized Knowledge

Assuming we remain human, then, the scientific quest is bound to be endless for at least these two reasons. First, the significance of the product of our knowledge or of the TOE would depend on the interests and thus on the character of the species making use of the theory or model. And the development of that collective or individual character isn’t bound by a morally decisive upper limit. If there are as many uses of a TOE as there are causal roles of knowledge or cultural assimilations of the theory, there are effectively endless forms of pseudo-ultimate knowledge.

Second, in so far as ultimate knowledge would be scientific and subject to methodological naturalism, this knowledge would be governed at least by the culture of instrumentalism. We’d think of this knowledge as a tool to further our domination of nature. We would therefore refuse to acknowledge any absolute bedrock even if that meant pursuing figments of our imagination or shadows of our fears and vanities. Those mental projections would likewise be endless, and they would drive the search for knowledge long after the objective facts had been exhausted.

In The Decline of the West, Oswald Spengler distinguished between the Faustian modern West, Apollonian ancient Mediterranean, and the Magian Middle East. But most civilizations are relatively Faustian in being promethean or “satanically” inclined to spoil the natural world, compared to the less expansive Neolithic and Paleolithic settlements and clans.

Civilizations are hierarchical and imperial rather than egalitarian because they paradoxically channel natural power dynamics to exploit or to humanize nature, to replace the wilderness with artificial habitats that reflect our minds and cultures back at us, thus reassuring us by making us feel more at home.

By contrast, the egalitarian settlements of the Neolithic period, and the nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers before them occupied the existential position of the outsider (whom Albert Camus called “the stranger”). That’s the figure who’s condemned to behold nature’s alienness while feeling powerless to mitigate the absurd dichotomy between mind and the world’s mindlessness.

Without being driven by psychopathic nobles who exploited the accumulation of resources and wealth, early behaviourally modern people huddled together in stable communities, worshiping animals and the Goddess as the powers of Mother Earth. Those comforting myths made life tolerable for them in lieu of the promethean ambition to actively replace nature with the products of human creativity. But as Mother Earth proved more and more to be no loving parent, as its indiscriminate ways became more galling, those communities grew restless, and competition arose to direct the communities’ efforts towards more productive, progressive ends.

Early humans might have felt at home in the enchanted natural landscape, but with no civilizational project to oppose nature’s objective indifference, the gradual loss of childhood innocence would have frozen those people in abject terror. This is perhaps the unconscious aspect of those early stable, egalitarian communities: those people were frozen in place, unsure how to respond to their dawning wisdom, no longer behaving like roaming animals at one with nature, but divided from nature by reason and self-consciousness.

In any case, science is the culmination not just of European cultures, but of civilizational, hubristic creativity. Science is Faustian, promethean, and satanic in that what we’re after is knowledge to make us invulnerable at the expense of the natural order.

The mythic character of Satan is a fallen angel who rebelled against the creator God and who seeks to undermine the Creator’s plan. Minus the mythic overlay, of course, we observe that there’s no intelligent designer and no divine plan, but just a horrific, absurdly headless, pointless, yet perilous universe which we can mitigate with science and technology.

The search for ultimate knowledge stems from this civilizational myth and from the fear, wild creativity, and love of humanity that inspired it. Scientific knowledge can therefore be only as final and complete as the culture that gives the best theory its purpose.