What is the Nature of Ultimate Knowledge?

Pragmatism, pure science, and the role of absolute knowledge

What are the prospects of anyone having ultimate, complete knowledge of the breadth and inclinations of reality, or a theory of everything?

We can answer that question by addressing a related one about the nature of pure science. We need to understand what knowledge, in general, is to know whether it makes sense to ask whether we can know what the universe really is.

Pure and Applied Science

What, then, is pure science in contrast to applied science? There are several ways of drawing this distinction, as this Encyclopedia article points out. Pure science is the basic kind that’s meant to explain a natural domain, whereas the applied kind takes as its starting point that basic knowledge and uses it to develop technologies to alter nature.

Psychologically, there’s supposed to be a difference in motive between the two kinds of science: the pure scientist acts only out of the scientific interest in understanding the world, whereas the applied scientist wants to use science to solve certain problems.

Sociologically, pure science is based in the academy, whereas applied science is practiced in commercial or governmental institutions that permit the scientists less investigative freedom.

But the latter two points can mislead us about the nature of knowledge because motives are extraneous to the models, theories, or statements that represent and enable us to understand the facts. After all, the motives can change.

For example, a scientist may intend only to understand how some natural process works, but that knowledge may prove useful in solving social problems. Any piece of pure science is subject to applications, which is to say that all knowledge is potentially useful, depending on our ingenuity and the needs that arise. Likewise, a scientist might intend to develop products to serve an industry, but stumble on a theory of how a natural system works.

The models remain whatever they are, regardless of how we arrive at them. Certain motives may be more likely to arrive at certain ends, but the question is whether the ends or purposes of pure and applied knowledge are so different.

If science has a different purpose than government or industry, what is that “purer” aim? What is it to seek to understand how nature works? Scientists understand the world by testing their guesses against observation and proving the mettle of their theoretical frameworks by making further predictions that can likewise be tested.

Science is a little like prophecy, then, except that prophecy would be magic and based on no rigorous knowledge of divine matters, and whereas the prophet hides behind obscure or ambiguous, poetic language to avoid being shown up by contrary turns of events, scientists show their work and make precise, empirical statements that can be tested. Nevertheless, scientists confirm that they understand something by showing that they can predict the thing’s future states, based on their models and laws.

The Causal Role of Knowledge

We can be more precise, though, about the scientific point of understanding how natural systems develop under different conditions.

Of course, science is the consummation of reason, and reason is an evolved trait and a function of animal intelligence. We cope with the environment not just by slavishly reacting to stimuli but by formulating mental intermediaries and pondering how the environment works indirectly, as we reflect on our concepts and thoughts. All such intelligence is geared towards enabling the animals to survive and to thrive by fulfilling their interests.

Human reason has grown beyond that initial purview, since we’ve used our intelligence to build unnatural, artificial worlds and have turned reason back onto itself, posing philosophical questions that transcend the animal concerns of our biological life cycle.

Still, these considerations raise the question of whether there can be such a thing as perfectly useless knowledge, which is to say knowledge that isn’t embedded in a causal role that’s directed towards achieving some end or other. Again, whether knowledge is academic or commercial isn’t decisive in this context since either kind potentially suits the interests of the other. But the question now is whether there’s a more fundamental, indispensable interest at stake in the pursuit of knowledge.

Again, we know the evolutionary interest: intelligence increases the species’ chance of surviving long enough to perpetuate its kind by producing another generation. Given the anomalousness of our species and our domination of the planet in the Anthropocene, we should wonder whether even pure human knowledge is instrumental in that it’s always directed towards achieving some end. If even so-called pure knowledge were instrumental or teleological (purpose-driven), this would inform the nature of ultimate knowledge.

There are numerous contenders for such ultimate aims, each contributing to an answer to the question of human life’s overall meaning. We can say knowledge is supposed to empower us or to enable us to dominate the world; knowledge might be meant to humble us or alternatively to facilitate our arrogance; knowledge might turn us into immortal gods or make us foolishly self-destructive; knowledge might incline us to create a replacement species, such as a race of artificially-intelligent machines that will wipe us out or render us obsolete, so that we act now only as a chrysalis.

But suppose there’s no such purpose. How might perfectly useless knowledge be implemented in a natural system? After all, our theories and models are generated by our brain and by language, which mesh with various other systems such that we can speak of the probable end of their interaction. Our brain is relatively autonomous, as far as natural things go, but the brain is still a control center for an organic creature. We can override our personal concerns as we serve institutions or some other higher good, but the point is that we think in terms of beliefs and desires, truths and goals.

Likewise, language is socially and culturally determined, and societies are certainly goal-driven. We’re explicit about those goals in our political, religious, professional, artistic, and various other discourses.

Useless knowledge, then, would have to arrive out of indifference and have no relevant or intriguing implications. Yet as soon as that knowledge is encoded in the brain as a pattern of neural activity, or written in some public format, the knowledge becomes part of the human system, and that system is self-directed.

Animal behavior is dictated largely by natural selection and thus by nature’s absurd, frenzied, and tragic creativity. By contrast, personal behavior is based on our self-awareness, imagination, relatively high intelligence, and free will. Everything we do deliberately or systematically, then, has a human-given purpose. Mind you, this isn’t to speak only of subjective, arbitrary, or mere idiosyncratic purposes, since some of our ends may be unconscious.

In any case, in so far as science or human reason generally is fundamental to certain cognitive and social systems, we can generalize about the evolution of those systems and therefore posit a probable end of pure knowledge.

This is to say that the notion of inherently useless knowledge is oxymoronic because human knowledge has a causal role. Useless or “pure” knowledge would have to exist in a vacuum rather than being integrated into our self-directed psychological and social systems.

Empirical Knowledge

Now we can apply the above to the question of ultimate knowledge by building up from the more mundane kind.

Suppose you know something about rain. What, then, is the causal role of that knowledge? That is, what exactly is that knowledge and what is it for? Roughly speaking, your knowledge would be a model of how rain works, which enables you to deal humanly — based on self-awareness, imagination, creativity, intelligence, and freedom — with that part of the environment.

This knowledge would be based on direct encounters with rain, which is to say that this knowledge is empirical. We can branch out and inquire about related, more abstract phenomena. For example, we can work towards understanding weather patterns more generally or about the planet that hosts those patterns on its surface.

Either way, empirical knowledge is divisive, since we focus on the rain, for example, and ignore everything else as though rain existed in a vacuum. Yet rain interacts with other weather systems, and although the Earth exists in what we call “empty space,” our planet is isolated only for most human purposes. Major meteor impacts happen rarely enough that we can ignore them. Likewise, the sun’s impacts on us are so constant that we can take them for granted in addressing narrower questions.

Moreover, for thousands of years, questions about global or cosmic phenomena would have been speculative, because there was no means of acquiring even indirect access to them. Now we have satellites and computers and a global civilization to provide reliable answers to such questions. We know about the planet because we’ve been off-world and have photographed the Earth in its relation to the solar system, and we’ve sent out satellites to look at other stars and galaxies.

Our knowledge, therefore, can be direct or indirect and the indirect kind is viable because of the technological extensions of our senses. Without those extensions, we’d be speculating or organizing our knowledge based on aesthetic or more dubious intuitions about how the world should be.

Ultimate Knowledge

Let’s finally pose the question: What could be the use or causal role of ultimate knowledge of the nature of reality? In attempting to extend our empirical knowledge that far, we run up against two problems.

First, the model of reality couldn’t proceed by analyzing the subject matter into parts, ignoring the foreign systems that are of lesser interest. Rain can be mentally divided from snow or from wind, but everything we perceive would be infused with whatever is most real. Alternatively, all would be part of the whole, and it makes no sense to speak of isolating the whole from something else. There would be nothing apart from the universe.

Thus, if empirical knowledge consists of a reductive model that divides and conquers, as it were, there can be no empirical knowledge of the ultimate constituents of matter and energy or of the universe as a whole.

Second, we’d need direct or indirect (technological) access to these final objects of inquiry. The more tenuous our physical grasp of something, the more speculative or otherwise dubious our understanding of what we’re talking about.

For these familiar reasons, ultimate knowledge has typically been couched in mythological and religious language. Just as the unvisited parts of the world were represented on old maps by such vague warnings as “Here be dragons,” we posited gods or spirits to answer our ultimate questions about how the universe came to be or why we’re here.

Scientific cosmologists use exotic mathematical reasoning and powerful technologies to probe the universe at high energy levels that resemble the universe’s earliest conditions, close to the Big Bang. Again, we can ask about the purpose of that cosmology. After all, a physical theory of everything would compete with a religious myth that likewise packages human knowledge and experience.

How would we show that the naturalistic answer to life, the universe, and everything is superior, say, to a monotheistic one? The latter would be incoherent and archaic, of course, but so would be the former, as I show elsewhere.

Again, empirical, naturalistic, or scientific reasoning consists in analyzing and dividing the territory, but that can’t be done when confronting the ultimate subject matter. Indeed, “ultimate subject matter” is oxymoronic. Whatever the universe as a whole or the ultimate consistent of matter is, that X can’t be more matter in so far as matter is understood as stuff that can be further divided. The whole of the universe can be divided into its many parts, but that whole wouldn’t itself be a part of a greater whole. Likewise, the rock-bottom level of matter couldn’t be scientifically explained by positing yet further conditions, elements, or forces, since there would be no such resources.

The physicist’s theory of everything might tidy up and tie together all our other scientific theories, but the monotheistic myth would prevail in the normative domain, unifying not so much our beliefs but our desires and interests, by providing an ultimate answer that guides our choice of how we should live.

We’d say that God created the universe and expects us to be good. That myth might be illogical and childish, but the cynicism required to condescend to religious people isn’t conducive to a well-functioning society. You’d have to keep that secular enlightenment to a minimum or risk mass depression and anxiety.

Thus, religions have their causal roles too. This isn’t to suggest the myths are empirically true or factual. But neither are scientific models factual in the naïve sense that they agree with or somehow picture or correspond with what they’re about. At this point of the argument, we’ve arrived at a pragmatic account of empirical truth, according to which empirical knowledge is a way of working with mental or linguistic intermediaries to manage our environment.

As to a more precise account of that management, I’ve referred to the evolutionary function, to empowerment, and to certain ethical implications. But perhaps the key factor is the one that distinguishes ultimate rational knowledge from religious myth. The former would have universal technological potency, meaning that scientific knowledge of ultimate reality, of the universe as a whole or of the essential nature of matter would enable us to edit, destroy, or recreate natural reality, at least in principle. By contrast, myths and religious creeds and institutions are useful in stabilizing society, in managing us rather than the world at large.

The picture begins to come together: the act of acquiring empirical knowledge is the original sin, as it were, of alienating ourselves from the world by pretending the world can be divided into isolated pieces which we can study and simplify. We use those models to generate technological applications that modify natural processes. A model of how rain works gives us the power, in theory, to change how the planet rains. A model of what the universe really (fundamentally or ultimately) is would amount to the potential to do to the universe what we’re presently doing to the wilderness on Earth, to humanize or to artificialize all of nature.

If so-called pure science is the sin that results in alienation, applied science is the cure we think can redeem us. Religions tend to be anthropocentric and therefore infantilizing rather than alienating, and they organize society in some uplifting way rather than attempting to test or to apply intuitive personifications as though they were objective or rigorous.

Some Disturbing Implications

This analysis raises a disturbing question. Assuming we’re not the only intelligent life in the universe, and vastly superior intellects have existed in the millions of years prior to our evolution, did those species discover the nature of reality? If so, why didn’t they apply that knowledge to alter the reality code?

Perhaps they did so and what we take to be nature is only the artifact of their endeavor. Perhaps the Big Bang marks the point of a universal intervention, in which case the foregoing analysis might link up with the simulation hypothesis.

Assuming there was no such intervention and yet statistically there should have been, by way of answering the Fermi paradox — assuming that is, there has been another hyperintelligent species and yet reality hasn’t been universally transformed or terminated, we may be led to conclude that empirical explanations are endless because there’s no bedrock reality.

This would entail that nature facilitates the sin of hubris and punishes that sin continually with alienation. The Luciferian ethos of science would be rewarded with an endlessly divisible subject matter, with no rescue from our sense of homelessness or from the illusion of our dominance over nature.