Can Reality be Understood?

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The history of humanity, however else one might describe it, is one of humans struggling to understand reality.  Since it is doubtful that any other species reflects as deeply as we do on existential questions, we might say that such reflection is one of the defining determinants of human existence. 

There are a number of ways in which we humans have advanced our understanding of reality.  We are tempted to say that science is one path, perhaps the premier path, but we must bear in mind that the formal practice of science is a very recent development in the timeline of history.  The earliest humans embarked on the path of science at or before the mastery of fire, which by the way, is a far more complex technology than we credit.  Try starting a fire without some manmade artifact such as a match, lighter or lens.  Lost hikers have died in the wilderness due to the lack of this skill. 

Once the scientific method was formalized, knowledge accelerated like a rocket, in some cases, literally.  This is not to say that in previous millennia, humans lacked our intellectual capacity.  They certainly demonstrated genius in the many technologies and other developments that enabled civilization to arise and prosper, setting the ground for today’s society.  Formal science did, however, stitch together the eclectic collections of the various disciplines, so that an obscure development in one technology can be combined with a completely separate field, producing a multiplier effect across the entire spectrum of science and technology. 

Unfortunately, the success of the scientific method, for all its liberating effects, has also led us down a dead-end alley.  There are many ways in which this can be demonstrated.  For example, modern weapons of war include nuclear, biologic, chemical, and even environmental techniques, which can foreseeably reduce civilization to a few surviving savages, or even annihilate us completely. 

A less obvious, but perhaps just as drastic way, is that science has led many of us to conclude that reality is entirely physical.  Science itself has become so revered, that one of the most damning remarks that can be made of an idea is that it is “unscientific.”  Unscientific ideas are considered to be the province of fools and fraudsters, of people who are either innocently gullible, or demonically evil.

Yet, even scientists themselves engage in activities which can be explained scientifically only by the most convoluted means.  Art, for example, which has been around since at least the cave-man era, is an aesthetic part of the human experience.  It could possibly be explained in material terms, but at the distant end of such a winding road, one does not really find art as we experience it.

Ethics are a huge part of science, at least in its formal mechanisms, but in the short-term, at least, some scientists have found success by violating the rules of ethics.  Are ethics a barrier to understanding reality, or an enhancement?

Interestingly, as scientists discover more and more about the cosmos, including about the quantum atom, they find ever more daunting barriers to further progress.  The discoveries of dark matter and dark energy pose not merely difficult subjects of study, but controversies as well.  For example, not all physicists accept the existence of either.  In cosmology, it seems that the precise tuning of the universe to host life, or even to exist at all in a coherent state, has been so difficult to explain, that physicists have resorted to skating on the thin ice of the “many universes” hypothesis, which is at present untestable.

As physics drifts into ever more intangible realms, it is often called upon to explain a growing number of unconventional observations that are made by credible witnesses.  Some of them may have perfectly physicalist explanations, such as the sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs, or in popular parlance, flying saucers).  Even more intangible is the realm of parapsychology, mind-reading, ghosts, and similar subjects, which are widely dismissed as deceptions, unintentional or otherwise.

Whether the barriers to further understanding involve dark matter, string theory, or the origin of the cosmos, or less physicalist subjects, it becomes reasonable to propose that there is a final limit to human understanding of reality. 

This final limit could be encountered in many forms.  It is unlikely that one day we will reach the proverbial brick wall, where scientists say, well, that’s it, we can go no further.  More likely, the barrier could be reached in increments.  The farther scientists go, the more uncertainty they will encounter, a state of science in which there are many conflicting theories, each of them plausible, but none of them provable.

It could also be reached when scientists, for example, find that every explanation they can devise for “consciousness,” falls short.  Clearly, that could lead researchers into a proverbial swamp in which every pathway they try leaves them increasingly inhibited from further understanding.  Can conscious beings understand consciousness itself?

Religion, it is said, may be the final refuge of scoundrels.  Surely, religion suffers from the same maladies that afflict other areas of human endeavor, including falsehood and fraud.

If we can, however, separate the popular notion of religion from a less well studied phenomenon, we can ask whether, in the final analysis, we must rely on divine revelation.

Such a notion is immediately attacked by skeptics, primarily with the question of, why doesn’t God speak to us in ways that are undeniable?

There is no answer that will satisfy the skeptics, but at the same time, there is no denial which will dissuade those who report having a close, personal relationship with God.  For determined skeptics, no explanation will suffice, while for others, none is needed.

One thing must be considered, however:  is the path we are presently upon leading us to destruction?  If so, then what other path might we explore?