Wednesday, January 3, 2018

2/1/18: Limits to Knowledge or Infinity of Complexity?


Occasionally, mass media produces journalism worth reading not to extract a momentary piece of information (the news) of relevance to our world, but to remind ourselves of the questions, quests, phenomena and thoughts worth carrying with us through our conscious lives (assuming we still have these lives left). 

With that intro, a link to just such a piece of journalism: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/12/limits-of-science/547649/. This piece, published in The Atlantic, is worth reading. For at least two reasons:

Reason 1: it posits the key question of finiteness of human capacity to know; and
Reason 2: it posits a perfect explanation as to why truly complex, non-finite (or non-discrete) phenomena are ultimately not knowable in perfect sense.

Non-discrete/non-finite phenomena belong human and social fields of inquiry (art, mathematics, philosophy, and, yes, economics, psychology, sociology etc). They are defined by the absence of the end-of-the-game rule. Chess, go, any and all games invented by us, humans, have a logical conclusion - a rule that defines the end of the game. They are discrete (in terms of ability to identify steps that sequentially lead to the end-rule realisation) and they are finite (because they always, by definition of each game, result in either a draw or a win/loss - they are bounded by the end-of-game rule). 

Knowledge is, well, we do not know what it is. And hence, we do not know if the end-of-game rule even exists, let alone what it might be. 


Worth a read, folks.

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