What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine?
Abstract: In this essay I will consider a sequence of questions. The first questions concern the biological function of intelligence in general, and cognitive prostheses of human intelligence in particular. These will lead into questions concerning human language, perhaps the most important cognitive prosthesis humanity has ever developed. While it is traditional to rhapsodize about the cognitive power encapsulated in human language, I will emphasize how horribly limited human language is - and therefore how limited our cognitive abilities are, despite their being augmented with language. This will lead to questions of whether human mathematics, being ultimately formulated in terms of human language, is also deeply limited. I will then combine these questions to pose a partial, sort-of, sideways answer to the guiding concern of this essay: what we can ever discern about that we cannot even conceive?
- Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s “strange inversion of reasoning”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (2009), no. Supplement 1, 10061–10065.
- Hugh Everett, “Relative state” formulation of quantum mechanics, The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (2015), 141–150.
- Max Tegmark, Is “the theory of everything” merely the ultimate ensemble theory?, Annals of Physics 270 (1998), no. 1, 1–51.
Paper Prompts
Sign up for free to create and run prompts on this paper using GPT-5.
Top Community Prompts
Collections
Sign up for free to add this paper to one or more collections.