On Limited Minds

I often get the argument "this is outside the limits of our mind" thrown at me in some form or another, usually towards the end of a debate about something spiritual or philosophical, like your garden variety "where did we come from?", "how did it all start?", "where does the universe end", or "what are the smallest particles" discussions.

I like to call that one the nuclear argument, because it does to debates what nuclear bombs do to wars: forcefully draw them to the wrong conclusion. The nuclear argument is typically launched as a hail-Mary move to end a discussion when it gets too chilly outdoors or after having one drink too many gets people in the mood for dancing rather than debating, or otherwise when the discussion starts to seriously challenge the people's fundamental premises that are presumed to be solid but are often way more shaky than they care to admit

This here is my humble attempt at disarming the nuclear argument.

First I want to try to define a "limit". What do we exactly mean when we say that something is limited in the intuitive sense of the word? A few thought experiments are in order:

You walk into a nice bistro somewhere in a crowded neighborhood in Paris. Like always, they have seating indoors as well as outside by the patio. Your where-to-sit options are twofold: indoors or patio. Now suppose you notice that they also have tables upstairs in an open-air roof level. You'd much rather sit there but too bad they don't have any free tables up there. Your options are now again twofold: indoors or patio. In the second scenario, you might say your options are limited, yet in the first scenario you wouldn't feel that way. Notice that you had exactly the same two options in either case. What then makes the second set of options limited? It must be the presence of a third conceivable option, one that is available to other people but not to you. In a very real sense, it is the physical presence of a table and some chairs upstairs that renders your two ground level options limited. The limitedness property of your ground level options is therefore -and this is key- not a salient property of these options, but rather a connection between these options and something else that lies entirely outside of them

Now you're a fish swimming in a shallow corner of lake Geneva, close to the busy downtown streets. So close, say, that you can hear the noise of cars passing by, and tourists shooting, laughing, and generally having a good time. As a sophisticated fish, you're curious to understand the pattern behind this noise. You're pretty sure it's not random, there are patterns and bursts that lead you to believe that something interesting is going on. You can easily conclude that the sounds are coming from above, since unlike your ability to move, your ability to locate the origin of sounds is not limited to the confines of the lake. Now being the curious fish that you are, you try to follow the sounds up to the surface. As soon as you reach the surface, your motor disability stops you in your tracks. You just can't get your body to move outside the lake no matter how hard you try. It is at this moment that you realize that your motor ability is limited. Notice again that without the noise it would have been impossible for you to distinguish between a reality where there is an outside to the lake plus a limitation to your ability to move, and another contending reality where the lake is everything that exists. The noise is truly your only viable disambiguator in this case, and without it, any argument among fellow fish about the limits of their motor function is moot. Without empirical evidence traceable to outside the lake, speculation on the existence of an outside world would have been just as baseless as speculating a lake of milk or honey. Note that baseless doesn't mean wrong, but rather simply unwarranted, unfounded, and therefore doesn't have better chances of being right than any other random hypothesis


Now fast forward to the human race:

I don't know about you, but I for one am incapable of holding illogical thoughts. For example, I can think of a unicorn, but I can't think of a man who is tall and short at the same time (neither of those exist, but one is imaginable and the other isn't). Is this an example of mental limitation? Well, as in the case of the lake or the restaurant, this isn't a question about my mind as much as it is about the world outside my mind. If I can demonstrate by empirical evidence that a being exists for which this thought is possible, yet for me it remains impossible, then I would be entirely warranted in drawing conclusions about my own mind's limitations. If not, not.

Without that hypothetical being, no argument about mind limitation can be credibly proposed. This is precisely because we would have no way to disambiguate between a reality where tall-short thoughts cannot exist, and a reality where such thoughts can exist, yet our minds are too limited to hold them. This is why, whenever someone launches the nuclear argument my way, I am quick to retaliate by bringing up the disambiguation dilemma. It usually goes like clockwork:

"Life after death exists, but is beyond our limited minds' ability to imagine"
"but what would be the observable difference from our viewpoint between a reality where life after death doesn't exist, and one where it exists but we're too limited to imagine it"
"there would be no observable difference, but that doesn't mean that what I'm proposing it wrong"
"I'm not saying it's wrong, just baseless. Its just as unfounded as proposing that "

At this point, depending on who you're talking to, they might splash you with their drink (never wear anything valuable to serious debates), invoke the Belief trump card (shake their hand goodbye and ask them to call you when they're ready to descend from their ivory tower of belief and play in the level playing field of logic), or they might soldier on this way:

"your proposal is just as baseless, since there would be no observable difference to support it either"

To which of course you reply:

"but I'm not proposing anything at all. The non existence of something we never observed is not a proposal, it's the default state of affairs. It is you who is proposing something, and therefore the burden of proof lies entirely on you."

That usually ends it. To date i haven't heard of a good comeback for this counterattack :)

However it is important to keep in mind that I'm not implying here that our minds don't have limits. Indeed, many limits have already been proven to exist. For example, our ability to crunch numbers mentally is severely limited. We know that since there exists today (artificial) beings capable of crunching numbers at much better speed and accuracy. It's just that when it comes to potential limitations of our thought process itself, we're just going to have to hold off speculation until we run into (or create) beings capable of thoughts that we cannot conjure. I find our constant reluctance as a culture to hold off on speculation before we gather sufficient facts something of a pathology. Really, people, it's okay to not know, and hold off on an answer till we find out more

Finally, if we are going to speculate without basis, where the options are to assume a limited or unlimited thought capability, I'd much rather go with the option that pushes me to think harder about the world's mysteries, rather than the one that prompts me to shrug my shoulders and give up. If you think about it, the nuclear argument is such a defeatist approach to life. It's a call to surrender, a mental laisse-tomber. I wonder now many advances we would have missed out on as a society had we stopped at such speculated limits in the past. Would we have landed on the moon? Or traveled through the skies at a thousandfold speed of cheetahs? Or furnished the compiled knowledge of the entire human race to every human being with an Internet connection? If there is anything we can learn from the past, it would be that limits have always been temporary. They exist only to be broken. If we do have a purpose then it would be to break limits! That's why I am so passionate about the subject. And so please don't take it personally, but the next time you try to inform me about my own limits, I'm going to take it as a challenge!