Some of my previous posts had featured the limits of human cognition. It seems to me that every thinking machine has finite capacity. Our brains of limited size. Working memory utilizes a finite number or engrams, units of memory, which can only be organized and related in a finite number of ways. A larger brain with more memory stores, and processing speed, may connect disparate concepts faster than our own brain.   One with more algorithms or processing schemas, might be able to tackle harder questions. Chess  computers have it over human players in their ability to look as the consequences of a position, more moves into the future,  and at greater speed than humans.  As has  often been said, chimps have the faintest notion of the square root of 2 and humans have their limitations as well. To think that we can figure everything out is hubris.

Having said that, it is true that in recent decades our processing capacity has moved far outside the confines of our own skulls. Considering the Internet alone, we humans are capable of networking so that each of our personal cognitive capacities acts merely as a node in a huge cognitive system and is no longer an entirety of mental processing. We are ramifying mental capacities as never before and no one would claim that humans are limited by their own biological mental computational capacities. All of use super fast calculating machines, and memory storage devices that bootstrap mental work. It is just the same thing as noting that we were not designed to fly yet we do quite frequently, capitalizing on the fruits of human invention, the same reason, that we radiated out of Africa and now populate all ecosystems in the world. We do so by bootstrapping capability or inventiveness of our brains. Even so, our cognitive capacity is still  not limitless.

As for myself, I frequently encounter concepts beyond my own understanding. Just recently scientists near the South Pole detected gravitational waves, felt to be a fingerprint of early Inflation of the universe. I have always been fascinated by cosmology, I believe, in just the same way that the ancients looked in wonder at the sky. I can recall exactly when I first came upon the idea of inflation. I was reading an article in Scientific American (written for mortals, not physicists)  by Alan Guth aboard a plane, in the late 1980s. My understanding was the universe had been found to be expanding  ever since the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. But there seemed to be some discrepancies of apparent size of the universe given the velocity of expansion. Therefore, it was hypothesized that their may have been period of super rapid expansion of Everything in the early life of the universe, which was termed inflation. It happens that right now I am in the middle of another book written for civilians by Max Tegmark, “Our Mathematical Universe” which explains simply for the non-physicist many of these same concepts. Tegmark maintains that the original Big Bang Theory may have discrepancies that are difficult to explain.  Our universe has been found to be flatter than it ought to be and less irregular or lumpy. Inflation allows physicists to account for these discrepancies partly in smoothing some of this out.  Now, the ‘smoking gun’ for Inflation has been discovered in gravitational waves.  In physics, I am not a professional.  But when I originally read Guth’s commentary over 20 years ago I thought it was ridiculous. You have a Big Bang Theory which fails to account  for some characteristics such as the size, flatness and lumpiness of the Cosmos. It doesn’t work, so then you come up with an ex post facto explanation which purports to smooth everything out. And to boot, the theory is quite unattractive, echoes of epicycles of the Ptolemaic theories that placed that earth at the center of the solar system, sort of sounds like we need some basic change in orientation.

But Inflation appears to be true. What’s more, Tegmark puts it in a different light. Inflation is not something that happened shortly after the initial Bing Bang explosion. According to him, our cosmos came to be at the tail end of an inflationary epoch in our particular part of Things while eternal inflation persists elsewhere. And as seems to be frequently mentioned in publications recently, I have read this in many places, our own observable universe is only one of an infinite variety of universes, which must exist given the proof of the inflationary model and for a host of other reasons.

I have to admit I can’t get my mind around very much of this. I am happy to hear that our Universe with all its matter dark and light,  and of dark energy,  didn’t literally expand from a volume smaller than an atom. My best understanding from Tegmark is that all of this came to be as things expanded practically out of nothing. How could Everything as huge as it is, have one been in a Singularity smaller than an atom? I can’t grasp it.

Suffice it to say that all of these considerations are profoundly counterintuitive. I do understand that much of the beauty of science is discovering truths that we could never even dream of or understand without science.   And as I have said before in these pages, one’s inability to understand something does not make it untrue, but more often than not, points to one’s own cognitive insufficiency – to an extent. How then is the skeptic to distinguish between what is true and counterintuitive or perhaps beyond human’s capacity to understand on one side, and the patently false, ridiculous on the other? Not a trivial question.

Finally, getting to ideas, a lot more mundane but of more immediate importance to me personally, just as I recall first reading Alan Guth, I can remember as if it was yesterday, when exactly I was struck by my own mental incapacity. It happened when I was about 12 years old and I was outside my parent’s house and thinking. In an instant I realized that there was no way to get my mind around, to fully understand, my own mortality. I couldn’t picture or imagine my own death, try as I might, a state of complete blackness. Part of the difficulty is that there is no blackness or any other experience. You don’t experience anything. And it doesn’t help to consider the period of time before you came to be as being equivalent as after you started to live.  As a person who enjoys thinking and experiencing as I do, I could never conceive fully of dying. I have felt ever since that there has to be some form of life after death even though I have only ever seen evidence entirely to the contrary. Of course, I have had conversations with very many people about this. Most have no trouble with the concept of their own deaths at all and some would even end their own lives. It seems to me that those people have not thought of the problem of their own mortality at sufficient depth to determine that they could have no idea of all of the ramifications. Recently I have come to think part of the difficulty might be in our understanding of the arrow of time. In studying time I might have a different view of the end of life.

I was nearly the same age, about 12, when right out of the blue, i was struck in just the same way with the fallacy of free will. I came to the firm conclusion that the future is determined entirely by antecedents.  I was Newtonian then, even though I didn’t own a pool table. The Bible, the Hebrew Bible particularly, the way I read it, was strongly in the camp of free will. Therefore it was wrong. Maybe people in the days it was written, couldn’t manage determinism. I didn’t know why. But over the next few years, with further reading,  I became convinced of the opposite. I believe in free will again, thanks largely to the influence of physics. There is mostly automatic type behavior and thought but there is some layer of free will in human and animal behavior, I am now convinced.  More universally, any of us can witness the struggle of biological organisms, even one celled creatures, to preserve their own life, whatever that is. I gave up determinism then, but to this day, I can’t get my mind around the concept of death.