THE ENLIGHTENMENT IDEAL IS AT WORK, full force, in David Chalmers’s book Constructing the World.1 Indeed, this book is an exemplar of the Enlightenment ideal. Here I briefly discuss how his conclusions are incompatible with the existence of the excellent beauties.
Chalmers’s central tool is the notion of scrutability, which is just comprehensibility. (Scrutability is introduced as a technical term so Chalmers can use it as he needs without importing a lot of implicit definitions and extra notions.) If we leave out the technical philosophy, Chalmers’s claim is this: there is a compact class of truths such that knowing those truths suffices to know all other truths about our universe.2 Chalmers calls this a scrutability thesis. Chalmers is asserting that knowledge of some relatively small set of basic truths about our universe (the compact class of truths) can serve as a basis for knowledge of all other truths about the universe. He says: “To a first approximation, these [scrutability] theses suggest that knowledge of the base truths about the world might serve as a basis for knowledge of all truths about the world” (p. 7).
We know from chapter 10 that there are excellent beauties, truths that we know but that we don’t really comprehend. Quantum mechanics is crawling with such truths, and, as discussed in the text, infinity defies our ordinary notion of “is contained in.” (If something X fits inside of something else, Y, then X is smaller than Y. The even numbers clearly fit inside the set of all the counting numbers. Ergo, the set of even numbers must be smaller than the set of counting numbers. But it is not.)
This is a good place to introduce our own technical term: Grok (from Robert Heinlein’s famous novel Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961). To grok something is to understand it thoroughly, intuitively, even empathically (that is, by empathy). More metaphorically, “grok” means to be one with or one with the observed. (In the novel, “grok” has a literal meaning, too: “to drink.”)3
We grok a lot of things. We grok the notion “contained in”: “If something X fits inside of something else, Y, then X is smaller than Y.” We grok both the notion of consciousness and the notion of being physical. Yet we do not grok how the even numbers are strictly a subset of the counting numbers while both sets are the exact same size. In general, we do not grok infinity. We do not grok how a physical being such as an Earthling could be conscious, which we clearly are. Nor, if we go the other way, do we grok how consciousness could be physical. (In the case of consciousness, it is fair to say that we don’t even comprehend in an ordinary sense how consciousness could be physical.) We understand quantum mechanics to a very robust extent, but we don’t grok it. My point here is that in its ordinary sense, we might understand the excellent beauties, but we don’t grok them.
What then of Chalmers’s scrutability thesis? Chalmers has not distinguished between understanding something and grokking it. The claim I’m making here is that this distinction is crucial to seeing the reality of how humans are embedded in, exist in, this universe. This distinction is crucial to understanding what humans are and the universe we are in: we grok some things, but not other things.
We might phrase the problem I am raising this way: the universe is perhaps scrutable, but it is not grokkable.
The parts that are not grokkable contain the excellent beauties, the mysteries that possess excellent beauty, to put it slightly more formally. Yes, we understand things, complex and difficult things. But there are many things we don’t thoroughly, intuitively, and empathically understand. There are many things we cannot be one with. All of these are ungrokkable things. And some of these ungrokkables are beautiful both intrinsically and simply because they are ungrokkable.
And what of the Enlightenment ideal? It fails, too, to distinguish between comprehending via science and rationality and grokking via science and rationality. We already know that the Enlightenment ideal is only partially true for ordinary, mundane comprehending. We now also know that it is certainly not true of grokking.4