Jargogled Impressions.

I often wonder about things I barely know anything about. We don’t know if we are indeed in a simulation built by a super-intelligent creator. We don’t know whether or not free will exists or we are bound by the songs of the cells instead. We don’t know what we don’t know, even in the immediate context of our environments. We don’t know what we are capable of, because of the fear and the passivity that surround us.

Some of these unknowns will likely stay so and are outside the realms of human understanding. They do serve a purpose though, in that they fuel our imaginations, serve as rough analogies, and offer up tons of enticing plot points for the nerdy authors of sci-fi lore. The dark forest hypothesis, the Dyson sphere, the infinite improbability drive, transhumanism, and of course the tropes around multi-verse, time travel, singularity, and simulation hypothesis. These unknowns have an autotelic nature, in that, the chase for understanding them is in itself the desired outcome in most cases.

There are yet another set of unknowns that we know we must understand and that can help deepen our understanding of the universe, solve fundamental puzzles, and make breakthroughs that have enormous practical implications. These unknowns become more specific and targeted, with a more utilitarian bent to it as they can help us make major technological breakthroughs. Unknowns such as the Riemann hypothesis, p versus np problem or Navier stokes existence in mathematics. Or unknowns such as the theory of everything, dark matter/energy, or quantum gravity in Physics right up to the origin of life via non-living matter.  The list of these known unknowns goes on across the different disciplines of human knowledge.

Other unknowns are within our reach, if only we applied ourselves and tried to learn about it. But these are either bound knowledge, applied skills, or inherently subjective understandings of things we are curious about and generally are keen to learn more about. They are curiosities that we meet outside the realms of our everyday lives and yet they present themselves often through the zeitgeist, the vox populi, the media, or our passions/interests. How do the ultra-rich live, how do they think? What does the day look like for someone like Elon Musk as he skirts between managing humanity’s aspirations across interstellar travel, human cognition, terrestrial motion, sustainable energy, etc. What went on with Schubert as he composed his divine inspirations? How do companies and organizations and societies and countries succeed? What is AI and what are the implications (that we know of) of LLMs in the modern and post-modern world? There are books one can read to know, even if second-hand to get a decent sense of these unknowns, enough to make you dangerous, but anything more can shove you back into the realm of helpless novice (the so-called knowledge chasm).  Increasingly, there are podcasts you can listen in on, as if eavesdropping on the experts, to satiate your curiosity. The tenets of ‘edu-tainment’ are built around this category of unknowns.

Then there are unknowns that demand immersive experience, even if un-attainable for most parts, versus second-hand commentary. What’s it like to step onto the tallest peak on earth? What is it like to feel and absorb the adulation and affection of millions and billions? What is it like to hold the black box in hand? What is it like to step into hostile territory not knowing whether you will come out alive? What is it like to feel really trapped in the systems of human endeavor? What is it like to experiment on psychedelics? What is it really like to rid ourselves of mimetic desires?

Then there are unknowns that traverse the dimensions of time and of probabilities. These are the ‘what if…’ questions we often ask ourselves to dissect our actions, our choices, our preferences, our outbursts, our communications, our interactions. The actions of external systems bundled with our internal conflicts and choices make for a rich lineage of events, some actual, others imaginary and extrapolatory, that we sometimes partake in for purely academic, if not epistolatory interests.

In our social lives, we meet with another set of unknowns – I call it the empathy barrier. Most call it ‘theory of the mind’. What is going on in someone else’s mind is a pursuit that most of us chase in our day to day lives. In our interactions, whether with a family member, a colleague, a manager, a friend, a stranger, a call center agent – we are constantly playing a game with the other person, adjusting and modulating our ways to what works while just performing a fermi estimation of the goings on in that other’s mind. These unknowns are pregnant with possibilities and are exploited by the novelists and the ‘creative writers’ of personal essays and memoirs.

All the different categories of unknowns – spread across the modalities of atoms, bits, and cells, whether macro or micro – fill the spaces in the world around us, if only we could look. A thrill in their chase is likely the answer to some of the most persistent and unanswerable dilemmas of our time here on earth. Even if we don’t get to an answer, the pursuit in itself can be a satisfying, enduring endeavor. In it, we can and should direct our psychic energy, lest we let cognitive entropy rule us and randomize our behavior.

There’s this line in the amazing, illustrated kid’s book “Here we are” by Oliver Jeffers that I like to read to Amara and that I sometimes reflect upon – “Though we have come a long way, we haven’t quite worked everything out, so there is plenty left for you to do. You will figure lots of things out for yourself, just remember to leave notes for everyone else”.

So much is buried in these lines!   We may have achieved much, as a species. But there is still a vast space for rich exploration, for contemplation and for action. As an adventure to figure some of these out, they beckon us and our future generations. As an adventure they are best served, as antidotes to the vicissitudes of daily life. As a collective adventure, they are best pursued, so everyone else can make sense of it.