The Void Beyond Wisdom

This is my first post for the year 2022. It has been a very busy start to the year and it did not occur to me to blog until today when I have a bit of breathing space. My morning and afternoon were spent running errands and the weather which was sunny and hot earlier has now turned gloomy, threatening rain and thunder.

Being out and about today refreshes me. One thing that I have to watch out for during this pandemic is the lack of exercise. I will have to see how I can incorporate more physical activities into my everyday life. 

As one advances in age, one has to be very careful with one's physical and mental health. The body starts its downward slide after a certain age. And so does the mind, if we are not careful.

The thought occurred to me earlier today on how we tend to over-estimate the intelligence of the average adult. We assume that adults possess the necessary reasoning capability and judgement to act wisely. But our actions are only measured by the intelligence of other similar adults--all who have come to the peak, at least biologically, of their mental capabilities. We can continue to learn and gain more knowledge, however as an adult we have to admit our physical body is already on its downward slide. 

An adult would always understand that a child would never understand certain things which they see so clearly. But they know that as the child grows up, he will change his point of view because he would have gained more experience in life and learned its valuable lessons. Our intelligence is not unlike the artificial ones--AI--which is becoming ubiquitous everywhere. It becomes better, the more data or experience is fed into it. It builds its model from the flow of information that it processes everyday.

 But after a certain biological age, the hardware to further improve our intelligence model is no longer growing in tandem. Our intelligence does not register the kind of leaps that we see from a baby to a child, a teenager and finally an adult. 

We can smile and understand the innocence of a child's thinking. But what makes us think that we are not equally naive when viewed from a higher alien intelligence? Why are we so certain that aliens would want to even communicate with us, given our still infantile intelligence?

If we are to project the intellectual growth that we had experienced on the way to adulthood onwards, what levels of super-intelligence would we have achieved, if only our biology is able to keep up with it?

This is why I am not sympathetic to people, especially religious ones, who think they already have all the answers. Everything that seem important to us now, the material life, the family we want to build, our career ambitions, the birth and death of loved ones would seem rather 'childish' when viewed from a higher intellectual vantage point. From there, all our concerns would seem rather petty because we are only seeing a small part of the picture, the same way a child cannot comprehended the everyday cares and concern of an adult.

What is important to us now--like the need to have a happy afterlife--may seem like the silly concern of a child who fears that Santa will not reward him with gifts if he does not behave. A child does not know any better. Neither do adults.

Humility in the face of the unknown is the best attitude. There's nothing wrong in admitting that we don't know and we are working on it. Our brains do not grow at at the rate that we experienced in our adolescence.  But at least we can factor in the limits of our intelligence when discussing matters beyond our ordinary sense-level experience. 

It is my hunch that this life that we cling on to so jealously and desperately is part of a much larger process of evolution, of which "we"--if that word has any meaning of all in this scheme of things-can partake, if we do not prematurely stunt our growth with certainty.

Absolute certainty is our greatest enemy of wisdom.  When we admit that we don't know, at the very least, we are looking out into the void of unknown. Who knows, something profound might emerge slowly out of the darkness?