The Insight of Ignorance

Back in my hometown this weekend and as always I end up rummaging through my old books and wandered down memory lane. It gladdens me to know that I've come a long way towards my childhood quest to understand the world. But I still have a long way to go.

The most important knowledge one needs to acquire is the knowledge of one's ignorance. We must know the limits of our own understanding. If we don't, we'll be trapped in a finite world of dogma, disguised as certainty. As a kid, I wanted to know about the origin of the cosmos, the fundamental nature of the universe and the ultimate purpose of existence. As I grew older, I gained some understanding in many of these areas and realised that there's so much more for me to tackle. The quest seems endless; one can never arrive at some definite endpoint.

But one should not despair because of that. Cliche though it may sound, it is the journey that matters. And as you gain more insights, your perception of the world shifts, opening vistas which you hitherto had not imagined. We are, what physicist Stephen Wolfram refers to as 'computationally bounded observers'. 

When we are perceiving the world, due to computational irreducibility, we can only perceive the universe in a very specific way. Our brains are finite computers--it will see only coarse-grained features. Our physical theories, will inevitably reflect our peculiar way of perceiving the world. 

I'd like to think that I've been expanding the computational capability of my brain since those teenage years of mine and at some point I will hit a limit. A computing brain within a computational universe can only, at best improve the language used to describe the workings of universe but it will still be finite. No language, even one like mathematics, can ever fully explain the universe.

It takes a certain wisdom to understand one's ignorance. And I'm happy to embrace the shallowness of my understanding. It is through this awareness of one's own stupidity that the boundary of one's intelligence can be expanded further.

We are trapped in this veil of ignorance simply because we are computationally bounded observers, embedded in a larger computational universe. The universe that we perceive, even with our best scientific understanding, is still only a parochial view of reality. But at the same time, we should not shy away from rejoicing in the fact that we are a natural consequence of how the universe is. 

Our existence is inevitable and once we are aware of our existence, we can reflect and track our evolving existence, using our finite computational ability. As all the ancient teachers have told us, an insight into our very own ignorance is the very key to enlightenment.