The Edges of Understanding
Living in the Age of Information can be an overwhelming experience. Every day has the potential to flood our lives with new information about current affairs, cultural experiences, and the lives of the individuals within our social networks, physical or digital. Every new piece of information must be evaluated and filed away with the rest of our knowledge to make sense of our realities. The Internet and social media have greatly increased the amount of information coming towards us and have made immense amounts of that shared knowledge available at our fingertips. Making sense of what’s true and false by comparing information with our individual and shared experiences can be exhausting. But learning how to understand and manage this constant flood of information offers the potential to unlock our shared wealth of knowledge to better manage our lives, both as individuals and as a society.
This article will be looking at the edges of our understanding, both as individuals operating practically in the world and as a species engaged in scientific endeavor to expand our understanding of the universe. To do this, we’ll need to look at Immanuel Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism to provide a framework for finding the edges of understanding that will give us the best (but never perfect) understanding of the universe. Next, we’ll apply that framework to scientific endeavor and its drive to find ways of extending and expanding our understanding of the universe. Finally, we’ll return to the Age of Information and apply this framework to understanding, managing, and maintaining the wealth of knowledge available to our species to live better lives.
Understanding Transcendental Idealism
In 1543 Nicolas Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which posited that the solar system was heliocentric, centered around the sun, and not geocentric, centered around the earth. His treatise was based not on dogmatic texts or church doctrine or metaphysical speculation but based upon observation of the heavens and the application of reason to understand their movements, done in such a way that was repeatable to anyone with the same tools. This approach to understanding the universe would become the basis for the scientific method, formalized initially by Descartes in 1637 with Discourse on Method.
The scientific method would revolutionize our approach to understanding the universe. Academics, philosophers, and engineers would take up the method to reform, extend, and expand our understanding of the universe at all levels, from the smallest fundamental elements to the heavens themselves, in search of a cohesive scientific understanding of the universe as it was, not as it was presumed to be. The scientific method would also be attacked, whether by the Christian Church challenging the results of scientific endeavor in conflict with religious dogma, or by philosophers beginning to chip away at the trust we can place in our senses and in our reason. Political attacks like the Christian Church can be dismissed as obvious political conflicts, as well as meaningless sophistry for argument’s sake. But other attacks brought more serious concerns that threatened to undercut the trust of our senses and our reason, and if we could no longer objectively trust our senses and reason, then we could no longer trust the results of scientific endeavor.
Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism emerges about a hundred years after the Scientific Revolution, searching for a means of splitting the difference between the objective advancements in scientific understanding of the universe and the growing skepticism of the objectivity of our senses and reason. Scientific endeavor is built on the belief that we can find objective knowledge about the universe, whereas skepticism teaches us that we can’t possibly have that understanding given the limitations of our bodies and minds. Kant would attempt to solve this conundrum with his theory of transcendental idealism, published in 1781 as Critique of Pure Reason.
Transcendental idealism is a division of our universe into two perspectives. The first world is the sensible world, the one we perceive with our senses and that we must practically operate within as human beings, which comes with all the dangers and imperfections of our senses and limitations of our reason. The second world is the intelligible world, the universe as it is, or the universe-in-itself, which provides the full grounding for the imperfect appearances we perceive with our senses. (Kant, 119)
Kant describes this as the following:
“This must yield us a distinction, however rough, between the sensible world and the intelligible world, the first of which can vary a great deal according to differences of sensibility in sundry observers, while the second, which is its ground, always remains the same.” (Kant, 119)
One practical way to consider this split is to consider the world from a nonvisual person’s perspective. The speculative television series See posits a world where nearly everyone has lost the ability to sense visual stimuli, and with it all the ways in which to experience the world through the sense of sight. The sensible world for the nonvisual inhabitants of See is an incomplete representation of the universe-in-itself. However, the nonvisual inhabitants viscerally understand that there is more to the world beyond their limited senses, not just from their shared history which contained sight in previous generations, but because the precious few visual inhabitants of See confirm the universe-in-itself is greater than the limited sensual experience of the nonvisual inhabitants. Kant’s theory is the extension of this concept, that there is the universe-in-itself, as it is, and there’s the imperfect experience we can access as human beings with our senses.
Georg Simmel summarizes this distinction nicely: “Kant defined everything knowable as phenomenon, as something delineated by our power of cognition, leaving things as they are beyond these powers and, therefore, in eternal darkness for us.” (Simmel, 16)
Another practical way to consider this split between the intelligible world and the sensible world is as an epistemological or knowledge gap. If we were to imagine a complete understanding of the universe-in-itself as a circle to represent the intelligible world, then our incomplete understanding of the sensible world would be a smaller circle within the intelligible world. Kant would argue that we can know what’s inside the sensible circle through our experience, but we can’t know what’s outside that sensible circle.
Kant believes transcendental idealism allows him to have both the objectivity of a universe-in-itself and the subjectivity of the individual and shared experience of the sensible world, by clearly delineating what we can know and what we cannot know. Our sensible world may only be able to provide an incomplete understanding of the intelligible world, but it is the world in which we practically exist and represents the edges of our understanding.
Two considerations are worth noting before we move along to how transcendental idealism applies to scientific endeavor.
No Knowledge of the Intelligible World
One of the consequences of transcendental idealism is the relationship between knowledge and the universe. Kant argues forcefully that we can only have knowledge about the sensible world, and that anything we claim to know about the intelligible world is merely assumption: “The concept of the intelligible world is thus only a point of view which reason finds itself constrained to adopt outside appearances in order to conceive itself as practical.” (Kant, 126) We can conceive of the intelligible world, but we have no method of directly verifying our conceptions of the intelligible world with our senses, otherwise it would be a part of the sensible world. Kant therefore draws a sharp distinction between physics as knowledge of the sensible world and metaphysics as speculation of the intelligible world.
Confirmation of the Intelligible World
Despite having no knowledge of the intelligible world, Kant believes the sensible world is a confirmation of the reality of the intelligible world, unlike Schopenhauer or Buddhism which posit that the sensible world is merely illusion. Simmel argues that “Kant’s conclusion is that the world is phenomenal and is, therefore, fully objective, real, and perfectly understandable, because everything beyond phenomenality would be as the proverbial dove on the roof, an empty phantasm.” (Simmel, 20) We may want the fuller knowledge of the universe, but we do not necessarily need this knowledge to practically exist within the sensible world. Kant draws another division between pure and practical philosophy, so as not to throw out the practical usefulness of philosophy in some quest for purely speculative knowledge, and to short-circuit the concerns of extreme skepticism.
Transcendental Idealism in Scientific Endeavor
As our understanding of the universe changes, so too does our approach to understanding the universe. The Scientific Revolution transformed our way of understanding the world from dogma and conjecture to observation and reason. Kant’s transcendental idealism then carves out the limits of what we can know based on observation and reason, while maintaining and giving purpose to a healthy skepticism of the sensible world. However, Simmel finds another interesting effect of transcendental idealism on scientific endeavor.
“Kant’s negation of problems, however, results in a new problem, despite his basic delineation of the boundaries of knowledge. A philosophical desire arises for the thing-in-itself, for being beyond imagination. A quest is joined to establish a relation with this being, whether it be in a ‘knowledge’ that is quite different from any given conception and that is liberated from the limits of subjective forms, or in an immediate relation that would not be knowledge but more than knowledge.” (Simmel, 16)
In a sense, the Scientific Revolution created a desire for knowledge and understanding about our sensible world, the one we practically operate within, whereas transcendental idealism created a desire for knowledge and understanding of the intelligible world, to know the universe-in-itself. Of course, since we can have no knowledge of the intelligible world, the only way to do more than simply conceive of the universe-in-itself would be to expand the capabilities of our senses and our reason. It is only through expanding those capabilities that we can expand the boundaries of the sensible world, and thereby attain a greater understanding of the universe-in-itself.
Scientists have been using technology to extend the capabilities of our senses and our powers of reason, thereby extending our understanding of the sensible world to better conceive of the intelligible world, or the universe-in-itself. Galileo invented his own telescope to confirm Copernicus’ heliocentric model. Microscopes have revealed previously hidden parts of the sensible world. More recent technologies have allowed us to observe wider spectrums of light or to detect radioactivity within elements. Computers have evolved over time to extend our rational capabilities beyond our limited capabilities.
Each technical advancement has led to new discoveries, which have expanded and changed our scientific understanding of the sensible world and have confirmed or denied our conceptions of the intelligible world. This is the role of technology in scientific endeavor: to expand the sensible world towards the intelligible world. We can imagine technology as a bubble around the sensible world, expanding our capabilities to know the universe-in-itself. The ultimate promise of scientific endeavor could be characterized as the quest to close the knowledge gap between the two worlds using technology and reason, to ultimately unite the sensible and intelligible worlds, pushing our edge of understanding all the way to the maximum limit.
Of course, we have no means of confirming that our technologies are accurately producing phenomenon about the universe-in-itself, but this doubt is no different from confirming that our senses are accurately receiving phenomenon in the sensible world about the universe-in-itself. Objectively speaking, we can always insist on the need for a purely philosophical skepticism. But practically speaking, how can we ever be sure of what we’re experiencing with our senses or our technology?
Possibility, Plausibility, and Plasticity
Because we can have no knowledge of the intelligible world, scientific endeavor in its purest form must consider all metaphysical explanations of the intelligible world as equally possible in its quest for understanding of the universe-in-itself. Universe formation theories based upon the Big Bang or upon any number of religious myths all have equal possibility as metaphysical explanations as we can neither prove nor disprove their viability. “Metaphysics has its own requirements and norms which cannot reasonably be expected to meet the demands of other scientific approaches.” (Simmel, 176)
Of course, the purest form of scientific endeavor need not be concerned with the practical constraints of time, resources, and technology that limit our capabilities of pursuing every metaphysical explanation. Pure scientific endeavor is only concerned with possibility, but practical scientific endeavor is concerned with both possibility and plausibility. Plausibility isn’t just based on the evidence or the argument at hand, but on how well hypotheses or theories align with other accepted hypotheses or theories. In this way, while the Big Bang and creation myths are both metaphysically possible, only one of those theories is considered plausible, and therefore more worthwhile to pursue with limited time, resources, and technology.
This plausibility test serves as our practical cross-check on both our senses and our technology in the sensible world. We use this test reflexively when we’re confronted with new information every day. Each piece of information we receive is subjected to a plausibility test based upon our experience and evaluated appropriately. Scientific endeavor performs this same process, albeit in a more systematic manner. Plausibility is what allows us to avoid the pitfalls of pseudoscientific claims about both the sensible and intelligible worlds.
We may feel unnerved at the idea that there is no knowledge of the intelligible world, and that therefore all metaphysical speculation about the intelligible world is equally possible. However, if all our knowledge is only knowledge of the sensible world, and we know that the sensible world is an imperfect representation of the universe-in-itself, then we must always be open to the possibility that our knowledge of the sensible world is imperfect and needs adjustment.
Transcendental idealism gives plasticity to our knowledge, something dynamic within the sensible world that can be changed as needed, not something fixed like religious dogma. This plasticity of knowledge is only possible with Kant’s healthy skepticism about the sensible world, which provides the ability to revise and reform our knowledge after major discoveries. Each correction simply becomes a reaffirmation that our knowledge of the universe-in-itself is imperfect in the sensible world. This plasticity of knowledge is important, because massive changes in our understanding of the universe-in-itself should lead to massive changes in our perception and understanding of the sensible world.
The Impossibility of Complete Understanding
While Simmel is correct that transcendental idealism ignites a desire to seek out the universe-in-itself, it also creates an impossible practical task of finding a complete understanding of the universe-in-itself. Recent technological advancement has given us incredible optimism about our ability to extend our senses and reason to understand the universe. However, the universe-in-itself as experienced in the sensible world may prevent us from ever reaching this goal, along with an important logical paradox that prevents us from ever reaching our goal.
Physical Considerations of the Universe
We can conceive of all sorts of metaphysical theories about the universe, but until we have a means of verification within the sensible world, they are all equally possible. The universe-in-itself, by all modern observation, is expanding in such a way as to create more of the universe to explore continuously. Scientists also currently theorize that the observable universe is only a fraction of an even larger unobservable universe. This creates many practical barriers to verifying our understanding of the sensible world based on astronomical observation and verifying our understanding of both the sensible world and the intelligible world is consistent throughout the universe.
The nature of space-time also prevents us from ever turning our conceptions about historical sciences into knowledge about the universe-in-itself. Time is theorized to move in one direction and at one speed in most places within the universe, which makes verifying historical theories about our universe impossible. The nature of space-time suggests that while we might one day be able to achieve a complete understanding of the universe as it moves through space-time, we may never be able to have a complete understanding of the universe as it may have been.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle provides a final practical barrier to a complete understanding, by stating that we can either know the speed or the position of particles in the universe, but not both. This principle is currently understood as a fundamental property of the sensible universe, not simply a technological hurdle to be overcome. Heisenberg in a sense confirms that there will always be edges to our understanding of the intelligible world, that we can never close the knowledge gap between the sensible world and the intelligible world.
Confirmation of Understanding Paradox
Of course, we can speculate that technologies can be developed which would allow us to travel instantaneously to anywhere in the universe, to travel back and forth in time, and to capture both the speed and position of a particle within the universe. Assuming that we could extend our senses and our reason to such an extent as to close the knowledge gap between the sensible world and the intelligible world, we would have no means of confirming that we had reached a complete understanding.
Transcendental idealism may have ignited a hunger for the thing-in-itself and technology has provided us the means to extend our senses and reason in ways that bring us closer to the goal of a complete scientific understanding of the universe-in-itself. But since we can have no knowledge of the intelligible world, we have no means of confirming we have ever reached our goal. Metaphysically speaking, we would have no reason to abandon our search for something instead of nothing, and so would continue to consider additional speculations. We would need a capability of stepping outside of our universe, which brings not only technical considerations of how we might do that, but also metaphysical questions about whether stepping outside the universe is even possible. In this way, we can never quench the drive that was ignited by Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism.
This paradox need not deter us from scientific endeavor, of course. We may never reach a complete scientific understanding of the sensible world or the intelligible world, or find a Theory of Everything, but we can still find practical use in the pursuit of that understanding, in much the same way that we cannot read all the books ever written in one lifetime but can grow with each book we do read. We can also expand and accelerate our understanding by both increasing our technological capacities to extend our senses and reason, and increasing diversity in perspectives with the scientific consensus, particularly those with interesting, plausible metaphysical ideas about the universe-in-itself which are worth exploring.
On a purely philosophical level, we may not be able to know everything, or may not be able to know that we know everything, but on a very practical level, we can always know more.
Transcendental Idealism in the Age of Information
So far, we’ve talked about the metaphysical concerns of the edges of our understanding. We’ve seen how Kant’s theory allows us to appreciate the skepticism necessary when dealing with our senses and reason, while creating a drive to understand not just our sensible world, but also the larger intelligible world, even if we may never reach a perfect understanding for practical and logical reasons. We have a better understanding now of how to separate the information we’re receiving between knowledge (of the sensible world) and speculation (of the intelligible world), how to use plausibility to evaluate the information we’re receiving, and how to use plasticity to integrate that information into our experience. We’re still left, however, with an enormous amount of information to process every day of our lives. To provide a little guidance on this remaining information, it is important to first understand the nature of this information and how it applies to our framework based upon transcendental idealism.
Introducing the Information World
The Age of Information was ushered in with the advent of the Internet, which began using technology to accomplish an important epistemological process: gathering and connecting the world’s information into one accessible network. Prior to these technological breakthroughs, our shared knowledge was carried forward in time by oral histories, written documents, media recordings, and information databases, necessarily limited at each stage by technology, resources, education, agency, and our imperfect understanding of the sensible world. The Internet not only gathers and connects this knowledge together, but also provides access to this knowledge to the rest of humanity.
Transcendental idealism can provide a framework for understanding the knowledge we have accumulated as a species about the sensible world and the speculation we have accumulated as a species about the intelligible world. We can imagine this sum of all externalized information accessible to our species as the information world. The information world includes all information in any medium accessible to at least one person, not just the knowledge we’ve managed to gather and connect to the Internet. Since all knowledge and speculation exists within the sensible world, then we can imagine this information world as existing wholly within the sensible world. Further, we can understand the information world as being an imperfect representation of the sensible world in the same manner that the sensible world is an imperfect representation of the intelligible world.
There are both similarities and differences between the sensible world and the information world that are worth noting. Both worlds are imperfect and incomplete representations of the universe-in-itself. The sensible world is imperfect because of the healthy skepticism we have about our senses and our reason. This imperfection carries over into the information world, but the information world is also imperfect because of the uncertainty of the knowledge itself. Beyond a healthy skepticism of information, we must also contend with the falsification of knowledge in the process of externalizing that knowledge into the information world, whether unknowingly through omission or knowingly through malicious intent. In this way, the information world is both an imperfect representation of the sensible world and a doubly imperfect representation of the intelligible world.
Technology also plays a part in the relationship between the information world and the sensible world. We can understand the role of technology here as attempting to close the gap between the information world and the sensible world, in the same way that scientific endeavor seeks to close the gap between the sensible world and the intelligible world. The extreme limit of technology then would be collapsing our understanding of the information world, sensible world, and the intelligible world into one consistent understanding of the universe-in-itself. All the practical and logical difficulties with finding a complete understanding between the sensible world and the intelligible world would make this extreme end impossible, but more debate exists on whether we can eventually capture a full representation of the sensible world within the information world on a practical level, as seen in efforts to capture three-dimensional video and to develop virtual realities.
What does all this mean for practically understanding the information world? We can speak in terms of generalities and ideals regarding the information world, but how does the information world affect our interaction with the sensible world or drive our speculation about the intelligible world? What follows are some practical considerations for the Age of Information based upon this framework.
Possibility, Plausibility, and Plasticity
We should keep in mind possibility, plausibility, and plasticity when it comes to dealing with the information world and its connection to the sensible world. When it comes to metaphysical speculations about the intelligible world with the information world, we can continue to affirm that all metaphysical speculations about the intelligible world are possible. However, when it comes to knowledge about the sensible world, not only should we retain our plausibility tests, but we also often have the means of verifying the truth of the information world in the sensible world, and thanks to the plasticity of knowledge, we can correct that knowledge in the information world to bring it more into line with the sensible world. The sensible world in some ways can be a cross-check on the information world, just as the information world can also be a cross-check on our own individual understanding of the sensible world.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
The process of externalizing information brings to light an important principle we can borrow from programming: GIGO or Garbage In, Garbage Out. Simply put, technological systems built to store and process information are only as good as the data that is eventually placed into them, whether that is data or information from another source, or data and information being captured in real-time by other technologies. Data and information often move and propagate faster throughout the information world than our ability to correct any bad input, so everyone should take extreme care when placing information into the information world, such that it accurately represents the sensible world, and never intentionally place misinformation into the information world. Examples would include our interactions with social media and the information we provide to other people and organizations for their information systems.
Media and Information Literacy
We know from practical experience that the information world contains both intentional and unintentional false data, which is not just an imperfect, but an incorrect representation of the sensible world. We have no guarantee that data and information within the information world is either accurate or uniform. Therefore, we should be wary that the information we take from the information world may be garbage until we’ve verified the data’s plausibility. Media and information literacy becomes paramount to properly managing the known uncertainty about the information world, particularly on how to verify data in the information world against the sensible world and against the information world itself.
Content vs. Presentation
Information systems often separate content from presentation, that is the data from how it is presented to the individual. Even if the imperfect representation of the sensible world within the information world were free from misinformation, accurate information can still be presented in the sensible world in such a way as to misrepresent that data. Misrepresentation of data from the information world becomes the compliment to providing misinformation to the information world. We should take care to not misrepresent the knowledge we take from the information world when communicating or applying it within the sensible world.
Data-Driven Systems
Unlike exploring the metaphysical assumptions of the intelligible world through scientific endeavor, maintaining the validity of the information world as an accurate, if imperfect representation of the sensible world has very real implications on our practical lives within the sensible world. More and more people and organizations are turning to data-driven systems to automate their processing, along with performing automated data-capture investigations of other people and organizations. We should socially challenge and resist the use of these systems in certain instances, keeping in mind the dual imperfection of the information world to represent the universe-in-itself, and especially when data-driven systems are designed in such a way as to purposefully misrepresent information about the sensible world.
Conclusion
The Age of Information has created a deluge of information within our everyday lives that can be difficult to separate and evaluate but has also become necessary to navigate our increasingly complex lives managed by data-driven systems, the Internet, and social media networks. This Scientific Revolution laid the foundation for the Age of Information, driven by a desire to find a more complete understanding of the universe-in-itself, spurred by Kant’s theory of transcendental idealism which defined the edges of our understanding.
While we may never be able to find a complete understanding of the universe-in-itself, we have managed to amass a great deal of knowledge about the sensible world and speculation about the intelligible world into a collection of data we might call the information world. Just as the sensible world is an imperfect representation of the intelligible world, so too is the information world an imperfect representation of the sensible world. Technology offers the promise of finding a common understanding between the intelligible, sensible, and information worlds for the universe-in-itself, but we must take practical care in our interactions with the information world and sensible world until such proposed technology exists. Understanding the nature and relationship between the three worlds helps us keep perspective about the information we receive from the information world to help us make better decisions in the sensible world and to better explore the intelligible world.
Works Cited
Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. Translated by H.J. Paton, Harper & Row, 1964.
Simmel, Georg. Schopenhauer & Nietzsche. Translated by Helmut Loiskandl, Deena Weinstein, and Michael Weinstein, University of Illinois Press, 1991.
