The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning 1st Edition

I found this book to be challenging, thought provoking, difficult, and rewarding. The most difficult part was the middle portion where the author surveys quantum physics. While the concepts or ideas in this section are difficult to grasp, I think the reader who stays with it gets a better grasp about science's limitations. I liked the author's allegory of knowledge as an island, and how the island's shore grows and shrinks depending on what science reveals. The more we learn, the more we don't know. In the author's words, "The goal of science is to clarify, to be best of our ability, the way Nature works. Science is not supposed to answer all questions. In fact, this kind of expectation is meaningless, especially when confronted with the nature of knowledge as we have addressed it in this book: ever-exploratory, ever-changing, reflecting so clearly how we approach the world, the kinds of questions we ask and can ask at a given time. The knowledge that we have defines the knowledge that we can have. . . . As knowledge shifts, we ask new kinds of questions that couldn't have been anticipated." The author's brief history of science brings the reader to the point that there is a limitation to what we can learn, and what remains a mystery (until resolved) is where myths are/may be created because we seek order, we want answers, we want to understand reality, yet reality may not be as firm as we think. As the author states it, "The very nature of scientific inquiry, always ongoing and always under revision, necessarily implies the notion of a changing understanding of reality."

This review of Marcelo Gleiser’s book will contain some praise, but also some significant criticisms. The book is engagingly and elegantly written – sometimes even poetic. In his prologue, Gleiser writes (pages xxii-xxiii):“But just for starters, once we explore the nature of human knowledge --- that is, how we try to make sense of the world and of our place in it --- it should be obvious that our approach is fundamentally limited in scope. This realization should OPEN doors, not close them, since it makes the search for knowledge an open-ended pursuit, an endless romance with the unknown. And what could be more inspiring than knowing that there will always be something new to discover in the natural world, that no matter how much we know there will always be plenty of room for the unexpected….”To my thinking, this very fact should shut tightly the door to atheism, because the unknown – and, I’m convinced, sometimes the unknowable – looms ever before us. Far too limited is the human vista for us to be ever justified in concluding that we can summarily rule out a loving and just Creator whose very existence can potentially be known by us. Fortunately, so far as I am aware, Gleiser never seeks to block out of his epistemology the possibility for a Divine Presence – even if his skepticism might seek to cast aspersions on that possibility.Further along in the book (on page 11), Gleiser recounts the event of telling his young son his views on what happens after we die. He states this:“It breaks my heart to have to tell him that what happens to us is the same thing that happens to the ant he crushes under his feet. He, of course, is not convinced. ‘How do you know, Dad?’ ‘I don’t know for sure, son. Some people believe we do come back; others that we go to a place called Paradise, where we meet everybody else who has died. The problem is that I haven’t heard back from any of them to be sure that that’s where we are headed.’”Without establishing trust with a “Higher Reality”, hope for the future can be painfully dim. In a somewhat relevant vein, Gleiser says the following (page 65):“Plato dreamt of a cave with an exit to the light of perfect knowledge, but it seems wise to accept that no knowledge can be perfect or final.”I do not agree that it is wise to accept that assessment, even if, for now, a person is left feeling compelled to remain embroiled in doubt. For the most fortunate among us, even such doubt can be essentially extinguished.Regarding the limits on what we can truly know about the universe, Gleiser presents the following view (page 92):“The lesson here is distressing: not only are there causal and technological limits to how much we can know of the cosmos, but what information we do manage to gather may be tricking us into constructing an entirely false worldview. What we measure doesn’t tell us the whole story; in fact, it may be telling us an irrelevantly small part of it.”Again on page 100, Gleisers emphasizes the point of how much uncertainty there is about our knowledge of the cosmos:“How can we then be so sure that we are that much better off, that we are not missing a big chunk of the cosmic picture? Science is efficient at discovering what exists, if within reach, but it cannot rule out with any final authority what doesn’t exist.”I believe that this is a critically important point. To my way of thinking, the sometimes touted “Theory of Everything” is little better than a joke. Human science will never do much more than scratch the surface of Ultimate Reality. Gleiser seems to concur with that assessment.Gleiser comments on whether we might live in a multiverse. On page 112 he says this:“Our Big Bang would be a local occurrence in a vast collection of cosmic histories.“Can such an idea, crazy as it sounds, be actually physics and not mere speculation? Any scientific hypothesis must be testable. Experiments or otherwise observational data must be collected to consider its scientific viability. Given that we have no evidence that we live in a multiverse – any direct evidence may well be impossible to gather – we must consider the idea with great care, checking wheat evidence we do have in hand, and add to it what we may collect in the future, if anything….“Taken together, the arguments above suggest that the multiverse is at least theoretically possible” (page 123). He continues with this discussion on page 129:“However, I stress again that even a positive detection of a neighboring universe would not prove the existence of a multiverse. Within the present formulation of physics the multiverse hypothesis is untestable, however compelling it may be.”Regarding some implications of quantum physics, Gleiser observes as follows:“Physics was thus proposing that something could exist without mass, that things could exist without being material. Since what exists defines physical reality, the new physics suggested that reality could be immaterial.”Indeed! Reality may be much more interesting than almost anyone had surmised. If “Spirit” undergirds all reality, then when science gets close enough to the ultimate nature of reality, mysteries might proliferate with a vengeance. Gleiser declares that quantum indeterminacy is intrinsic to mass-energy – not merely the result of our limits on precision of measurement. On page 174, Gleiser says this:“Perhaps the most puzzling aspect of Heisenberg’s principle is that uncertainty inherent in quantum physics is not a technological problem resulting from instruments with limited precision; quantum uncertainty is fundamentally an expression of how Nature behaves at the shortest distances, an expression of a world alien to our own. We can’t make it go away with better technology.”Gleiser creates an imaginary conversation with a scientific realist. On page 181, he expresses these thoughts:“’Well, perhaps the lesson from quantum mechanics is simply that we can’t understand the nature of reality, that we must learn to live with this realization and accept that we can only have partial knowledge of what reality is. We must learn to let go.’”Here’s more about quantum mysteries (page 214):“Taken together, the experiments rule out local theories of quantum mechanics using hidden variables to explain instantaneous action-at-a-distance. Nonlocality (also sometimes called ‘separability’) – influences acting superluminally between members of spatially separated entangled pairs – is a ghost that seems to be real. Reality is not just stranger than we suppose. It’s far stranger that we CAN suppose.”Gleiser emphasizes that quantum mechanics has proven to present us with unsolvable mysteries. On page 231 he writes:“Quantum mechanics forces us to confront the unknowable head-on. This is why it makes most physicists uncomfortable. ‘Unknowable’ is anathema to the core goal of the scientific program, which is designed to deal with, and ultimately make sense of, unknowns. Einstein, Schrodinger, and the scientific realists shun the possibility that Nature would keep secrets beyond our grasp.”On pages 234-5 he continues: “There are aspects of reality that are permanently beyond our reach. The Island of Knowledge must exist as an island, surrounded not only be what we don’t know but by the unknowable nature of the quantum realm.”And of very great interest to me, Gleiser observes the following:“Inevitably, we will have to confront the role of quantum effects in the brain and its possible relevance to consciousness, beyond what Wigner proposed.”I am quite nearly convinced that quantum physics is closely tied to the fantastically mysterious functions of the brain, the mind, consciousness, freedom of the will, and the fact that the human brain is the most obvious interface between mind and matter that we can ever discover.With regard to whether computers can ever think, Gleiser says this (page 261):“The practical feasibility of thinking machines, then, depends on how the brain functions and the nature of the mind.”That is entirely correct, and according to my view of reality, computers can never be brought into a status whereby they think, feel, or have even a spark of consciousness. Thus, strong AI (artificial intelligence) is ruled out. On page 265, Gleiser comments on the dualism of mind/body:“If the soul is not material, how can it interact with the material? Indeed, if it does interact, it must exchange energy with matter. Such an energy exchange process would make the soul or parts of it material, forcing it t have a detectable signature.”In the margin of my book, next to that paragraph, I wrote this: “Read Whitehead and David Ray Griffin!” In other words, I believe that Alfred North Whitehead generated a philosophy of ontology that renders the viability of the objective existence of mind and its interactions with the body plausible. His book, “Process and Reality”, is profoundly difficult to read, but a “disciple” of Whitehead (David Ray Griffin) is a highly prolific expositor of Whitehead’s profound philosophical system.Gleiser’s book is an excellent production. It contains much expert physics, and it is quite effective at driving home the point that the human acquisition of knowledge will forever be constrained by what is unknown and even what is unknowable. This is, by my reckoning, the best physics/philosophy book I’ve yet read. Some discussions are deep and technical, but overall the book is quite palatable to a fairly educated layman.

Providing an overall reflective survey of mankind's incremental probing and discernment of physical reality, this book is remarkably readable for motivated non-scientists. It is generally well composed, and the text and ideas both flow smoothly and plausibly. Moreover, this book engenders a sustained if not escalating sense of awe regarding the evolved state of knowledge of the physical sciences, together with an appreciation of the enormity of its enabling contributions.Regarding the book's title, the expanding island/shoreline metaphor is apt and well elaborated. Here the area of the island associates with the body of extant knowledge, and the shoreline with the accumulation of unanswered questions. From the shoreline, the waters loom as the unknown, and even some of the unknowable, against the horizon of the marginally knowable. Beyond the horizon lies the strictly unknowable, as proscribed via physical constraints. Notably, the island of knowledge is not composed solely of scientific knowledge, as the author admits other ways of knowing (which lie outside the scope of the book). Plato's Allegory of the Cave is also invoked to characterize human limitations in discerning reality. As an interesting twist, the cave wall, onto which human access to reality is projected, affords enhanced perceptual resolution concomitant with the increase in extant knowledge.The book is divided into three complementary parts: the cosmos, matter, and cognitive faculties. I found the first two parts to be excellent and most insightful, but the third part seemed rather weak and not well integrated into the foregoing parts. Seemingly, the book's treatment of cognitive faculties is directed at limitations regarding human prospects for dealing with the potentially knowable. Here, binding limitations associate with intellectual tools like mathematics, and constraints like those imposed by Godel's Proof. Thus, some cognitive limitations apply to scientific inquiry in general. Aside from these absolute limitations, each individual investigator has personal perceptual horizons that tend to occlude or distort the apprehension of what precisely is known, what is potentially knowable, and what questions are in consequence entailed or answerable. Apart from inherent limitations on what is knowable per considerations of physics then, there are cognitive limitations of either an essential nature or an incidental one.Furthermore, these three parts of the book do not reflect a "shifting scientific worldview" (p. xiv), at least in my construal; rather, these foci have been more or less contemporaneous since antiquity. Instead, the distinguishing shifts largely associate with the progression of four understandings of the phenomenon of gravity: Aristotelian, Newtonian, Einsteinian, and that of quantum gravity. This progression is quite well developed in the first two parts of the book. Moreover, this progression now yields to the prospect of a pending "new physics (that) needs to explain how...the physics of the very large meets the physics of the very small. This is the realm of `quantum gravity', the marriage of the general theory of relativity with quantum physics" (p. 72).What especially held my interest in the first two parts was the well integrated and highly readable exposition of the key controversies and discoveries in the physical sciences. The text read well and the ideas flowed smoothly. This coverage was augmented by relevant notes on shifting worldviews, contributions/speculations of principal figures, and the author's remarks/insights. Regarding worldview transitions, the current protracted puzzlement and dissensus with respect to the interpretation and full assimilation of quantum theory receive insightful treatment, albeit one necessarily with a less than satisfying closure. Basically, the radical yet demonstrated aspects of quantum physics of action-at-a-distance and quantum interference are deeply disquieting and obdurately problematic for many in the physical sciences research community. This demonstration is nicely described in Chapter 26, wherein the author undertakes to "discuss Bell's theorem and how its experimental implementation shows that reality is stranger than fiction." Here, the `extraordinary' prevails in several experimental cases, which show the violation of Bell's inequality in consonance with the quantum predictions.Accordingly, a still emerging worldview will somehow have to rationalize and accept "how nature behaves at the shortest distances", i.e., action nonlocality and measurement nondeterminism. In consequence, there is now major research emphasis on the foundations of quantum physics, as in the phenomena of pair entanglement and superluminal interactions. Meanwhile, derivative technologies like semiconductor devices and quantum computing are nonetheless exploiting quantum effects, if only on an as yet exploratory basis.Among the interesting sidelights regarding the actual research pursuits of quite a few historically prominent figures are their somewhat prevalent investigations into alchemy or the occult. Newton, for example, was considerably involved in alchemy, and J. J. Thompson in occult endeavors. Alchemy, moreover, is seen as sort of a precursor to modern science, although it eventually discarded such subject matters. With the demonstration of quantum weirdness or the `extraordinary', however, it would seem that such discarding may not be altogether warranted, at least rhetorically.As a non-specialist in its subject areas, I nonetheless really enjoyed this book. Its content was very illuminating, largely in that it clearly explained and integrated matters with which I had been somewhat familiar but inadequately informed. Despite certain of my reservations, like one cited above, I believe this book to be a solid Five-Star selection. Further, Professor Gleiser's writing would suggest that he is an agile, spellbinding, and compelling lecturer.

What is knowable? Science is the way to expand the island of knowledge. The author argues that as we expand the island so do we expand the shore of unknown. He shows this by historically examine our knowledge of universe by the progress of philosophy and physics.

Interesting

Elegantly written by Marcelo Gleiser – an author who has enviable metaphysical chops. I use the following quote in my book “As the island of knowledge grows, so do the shores of our ignorance.” He writes, “Learning more about the world doesn’t lead to a point closer to a final destination but to more questions and mysteries.”

In his eloquent book about the limits of science, physicist Marcelo Gleiser, shows how scientific theories are ‘always under revision’. He writes:"To hope that science will answer all questions is to want to shrink the human spirit, clip its wings, rob it from its multifaceted existence."Knowledge and wisdom can come from many sources. Freeman Dyson talks about the ‘complementary’ of science and soul knowledge. In physics, complementarity is the existence of two physical realities which cannot be seen simultaneously. For example, light can behave like both a wave and a particle; you cannot observe them both at the same time, but both models are needed to understand light. Likewise we need more than science to understand the whole human experience.Gleiser is respectful of people's beliefs and his scientific explanations are crystal clear.

Il n'y avait pas beaucoup de nouvelles idées apportées que je ne connaissait pas et on plonge souvent dans des concepts avec peu d'importance.