The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Plot twist – there is no final frontier
AC Grayling’s breathtaking book proves that the more we know, the more we realise we don’t know
THE FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE by A C Grayling
432pp, Viking, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £20, ebook £9.99
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“He went in unto her” is interchangeable with “he knew her” in the King James Bible; “yada”, the Hebrew for “to know”, also means “to have penetrative sexual intercourse with”. That to know can be to violate is an accurate ambiguity. What is perceived or known is not what it is, or would be, in its pristine state. Even our eyes and reasoning are not neutral portals on to the world; categories and theories, investigatory tools and techniques, tend to probe, modify and distort it. As AC Grayling puts it, the primatologist observes not chimpanzees, but “chimpanzees that are under observation”.
But the “Meddler Problem”, as Grayling calls it, has its opposite and corollary. We may sully what we enquire into, but equally, because constricted within a specific time, space and size, we can only peer at it “as if through a pinhole”. In this brilliant survey of state-of-the-art science, history and psychology, Grayling diagnoses 12 such problems, and shows how any success in surmounting them, while extending what we know, simultaneously reveals the extent of what remains unknown.
At the end of the 19th century, he says, physics was declared complete, with only a few minor details to be filled in – but then JJ Thomson discovered the electron, and, even within the next century’s first decade, Einstein produced his special theory of relativity, and Bohr and Planck invented quantum theory. A satisfactory nemesis; except that, even as physics has been extended and transformed, physicists have discovered that only 5 per cent of the matter in the universe can be accounted for, 95 per cent consisting of “unknown stuff ”: dark matter and dark energy.
And much of what we know in principle seems, in practice, actually unknowable. We ineluctably apprehend the world as existing independently of us, and consisting of things that causally interact in space and time, and that either have or do not have particular qualities at any particular instant. According to quantum theory, however, sub-atomic particles do not have a definite character until being measured. We might nod sagely when told this; to comprehend it, though, outrages our conceptual capacities. “How can the nature of reality depend upon a measurement being made of it?” How (in a weird inversion of the Meddler Problem) can observation, rather than interfering with what is observed, be essential to what the thing actually is?
Science is, anyway, not purely empirical, as Grayling reminds us. Data of any sort are only gleaned and apprehended to fit within a theory, and whether a theory is accepted, or even researched, depends on its elegance, simplicity and consistency, and how well it coheres with already existing theories (the “Criteria Problem”). Even that it “works” is no guarantee of its truth. Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe “worked” for maritime navigation and predicting eclipses, but it was still wrong.
The book’s second section (History) focuses on how archaeological discoveries since the 19th century have vastly enlarged our pinholeview of previously unknown earlier millennia. But, says Grayling, it is still only a pinhole, and to generalise from the bones and artefacts unearthed is all too easy – characterising Palaeolithic culture, for instance, without factoring in the possible perishable materials that have been lost.
He provides wide-ranging erudition on varieties of pre-human hominin species, genetic clues to our forebears’ travels and interbreeding, the epic of Gilgamesh, cuneiform writing, and bifurcations of Indo-European languages. He examines the “Reading-in Problem” – how history is inevitably contaminated by views peculiar to the times and personal biases of the historian – and the revisionism (healthy or unhealthy) that attempts to solve it, including current re-adjustments on views of colonialism and race.
The problems of knowledge are most acute when we seek to know ourselves. What are we even sup
posed to be investigating? Brains can of course now be directly observed, but brain processes are not informative per se. Observing them needs to be correlated with what the brain-owners report or reveal, over a series of systematic, cumulative investigations. Anyway, piecemeal correlations are pretty futile, says Grayling. Mental functioning is not local, but distributed across the whole brain. Neuronal structures continually develop, adapting when damaged. Individual brains vary.
Are neurologists observing at the wrong scale? he asks. Are they, like someone searching for lost keys under lamplight, looking only at what is easy, but pointless, to see? Or staring through the lens of an inapposite metaphor: that the brain/mind is essentially a computation machine?
Neurologists and philosophers, Grayling argues, constantly presuppose and smuggle in the consciousness they purport to explain. He urges that the mind is not simply a skull-enclosed agitation of neurons. That we think and feel as we do necessarily involves the things outside us, which our thoughts and feelings are about. “Understanding minds involves much more than understanding brains alone: it involves understanding language, society and history, too.”
Scholarly, lucid and accessible without being patronising or diluting, Grayling offers a masterly exegesis of current knowledge in three disciplines, as well as an analysis of what both opens and obstructs our access to such knowledge – in effect, four books in one.
Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe ‘worked’ for navigation – but it was still wrong