Seven Limits of Knowledge: A List for My Students
This scene, right outside my apartment building, is sort of limits-of-knowledge-ish. Right?
HOBOKEN, SEPTEMBER 4, 2026. This fall I’m teaching two sections of a required humanities course designed to help first-year students read and write at the college level, whatever that means. Professors can customize the course, focusing on a theme of our choosing. I’m dwelling on limits of knowledge. Here are limits I plan to cover:
Solipsism. You walk and talk as if you are a conscious human being, like me, but you’re just a mindless bot. I can’t be sure you’re mindless, but I can’t be sure you’re conscious, either. For all I know, I’m the only person in the world with conscious feelings, perceptions, thoughts and so on. This perspective, called solipsism, is a bit extreme, but it reflects a hard truth about our existence: No one really knows what anyone else is thinking. All you can do is guess, and sometimes you guess wrong. Each of us is trapped in the bubble of our personal, subjective awareness, sealed off from the sentience, if any, of friends, lovers, dates, bed bugs, students, politicians, ChatGPT--everyone and everything. Deal with it.
Self-Gaslighting. Gaslighting is when you lie to someone and, if she doesn’t believe you, tell her she’s nuts. Self-gaslighting is when you tell yourself a whopper, like, I’m a good guy, I only lie to my girlfriend for her own good, and convince yourself it’s true. Everybody self-gaslights at least a little, even scientists, who are supposed to be scrupulously honest. Even science journalists have been known to self-gaslight, although most, like me, are humble truth-tellers. As a rule, the more powerful you are, the more you self-gaslight. Tech moguls sell us devices that addict, distract and depress us and say, This is for your own good. Presidents say the same thing to people they are bombing. The solipsism problem prevents me from knowing for sure, but these bullies seem to believe their own bullshit.
The Gorilla. A researcher makes you count how many times a pack of people in a video pass around a basketball. When the video ends you say triumphantly, Nineteen! The researcher says, Cool, but did you see the gorilla? Hunh? Gorilla? What gorilla? The researcher plays the video again, and you see a guy in a gorilla suit walk slowly through the basketball-passers. WTF? How did you miss that? Here’s the takeaway from the gorilla experiment: When you pay attention to this thing, you overlook other things that might be really, really important. At this very moment, a big, smelly gorilla is sitting next to you, staring at you, scratching his belly. What is the gorilla? What are you missing?
We’re Arrogant Apes. Einstein thought science should be explicable to everyone. Ha. You’ve got to be a freak to get—really get, at the mathematical level—quantum field theory, and then you still don’t get it. That’s not surprising. Our species is only two or three hundred thousand years old, and as recently as 20,000 years ago most of our ancestors were still wandering around eating roots and maggots and an occasional bison or badger. I remember our humble origins whenever I look at my hairy torso in the mirror. Our accomplishments are impressive, given that we’re horny, competitive apes, designed by natural selection to make copies of ourselves, that is, to pass on our genes. But we didn’t evolve to solve or even care about the mysteries of existence. That brings me to the next limit:
No One Gives a Shit. I became a science journalist because I never grew out of the childish stage of being wonderstruck. I obsess over how the universe came to be, how life began, how matter makes a conscious mind, stuff like that. Most adults, including voters and politicians, grow out of being wonderstruck and focus on finding a mate, making moola and so on. Or maybe they’re a little wonderstruck, but they don’t want to give their hard-earned tax dollars to eggheads obsessed with how galaxies formed. Most of us only care about knowledge that benefits us in practical ways. Helps us live longer, get around and swap info faster, get richer, kill our enemies and so on. This limit of knowledge—people not giving a shit about knowledge for its own sake--is more apparent now than at any point in my career.
The Weirdness. Let’s say we all give a shit and are happy to spend our hard-earned tax dollars on space telescopes and other impractical gadgetry. Not to be too utopian, but let’s say that instead of spending $1 trillion a year on ways to kill people, we devote those funds to “pure science.” Well, no matter how much we learn, the world will remain weird, that is, baffling, inexplicable. Reality isn’t just temporarily weird, weird until we figure it out. Reality is intrinsically, objectively weird. The more we study existence, the more improbable it seems. There is no reason for us to be here, and yet here we are. No matter how much we learn about the cosmos, we’ll never dispel the weirdness. This may be the ultimate limit of knowledge.
AI Is Making Things Worse. AI will solve puzzles too tough for our puny primate brains. It will supercharge our knowledge-seeking, transforming the Huh? of bafflement into the Aha! of illumination. That’s what AI boosters say. I say: Bullshit. First of all, any tiny tidbits of truth generated by AI will be lost in the accelerating gush of AI-generated bullshit. Second, AI is making our brains flabby. Third, even if we all get Neuralinked and fuse together into a gigantic superintelligent meta-mind, like The Borg in Star Trek, we’ll still self-gaslight, we still won’t see the gorilla, the universe will still be as weird as ever, if not weirder.
Conservation of Ignorance. This conjecture might be a little much for first-year students. I’ll save it for next semester.
Further Reading:
For more on limits of knowledge, check out this list of my previous “Cross-Check” columns or read any of my books.