More Is Incomprehensible
A short meditation on human knowledge.
There was a time when I found nothing more beautiful than equivalence. “This reduces to that.” “Everything is, at bottom, just math.” The world seemed compressible, and compression felt like understanding.
I am no longer sure this is something a human mind can hold.
Hold a Romanesco broccoli and look at it. Visibly unified, spirals repeating at every scale. Now imagine standing on one of those florets. The grand spiral is invisible from where you stand. I think human knowledge might have this shape. Unified, perhaps, but from a point no one occupies. Every mature discipline accumulates abstractions over generations until its practitioners share a common sense that is not common at all. A cardiologist and a rocket engineer both “use physics,” the way a poet and a lawyer both “use words.” The reduction is true but tells you almost nothing. And within each discipline the fractal repeats. Two researchers in the same field, working on neighboring problems, might find the walk between them surprisingly long.
The reductionist promise is that you can always zoom out, see the whole spiral, and use it to move between any two points. But the passage can be longer than a human mind, and longer perhaps than the collective capacity of any group of minds, and such a reduction that no one can traverse has almost the same standing as one that does not exist. People regularly observe, after the fact, that some new result in one field echoes an old result in another. This somehow has become its own genre of commentary lol, and it is almost always retrospective. Research does not actually work by tracing the spiral back to its origin and reasoning outward. You think from your own floret, in your own language, and the resonances with distant florets, when they come, come after the fact. Building on prior work across that distance is the dream but rarely the path.
The universe may well be unified, the way a Romanesco is unified, maybe it would not matter. The world seemed compressible, and I mistook that for understanding. Understanding is… smaller than that, and closer, and has always required you to stand somewhere in particular.