Descriptions
We do not have direct access to reality. What we have is descriptions — and the gap between pursuing truth and pursuing accurate descriptions is large enough to fall into.
We do not have direct access to reality. What we have is descriptions of it — models, abstractions, mathematical formulations — that, when well-constructed, reliably predict what reality does next. The distinction matters.
It matters because “truth” is a seductive word, and the gap between pursuing truth and pursuing accurate descriptions is large enough to fall into. We can talk about truth in the abstract indefinitely. What we can actually work with is descriptions — their fidelity, their usefulness, and whether they can be communicated to another mind without losing something essential.
A description that is so abstract or so complete that no human can process it is not useful knowledge. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to the Great Question — of life, the universe, and everything — turns out to be 42. Technically complete. Entirely useless. A good description enhances the accuracy and resolution of someone else’s mental image and helps their understanding crystallize around something real.
Descriptions narrow possibility space
What a good description does, at bottom, is reduce the number of things that remain plausible. Consider a robbery victim giving a statement to police: the assailant was male, short black hair, occurred twenty minutes ago, three streets north. That description is almost certainly imperfect — incomplete at minimum, possibly wrong in parts. But it has done something valuable: it has dramatically reduced the space of possibilities the police need to search.
We can now almost certainly rule out a woman with long red hair operating from a different continent. That may seem obvious, but it is the mechanism by which knowledge works: eliminating the impossible, or merely the implausible, until what remains is tractable.
Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
Truth and impossibility are two sides of the same coin. You cannot desire the former while refusing to acknowledge the latter.
The virtue of closed-mindedness
This has an implication that popular culture resists: being closed-minded is sometimes correct. More than correct — it is the expected endpoint of good reasoning.
To describe something is to close your mind to alternatives. Not to the point of dogmatism, but substantially. A mind that stays open longer than the evidence warrants is just as decoupled from reality as one that closed too early. The virtue is not openness, but calibration.
In cellular biology, a partially permeable membrane is an evolved and adaptive trait precisely because it only lets some things in. The virtue of the membrane is its selectivity, not its promiscuity. Our epistemic ideals should work the same way.
Open-mindedness is often performed rather than practiced — a way of signaling humility while avoiding the commitment that genuine reasoning demands. Uncertainty is not a shortcut to understanding. Passivity is not a shortcut to morality. At some point you have to close your mind around what the evidence supports, and remain open to revision only if something better arrives.
Religious and spiritual accounts of the universe tend to do the opposite: they expand the space of possibilities rather than constrain it. An omnipotent god can do anything — which means the “description” predicts nothing and eliminates nothing. This is aesthetically appealing to some, but it should not be confused with knowledge. A description that leaves everything open to interpretation is a story.
Constrained creativity
One charge leveled at science is that it lacks imagination — that empirical constraint kills creative thinking. This is backwards.
Feynman: “In the case of science, I think that one of the things that make it very difficult, is that it takes a lot of imagination. It’s very hard to imagine all the crazy things that things really are like.”
Is it more creative to posit a single omnipotent designer, or to account for the emergence of biological complexity from the interplay of physics, chemistry, and evolutionary pressure? The former requires a single assumption and stops there. The latter demands that you keep imagining until your imagination matches the data.
Creativity is a tool in the scientific process, not the whole of it. Constrained creativity — imagination disciplined by evidence — is the most difficult and admirable form of it. It is also what produces accurate descriptions, rather than compelling stories.
Knowledge should not only be considered limited, but also limiting. That is not a flaw. That is the point.