Daily Excerpt: Rainstorm of Tomorrow (Dong) - Is the world of nature knowable?
The following excerpt comes from Rainstorm of Tomorrow by Renyuan Dong.
Core Question: Is the world of
nature knowable?
The tree
represents an existence of obscurity, mystery, metaphor, and silence. While its
canopy can stretch up to several thousand square
meters, its roots can cover an area of up to ten
million. Such shocking, asymmetrical data prompted a nascent passion within me
to carefully reimagine tree roots. Where to find a tree floating tranquilly in
a lake, with its wanton crown stretching above shimmering, fluid moonlight; and
beneath the water’s surface, as neither a reflection nor an attachment, grows
another “tree,” its composition of interweaving, soil-delving roots discarded
for an indiscriminate splay into the water? What a spectacular dual-tree
picture it would cast upon the lake! Yet, this image is by no means symmetric,
since the submerged tree is much more flourishing than its peer above the water
– the part we normally see and recognize as a “tree.” Such a scenery would
challenge our habitual perspective, as we human beings commonly rank the
primacy of an object’s features on the basis of their “size.” By such a metric,
would not the “roots” be defined as the “trunk,” the principal component of a
tree, while the “trunk” instead assumes the role of the “roots”? Is it possible
that the “trunk,” which always comes to our mind first whenever the concept of a
“tree” is elicited, is just the tip of the iceberg exposed by an unfathomable
creature? Is it plausible that the roots, surviving in the rotting mire and
interwinding through the dense soil, would instead represent the prime sign of
a “tree” and its future growth? “Impossible!” retort arrogant humans, “It is
the so-called ‘tip of the iceberg’ that shelters us from the summer heat and
heavy rain. And after all, the dual-tree cast up and down the lake is merely
something of dreams. In reality, no tree floats like a castle in the air. They
are all solidly rooted in the soil and stretch actively toward the sky.”
Indeed, the tree can be rooted in the soil and grow
toward the sky. To some extent, even the discussion concerning whether the tree
is growing in the air or the soil seems meaningless as long as we are satisfied
with the interpretations of the “human
world:” a collection of human minds and consequent thoughts of the external
material environment, a self-interpretation of nature (or the creator’s world
if you believe in a creator). Yet,
the world of nature—and the phenomena within it—is not subject to human minds.
Just as there is never a single snowflake falling in pursuit of symbolizing
“purity,” there is never a flock of wild geese flying by with the intention of
evoking homesickness in skyward onlookers. “You not being a fish yourself… how
can you possibly know in what consists the pleasure of fishes?” (Zhuangzi, 2001,
p. 67). The only way to reveal the truth of a tree is to ask the tree itself.
Yet. the tree stands still. Then, think of yourself as a tree! If we hold
steadfast to our human existence, it is difficult to comprehend that the tree
grows into the soil rather than into the air. It takes only a shallow swamp to
trap human feet, to say nothing of covering an entire body in dense soil.
However, each creature has a suitable environment and adequate pressure for its
own survival; an excessive amount would lead to an unbearable
weight of being while insufficient pressure would dissolve our sense of
reality. For trees, we cannot rule out the possibility that the air is
an unbearably frivolous and ethereal presence in their lives, just as humans
would suffocate at high altitudes due to the thin air and the consequent lack
of oxygen. On the contrary, only the density of the soil manages to ease their
minds. As their roots stretch through the gaps in the earth, they will never
know whether a pile of soft soil or a piece of hard rock awaits them ahead.
Thus, the growth itself becomes an adventure. This is the weight that trees
must bear in their lives, and the wonder that human beings would never
understand.
Humans have always tried to seek out “Truth.” Yet, in
this pursuit, we are often waylaid by cognitive biases and distortions rooted in the inherent limitations of the
sensory channels that humans rely on to explore the world. We see this
world through “human eyes” rather than through the “creator’s eyes,” a
predisposition shared by all our senses. They present a colorful, fragrant,
lively world to us yet one that is far from encompassing the entire being of
nature. While many colors are registered by human eyes, there are even more
varieties that fall outside our visible spectrum and are thus imperceptible to
us, not to mention that our sensory channels can only perceive light, acoustic,
chemical, and physical stimuli. We lack specific sensory channels for detecting
other potential sources of information, such as magnetic induction, which made
the acknowledgement and study of such phenomena impossible for a long time
(before science came to our aid).
Imagine the
world from the eyes of a bat! Through darkness, everything is represented by
the crisp sound of stones breaking a lake’s surface, each producing a different
note, reverberating before gradually fading, just
like the ripples that spread out to the water’s shores. And what about the
world of an insect with compound eyes? It is composed of stacked, contiguous TV
screens, each playing the same program slightly out of sequence. Thus, sensory limitations lead to cognitive
biases and distortions, granting each being its own “self-righteous” world.
Science and technology have not only supplemented our sensory ability and exploratory approach to external
physical and chemical phenomena by augmenting our native senses but also
corrected the cognitive errors caused by subjective feelings and emotions. For
example, the essential motion status of a being is motive rather than static, and
the descent time of a free-falling object depends on its mass rather than its
size. Therefore, the sensory
limitations mentioned above should be regarded as the limitations that remain
after science and technology have enhanced humans’ sensory
ability and exploratory approach. These remaining sensory limitations
lead to cognitive biases.
Aside from the
restrictions imposed by our senses, we are also imprisoned in a cage of time and
space, hindering the study of space-time phenomena at significantly different
magnitudes, such as those at the scales of the universe or the microscopic world. For example, consider the following highly controversial
hypothesis: The universe is not a concept of infinite time and space but
rather the inner cavity of a giant creature, its organs and soft tissue being
the nebulas and stars of our telescopes. So what about us? We human beings are
something akin to bacteria living in that creature. In that case, are we
probiotics or parasites? Are natural disasters and environmental changes
movements of a universe-generated immune response to human overcrowding and pollution?
Moreover, what is taking place in vitro of the giant creature? Perhaps there is
another, even larger organism in comparison with which our universe (the giant
creature) may be as small as a parasitic bacterium. The structure of nature may
thus circulate endlessly. The reason why human beings cannot equivocate a
boundless cosmos with a bounded inner body and hence cannot associate their stalwart selves with dismissible microbes is that we
lack eyes big enough to behold the universe in one glimpse—nor can we shrink
our bodies as Sun Wukong (the Monkey King)[1] did to
enter the body of Princess
Iron Fan. Therefore, we cannot comprehend the world
of bacteria inside the human body.
“To be means to be perceived (esse est percipi)”
(Berkeley, 2003, p. 32). The reason that I, an ardent materialist,
am quoting George Berkeley, a representative idealist, is that this phrase
means much more than is at first apparent: To be means to be appreciable by human beings. The existence of an object does not depend on
whether it is sensed, but on whether it can be detected by the human sensory
ability and exploratory approach. Even the retort in a satirical comic picturing Berkeley walking toward a cliff with his eyes
closed, muttering, “to be means to be perceived” (implying that the
cliff is not perceived by Berkeley but exists regardless),
is not enough to refute his theory. The object not
perceived may exist in a state of being temporarily unperceived. If it is ultimately appreciable, then it exists; as Berkeley
finally arrives at the edge of the cliff, or even falls from the cliff, he
would become aware of the cliff’s existence. The implicit
semantics of Berkeley’s quote are: Even if we have tried every means of
detecting an “assumed” object, yet there is still no way that it can be
perceived or sensed, we should not assume that such an object exists. Whether
or not one agrees with this argument informs their association with one of the
two schools of epistemology: cognosciblism or agnosticism.
There are
two major points of contention between cognosciblism and agnosticism: First,
for those objects that we can perceive, does our perception reflect the nature
of objects in the objective world? Given my
previous argument that human sensory limitations entail cognitive
limitations, you may answer in the negative. As we have always lived in the
“human world,” we can never capture the nature of the “objective
world.” However, there may be an extent
to which you would disagree with this point of view. If I say there are people
with ordinary vision,
hypochromatopsia, and achromatopsia in this world, this would further
imply that the nature of the objective world may not be as colorful as our
ordinary vision suggests. You may then agree that worlds colored to different
degrees are likely neither closer to nor farther away from the nature of the
objective world. But if I were to say the “human world” is merely a projection onto
three dimensions of the “objective world,” which is actually 16-dimensional in
its nature, you may find that such a notion sounds quite ridiculous.
Second, for those objects we cannot
perceive, could they possibly exist in the objective world while being unappreciable to human beings? Suppose there is such a
Substance A that could neither be detected by human sensory channels nor
interfere with the objects or phenomena that are appreciable
to human beings. Therefore, Substance A forever remains outside the
cognitive field of human beings. Do we have sufficient
grounds to assume that such Substance A exists? Opponents usually state that
this assumption can never be falsified, and therefore requires no research. It
is like “the dragon in my garage” (Sagan. 2011, p. 169): an invisible,
floating, untouchable, fire-breathing dragon that spews heatless flame that
neither burns nor blows anything away. You cannot think of any way to test
whether it is really there. In contrast, we could raise another example named
the non-existing dragonfly in the world of an ant: “The world is 2-dimensional
in the eyes of an ant. If you lift the ant from the ground, it disappears in
the eyes of its companions” (Luo, 2017, n. p.). Since ants lack the concept of “height” (strictly speaking, ants can
perceive only a very limited range of altitudes) and there is no
direct-interest between ants and dragonflies, the latter fly outside the
former’s cognitive world. Yet, they do exist. Ultimately,
this kind of analogy is merely an inductive argument. However, many
examples we may raise concerning the inability of creatures living at lower
dimensions to recognize the existence of creatures living at higher dimensions,
such argumentation could only imply that there is a big possibility that a
substance unappreciable to humans might exist in the objective
world. In order to prove it, we might have to wait like the ants in the prior
example. Only on the day when the dragonfly falls to the ground when its life
has come to an end can we finally confirm
the existence of such “dragonflies” for the first time.
In terms of the knowability of nature, the advocates of cognosciblism would prevent you from worrying unfoundedly. Pessimistic
advocates of agnosticism would warn you not to bite off more than you can chew.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Wittgenstein, 2014, p. 3).
And I, as an optimistic advocate of agnosticism, would suggest you “stay
hungry, stay foolish” (Brand, 1972, back cover). More important, I raised the hypothesis that “the universe might be contained within
a giant creature” not to convince you (at least, not in this chapter) but
rather to remind you that imagination is always possible
in the pursuit of better explanations in today’s world—a world where
scientific explanations are all-encompassing and (seemingly) persuasive, a world where the unknown wonders are vanishing rapidly
together with room for further improvement. Imagination would bring forth
myths; imagination would bring forth religions; imagination would bring forth
the “seeming” enemies of science, and because of that, imagination would
eventually bring forth the ground-breaking progress promised by science or
whatever name that speaks for “Truth” (if science were to be regarded as
witchcraft by then).
[1] Sun Wukong and Princess
Iron Fan are characters of Journey to the West, a Chinese novel attributed to Wu Cheng'en. This scene happens when Sun Wukong shrinks himself and wreaks havoc
inside the body of Princess Iron Fan, making her surrender and agree to lend
him the Iron Fan.
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