The Seduction of Surrender
There are a lot of things we know. There are a lot of things we don’t know. But we’re learning more all the time.
And yet… are there some things that will forever remain beyond our grasp?
Some questions aren’t just unanswered. They feel unanswerable.
Not because we don’t want to know. Man is innately driven to ask the questions. But there comes a point where repeatedly asking the questions and being unable to answer them starts to go from
- Gee, I’m curious . . . to
- This is important! . . . to
- I’m getting frustrated by my inability to answer this! . . . to
- This is AGONY! . . . to
- I give up!
Some give up by asking, “does this really matter?” and deciding that it does not.
I can respect that. If it’s giving you heartburn. An ulcer. If it’s negatively affecting your quality of life. And knowing the answer is not reward enough for you. Fine, in that case, by all means. Set the work aside. Just don’t be surprised if the answer comes to you later! 🙂
Ah, but . . . others give up by declaring: there are some questions that mankind will never be able to answer! Or as once famously decreed by the scientist Emil du Bois-Reymond: Ignoramus et ignorabimus, which means: We do not know, and we shall not know. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever. It has the ring of wisdom. The elegance of finality. And for many, the comfort of resignation.
Because let’s be honest: there is comfort in boundaries. Comfort in drawing a circle around what is possible and labeling the rest as off-limits. There’s no risk of failure if you never try. No embarrassment if the test is never taken. Well . . . until some one calls you out on that.
But is that boundary real? Is it truly unknowable?
Or is it just too uncomfortable to face our inability to answer it? Does getting an answer require us to let go of false — but precious — pre-conceived notions? Do we have to re-think our approach to problem solving? And is that prospect a little frightening? Or worse: inconceivable.
What is truly terrible, however, is when one person voices this resignation . . . and the rest of the world falls in line behind them. When personal defeat becomes dogmatic boundaries shaping the thinking of generations to come.
A Line in the Sand
The man who coined the phrase wasn’t trying to kill curiosity. He was, in fact, one of its most devoted practitioners.
Emil du Bois-Reymond. Physiologist. Thinker. Professional drawer of lines—not because he feared what was on the other side, but because he respected the act of drawing them. He believed that boundaries, when drawn with care, could clarify. Could discipline inquiry. Could protect science from slipping into fantasy.
In 1872, he stood before the Prussian Academy of Sciences and declared that there were seven world riddles—seven questions science could not answer. Among them: the ultimate nature of matter, the origin of life, and the problem of consciousness. On these, he said, “Ignoramus et ignorabimus.”
We do not know, and we shall not know.
It wasn’t a throwaway line. It was a line in the sand.
And at the time, it made sense. The tools of the day were powerful, but blunt. We had dissected nerves but couldn’t yet explain how they carried signals. We could detect electricity in muscles but not measure its speed. The brain, as a seat of thought, was a black box with no key.
Du Bois-Reymond wasn’t pessimistic. He was precise. He didn’t say we should stop trying. He said we should stop pretending. He wanted science to speak with integrity—to admit where its reach ended.
But here’s the thing about lines in the sand: they rarely stay where you draw them.
And while du Bois-Reymond drew his boundary with rigor and hesitation, others picked it up with enthusiasm and permanence.
He had meant to warn. They . . . some of them at least . . . made it a rule. A sacred cow that you do not draw near. For if the cow is understood, it ceases to be sacred. And so it is that temporary limitations become dogmatic boundaries to inquiry.
The Line Moves
Not all limits are false. Some really are boundaries.
But they aren’t always where we thought they were.
For most of history, heat was thought to be a kind of substance. A fluid called “caloric” that flowed from hot things into cold things. We could feel it. Measure its effects. Use it. But we didn’t know what it was.
Then someone reframed the question. Instead of asking what heat is, they asked what heat does. And in that shift, mystery gave way to mechanics. Heat, it turns out, is not a substance at all—it is motion. Specifically, the motion of molecules. Jiggling. Colliding. Sharing energy through interaction. Not a thing, but a pattern. Later still we figured out that a specific frequency of electromagnetic radiation could play a role.
That shift in framing changed everything.
The same was true of disease. We used to think it came from foul air, moral failing, or bad blood. It was everywhere and nowhere. It struck with no visible cause. But once again, someone changed the frame. Instead of asking why the sick suffered, they asked whether something smaller might be doing the damage. Invisible invaders. Organisms, not omens.
The moment we had that new frame, things began to click. Illness became infection. Plagues became patterns. The unknowable became identifiable, testable, curable.
And yet, the more we study, the more we learn our own habitual thoughts play a role in whether or not we succumb to the effect of these unseen forces. While mis-framed, maybe there was a small element of truth to those ideas of moral judgment.
And then there were the stars.
For most of human history, they were beyond not just our reach but our comprehension. Distant fires. Divine candles. Fixed points in a mysterious firmament. And even after Copernicus and Kepler and Newton, we still couldn’t answer the simplest question: what are they made of?
No one expected that the answer would come from something as small as a slit of light.
Spectroscopy—the study of the light emitted or absorbed by materials—gave us a way in. It let us match the signature of distant starlight to known substances here on Earth. Hydrogen. Helium. Iron. Carbon. Atoms, not myths. Patterns, not portents.
But let’s be careful. These measurements are real—but they are still inferences. Translations. We haven’t touched a star. We haven’t captured its light in a bottle. We read it from a distance, using tools and models that are still evolving.
So yes, we should be proud of how far we’ve come. But never so proud that we forget: we got here not by accepting mystery, but by challenging it.
No Longer Just a Line
The problem wasn’t the mystery. It was the model.
In du Bois-Reymond’s day, science was still shaking off the mystical and mythological. It had only recently gained traction as a discipline rooted in material cause and effect—a system of reliable, testable, repeatable methods. It needed guardrails. Standards. A way to separate what could be demonstrated from what could only be imagined.
And materialism provided those guardrails. It asked: can we touch it? Measure it? Model it mathematically? And if not—well then, perhaps it isn’t real enough to belong in the lab.
There is wisdom in this. It kept science from dissolving into storytelling. It gave us engineering. Chemistry. Microbiology. Planes, rockets, antibiotics, and microchips.
But it also came at a cost.
When materialism became not a method but a worldview, it started to draw limits that looked like laws. If something couldn’t be measured, then it must not matter. If something couldn’t be modeled, then it must not exist.
And so the boundaries we drew to keep out nonsense may have inadvertently set limits to how much we can understand. Not because we can’t understand it, but because understanding those things requires a different approach, a different way of seeing the world, a different paradigm for making sense of it.
Du Bois-Reymond wasn’t necessarily trying to enshrine those boundaries. Or maybe he was. Science has always had a certain arrogance about its declarations of truth. They speak with certainty in public, while in private expressing their reserve. To the detriment of the understanding of the general populous.
Science, at its best, is a mapmaker. It sketches what we know, updates it as we go, and marks the unknown with care. But when a scientist declares that a question shall never be answered, they’re not just drawing a boundary—they’re building a wall. And not just for themselves, but for everyone who comes after.
That’s not caution. That’s philosophy in a lab coat—dressed up in certainty, but still just a personal limitation masquerading as universal law.
And that’s the irony. The very discipline that taught us to ask for proof began, in certain corners, to use its lack of proof as proof that there is nothing worth finding.
Limits are real. But they are not always fixed. And they are never eternal.
We forget. The map is just that: a map. As our tools get more refined, our map gets more accurate.
But, oh! The hubris of thinking the map we have now is the final map! We, in our limited capacity, have somehow managed to ascend to the throne of heaven and established dominance over the eternal. As it says in Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.”
Damn. Hubris isn’t new.
Maybe it’s intrinsic.
I wonder just how much of it I’m guilty of.
Mind Comprehending Mind
In 1872, when Du Bois-Reymond stood before the Prussian Academy of Science, he declared that consciousness, among other things, was unknowable.
And this makes sense, if you think about it. How can a mind comprehend mind itself? After all, ‘comprehend’ means to encompass, to encircle, to view from every angle. The idea that a mind could comprehend mind itself is akin to writing a computer program that emulates the very computer it is emulating!
But that absurdity is due to a misunderstanding. Comprehension is not emulation. It does not require us to track every detail and be able to play it out in real time in our minds. Indeed, that would be impossible.
No, comprehension only requires us to understand who the actors are, and the parts they play, and how they interact with one another. It requires us to build a model of the mind. And as we know:
All models are wrong. Some models are useful. — George Box
That opens up an intriguing possibility, doesn’t it? Could we build a useful model of the mind? One that doesn’t just articulate how it behaves, as we have in the field of psychology. But one that describes exactly how that behavior is achieved, a model of the kind we seek in neurobiology?
Indeed. And perhaps that model isn’t even that hard to construct. Perhaps all the pieces are already in place, we just need to connect the dots.
Music. Resonance. Dissonance. Magnetoencephalography. Electromagnetic fields that dance in our skulls. The model has already been built. It just hasn’t become popular yet.
Determinism vs. Free Will
If consciousness is the rhythm, then choice is the moment the rhythm changes.
Free will is another one of those questions we were told we couldn’t answer. Not because it’s undefined—but because it’s too defined. Too many disciplines claimed it: philosophy, theology, neuroscience, psychology. And every one of them gave a different answer.
One side says: it’s an illusion. Just atoms in motion. Just dominoes falling. You are a passenger in your own mind.
Another says: no, you’re the driver. You choose. You act. You’re responsible.
And caught in the middle is everyone else, wondering how to live as if they have agency while being told they do not.
But again—what if the paradox is the problem? What if we’re asking the wrong kind of question?
Let’s start simple.
The brain is a mechanism. We know this. It takes input, processes information, and produces output. It is influenced by genetics, experience, chemistry, and context. No one seriously doubts that.
But that does not make it predictable.
Because the brain is not simple. Billions of neurons, trillions of interconnections, each of which is a mechanical computational unit that is subject to countless influencing factors. Factors like temperature, pressure, gravity, and electromagnetic frequencies. Not to mention things like oxygen levels, hormone levels, or nutrition. And let’s not forget its self-referential nature, where our own ideas feed back in on itself, becoming a factor in our decision making process. And don’t forget: minds have memories.
Variables. Lots and lots of variables. Many of which we cannot control. Mechanistic, sure. And we lose nothing in that. Because, thanks to those variables, it is both mechanistic and unpredictable! You would need to recreate the entire universe playing out in real time to be able to accurately predict the decisions of a single individual.
And the reality is, that randomness actually contributes to our success.
So the question about free will is, like so many unsolved problems in science and philosophy, a problem of definition.
It’s not a question of whether or not you have the ability to decide things for yourself. You do. The question is: does knowing how you do it change anything about what it is, or render it non-existant?
I don’t think so.
Does knowing how babies are made make it any less fun making them? It can, if you fixate on it . . .
Does knowing how hamburgers are made take away from the flavor? Again, only if you fixate on it . . .
The idea that believing that the mind is a machine, even a divinely designed machine, somehow denigrates us . . . that’s just a case of believing that the mystery, that our own ignorance about ourselves and how we function, is an essential element of what we are. And of having the experience of being alive soured by how you think about what it means.
All freedom is within limits. Always was. Always will be. That doesn’t mean it isn’t freedom.
Particle / Wave Duality
Another of those so-called “unknowables”, perhaps the greatest most fundamental of them all, is light.
It behaves like a wave. It behaves like a particle. It moves through space as if space is something, and yet we’re told it moves through nothing. It is massless, but it carries energy. It can push on things. It is constant, yet dependent on the frame of the observer. It is the speed limit of the universe. And it breaks our models just enough to remind us that we do not fully understand it.
Quantum mechanics tried to make peace with this. It didn’t solve the paradox. It institutionalized it.
And matter? It plays by similar rules. It can act like a wave. It has probability fields. It is made of things that are not things, with behaviors that only make sense as math. It exists and it doesn’t, until you measure it. And sometimes, after you measure it, you still don’t know what happened.
This isn’t an argument against physics. It’s a testimony to its honesty. Physics doesn’t hide the mystery. It has simply learned to work around it.
But . . . what if we have the answer, we just haven’t asked ourselves the right question yet?
Did you know that there exists a type of wave called a soliton? For the longest time, I didn’t. I wasn’t taught about them in school.
It’s a wave, like any other wave. Except it propagates in a non-linear medium, a medium where moving the substrate twice as far requires, for example, four times as much energy. In that kind of a medium, the bounce-back has a subtle reinforcement effect. It literally creates a refractive effect that offsets the diffusion tendencies of waves. A soliton is a wave. But it moves in a straight line. Like a particle. It’s a fascinating subject worthy of a deep dive.
But . . . did you catch that? It’s a wave that propagates losslessly, in a straight line, like a particle.
One more time for emphasis . . . it’s a wave that looks like a particle. Does that sound like any mysteries that we supposedly would never be able to solve?
Oh, wait, we can’t do that! That would reunite classical and quantum physics and integrate with relativity and basically provide the grand unification theory we’ve all been chasing. If we actually found that, we’d have no excuses to ask for grant money.
No, that’s too cynical, even for me.
The Edge of the Map
Labeling anything as “unknowable” is an understandable impulse. At the same time, it’s inexcusable. Be honest. If banging your head against the brick wall is giving you a headache, don’t make excuses for taking a break. Don’t label the wall as a boundary through which
“you shall not pass!” – Gandalf
You don’t need to make excuses. You need a break so you can come back to it later with fresh eyes, a fresh perspective, and a fresh approach.
The problem isn’t the subject matter. It’s the questions you are asking of it.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably say it again:
“The questions we ask ourselves create the box we want so desperately to think outside of” – John Arrowwood (me)
Sorry, Emil . . . Er, Mr. du Bois-Reymond. It was a nice thought. And I respect you for it. But to put it bluntly: you were wrong.