Trying to understand reality lead to understanding useless things?

Question

If one sets his purpose as achieving the truest possible understanding of reality (I know one might die and not achieve it), then doesn't this mean that he needs then to understand all the things that are in closed systems like, for example, I created a language with certain rules, then he is obliged to learn it because understanding its content he will have a true understanding of the language.

How can we solve this problem of being obliged to understand those useless things, and is understanding them really a true understanding of reality, isn't it possible that literature, art, math, and piano are all also in that useless category?

Answer 1

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

-Ludwig Wittgenstein, TLP 5.6

"Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When a language dies, so much more than words are lost. Language is the dwelling place of ideas that do not exist anywhere else. It is a prism through which to see the world.”

-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

I recommend a listen to Donald Hoffman on why we can't trust evolution to result in seeing things as they are (TED Talk).

I'd also recommend reading about the ancient Indian metaphor of Indra's Net, which can help us picture how 'reality' can be thought of as emerging from a peer-to-peer network.

What is useless? What is useful? Those are not logical categories, universal for all people. Rather they relate to what the person categorising, wants to do. Is unserstanding Linear B useless? Well, a lot of people are interested in human history and archeology, enough to have funded a bunch of people to figure it out. Should you learn Linear B? Probably not, unless you are deep into some pretty niche academic discipline where it would be relevant.

I make the case here that science isn't about reducing everything to explanations that use the same building blocks, but rather getting the different domains we are interested in to interface, through finding enough about what they have in common to relate: Is the idea that "Everything is energy" even coherent? That means finding what abstractions are most transferable; like say, whole numbers are an abstraction that applies to all kinds of domains, to give useful inferences.

No one else can decide what is useful or useless to you. But I would suggest that in general the more transferable the information is, the more intersubjective, the more fundamental it is.

Consider though, a beautiful piece of piano may not reveal anything fundamental about the world, but if it makes you happy to listen to it, it has not been useless to you. It may have been more useful than say knowing some physics that will never impact your life or wellbeing.

Answer 2

The Value of Prudence

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prudence

1 : the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason

2 : sagacity or shrewdness in the management of affairs

3 : skill and good judgment in the use of resources

4 : caution or circumspection as to danger or risk

Reality only has to be understood as to what actions are prudent or imprudent in the actual dramatic context. That is context-dependent so there is no ultimate understanding of reality. The human body generates the dramatic context and the value of prudence as the desire to gain and keep vitality - the ability to live.

Answer 3

No, I don't think we need to know everything to understand reality. What we need is to know enough about everything.

This is what I mean by enough. We understand something by building, in our imagination, a model of it -- and so we understand reality by building a comprehensive model of it. We can think of it as of piecing together its map -- and a map doesn't capture the territory in every detail, only to a certain resolution. It also could be interactive -- if we want to know more about a certain place, we can zoom in to see it in better detail. In general though, a map is useful when it shows everything in good enough resolution.

Going back to our understanding of reality, it should cover all the territory (ideally) and answer our basic questions, like, what is reality anyway? What are its properties -- is it random/chaotic, or ordered/deterministic? What is "deterministic"? Is reality shared, or everyone has their own? How about truth -- what is truth anyway? Also, why we suffer for it? Why we often mistreat each other? How should we treat each other? Can we be happy? What is happiness? Why some people believe in God and some don't? Should you believe in God? What happens after death? What is the meaning of life, what should we live (and, perhaps, suffer) for? What makes us the way we are, what makes us human, what makes us conscious, where our feelings come from, what does it mean to understand, and why it's a struggle?

(this is my stab at it -- at least that's the starting point because that's what we often struggle with when we try to piece together a puzzle)

And, again, once the basics are covered, we can zoom in and get a better understanding of any area of interest -- psychology, physics, poetry, computer science, or why people do "useless" things.

Answer 4

If you don't mind me saying so, your question shows a lack of clarity in your thinking. The answer to your questions depends on what you mean by the truest possible understanding of reality. For example, consider snow. You might say that you understand snow if you realise that it is a form of precipitation, that it is made mainly of hydrogen and oxygen, that its distinctive hexagonal crystals are a reflection of the geometry of water molecules and so on. Or you might say that understanding reality to the maximum possible extent requires you to know the shape, location, and lifespan on every particle of snow, the total volume of snow on Earth at every instant of time, the geographic distribution of snow, the mean temperature of all snow, etc etc etc. Clearly it is not possible for a human to know everything about snow, let alone all aspects of reality. Given that, if you wish to develop your understanding of reality in an effective way, you need to prioritise. You must decide what is important to you, and focus on gaining an understanding of those topics which is adequate for your purpose. The amount of nonsense on the internet is almost endless, so why bother trying to gain a comprehensive understanding of it?

Answer 5

There are two questions there: how to understand reality fully; and what is useful or useless knowledge.

The first is quite obviously not possible for us humans: our brain capacity, and our time, is very limited compared to all the facts that abound in the universe. While a few hundred years ago we had sufficiently little knowledge, as a species, that individuals could grok almost all of it (i.e., true polymaths), this point in our development has come and gone. Today, in any given science or otherwise fact-based field, there is on the order of many magnitudes more to learn than a single person can ever aspire to do. Even if we only take simple physical facts ("this stone sits on top of that bit of mud" and so on and forth), it is utterly impossible.

Secondly: what is useful or useless. This has no general answer and is decided by the individual. If piano and art makes you happy, and if you consider a certain degree of happiness useful, since it recharges your energies for actually productive work (like getting food to stay alive); or if you even make your living from arts; then it surely is important and useful. Knowing why a specific pebble has ended up just there in a river bed is almost certainly very useless. Understanding how pebbles work in general might be useful for engineers having to decide whether to change a river's flow or build a bridge or something like that.

How to decide which truths you want to learn: It is not like all truths are there and must be known to understand anything; it is the other way around. You set goals (if you do not know what good universal goals for yourself could be, then start by any combination of "be happy", "make progress", "help others be happy", "help others make progress" and so on and forth - from those, pretty much every other goal known to mankind can be reached as sub-goal) and from that flows a decision tree of what kinds of things you need, want, should, must learn. Then you trickle down to ever more details, and eventually you learn individual objective facts. And then you can define any fact you know as useful if it pays into any of your goals or sub-goals, large or small.

Answer 6

There is no useless information; everything is foundational. For example, I've sometimes suspected that theoretical physics is a house of cards; assumptions built on top of assumptions, and such a house can't stand. However - especially in recent years - you see such theoretical research turn into practical applications like quantum computers which now do exist thanks to theoretical research into space-time.

To build a true understanding of anything, one has to appreciate all the inputs. Do you understand a cup of tea? First, you need to know about botany, then the curing process, who grew the tea, how tea strains were selected and bred, how to propagate cuttings, what are the taste buds in the mouth, what is tannin and so on.

If the goal is "The truest possible understanding of reality" then that can never be reached. Even your passage through time adds more variables to examine, so is therefore an infinite journey.

If understanding as much as possible in the least amount of time is the goal, take the path of least resistance. Focus on what is quickly solvable because that will then open up an entire rabbit hole of new understanding.

Ever sat up till 4AM on Wiki or ChatGPT just learning fact after fact? One question always leads to another and it seems there is no end.

Answer 7

Welcome. :D

truest possible understanding of reality

Well, you've managed in a single clause to bring about 4 extremely difficult philosophical topics. Any answer to your question would be contingent upon four questions:

• What is truth?
• What is possibility?
• What is understanding?
• What is reality?

Because of the limits of this forum, this sort of question can't be answered. A lifetime of study might lead to a position, so I'd say you're well suited to being a philosopher. Let's point you in the direction:

• There are many theories of truth. Not all of them agree. You'll have to decide which sort of theories of truth apply, and what your views are on them.
• Besides the epistemological exploration of truth, there is one of modality (SEP), which explores what is meant by possibility.
• The SEP also has an article on understanding. This delves into semantics and thought. There are a number of frameworks that purport to describe what 'understanding' means.
• Reality. Do you mean physical reality? Personal reality? Social reality? What exactly is physical reality, and is it identical to physicalism (SEP)?

So, the answer I'll elect to provide is to ask you to read the articles, and then reformulate your question.