Boldly Going Where Nobody Has Gone Before

What if life is one enormous computer game? Not just metaphorically. What if we’re all manifestations of some greater consciousness, temporarily experiencing the universe through billions of different perspectives? Perhaps God, or whatever we might call it, has deliberately forgotten everything it knows so that it can experience the universe afresh.

There’s something rather entertaining about imagining that, when we die, we take off our virtual reality headsets and discover we’ve been playing Human Life Simulator. Perhaps there’s even an enormous intergalactic high-score board. I wonder what we’d get points for? Money? Happiness? Experiences? Knowledge? Relationships? Surviving a particularly difficult Tuesday?

But there’s another possibility that I find even more interesting. What if God doesn’t actually know everything? What if, rather than being an all-knowing entity that has deliberately forgotten what it knows, God is itself searching for something? Something that doesn’t yet exist, or something that even God doesn’t know how to find. And what if we’re all part of that search?

Now, before you start wondering whether I’ve spent too many afternoons contemplating the universe in McDonald’s, bear with me. Because I think there’s a rather interesting idea hiding underneath all this speculation.

Every Possible CD

Imagine an ordinary 700 MB compact disc. It can store roughly 5.6 billion bits of information, each of which can be either a zero or a one. That means there are approximately 2 to the power of 5.6 billion possible combinations of information that could be stored on that disc. It’s a finite number, but it’s so extraordinarily large that we couldn’t possibly begin to explore every combination.

Somewhere within those possibilities are recordings of every song you’ve ever heard, every book you’ve ever read, and every song and book that nobody has yet created, provided they can be represented within that amount of data. There are scientific discoveries, extraordinary works of art, and ideas that might change how we understand the universe. Of course, almost every possible combination would be complete nonsense. Random noise. The challenge isn’t simply generating all the possible combinations. The challenge is discovering which combinations actually mean something.

And even that raises an interesting question. Mean something to whom? Imagine finding a sequence of bits containing a brilliant scientific theory written in a language nobody understands. The information might be there, but without the ability to interpret it, it’s effectively worthless. Or imagine a mathematical formula that could revolutionise physics, except that nobody has yet developed the concepts required to recognise what it describes.

There’s a difference between information existing, information being accessible, and information being meaningful. In a mathematical sense, all the possible combinations of bits are already defined. But that doesn’t mean all the knowledge they might represent is already available to us. Knowledge requires interpretation, understanding and context. Sometimes we need to make one discovery before we’re capable of recognising the significance of another.

And perhaps some of the most important discoveries aren’t simply hidden answers waiting to be uncovered. Perhaps they’re entirely new ways of thinking that allow us to recognise possibilities we couldn’t previously have imagined. Which makes me wonder whether humanity is engaged in something rather like an enormous search.

Humanity’s Enormous Search Party

Imagine that instead of one person searching through all these possibilities, we have billions of people, each with different knowledge, experiences, interests, abilities and perspectives. Some are exploring mathematics, while others are studying biology, physics, psychology, history or philosophy. Some are building machines, while others are creating music, raising families, developing relationships, travelling or simply trying to understand themselves and the world around them. We’re all exploring different parts of an unimaginably large landscape.

And here’s something rather extraordinary. Humanity collectively knows vastly more than any individual human could ever know. Think about your smartphone. Could you build one entirely from scratch? I certainly couldn’t. Even the people who design smartphones depend on knowledge developed by countless other people. We need physicists, engineers, chemists, mathematicians, programmers, manufacturers and thousands of other specialists. No single person understands every detail of the enormous network of knowledge and activity required to produce one. Yet somehow, collectively, we can do it.

Humanity has developed an extraordinary ability to accumulate knowledge across generations, distribute it between individuals and combine it into things that none of us could achieve alone. In that sense, perhaps humanity is already something resembling a collective intelligence. Not because we’re all connected through some mysterious supernatural force, but because our individual discoveries become building blocks for other people’s discoveries. And the more we discover, the more possibilities become available.

This last point is particularly interesting, because it suggests that we’re not simply searching through an enormous collection of things that already exist. We might actually be changing what’s possible as we go along.

The Next Door

There’s a concept called the adjacent possible, associated with the scientist Stuart Kauffman. The basic idea is that, from any particular state of affairs, some possibilities are accessible while others aren’t. But when something changes, new possibilities become accessible. Before we understood electricity, we couldn’t build electric motors. Before computers existed, we couldn’t develop computer networks. Before those networks existed, we couldn’t build the internet as we know it. And before the internet existed, an enormous range of modern possibilities simply wasn’t available.

Each development creates opportunities for further developments. It’s rather like exploring an enormous building. You enter one room and discover several doors. Each door leads to another room, containing even more doors. Some lead nowhere particularly interesting, while others open up entire new wings of the building. And occasionally, somebody discovers a door that nobody had previously realised existed.

What’s fascinating is that the building doesn’t necessarily have a fixed layout. Opening one door might somehow cause several entirely new rooms to appear. This makes our original CD analogy even more interesting. The CD represents a fixed collection of possible combinations of information. But human discovery isn’t quite like that. We don’t simply examine possibilities independently of one another. What we discover changes what we understand, what we can imagine, and what we’re capable of doing next.

We’re not just exploring the map. We’re expanding the territory we can explore.

And that raises another question. If humanity is collectively exploring this enormous landscape, who is best equipped to discover the next interesting door? The obvious answer might be the people who know the most about a particular subject. And often, that’s probably true. But perhaps some of the most interesting discoveries come from people who recognise connections between areas that other people have been exploring independently.

Which brings me to something I’ve become increasingly interested in.

The Polymath

We live in an extraordinarily specialised world, and understandably so. Human knowledge has grown far beyond what any individual could hope to master. If you want to push the boundaries of quantum physics, you’re probably going to need to spend rather a lot of time studying quantum physics. There’s no getting around that. But I wonder whether specialisation also creates a problem.

When we become deeply immersed in one subject, we can start seeing everything through the assumptions and methods of that subject. A psychologist might approach a problem differently from an engineer. A biologist might notice something that an economist overlooks. And a philosopher might ask whether everyone is trying to solve the wrong problem in the first place.

This is where polymaths become interesting. A polymath is someone with substantial knowledge or expertise across multiple disciplines. Historically, people such as Leonardo da Vinci explored art, engineering, anatomy and numerous other subjects. But I don’t think the most interesting thing about polymaths is simply that they know lots of things. It’s that they can recognise connections between things that other people might never think to connect.

Consider how nature has developed solutions to problems over billions of years. An engineer studying efficient structures might discover something useful by looking at bones. Someone developing computer algorithms might learn from the behaviour of ants. A psychologist studying human decision-making might find useful parallels in economics. Ideas developed to solve one problem can sometimes be surprisingly useful in an entirely different field, and perhaps some of humanity’s most interesting discoveries are waiting at those intersections.

Returning to our enormous building, specialists might be particularly good at exploring deeply into individual rooms, understanding everything they contain and discovering doors that nobody else has noticed. But perhaps polymaths and other people who move between disciplines are especially good at noticing that two rooms, which everyone assumed were completely separate, actually share a wall. Or that a problem which has frustrated people in one room was solved decades ago in another.

That’s an appealing possibility. But it comes with a fairly substantial problem.

The Danger of Knowing a Little About Everything

It’s quite easy to become fascinated by lots of subjects without developing a particularly deep understanding of any of them. I can spend an afternoon discussing quantum physics, consciousness, evolution and the meaning of life. That doesn’t make me a physicist, neuroscientist, biologist or philosopher. And there’s a danger that superficial similarities between subjects can create the illusion of understanding. Just because two things sound similar doesn’t necessarily mean they’re connected in any meaningful way.

The language of quantum physics, for example, has occasionally been borrowed to explain all sorts of things about consciousness and human experience. Sometimes there might be an interesting question worth investigating. But using scientific terminology doesn’t automatically make an explanation scientific. A connection needs to be more than an entertaining analogy.

So perhaps the ideal isn’t simply to know a little about everything. It’s to develop genuine understanding in some areas while remaining curious about others. To recognise where our expertise ends, to be willing to learn from people who know things we don’t, and perhaps most importantly, to develop the judgement to distinguish a genuinely useful connection from a superficially attractive one.

And perhaps we don’t all need to become polymaths in the traditional sense. There may be enormous value simply in being willing to explore outside our usual areas of expertise, to communicate with people who think differently, and to recognise that the way we’ve learned to approach a problem isn’t necessarily the only way to approach it.

Which brings us back to our enormous search party. Perhaps humanity needs both specialists and generalists: people who explore deeply into particular subjects, and people who travel between those subjects, noticing connections and carrying ideas from one place to another. Neither approach is inherently superior. They complement one another.

But there’s another question that I think is even more important.

But What Are We Actually Searching For?

So far, I’ve been talking about expanding human knowledge as though that’s obviously a good thing. But is it? We tend to assume that discovering new things and developing new technologies represent progress. And in many respects, they do. Scientific discoveries have helped us understand the universe, treat diseases, communicate across enormous distances and achieve things that previous generations could scarcely have imagined.

But not every discovery necessarily makes the world a better place. Understanding nuclear physics has given us extraordinary scientific and medical capabilities, but also nuclear weapons. Advances in artificial intelligence might help us solve enormously difficult problems, while simultaneously creating problems we haven’t yet learned how to manage. Perhaps expanding the range of things we can do isn’t quite the same as expanding our understanding of what we should do.

And perhaps wisdom is as important as knowledge.

This brings me to another thought. Imagine two people. One dedicates their entire life to mathematics and discovers something genuinely new. The other spends their life developing wonderful relationships, helping people around them and becoming increasingly happy and wise. Which person has contributed more to humanity?

I genuinely don’t know. Perhaps both have. Perhaps they’re contributing in completely different ways that can’t meaningfully be compared. And perhaps that’s the point. We tend to think of the frontier of human progress in terms of science, technology and discovery. But what about the frontier of human experience? What about understanding happiness, relationships, compassion, freedom and how to live a good life? I suspect there are still enormous amounts we don’t understand about these things.

And unlike a new discovery in theoretical physics, some of these discoveries might be accessible to people without years of specialised education. Of course, there’s an important distinction between discovering something new to ourselves and discovering something genuinely new to humanity. Realising that a particular way of living makes me happy doesn’t mean I’ve uncovered a previously unknown universal truth. But that doesn’t make the discovery worthless.

Something can be enormously valuable to us without being a world-changing contribution to human knowledge. And sometimes, personal discoveries can become valuable to other people too. Perhaps the landscape we’re exploring isn’t simply a landscape of facts, inventions and scientific theories. Perhaps it also includes experiences, relationships, values and ways of living.

And perhaps part of the challenge is learning which possibilities are worth exploring in the first place. After all, an enormous number of possible futures might be available to humanity. But surely we don’t want to pursue all of them. Which makes the ability to recognise worthwhile possibilities rather important.

Finding the Edge

All of this leaves me wondering how we might become better explorers. Not necessarily professional researchers or extraordinary polymaths, but simply people who are better at discovering interesting and worthwhile things.

I suspect curiosity is a good place to start. When something catches our attention, perhaps we should allow ourselves to explore it, even if it doesn’t seem particularly useful, even if it has nothing to do with our careers, and even if we can’t immediately explain why it interests us. Because we don’t necessarily know where an interest might lead.

Something we learn about history might change how we understand politics. Something we learn about psychology might improve our relationships. Something we discover while travelling might challenge assumptions we’ve held for decades. And something we read in a completely unrelated subject might provide the missing piece of a problem we’ve been thinking about for years.

There’s also something to be said for deliberately exploring outside our usual interests. Reading a book we wouldn’t normally choose, talking to someone with completely different experiences, trying to understand an argument we initially disagree with, or asking questions that might make us look a little foolish. Perhaps especially that last one, because one of the obstacles to learning is the desire to appear as though we already know the answers. And if we’re genuinely interested in exploring the unknown, being comfortable with not knowing seems rather important.

I also wonder whether we sometimes underestimate the value of following an interest simply because it’s interesting. We live in a world that often encourages us to justify how we spend our time. What will we gain from learning something? Will it improve our careers? Make us more productive? Help us achieve some particular goal? Those aren’t unreasonable questions. But if we only explore things whose usefulness we can already recognise, might we be limiting ourselves to possibilities we already understand?

Perhaps some of the most interesting discoveries begin with interests that don’t appear to have any obvious purpose at all. And sometimes, the value of exploring something might simply be the enjoyment of exploring it.

The Questions Nobody Is Asking

But perhaps there’s another level beyond simply learning new things. Most education involves learning answers to questions that other people have already asked, and that’s enormously valuable. We don’t need to rediscover mathematics every generation. But eventually, if we explore far enough, we reach questions for which nobody knows the answers. That’s the frontier of knowledge.

And I wonder whether one of the most valuable intellectual skills is learning to recognise questions that nobody has thought to ask. Not just finding new answers, but finding new problems, new perspectives and new ways of connecting ideas. Sometimes the breakthrough might come from discovering that a familiar question has been framed incorrectly, or that two apparently unrelated problems are actually manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon, or that something everybody takes for granted isn’t necessarily true.

And perhaps this connects with our earlier discussion about information and meaning. An answer might be available in some abstract sense, but if nobody has developed the concepts required to ask the relevant question, how would we ever recognise it? Perhaps one of the most important things we can discover is a new way of looking at something we thought we already understood.

Of course, asking an unusual question doesn’t automatically make it a good question. Sometimes there’s a perfectly sensible reason nobody has been asking it! But perhaps developing the ability to recognise worthwhile questions is just as important as developing the ability to answer them.

And that brings us to another interesting possibility. What if there isn’t some ultimate answer waiting at the end of all this exploration? What if every answer simply opens up more questions? Perhaps there isn’t a final room in our enormous building, containing the ultimate explanation of everything. Perhaps every new room reveals more doors, and every discovery expands the range of things we might eventually discover.

Would that make the exploration pointless? I’m not sure it would. In fact, I rather like the possibility that the universe might be endlessly interesting.

Boldly Going

Which brings me back to our original rather ridiculous idea. What if we’re all part of some enormous cosmic experiment? What if God, the universe, or whatever might lie behind existence is exploring possibilities through billions of different conscious experiences? And what if there isn’t necessarily a predetermined answer to discover?

Perhaps, rather than searching for something that already exists, this hypothetical cosmic intelligence is exploring what might become possible. Or perhaps there’s no cosmic intelligence at all, and we’re simply conscious creatures who happen to find ourselves in an extraordinary universe, trying to make sense of it.

I have absolutely no idea which, if any, of these possibilities is true. And I don’t think we need to believe any of them to find something useful in the idea. Because whether or not there’s a cosmic intelligence behind everything, humanity really is engaged in an extraordinary collective exploration. We’re discovering things, combining ideas, learning from one another, making mistakes, occasionally stumbling across something remarkable, and opening doors that previous generations couldn’t even have imagined.

The wonderful thing is that we don’t all need to explore the same territory. Nor do we all need to become famous scientists, inventors or philosophers. Perhaps one of us will make an extraordinary scientific discovery, while another might develop a better way of raising children. Someone else might create a beautiful piece of music, and another might discover a way of living that makes them profoundly happy. I’m not sure those things belong on the same leaderboard. I’m not even sure there should be a leaderboard.

But I do think there’s something appealing about approaching life with the mindset of an explorer. Being curious about things we don’t understand, being willing to question what we think we know, developing skills and knowledge that allow us to venture into unfamiliar territory, and remaining open to the possibility that something extraordinary might be waiting around a corner we hadn’t previously considered.

And perhaps recognising that exploring isn’t necessarily about reaching some final destination. Not because we need to achieve something remarkable, or because our lives are somehow incomplete without another discovery. But because exploring can be enjoyable in its own right, and because we never quite know where it might lead.

Perhaps that’s the practical lesson in all this. We don’t have to know what we’re looking for to discover something worth finding.

And if there really is an intergalactic high-score board somewhere, I rather hope curiosity earns a few points.