Category Archives: Science

Why Discrimination Is Reasonable, According to Karl Popper

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A while ago, I had a discussion with a friend of mine: we were talking about how people from different cultures interacted with each other. My friend claimed – and he was quite serious about it – that ‘All Moroccans are aggressive’. ‘How do you know?’ I asked him, ‘Have you met all Moroccans?’. ‘No’, he said, ‘but the ones I’ve met, were all aggressive’. Well that seems discriminating, doesn’t it? But while he said this, an idea popped into my mind: Karl Popper’s falsification theory. And I came to a rather unexpected conclusion…

You might have heard of Karl Popper. He is a big name in (the history of) philosophy of science. Popper was a proponent of a tenet called ‘critical rationalism‘, and he is best known for the notion of ‘falsifiability‘ he came up with, in which falsifiability refers to ‘the inherent testability of a scientific hypothesis’. Popper used the notion of falsifiability as a criterium to distinguish science from what he called ‘pseudo-science’, in which a pseudo-science would be any possible ‘science’ that makes unfalsifiable claims – claims that cannot be refuted. An example of an unfalsifiable claim would be: God exists. It is impossible, by means of empirical investigation, to falsify this claim. Therefore, according to Popper, religion – or at least this religious claim – is not scientific.

Given that there are unfalsifiable claims, there must also be falsifiable claims. An example of the latter would be: All swans are white. You can see why this claim is falsifiable: if you would come to see one swan that is not white, this claim has shown to be false. And even though you are unable to prove that the claim ‘All swans are white’ is true, you can prove that it’s not true – thus falsify it. The assumption underlying the notion of falsifiability is that, as long as a falsifiable claim is not falsified, it should for the time being be accepted. There is after all no reason to say it is false.

Now, let’s go back to my friend and his seemingly discriminatory beliefs. Because if you take a closer look, it appears that discrimination and falsifiability are two sides of the same coin. Why is that? Well, let’s assume that we would state the claim ‘All Moroccans are aggressive’ – like my friend did. This claim is clearly falsifiable: one not aggressive Moroccan is sufficient to prove the claim to be false. Now, let’s assume my friend and I go to a bar and meet a few Moroccans. And, as my friend expected, they are indeed aggressive. Thus far, Popper couldn’t blame my friend for holding on to the claim ‘All Moroccans are aggressive’. After all, the claim hasn’t been falsified yet.

The point being: doesn’t my friend apply the same method as is used in the sciences? Making bold conjectures and, based on data, either refute them or not? We don’t seem to have a problem with claiming that ‘All Swans are white’, until it has been proven to be false. So why would a claim applying the same ‘scientific’ methods, when applied to members of our own species, suddenly be discriminating? Isn’t it utterly reasonable to hold on to your claims until they’ve proven to be false? Or in the case of my friend: to hold on to his unfalsified ‘discriminatory’ belief?

Note that I am not claiming that discrimination is reasonable in itself. What I am claiming however is that we cannot accuse people of holding unreasonable beliefs if they (these people) haven’t been proven wrong in holding this belief. For example: although we might have had good experiences with Moroccans, they – my friend, for example – might not. And, given Popper’s theory, this makes their beliefs no less reasonable to hold than ours.

What do you think?

Flipping the Hierarchy of the Sciences

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There are different sciences, and each one is ‘appreciated’ for its own unique contribution to our collective knowledge pool. But some sciences are appreciated just a little more than others. Whether it be the social sciences that are regarded as the most complex and developed sciences, as Auguste Comte believed, or the natural sciences as being the ones coming closest to the ‘objective truth’, as people in our society – implicitly or explicitly – seem to presume: there’s always a certain hierarchy in our perception of the sciences.

It’s understandable why – at least in our society – the natural sciences are regarded to be ‘better’ or ‘more scientific’ than those ‘subjective’ social sciences. The natural sciences – physics, chemistry etc. – are related to Western industrialism and the inventions (steam engine, electricity, televisions etc.) it brought forth. And since natural sciences –> inventions –> money, and since money is good, the natural sciences are good too. At least better than the social sciences, for the latter won’t make us millionaires. But even though such hierarchies are understandable, they might have some negative implications for the manner in which the ‘lower’ sciences are being looked upon. They might, for example, lose their ‘scientific status’, and hence the respect that comes with this status. But there’s a remarkably easy way to solve this problem.

People are used to thinking in terms of higher and lower, at which ‘higher’ is associated with ‘better’ and ‘lower’ with ‘worse’. This vertical manner of thinking might be a relic from the past, in which religion was very prominent and in which higher meant closer to heaven, and in which heaven was good. But whatever metaphor was responsible for the pyramid-structured hierarchies we tend to visualize in our heads, it’s a fact that it’s omnipresent in our conceptual frameworks.

But let me ask you something: what would happen if we would turn this vertical hierarchy on its side? If we would obtain a horizontal ‘hierarchy’? Would we then still have a hierarchy? Probably not, for the distinction between higher and lower ranks would have disappeared. It’s just left and right, with left – for example – being the social sciences and right the natural sciences – in case you order the sciences based on a criteria such as ‘nature dominance’. Or you could put the natural sciences on the left hand side and the social sciences on the right – in case the variable of choice would be something like ‘people dominance’. Whatever criteria you use for ordering the sciences, the hierarchy will have disappeared, and hence the negative consequences for a science appearing at the bottom of the ranking.

It’s a very easy change in ordering the sciences, but one who doesn’t entail the negative consequences of a vertical hierarchy.

But what do you think?

What is Science without “Truth”?

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According to a survey of professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views 44.9% of the respondents accept or lean towards correspondence theories of truth. Whereby a correspondence theory of truth states that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world and whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) that world. As I’ve tried to explain in Does The Truth Exist?, the idea of something – a sentence or a belief – being true can only hold within a set of presumptions supporting this sentence or belief. Also, as I’ve explained in What You See versus What Other People See, we’re always forced to see the world from our own point of view; there is no “God’s eye point of view” from which we can tell which of our beliefs correspond to reality and which don’t. Therefore I was flabbergasted to read that so many philosophers – 44.9% (!) – truly believed that our notion of “truth” must be founded in this – for us unobservable – correspondence relation.

Because think about it: how would we be able to falsify a correspondence relation between a sentence and “reality”, if it’s impossible for us to judge the accuracy of this relation? It is like attaching one part of a wire to the word “tree” and throwing the other part into the dark and asking, “Is it really connected to a tree?”, even though it’s so dark that we are unable to judge whether or not this is the case. And if there’s no way for us to judge this, how then can we base our notion of “truth” on it? Isn’t that ridiculous?

It seems like we’re indoctrinated with ideas about absolute entities “floating around” somewhere in space, waiting for us to find them. Notions like “Truth”, “Right” and “God”. While the latter is losing value in our science-based society, the former two have occupied the empty space left by its departure from our Western “intellectual” belief-system. But isn’t it true that the notions of “Truth” and “Right” are just as unattainable as the notion of “God”? That, although the statement “God does exist” cannot be falsified or confirmed, so can’t statements like “the Truth exists” and “the Right exists”? Isn’t it just a shift in paradigm? A shift in authority between religion and science? A shift that doesn’t bring us any closer towards those absolute – and therefore unreachable – concepts like “Truth” and “God”?

If so, then we have to radically alter our notion of science and what its practice should be. We usually think of science as progressively, by means of getting rid of the “wrong” beliefs, getting closer to the Truth. Of accumulating “facts” and “laws” in an everlasting effort to get to know the world as it really is. But what if the Truth is unattainable, or even more disturbing: what if it doesn’t even exist.  Should science then still be involved in the accumulation of “true” ideas? Without knowing whether its ideas are true or not? That seems stupid, right?

The only manner in which the idea of “getting to know the Truth” might be tenable, is by radically redefining our notion of “Truth”. Each annotation of truth as something that “accurately describes the world out there” should be discarded. Scientists should be seen as what they truly are: builders of useful concepts. A revival of instrumentalism should be fought for. This is the only way in which we will be able to take science’s efforts seriously. And it is in this way that science can – like we believe it does – make progress. Ideas can become more and more useful; our knowledge of subatomic particles can provide us with new insights regarding energy supply. Why would we need the notion of “Truth” for that?

But what do you think?

Do we Need the Social Sciences?

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There is a debate in philosophy of science about the status of “entities” like “churches”. Most of the philosophers agree on the fact that “churches” don’t really exist; that is, don’t really exist apart from the people that are part of a church. Just like a forest cannot exist apart from the trees being part of it. That’s pretty clear, right? The sum is merely a collection of its parts; “1 + 1 is always 2”. This is the ontological part of philosophy; the part of what exists out there in the world, with the position of “ontological individualism” winning the battle.

But there is a problem. Because if “churches” don’t really exist – in the sense I explained above – then they cannot have causal powers. After all, how can you cause something if you don’t exist? That’s impossible, right? But if that is true, a painful question arises: what then about sociology? Or what then about any social science dealing with entities like “churches”?  If these entities can’t cause anything, why then use them in “social laws” like, “If a group has the property of being a church, then its degree of solidarity will be higher than groups that do not have this property”? Then this “law” wouldn’t make sense, right? Unless, of course, it is not a causal relationship being “captured” in this ‘law”, but merely a correlation between the properties of “being a church” and “having a high degree of solidarity”. In this latter interpretation of “law” it can be true that members finding themselves to be “part of a church” have a relatively high degree of solidarity.  But then this would be merely an observation, right? Not a law representing the “causal nature of the universe”, right?

This is difficult issue for philosophers to crack. Since it is appears not to be easy to do without terms like “churches” in “social laws”; that is, if we would claim that “churches” don’t really exist and that the “laws” making use of the term “church” are not really laws, then we would have to come up with an alternative; an alternative posed in terms of individual properties instead of social properties like “being a church”, “being a football game” or “being an argument”. So how are we going to do this? Well, we could come up with a list consisting of all the “individual level properties” belonging to the social level property “being a church”. That list could look something like this: (1) the individuals share a building in which they pray, (2) the individuals believe in the same God…etc. etc. You get it? But then the problem would be that this list can go on forever! How could we ever put this in a law?! That’s impossible, right? And because this is impossible to do, it also becomes impossible, according to certain philosophers, to do away with social properties like “being a church” in social “laws”; after all, they claim, these social terms are needed to make sure that we don’t regress to those kinds of infinitely long lists.

The conclusion of this debate? Social laws are needed. Although churches might be composed of nothing more than individuals; it is conceptually impossible to reduce “social level entities” to “individual level entities”; where the former are used in sciences like sociology and the latter are used in sciences like psychology, neuroscience etc. Another implication of this observation is that it is impossible to do away with the social level sciences – like sociology – by reducing them to individual level sciences – like psychology. Therefore, our efforts to do so have failed miserably……although I seriously doubt the validity of this argument. But that’s something for another article.

But what do you think?

A Game of Tetris: That’s All the World of Chemistry Is

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“Let’s see; where can we put this fine little atom? Is there still some space left, there, next to the Oxygen element? No hmm…okay; that means we’re done for now! We’ve made ourselves a water molecule.”

That’s the way the world of chemistry works; it’s nothing more than a big game of Tetris, played either by nature or by members of our own kind. Measuring and thinking; pushing and retracting; we build ourselves the little worlds we want to. Of course, we have to comply with the rules nature set for us. We can’t make a water molecule by adding only one Hydrogen element, but that’s merely a side-note, right? A little side-effect of the Tetris kind of game Nintendo’s part of Mother Nature has build for us. And who knows: maybe, when we enter the next level, a can of new possibilities will open.

Incredible, right? The way in which nature works? As if it is made for us to understand. It almost makes you presume the existence of a creator; the Nintendo God of chemistry; the one who determined the compositions and configurations in which we are allowed to put the elements together. But maybe something different is going on; maybe we have created this game of Tetris for ourselves in our own little minds; just to make sure that “we understand” the world. After all, isn’t it suspicious that electrons are “too small to see”? That they “just can’t seem to be reflected by light”? And that we have to come up will all kinds of mind-boggling constructions, like light being both “waves and particles”, in order to keep up this facade of knowledge?

Don’t be silly. Of course atoms and subatomic particles exist. Why else would they be so useful to us? Why else does nuclear energy provide us with the power it does? Are you saying that, only because we cannot “see” everything we’re talking about, these “undetectable” things don’t exist?

Well, we can’t see God can we? And still we can attribute many effects to this “cause”: it is God who has made us; it is God who determines our fate; and it is God who makes sure that you go to heaven and I go tell. That’s an elaborate and simple explanation, right? It would surely pass Occam’s razor because of the absolutely minimal number of assumptions it makes: only God has to exist and all of our sorrows can be explained. But does this make God real? Or is it merely a “useful” construct?

But let’s not take this route; let’s keep it “scientific”. Science is, after all, true; and religion isn’t, right? Right?! And let’s be honest; the predictability of the “it’s God’s will” argument isn’t that high, right? Our subatomic particle theory can at least, although it is by means of probabilities, give us a clue about what might happen when we start messing around in “our” world.

So, what’s the conclusion of this article? The conclusion is that we will keep on playing Tetris; no matter who set the rules of the game: whether is Mother Nature or ourselves.

But what do you think?

The Inevitability and Arbitrariness of Signs

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Linguistics is the study of language. And language is, if you think about, a beautiful and very intricate system. It has all sorts of rules or conventions that allow us to communicate with each other. Without these rules, no-one would be able to understand each other. I want to take a look at a central concept in linguistics: ‘signs’. For what exactly is a sign? Probably all kinds of associations with road signs and the like pop into your mind. But when used in a different context, a religious context for example, it can refer to ‘a sign from above’; a message from God. In other words: the notion of ‘sign’ is multi-interpretable.

There is something very peculiar about signs. Something that a man called Ferdinand de Saussure pointed out: the inevitable – but utterly arbitrary – connection between ‘signifiers’ and ‘signifieds’. But what does this mean? And why is this connection both inevitable and arbitrary at the same time? Let’s take a look at that.

According to De Saussure, a sign consist of two parts: (1) a concept or meaning (the signified) and (2) a sound image (the signifier). The signified is your mental image of – let’s say – a tree. When you hear the word ‘tree’, you immediately think about a big green thing standing in a park. That’s the conceptual level of language. The other is the phonetic level or the sound image of ‘tree’. When you write the word tree, you write a ‘t’,’r’, ‘e’ and ‘e’. And when you pronounce these letters in your head, the meaning or concept of a tree immediately arises. De Saussure claims that every sign we know of (whether it is a road sign or a sign from God) consists of these two parts: the thing representing and the thing being represented.

Now De Saussure points out the following: the connection between the word ‘tree’ and the concept (or mental picture) of a tree is utterly arbitrary. It is just because the English community has chosen to take the word ‘tree’ to stand for the mental image of a tree that this connection – or sign – exists. The concept of a tree could have just as easily been called ‘worm’ or ‘water’. You can see this arbitrariness at work when comparing different languages. The Dutch word for a tree is ‘boom’, yet  it still refers to the same mental image as the English word ‘tree’. It’s a convention. Nothing more, nothing less.

Furthermore, De Saussure claims that the fact that we know that ‘tree’ refers to the mental image of a tree is because we also know what other terms refer too, and where the word ‘tree’ doesn’t refer to. By that he means that we can understand the meaning of a word only in relation to other words. It is only because we know that the word ‘branch’ refers to a specific part of a tree that we obtain the mental picture of what the concept of a tree looks like. If we wouldn’t have mental images of ranches or leaves, and all the other parts making up a tree, we wouldn’t know what a tree would be.

So now you know that the connection between a “word” and a “concept” is arbitrary but necessary for the mental image to exist. We can “choose” the connection between the word “tree” and the mental image “tree”, but it nevertheless has to exist for us to grasp the mental image of a “tree”. Because our mental image of a “tree” only exists in relation to other words referring to other mental images.

This observation made me ask the following question: if we wouldn’t have the “phonetic sound” (the tones you hear when a word is uttered) of the word “tree” resonating inside of our heads, would that imply that we wouldn’t know what a “tree” was? In other words: if we wouldn’t have the word “tree”, or any other word referring the the mental image “tree”, would that imply that we wouldn’t know what a “tree” – in our every day conception of it – was? That we wouldn’t know what that big green thing standing in the park was?

Maybe animals can clarify this issue. Cats – for example – don’t seem to use words like “food” to refer to a mental image of “food”. However, they still are able to distinguish “food” from “non-food”. That is, when I put down real food in front of my cat, he runs straight to it. He doesn’t do this when I put a television in front of his nose. So he must have some “system of thought” that makes the concept of “food” different from the concept of “television”. The real question is: is this “system of thought” purely based on unconscious, intuitive and impulse driven forces – like “the smell of food” – that trigger him into moving towards the food, or does the cat have a “sound image” connected to his “mental image” of food that allows him to differentiate “food” from “non-food”?

I don’t know, but I find it pretty fascinating to think about.

But what do you think?

An Application of Freud’s Theory of Mind

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Everyone must have heard of the name ‘Sigmund Freud‘ at some point in their lives. Thinking about the name, there might be all kinds of images popping up in your mind: things like the mind being like an iceberg, notions like ‘The Id’ and ‘The Ego’, and Freud’s ideas about sex as the explanation for pretty much everything we do. But you might not fully remember all of it. You could say that the ideas might be floating around somewhere between your consciousness and your unconsciousness – to speak in Freudian terminology. But what was it exactly that Freud claimed? And why do many philosophers of science condemn his theories to the realm of ‘pseudo-science’? And what’s the value of Freud’s ideas? Let’s apply Freud’s ideas to an everyday situation and find it for ourselves.

Let’s imagine that you are a guy that goes out with some friends. You guys are ‘chilling in the club’, while suddenly an absolutely gorgeous woman enters the room. You notice a certain feeling taking control over your body: attraction, the feeling of you wanting – in whatever sense defined – that woman. This is not a feeling for which you might necessarily have arguments. No, the feeling is just there. This feeling comes down from the part of your personality that Freud calls ‘The Id‘. The only thing that The Id cares about is receiving pleasure, loads of it. It has an inextinguishable urge to grab on to everything within its reach, just for it to calm down its perpetual longing for pleasure; no matter how briefly the satisfaction might last.

You can imagine that society would be a rather chaotic institution if every one of us would just give into his animalistic urges at all times. The notion of rape would become little different from our custom of shacking hands. Therefore some basic rules of conduct need to be ingrained in each member of society: ‘Be gentle to others,’ ‘Help an old lady cross the street’ and ‘Don’t have sex with someone else unless that someone wants to’. It is within this domain of ‘The Superego‘ that all kinds of religious and political beliefs nestle. Beliefs that will guide you in living your life like a caged monkey.

Surely: it’s all nice that we are trying to control our animalistic urges by coming up with a set of reasonable rules. But who makes sure that the needs of The Id and the rules of The Superego are properly matched? After all, as we have just seen, they might contradict each other. So we can’t always satisfy both at the same time: we can’t just rape everyone and be a gentleman at the same time. And that’s where ‘The Ego‘ comes in. The Ego is the controlling power, the power that tries to satisfy the needs of The Id while taking account of the rules of The Superego. The Ego is the house of reason, of the economically thinking part of you; the part that decides to fulfill the most pressing urges first – like the urge to still our hunger – and postpone not so pressing urges – like the urge to have sex – to a point in time at which satisfying this urge might be more ‘appropriate’.

Now you can understand why Freud sees our sexual drives as the prime reason for all our psychological problems, right? After all, it isn’t easy to suppress our animalistic needs, put forward by The Id. That can only be done by repressing the beast that lives inside of us. Or, to put it more boldly, the beast that we simply are. But taming the beast does not make it fall asleep. The beast is still there, waiting for his opportunity to come. And when it comes, he unleashes his true nature. So we have to do everything within our power to shackle the beast, everything in order for us to live a ‘reasonable’ life.

There are – and have been – many criticisms about the scientific status of Freud’s ideas, and you might see why. It’s after all quite difficult to capture something as intangible as ‘The Id‘ in terms of empirical data. Nonetheless, Freud’s ideas have found to be very influential within the domain of psychiatry, even though the current generation of psychology students hardly learns anything about them.

Ah well, scientific or not, it’s still a pretty fascinating point of view, right? Oh, and for the guy at the bar: he took the girl home.

But what do you think?

The Humanities: Are They Truly Scientific?

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What are the criteria for being called a “science”? Usually we seem to associate scientific thought with notions like “facts”, “the truth” and non-subjective enumerations of “the way the world works”. This “normal” interpretation of science often comes down to the idea of science as being able to describe and explain the universe according to a set of formal or natural laws. However, not each discipline that we normally consider to be a science seems to occupy such an “indisputably scientific” position; an indisputable position like physics or chemistry does. Not all the sciences are about the predictable domain of nature. Some of them handle about what might be the most difficult entity to capture in terms of laws: the human being and its utterly unpredictable behavior. Therefore the following question seems justified: are the disciplines that are trying to grasp this interpreting and subjective animal called “human” worthy of being called a science? That is, are the humanities truly scientific?

By humanities, I am referring to disciplines like history, literature and likewise disciplines having the human, or its creations, as its research object. In order for these disciplines to position themselves as being a collective of genuinely “scientific” endeavors, they could try to shed any accusations of subjectivism by adopting an empirical and falsifiable method of inquiry. Being “scientific” in this sense means having a positivistic stance of gathering data and inferring logical conclusions from this data; a stance that isn’t interfered by any introspective or intuitional attempts to gain knowledge. By choosing the positivistic route, no doubts about the objectivity (as being the counterpart of subjectivity) of the humanities’ claims can be made.

However, applying this empirical method of inquiry, and presupposing an attitude of “just sticking to the facts”, might hollow out all that is the humanities. And although the humanities might not be objective in the sense that physics or chemistry are objective, they still seem to be able to contribute valuable insights to our shared pool of knowledge. Therefore, it might be more reasonable for us to make a distinction – within the humanities – between: (1) descriptive inquiries and (2) hermeneutic inquiries.

By making this distinction, full clarity can be provided about (1) the areas within the humanities that are striving to represent “the facts”, and thus should be interpreted to provide an objective description of any state of affairs, and (2) the research that strives to come up with reasonable interpretations of historical events, texts and any other product of human creativity. By explicitly separating these two types of research from each other, we might be able to get the best of both worlds: on the one hand (1) we can satisfy our need for “objective data”, and on the other hand (2) we are still able to come up with interpretations of human constructs. This would provide us with the completest picture the humanities would be able to offer us.

So let’s wrap things up. You could say that the humanities provide us with interesting reflections on what might be going on in those creative minds of our ancestors. However, we should not expect the humanities to adhere to the rules of scientific investigation as they are laid down by positivism. In order to avoid the harmful trap of condemning all of the humanities to the realm of subjectivism, we could try to come up with a sub-domain within the humanities that is confining itself to empirically verifiable facts. However, on a holistic scale, the humanities should be respected for the unique contribution they make to our system of beliefs; even though it might not be possible to capture their insights in terms of laws, and even though a certain part of the scientific community might have problems with calling the humanities “true” sciences.

But what do you think?

Infinity: The Scientific Way of Saying that We Don’t Have a Clue

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Physicists claim that the universe is (increasingly) expanding. But, if you take a closer look at it, you come to see that this isn’t exactly true, don’t you? Since – to make things clear – it appears that the universe isn’t expanding in the sense of something becoming larger; no, it is expanding in the sense that the space between “the things” (galaxies, in this case) is getting wider. It can be compared to a piece of dough scattered with raisins and put in an oven. You will see that, when the dough starts rising, it is not the space within the oven (“the universe”) that is getting larger; no, it is the space between the raisins (“the galaxies”) that is expanding. Okay, okay…but why would this observation be of any importance?

Science is commonly conceived of as being the furthest the human species has come in its quest for finding “the truth”. Science is the realm of human thought that has been endowed with the authority to officially distinguish what is true from what is nonsense. And the scientific journey has proofed to be very valuable to us. It has provided us with prosperity; loads of it. The discovery/invention of electricity and other sources of power are marvelous achievements that – for the biggest part – can be attributed to the scientific enterprise and its longing for knowledge.

In spite of all these accomplishments, we have to stay/become realistic. We have to realize that science is not going to solve our everlasting longing for “the truest of truths”; that science is not going to provide us with final answers to any of the existential questions around. Questions like, “Why are we here?”, “What is right and wrong?”, and, “What are we?”. These are questions so fundamental that they cannot be (satisfactorily) explained upon by science, or by any system of thought for that matter.

And therefore I was glad to read a physicist admitting that we do in fact not know what, if anything, lies outside of the (observable part of) the universe. Our universe might, as he mentioned, go on for infinity or it might – in some inconceivable manner – “be wrapped around itself”. Although I very much appreciate the humbleness of the physicist in admitting that our knowledge is indeed limited, I want to take a look at the two options he put forth for how our universe might be (un)limited.

The first option concerns the notion of infinity. Let’s ask ourselves: what actually is infinity? To me infinity seems to be a concept that is truly unimaginable for us human beings. And although we can try to come to grips with it by translating the concept into mathematical terms, this quest will always result in awkward and unintuitive conclusions. And it is this observation that made me wonder: isn’t infinity just a “quasi-rational” and allegedly scientific response to what is in fact an inexplicable question about the universe? Isn’t talking in terms of “infinitely big” or “infinitely small” just as much a sign of our ignorance as are explanations pointing towards a God-like creature? Even though the former is considered to be a “rational” explanation while the latter is considered to be nothing more than a relic from the “superstitious” past?

And what about the other explanation; the idea that the universe is somehow wrapped around itself, or that our universe is part of a multiverse? These explanations are just as inconceivable as the concept of infinity is. After all, if there would exist a multiverse, where would this multiverse have come from? Another multiverse? But where would that multiverse have come from…? Isn’t this just a slightly more “rational” infinite regress to get lost in?

Thus, although it might sound “rational” or “scientific” to be talking about infinity as being a genuine explanation for the size of our universe, it does not bring us any closer to having any knowledge about the way the world works. Since, in order to get closer, we have to know how far along the way we are. And how can we know how far we are if we are dealing with infinity? That is, how can we point to something being an explanation, if this explanation itself is incomprehensible?

I don’t know. Therefore I ask you: what do you think?