Humans may be in a state of total confusion as to the fundamental makeup of the cosmos and its rules, to the point where even extremely basic concepts would need to be revised for accurate understanding.

epistemic status: Philosophy

Content Warning: Philosophy

Attention conservation notice: Philosophy

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy

—William Shakespeare, “Hamlet” I.5:159–167, 1600

I want to describe a philosophical stance and/or position that could be called "ontological cluelessness".

Definition

Ontological cluelessness is a state of knowledge that humans could be in, in which they haven't yet discovered the correct basic categories and frameworks for making sense of the cosmos^[1] in which they find themselves.

That is, humans currently use some basic frameworks for making sense of the cosmos, which include several branches and flavours of science, mathematics, many religions, and many philosophical frameworks; they also use many basic categories like the notion of a physical law, consciousness, matter, God, substance, Being, moral facts, logical entailment, stories & myths, and so on.

These frameworks and categories may be utterly inadequate for making sense of the cosmos humans find themselves in, and instead represent a local maximum in the space of conceptual apparatūs that could be used to make sense of the cosmos. If that is indeed the case, humanity finds itself in a state of ontological cluelessness. I don't want make strong claims as to whether humanity is in a state of ontological cluelessness, but I believe that it is a hypothesis worth tracking.

Ontological cluelessness can be intepreted in multiple versions with differing strength, where weaker versions may retain some fundamental categories (such as the notion of a concept, or the notion of knowledge); the strongest version calls into question all current ways of knowing (as in inventing notions as basic as the concept of a concept). Leaving this latter kind of strong ontological cluelessness would entail an extreme upending of what we thought the cosmos was made of, the basic principles by which it operated, and the ways to make sense of those principles.

Relation to Other Ideas in Philosophy

Ontological cluelessness is distinct from radical skepticism, pyrrhonism and mysticism:

1. It differs from radical skepticism in that it does not make any strong statement about whether knowledge is possible or not, and indeed a state of ontological cluelessness may hold open the possibility of far deeper or richer knowledge of the cosmos.
2. It is close to pyrrhonism, but differs from it in not making a positive claim that judgment should be suspended.
3. Ontological cluelessness differs from mysticism because it doesn't preclude the possibility of knowing, and doesn't promise the attainment of insight or mystical knowledge. It also doesn't claim spiritual meaning and knowledge is privileged over other kinds of knowledge.

Ontological cluelessness can be seen as a tacit pre-supposition for much foundational (mostly continental) metaphysical work (e.g. Heidegger, Deleuze, Whitehead, maybe Hegel?). That is, looking at Heidegger with his investigation of fundamental ontology and Dasein (and especially his later Kehre and aletheia) and Deleuze with his nomadic science, I feel like that's the kind of metaphysics one'd see that resolves ontological cluelessness. Analytic metaphysics, as far as I can tell, mostly tacitly rejects ontological cluelessness.

Ontological Cluing

I will call the process of resolving/exiting ontological cluelessness "ontological cluing". Ontological cluing could take three different forms:

1. "Additive ontological cluing", in which new categories and frameworks are added to existing ones to allow for a more adequate understanding of the cosmos (thus our current concepts represent a subspace optimum).
2. "Replacing ontological cluing", in which existing categories and frameworks are wholly dropped.
3. A secret third option, opened up by the process of ontological cluing.

Ontological cluing can also be thought of along two other axes:

1. Recognizable vs. unrecognizable ontological cluing: Whether, when someone has undergone ontological cluing, a third person can recognize that fact.
2. Communicable vs uncommunicable ontological cluing: Whether the ontological cluing can be communicated, and to what degree.

The secret third option is possible for both the recognizability and the communicability axis.

Superintelligences may help with ontological cluing if they are philosophically or metaphilosophically competent.

Examples of Ontological Cluing?

This post has been pretty abstract so far, partly due to the abstract nature of the topic at hand. I don't want to speculate or pretend that I can resolve ontological cluelessness if humanity is in that state, but I can give examples of intellectual advances that'd count as ontological cluing if humanity's ontological cluelessness lies in the past. Examples would include:

• The concept "concept".
• Both the intuitive mental motion of abstracting something, and the concept "abstraction".
• Developing both an intuitive understanding of causality, and developing a concept of "causality", and developing a formal theory of causality.
• The invention of language, mathematics.
• The moves from animism to paganism to monotheistic religions.

Likelihood

I personally think it's pretty likely that humanity is ontologically clueless, and if forced I'd put a 30% chance on it (though this number is obviously fraught, since resolving ontological cluelessness may upend the notion of probabilistic notion or probabilities, and after all may never be resolved by experiment).

Humans don't seem to have been selected very strongly for understanding the cosmos accurately, and also not selected very strongly to be competent at philosophy or metaphilosophy.

Practical Implications

I don't think that believing in the option of being ontologically clueless has immediate practical implications. It may lead one to take an open stance towards new conceptual schemes and frameworks, and a receptivity to what could be encountered. It may turn out that our actions matter much more than we think, or much less; it may turn out that the cosmos is much larger than we think, or much smaller; it may be the case that the universe is much better and forgiving than we believe, or much more adversarial and unforgiving; and all of those notions could stop making sense if we understand what, so to speak, "is going on".

Whether or not we are in a state of ontological cluelessness is a crucial consideration, but a frustratingly vague one.

See Also

Nick Bostrom has been hinting at something adjacent to this in some recent interviews (which, maddeningly, I can't find), and I wildly extrapolated his subtle hints; all the mistakes and muddled thinking lie with me.

• Alternative explanation, in form of poetry.

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1. I will use the term "cosmos" a lot here because the entirety of existence may turn out to be much larger (think Tegmark IV) or much smaller (think solipsism) than what standard science considers to be the "universe". ↩︎