Abstract: This post briefly offers thoughts on a basic path towards understanding everything.
"The Answer to the Great Question...Of Life, the Universe and Everything...Is...Forty-two." - Deep Thought (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, hyper-intelligent beings design a computer system known as Deep Thought which is analogous in capability to our conception of a superintelligent machine. Yet when asked the answer to "Life, the Universe and Everything," Deep Thought replies "Forty-two," which does not satisfy the hyperintelligent beings' hope for a meaningful answer.
Deep Thought suggests that perhaps these beings have "never actually known what the question is," which he proves by the beings inability to define what the question actually means. The hyper-intelligent beings are limited by their biology. They cannot comprehend what this question truly means. Humans face a similar problem, we are limited by our range of consciousness in finding answers.
The purpose of technology is to enlarge this range. For nearly two thousand years Western medical thought was dominated by the idea that illness was due to the imbalance of the four "Humors": Blood, Phlegm, Yellow Bile, and Black Bile. During the Black Death humans came closer to the truth through their observation that disease occurred in unhygienic crowded areas. This led them to believe that disease spread from rotting organic matter. It was only with the invention of the microscope, a tool which extended human’s natural capabilities by allowing us to see microscopic organisms that we were able to determine the existence of germs. There are many other examples. Computers allowed us to do calculations with ease which would have taken humans thousands of years. This allowed us to do the widespread computation required for the modern internet (imagine if humans had to manually do all the calculations required for the internet to run). This example specifically shows the compounding effect of these “capability-expansions.”
While I previously showed how technology expanded our capabilities I now will show examples of natural limitations in our thought. A perfect example here is the Monty Hall Problem. Without going into the details which I’m sure are familiar to most readers, many people naturally find a certain probability to be ½ when in reality it is ⅔. This is a result of our way of thinking. Other cognitive biases such as confirmation bias, anchoring bias, and hindsight bias affect our cognition. I posit that our cognition is limiting our questions. We cannot hope to find the answers to the most important questions with our biological range of cognition. Even with superintelligence our grand understanding will still be limited by our biology. This range of comprehension must be expanded by integrating technology into our biology.
The philosophy is as follows: We must expand our cognitive abilities and build technology to find answers to deeper questions, and to understand what questions we should be asking. We must integrate technology into our biology or else we will always be limited in our understanding. The goal of humanity should be expanding our consciousness to better comprehend our world.