And he dreamed, and behold, there was a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven. And behold, the angels of God were ascending and descending on it! And behold, the LORD stood above it and said, “I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac. The land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring. Your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed. Behold, I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land. For I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it.”

- Genesis 28:12

That night Jacob arose and took his two wives, his two female servants, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He sent them across the stream along with everything else that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then the man said, "Let me go, for the day has broken." But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said, “What is your name?” And he said, "Jacob." Then he said, "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed."
- Genesis 32:22

The ineffable is dead; science has killed it. Oh, there are still open questions, there are still things we don’t know, but almost none of it is truly unimaginable any more. The origins of life: tide pools, maybe, or hydrothermal vents—we’ll know once we can run more powerful simulations. Consciousness: looks like it’s a pattern of recursive attention in a neural network, we’ll be able to recreate it once we get better architecture searches working. Even the laws of physics themselves we can chalk up to the multiverse: if all possible universes exist, we can think of our own as just a random draw from the set of universes in which it’s possible for life to flourish.

There’s only one real mystery left. One thing that feels impossible to understand, even in principle: ...

Robert Dewan

Robert Dewan