In my fantasies, if I ever were to get that god-like glimpse at how everything actually is, with all that is currently hidden unveiled, it would be something like the feeling you have when you get a joke, or see a “magic eye” illustration, or understand an illusionist’s trick, or learn to juggle: what was formerly perplexing and incoherent becomes in a snap simple and integrated, and there’s a relieving feeling of “ah, but of course.”
But it lately occurs to me that the things I have wrong about the world are probably things I’ve grasped at exactly because they are more simple and more integrated than the reality they hope to approximate. I think if I really were to get this god-like glimpse, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I probably couldn’t fit it in with anything I think I know. It wouldn’t mesh. It wouldn’t be the missing piece of my puzzle, but would overturn the table the incomplete puzzle is on. I have a feeling I couldn’t even be there, intact, in the way I am now: observing, puzzling over things, trying to shuffle and combine ideas. What makes me think I can bring my face along, face-to-face with the All?
And then today I read this: “We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realize to be contingent particulars, just things among others here below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable, and as such in peril of being judged non-existent. Then the sense of the Divine vanishes in the attempt to preserve it.” (Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals)
I like to phrase it as “the path to simplicity involves a lot of detours.” Yes, Newtonian mechanics doesn’t account for the orbit of Mercury but it turned out there was an even simpler, more parsimonious theory, general relativity, waiting for us.
In my fantasies, if I ever were to get that god-like glimpse at how everything actually is, with all that is currently hidden unveiled, it would be something like the feeling you have when you get a joke, or see a “magic eye” illustration, or understand an illusionist’s trick, or learn to juggle: what was formerly perplexing and incoherent becomes in a snap simple and integrated, and there’s a relieving feeling of “ah, but of course.”
But it lately occurs to me that the things I have wrong about the world are probably things I’ve grasped at exactly because they are more simple and more integrated than the reality they hope to approximate. I think if I really were to get this god-like glimpse, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I probably couldn’t fit it in with anything I think I know. It wouldn’t mesh. It wouldn’t be the missing piece of my puzzle, but would overturn the table the incomplete puzzle is on. I have a feeling I couldn’t even be there, intact, in the way I am now: observing, puzzling over things, trying to shuffle and combine ideas. What makes me think I can bring my face along, face-to-face with the All?
And then today I read this: “We yearn for the transcendent, for God, for something divine and good and pure, but in picturing the transcendent we transform it into idols which we then realize to be contingent particulars, just things among others here below. If we destroy these idols in order to reach something untainted and pure, what we really need, the thing itself, we render the Divine ineffable, and as such in peril of being judged non-existent. Then the sense of the Divine vanishes in the attempt to preserve it.” (Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals)
I like to phrase it as “the path to simplicity involves a lot of detours.” Yes, Newtonian mechanics doesn’t account for the orbit of Mercury but it turned out there was an even simpler, more parsimonious theory, general relativity, waiting for us.