[LAM 3] The Unbearable Insufficiency Of Science

Hyderabad, May 1, LA 3 (conventionally 2025)

I previously claimed that we've reached a point where we are all, consciously or not, revisiting what we thought makes a human, well, human. Perhaps that claim requires some defense.

For most of history, you were pretty safe if you believed that we are the only intelligent beings on Earth. We won’t get into the details of the definition of the word intelligence — we all “know it when we see it”. But the world changed on 30th November 2022. Something else appeared that seemed to simulate intelligence. Suddenly, all the answers that have served us well since the middle of the 18th century are no longer valid.

The Domain of God

Until very recently in history, religion and quasi-religious epic-narratives provided most of the answers to questions that concerned human beings.

Religion attempted to explain almost everything that we care about.

Which questions do we care about? There appear to be two broad classes of questions that a human must contend with in life. One class of things is the nature of reality, the nature of the world, the reason for our existence, the human condition — the big questions. The other class of things are related to practical decisions of every day concern: How do you live? How do you treat your neighbor? How do you decide on a partner? Should you select a mate for life? Is it okay to steal? Is it okay to lie? What should you work on? How hard should you work?

The overwhelming success of religion is accounted for by the fact that it comprehensively answered all of these questions very convincingly for most of history, framing most decisions in a sense of right and wrong. It also had assistance from extremely long and detailed and, in some cases, entertaining narratives that seem to contain an application of this principle of wrong and right, good and bad, degeneracy and transcendence within everyday situations of complex lives. While I cannot say for certain of the biblical applications, I know that this is what dharma is: the nuanced judgement of right and wrong applied to extremely complex individual lives. A pure philosophy only exists in fiction, and is of little value. The success of complex works like the Mahabharata, beyond the excellence of their stories, owe to the fact that they offer so much application in difficult times. Only upon reaching the end do you realize that Pandu and Bhishma (brief), themselves perhaps the utmost examples of virtue and goodness, are in-fact hapless villains — they take technical applications and bindings of their understanding of dharma to its extreme and society pays the price.

However, one big failure of religion becomes evident when it comes in contact with criticism of almost any kind. I don’t know when it happened for me, but it appears I began to question the credibility of these claims somewhere between the ages of 9 and 13 when I began to read. My development seems to lag European society by 200 years or so, since most of the West seems to have caught on during the Rationalism.

The Problem With Science

The problem with science, see, is that while it does a stellar job of trying to approximate the nature of reality, it does not even begin to answer any of the more mundane questions — small questions like what should you do every day? How or who do you marry? How do you treat your neighbor? Where is the line between shrewd business and cheating or lying? Is lying even bad? What is meaningful work? How much work is good?

Science provides much better answers in a narrow domain.

In order to make any of these decisions, every one of us that claims to not be an NPC (a "Non Player Character", or someone who gets their beliefs and thoughts from those around them) must construct a valuation for small things from scratch all by ourselves. This is a monumental cognitive task for minds presently accustomed to ample and ever-increasing dopamine. On the other hand, my grandparents were people of such unshakeable faith, and it has evidently served them so well in life — my grandfather was a very successful businessman, and my grandmother is one of the happiest people I know. They knew their place in society, they had a strong sense of right and wrong, and most decisions found close enough analogues in scriptures and epic narratives that both the human and the cosmic consequences of falling on either side of a decision were pretty well laid out.

Berkeley (the man, not the school), the intellectual ancestor to the instrumentalists (a class of meta-scientists that believe that science is merely a predictive instrument and not an explanation of reality), was perhaps right in realizing this. Berkeley was a man of science, but he was also a devout Christian. On facing the incredible onslaught of success of scientific theories in the early 18th century that contradicted the claims of the church and undermined divine providence, he essentially came to the conclusion that while this new way of thinking called science was effective at making predictions about the world and reality, the structure of the world is still given by God. Whether he’s wrong in his last claim, we don’t yet know. But he was correct in realizing that God serves an essential function and science, while undermining its credibility, does not even begin to offer an alternative in most areas.

Why Now?

The advent of Rationalism in the 1700s, in spirit, called for each of us to create our own values, to answer a call to become the Nietzschean Übermensch (Overman — roughly, an ideal person who creates their own values). Most people who thought about this likely convinced themselves that there was something about us that was special, that cannot — and would never — be explained by science or evolution. Some of the best minds of the 21st century seem to still think so, including leading intellectuals like David Deutsch, who seems to find it difficult to change his mind that there is something afoot in recent AI advances that is truly surprising and questions the limitations of compute and probability.

On the other hand, some of the most profoundly influential people today believeintelligence may just be a property of matter. That we are not that special after all. In either case, recent events mark humanity trailblazing a new path into unknown territory filled with existential beasts that we are all confronting in the midst of an already chaotic life. In other words, the task of the 21st-century Overman has become incredibly difficult.

It is becoming increasingly obvious that New Answers are needed to give us all a sense of meaning and direction, overcoming the insufficiency of modern science and the hyperbole of religion. Even if you are a true Popperian, you must see that everything starts with a conjecture. Every religion was a phenomenal conjecture. Science struck a significant blow to all of them. But competing and compelling conjectures to answer questions in the domain of religion never arrived after that. The key epistemological question is — is any theory better than no theory? I think Popper would say so.