Is complete knowledge an oxymoron?

[Jim__]

This is a follow-up column by WILLIAM EGGINTON on another column that was discussed in the R/T Forum: here. In this follow-up - a column mostly concerned with questions of the possibility of a deterministic universe - Eggington states that completed knowledge is an oxymoron:

Knowledge can never be complete. This is the case not merely because there will always be something more to know; rather, it is so because completed knowledge is oxymoronic, self-defeating. AI theorists have long dreamed of what Daniel Dennett once called heterophenomenology, the idea that, with an accurate-enough understanding of the human brain my description of another person’s experience could become indiscernible from that experience itself. My point it not merely that heterophenomenology is impossible from a technological perspective or undesirable from an ethical perspective; rather, it is impossible from a logical perspective, since the very phenomenon we are seeking to describe, in this case the conscious experience of another person, would cease to exist without the minimal opacity separating his or her consciousness from mine. Analogously, all knowledge requires this kind of minimal opacity, because knowing something involves, at a minimum, a synthesis of discrete perceptions across space or time.

The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges demonstrated this point with implacable rigor in a story about a man who loses the ability to forget, and with that also ceases to think, perceive, and eventually to live, because, as Borges points out, thinking necessarily involves abstraction, the forgetting of differences. Because of what we can thus call our constitutive ignorance, then, we are free — only and precisely because as beings who cannot possibly occupy all times and spatial perspectives without thereby ceasing to be what we are, we are constantly faced with choices. All these choices — to the extent that they are choices and not simply responses to stimuli or reactions to forces exerted on us — have at least some element that cannot be traced to a direct determination, but could only be blamed, for the sake of defending a deterministic thesis, on the ideal and completely fanciful determinism of “how we are” at the time of the decision to be made.

Far from a mere philosophical wish fulfillment or fuzzy, humanistic thinking, then, this kind of freedom is real, hard-nosed and practical. Indeed, courts of law and ethics panels may take specific determinations into account when casting judgment on responsibility, but most of us would agree that it would be absurd for them to waste time considering philosophical, scientific or religious theories of general determinism. The purpose of both my original piece and this response has been to show that, philosophically speaking as well, this real and practical freedom has nothing to fear from philosophical, scientific or religious pipedreams.

This last remark leads me to the one more issue that many readers brought up, and which I can only touch on now in passing: religion. In a recent blog post Jerry Coyne, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, labels me an “accommodationist” who tries to “denigrate science” and vindicate “other ways of knowing.” Professor Coyne goes on to contrast my (alleged) position to “the scientific ‘model of the world,’” which, he adds, has “been extraordinarily successful at solving problems, while other ‘models’ haven’t done squat.” Passing over the fact that, far from denigrating them, I am fervent and open admirer of the natural sciences (my first academic interests were physics and mathematics), I’m content to let Professor Coyne’s dismissal of every cultural, literary, philosophical or artistic achievement in history speak for itself.