Blindness in Scientistic Pursuits

We are not the masters of our own understanding. In our modern age, we pride ourselves on knowing what we know about the cosmos and calling it everything, yet we remain blind to the very foundations of existence. We gaze at the stars with telescopes and advanced mathematical equations, believing we have unravelled secrets but only highlighting the importance of the most fundamental questions which remain unanswered: the nature of consciousness, the origin of life, or even the foundation of reality itself, remain shrouded in mystery and unobserved.

Scientistic hubris is not new. It is the same arrogance that has driven humanity to claim dominion over nature, to reduce the universe to its parts, and if anything defies our tidy frameworks we label it “unscientific.” We tell ourselves that consciousness can be explained by brain chemistry and neurons alone, not the energy itself. They believe that life arose from random chemical reactions. They believe that gravity operates according to mathematical laws we’ve yet to fully comprehend or place within an underlying universalisable principle. The paradox is plain: the more we know, the more we come to realise how little we understand.

Consider this: if the universe is governed by the invisible forces of big bangs, quantum fields, dark matters, dark energies, black holes, or some as-yet-unidentified entity needed to fill in whatever other gap the standard model has, we are not only blind to their workings but also to any observations confirming their existence. We claim to measure gravity through our planetary specific and derived equations, yet we cannot explain why it exists in the first place. We call life a “biological process,” yet we have no satisfactory theory for how non-living matter gave rise to self-replicating organisms. And what of consciousness? The most enigmatic of all phenomena remains a mystery that eludes neuroscience.

This is not a failure of science, but a crashing into its limits. To claim certainty in the face of such uncertainty is to court disaster. If we are to truly understand the universe, we must first acknowledge our ignorance not as a weakness, but as a virtue in light of what all this divinely simple complexity. It is only through humility that we may begin to glimpse the deeper truths beyond our current frameworks.

Read more at 24K Journal on the crisis of epistemology, click here.