The Faulty Arrogance of Logic

Why knowing requires curiosity, and curiosity requires humility.

About 2,500 years ago, two Greek philosophers wrote an argument for “atomos”—an indivisible building block of matter. It’s a logical conclusion to draw. We look at the world around us, we see what seem like solid objects, and these objects can be broken apart. Of course, then, there is some level at which objects don’t break apart, and those must be fundamental building blocks of reality. 

Not only is this conclusion wrong, it’s catastrophically wrong. We patronizingly remember these beliefs as steps on our way to scientific enlightenment much in the same way that an art historian will invoke flat Byzantine art as a step on the path to the Mona Lisa. But we fail to learn the underlying lesson.

Logical systems tend to fall in love with themselves.

It’s tempting to ignore evidence rather than complicate an elegant model.

We remember Albert Einstein for the monumental leap his work made in physics. It’s easy to forget that later in life, Einstein was also a denier of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is now the most established, well-tested discipline in Physics. 

It’s easy to empathize with Einstein and the many skeptics of quantum mechanics during that time. Einstein’s theory, which seemed to build upon Isaac Newton’s, dictated every object in the universe—from things the size of soccer balls to the most massive distant stars. If the rules apply as objects become much, much bigger, then shouldn’t the same rules apply as objects become much, much smaller? 

Aesthetically, the model is so much more elegant if the answer is “Yes!” But reality is much stranger and more complex. Logic can help us map explored territory, but we can’t trust it to tell us what’s over the next ridge. No amount of logic gets us to quantum mechanics. 

Logic isn’t curious.

There’s an insidious quality to logic. When we arrive at a logical conclusion, it feels as if a layer of the universe has been peeled back, and we’ve discovered a previously-hidden reality. But that’s not what logic really is. 

Logic is an emulation of reality. It’s a way that we approximate a system so that we can tinker with it, rearrange it, consider it from different angles, break it apart, rebuild it. But it isn’t reality. It’s a simplification of reality. 

During a debate about spiritual belief, atheist philosopher Sam Harris famously said: 

If someone doesn't value evidence, what evidence are you going to provide to prove that they should value it? If someone doesn't value logic, what logical argument could you provide to show the importance of logic?

It’s a totally logical statement, but it makes a mistake. It elevates logic to the level of evidence. Unfortunately, something can be both completely logical and entirely wrong. 

Logic is the most useful tool we’ve ever invented, and like all tools, it has limitations. 

Undoubtedly, logic is a useful tool—perhaps the most useful tool we humans have ever invented. Logic is responsible not just for myriad scientific discoveries but for the scientific process itself. Form a hypothesis, test the hypothesis, evaluate based on observation—that’s a logical system, and it’s proven invaluable for human progress. 

It’s a tool. But like all tools, it has limitations. 

Logic doesn’t determine scientific truths. It can’t evaluate the efficacy of a medicine or the conductivity of a metal. Logic can’t tell us whether or not aliens live in our universe or if there are other universes entirely. It can’t tell us what we’ll find if we explore the cosmos or the deepest recesses of our consciousness.

Logic helps us build hypotheses about each of these examples, but it doesn’t have the final say. Evidence and observation do. As we look back through generations of scientific discovery and understanding, from the earliest mythologies about the creation of the universe through the multiverse predicted by String Theory, at least one thing is consistently true: Reality is much stranger than we realized.

Intellectual humility is healthy. And logical. 

In A Universe from Nothing, Lawrence Krauss observes that our Sun is probably a third-generation star. After the big bang, three generations of stars formed and exploded to create the elements that make up the Sun.

He asks us to imagine an alien living on a planet around a fourth generation star. Imagine that it had a similar evolutionary timeline and over billions of years, evolved the same technology we use to observe the universe. Using the same tools and same scientific process, its model of a universe will look radically different.

We arrived at our theory for the Big Bang based on radiation we detect throughout the furthest reaches of the universe. We also observe galaxies around us moving incredibly fast away from each other. These two discoveries—the universe’s background radiation and the way galaxies are moving away from each other—are core inputs to our current model.

By the time our fourth-generation star alien looks around, the microwave background radiation will have cooled to undetectable levels. Its galaxy will have moved so far away from other galaxies that it will never detect another. 

It will never arrive at a “Big Bang” theory. Its “universe” will be a small portion of what we were able to observe a few billion years prior. It’s almost heartbreaking to imagine the befuddled alien scientists never arriving at what we understand to be a fundamental reality of the universe.

But who’s to say that some second-generation star aliens haven’t thought the same thing about us? 

Knowing requires curiosity. Curiosity requires humility.

Today, we are at risk of the same arrogance for which we condemn past, “ignorant”  generations—How could they possibly think they had it all figured out? 

Inevitably, tomorrow’s discoveries will make today’s logic seem foolish, as it always does. We’ll find that a presupposition underlying one of our theories was incorrect, and we’ll rewrite it. We’ll discover a strange reality that’s totally unpredictable based on what we know today. As long as we keep making progress, we’ll continue to repeat this cycle. 

The takeaway here isn’t to deny the value of logic. Rather, it is to reinforce a logical idea: That in the face of everything we’ve learned in the last 100 years, and everything we’ll learn in the next 100 years, we ought to be humble.

Humble enough to recognize that when we push too hard against our logical scaffolding, it inevitably topples. Humble to the possibility that what seemed logical a few moments ago might be completely and utterly wrong. Humble that for all we’ve learned about the universe, understanding it more deeply requires investigation with genuine curiosity.

At the heart of curiosity is humility. It requires that we deny the siren song of a beautiful logical system and dive into the messy depths of reality.