In Awe of Nescience

Exploring faith, magic, and technology

“If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.”-Cardinal Lawrence in the movie The Conclave

The Milky Way seen from Banff, Alberta. Photo by Zoon1984

I am held in awe gazing upon the ocean, standing at the south rim of the Grand Canyon, or staring wide-eyed into the Milky Way on a clear, moonless night. Ocean, canyon, and universe transcend anything I have ever touched or navigated. My own eyes are inadequate for gauging their vastness or revealing their secrets. My awe springs from this perceptual and cognitive transcendence, this nescience.

Nescience¹ is a fancy word for 'ignorance'. It is the opposite of "knowing". By its infrequent use, 'nescience' lacks the negative connotations of 'ignorance'. I am also held in awe by my nescience of how the brain works, how quantum entanglement entangles, and how a cell phone works. We cannot know everything, but we can’t even gage the vastness of our own nescience. Nescience feeds my curiosity; I am driven to understand unsolved mysteries because evolution has provided me with a curiosity reward center in my mid-brain².

You might fault me for having an advanced degree in electrical engineering and not knowing how a cell phone works. Fact is, the person does not exist on this planet that knows how all parts of a cell phone work. It requires thousands of engineers, each a specialist within a narrow domain of engineering: digital or analog circuit design, circuit board fabrication, antenna design, computer architecture, microelectronic fabrication, electro-optics, power management, software development, user interface design, and much more. Nobody has deep expertise in everything. Our brains are amazing, but they are finite.

Perhaps it is this finiteness that explains why we remain unaware of our own nescience. If you have limited memory, you don't want to fill it up with provisional thoughts. So we fill our brains with those things we believe to be most true. We ground some of these beliefs in personal experience; we learn others secondhand. A few beliefs originate from personal innovations or discoveries. Every belief is an article of faith.

Faith is nothing more than a commitment to an idea. Everyone has faith. Atheists have faith that God is nonexistent, even though it is impossible to prove nonexistence. Science itself rests on the faith that the laws of nature are immutable—even though Euclidian physics gets weird at quantum and galactic scales. Faith exists because we refuse to be paralyzed by nescience.

Some view the world in absolutes: black or white, good or bad. They are quick to share their beliefs—perhaps because they hope to find confirmation of their own beliefs in others. The world’s two billion Christians belong to over 45,000 denominations. Each denomination believes it is the one true religion. That is real faith.

Others view the world with a larger palette. They can hold multiple provisional beliefs or hypotheses about the world. These individuals see the world in shades of gray and endless possibilities. They are aware of their own nescience and it humbles them—this is called wisdom. Those of the black-or-white ilk often mistake holding multiple provisional beliefs for being wishy-washy. For gray-scale people, holding multiple provisional beliefs is being open-minded. But when it comes time to act, the open-minded do not hesitate but select the one provisional belief with the most evidential support.

It takes discipline and courage to divide one's faith (confidence in a belief) among multiple competing beliefs. Grabbing onto one belief and joining a group where competing beliefs do not exist is easier. It also takes courage to change your mind. Economist Paul Samuelson famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?".

Before Technology, There Was Magic

Nescience isn't limited to oceans, canyons, and skies. We cannot comprehend most technology. And before cell phones and Artificial Intelligence, there was magic. When I speak of magic, I am not referring to slight-of-hand or parlor tricks, but magic as a belief in a supernatural source of positive and negative outcomes. Magic is still a force to be reckoned with and it confers power to those believed to wield it³. We recognize the utility of magic and technology without knowing how or why it works. But we accept it works entirely on faith.

I've compiled a table that compares archaic magic to modern technology. Arthur C. Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Growing up, I wanted to understand the tricks behind parlor magic tricks and I also wanted to know how clocks, radios, and combustion engines worked. This curiosity, this awe of nescience, motivated me to become an engineer. Even though I have a better grasp of these technologies than some, each is still obscured from me by a boundless cloud of nescience.

Can you think of any parallels that I have left out?

We can draw a few conclusions from these comparisons:

• Magic evolved into technology. Alchemists became chemists. The goals of magic and technology never changed. Just our approach to reaching them.

• People fear and resent tech bros and scientists for the same reason they feared and resented witches and sorcerers. They perceive witches and sorcerers to have power or secret knowledge that others do not. Whether they have actual power is irrelevant—their influence comes from the perception that they have power. In 2024, the much maligned OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described GPT-4, his company’s flagship AI model, by tweeting in X, “Feels like magic to me.”

• Reality is more magical than miracles. Nobody makes that point better than Daniel Dennett, the great American philosopher who died at age 82 in April, 2024. This quote comes from an interview in the New York Times Magazine, Aug. 27, 2023:

"Some people don’t want magic tricks explained to them. I’m not that person. When I see a magic trick, I want to see how it’s done. People want free will or consciousness, life itself, to be real magic. What I want to show people is, look, the magic of life as evolved, the magic of brains as evolving in between our own ears, that’s thrilling! It’s affirming. You don’t need miracles. You just need to understand the world the way it really is, and it’s unbelievably wonderful. We’re so lucky to be alive! The anxiety that people feel about giving up the traditional magical options, I take that very seriously. I can feel that anxiety. But the more I understood about the things I didn’t understand, the more the anxiety ebbed. The more the joy, the wondrousness came back."

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024). Photo by Dmitry Rozhkov, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia

1. from the Online Etymological Dictionary: nescience (n., ˈneSHəns), "ignorance, a state of not knowing," 1610s, from Late Latin nescientia, from Latin nesciens "ignorant, unaware," present participle of nescire "not to know, to be ignorant," from ne "not" (from PIE root *ne- "not") + scire "to know"

2. Mehran Ahmadlou et al., A cell type–specific cortico-subcortical brain circuit for investigatory and novelty-seeking behavior.Science372,eabe9681(2021).DOI:10.1126/science.abe9681

3. The elephant in the room is religion. That is a deeply personal and emotionally-charged subject I chose to sidestep at this point. It is not my intent to challenge anybody's faith or belief. I invite you to draw your own conclusions on this matter.