PART ONE: NOBODY SHUT THE DOOR
When my kids were little I would tease them pretty badly, I admit. Like, if I found a door had been left open, I would yell at them: “Who left this door open!”
They were smart kids, and they knew what the answer was – everybody left the door open. If anybody had closed it, it would be closed, but everybody left it open. Every single person in the world.
Nobody closed it.
To reduce linguistic cuteness, I am going to make up a couple of words here. Instead of “nobody” I will say “negperson,” and instead of “nothing” I will say “negobject.” These are just substitutions, nothing has been redefined, there’s no trickery but it provides some room to break habits in interpretation for a minute, to attribute a state of presence to something we habitually wave away as unworthy of our attention.
Negperson accomplishes a lot in the course of a day, you might notice. Negperson is infinitely more prolific than anybody. Many times in a day we encounter problems that have been solved by negperson. Negperson includes not only those salient people who have been assigned to solve it, but other people as well – no stranger broke in and solved the problem – and also – why not? – other animals and objects. Negperson is only the human subset of negobject. So we can say that not only negperson, but negobject solved the problem. My car didn’t solve the problem, or my dog. Also, a unicorn on Mars did not solve the problem, nor did a three-horned unicorn on a planet that has not been discovered yet. And I think it would be fun to argue with someone about whether unicorns can have three horns or not.
Q: What is the solution to this problem? A: there isn’t one. The solution is negobject. That’s why we call it a problem. If anyone had solved the problem, it would be solved, and there would not be a problem. If we talk about a problem then we are assuming that there is a solution that negperson has found. So what I’m talking about here is the question, where is the solution to a problem if no person has found it?
If anyone had shut the door, it would be shut. And not only a person, and not only possible things – a three-horned unicorn that has been ejected from its so-far-undiscovered planet and become a meteorite could crash into the door and shut it. Stranger things have happened. The negobject who has shut the door contains all possibilities; it would be metaphorically accurate to say that negobject is pregnant with answers. It also contains all impossibilities, and until a problem has been solved there is no distinction between possible and impossible proposals.
It’s not important but perhaps noteworthy that the object of search – a problem solution – and the discoverer of that object exist in the same place. Similar searchers examine similar candidate solutions.
At Time 1 only negperson has found a solution; at Time 2 a solution is known and the searcher is somebody. Solving the problem instantly transforms both searcher and solution from negobject to something.
Maybe the door has not been shut, but somebody pushed it without latching it, maybe somebody solved the easy part of the problem and left the rest for somebody else. These concepts offer us the insight that negobject can be measured, there is distance, negobject is not homogeneous. Nudging the door is not shutting it, but it’s closer to shutting it than sitting in a restaurant across town eating. And even that is closer than orbiting another planet, or a microorganism crawling around a drop of water, can barely budge a molecule.
So even though a problem has not been solved, it is possible that it has been close-to-solved. Five does not solve the problem 3+1 but it’s closer to the solution than 3+1=5,000, which is closer than 3+1=hamburger. We can say only negperson has solved the problem in a discrete sense, but somebody might have gotten close. Of course 3+1 is a trivial example, but what if the problem is world peace, or resolving a family dispute, or getting a car to steer itself – close is measurably better than not-close. Most of the best problem-solving techniques are variations on trial and error, often with lots of errors. That is, lots of not-solving the problem. (In current political discussion this is sometimes called FAFO.) Successive approximation is an often-used version of that, a series of increasingly high-quality failures.
It may be hard to locate a problem solution in a space but intuitively we know if two things are similar or not – which even in colloquial language we call “close” – and how similar they are compared to a third thing. The fact that our minds can evaluate the similarities of these things tells you that there is some kind of metric of distance between pairs of them, even if we don’t know how to represent the problem mathematically so that the distance or similarity is calculable (today’s LLMs solve this problem within their constrained domain of semantics). This gives us hope for exploring and understanding the unknown.
PART TWO: CURIOSITY
It’s obvious but important to note that you can’t tell if a proposed solution is good or not before you evaluate it. You can propose a solution for world peace and it might work, you don’t know until you implement it and see if peace results. We can argue all day about whether a cease-fire is better than a new boundary line, but until we try one or the other we will not know if they solve the problem. Problem solutions may require a multidimensional representation but a one-dimensional number line evaluates the goodness of a solution. Zero to one will do it. If a solution is better and worse in different ways, the judgment dimensions still need to be combined to a single evaluation. Which can be harder than the original problem.
Language directs us toward things that can be observed – you cannot attend to nothingness or speak of it. We have names for perceptible things and verbiage that explains them but all nothings are lumped together and neglected as such. If I draw one square on a piece of paper then we can say, accurately, that there is “no square” beside it, but language paralyzes our ability to say anything about that no-square, what color it is, size, thickness of line. We are stuck negating it along with the rest of the infinity of no-things, and generally consider negobject to be less than something, a negligible absence of anything.
Our ability to represent negobject is impoverished, but negobject is obviously infinitely more plentiful than anything. In fact, alongside the visible square there is a not a big red square, an invisible tiny square filled with yellow, a gray square with no outline… an infinite number of no-squares are on the page beside the one square that we can see. Plus all other shapes, possible and impossible, not-share the page with our one perceptible square. Negobject is the source of all new ideas, good and bad, and all new things. They exist as negobject at Time 1, and at Time 2 they are something. This must violate some law of conservation, doesn’t it? No, conservation only applies to the tiny subset of empirically observable things.
When we have a question or a problem, there is a situation where something is known and something is not known. We know enough to say there is a problem but we do not know the solution to it. Most of the domain we are considering does not empirically exist – for instance, the solution to our problem, the answer to our question. Solving the problem means converting part of negobject to something and evaluating it, and determining that the evaluation is good enough.
By the way I am not going to quibble about whether having a solution in your mind is the same as implementing it in reality. We do have a cool talent for imagining things, but I do not want to focus here on issues regarding how we solve problems, mentally. Great topic, some other time.
Science confines its study to perceptible things, and a lot of knowledge has been born through its careful pursuit of representations that accurately describe the nature of the empirical world. Scientists’ obsession with so-called “real” things has done the world a great service in sharpening our understanding of things as they appear. Science has carefully defined its domain to exclude things that are not observable or perceptible, and nothing would be added to our understanding of those things if we expanded science to include ghosts, spirits, minds, unicorns, and other unseen forces. It appears that physical reality can probably be comprehensively summarized in terms of its own parameters, excluding questions about where it came from, what is beyond the universe, etc. On the other hand, everybody knows that science is not “enough” to satisfy our minds. It explains things, in the way that a freezer freezes things or a dog barks; explaining things is what science does and that is very useful.
Let’s not lose sight of the infinite creativity that engulfs the observable universe. Today we eat food that did not exist a century ago, build our homes and furniture out of materials that only existed as negobjects. Even the use of gasoline for energy became empirically perceptible less than two hundred years ago. We walk around talking to one another on devices that were undreamed-of, negobjects in the rememberable past. Who would have thought that one runaway species would literally crash the earth’s environment? Pollution, mass extinctions, climate change, radioactive oceans etc. existed only as negobjects until very recent human history.
The perceptible universe can be explained and understood, and will be. But that is not where the interesting stuff is. Surprises and innovations come, and will continue to come from negobject, passed into observable reality through purpose or happenstance. History tries to explain the transmutation of nonexistent possibility to empirical observability.
The visible world as it is, the empirical world, is one of many possible ones. Time reveals to us a linked series of singular manifestations, where things are shifted from imperceptible negobjectness to a state of observability. A musician holds up his instrument and the audience waits to see what time will bring them in this carefully controlled transmutation of negobjectness into somethingness. The tones that will come into perceptible being are unknown until the exciting instant when they are given birth. We find joy in the release of potential into observability, in discovery and invention and the novelty of conversation and travel.
This is why curiosity is the highest virtue. It is an inherent acknowledgement that the known is embedded in a multidimensional negobjective matrix that contains all futures and all knowledge. Science is an especially focused transformation of bringing explanations of the visible world out of negobject, and invention, art, and explanation itself are unscientific processes for manipulating the release of negobject into being, in its common sense of being perceptible.
The person who shut the door is simply not perceptible. Yet.