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A long, long time ago I started a new job at Argonne National Laboratory. Soon afterwards I happened to attend a presentation by the laboratory director, Walter Zinn. He was talking about the nature of scientific research. His words were delivered in an informal, casual manner, but they remained with me all these many years, and I am as intrigued now as I was then.

There are three levels of research, he told us. The first level is the study of all the things we don’t know. The next level is the study of all the things we don’t know that we don’t know. And then, the most challenging of all, is the study of all the things we are incapable of knowing.
The things we don’t know occupy the time and efforts of most of the people working in research. We look for a cure for cancer and a cure for crashes. We work to go faster, bigger, cheaper, better. And just about everything we don’t know how to do today, we will be able to do sooner or later. If we can describe it, there is a technical solution. But just because we can do something doesn’t mean we will, or should, or even want to. But that is someone else’s problem. By then we, the people doing the research, will have gone on to something else.

The things we don’t know that we don’t know is the work of Mendel before genes were identified. It is Newton before relativity. In the computer field it is Babbage before electronics and Von Neumann before transistors. It is building computers from biological or molecular elements or something entirely different.

The things we are incapable of knowing is the fascination of anyone fortunate enough to be in a position where they can even be concerned about such things. Most people have to make a living somehow and the pursuit of the unknowable is definitely in the luxury category. For those fortunate few, it extends the intellect of the human mind to the absolute limits. And then, to even consider the matter, we have to move outside of what the human mind has evolved to since the days of the cave man.

As humans we are creatures of curiosity. And probably the most curious quirk we have is that we are curious. Most of our fellow inhabitants of this earth seem pretty much content with what they have, but we always find it necessary, for some strange reason, to change it all.

What we don’t know how to do is pretty much a linear extension of what we do know how to do. All the predictions of the scientific prophets are in this well-behaved realm. They have to be. Any prophesy outside of the familiar is meaningless because it does not mean anything to anybody. It has to be considered science fiction and no one can risk career and fortune to what is believed to be pure fiction. So all the predictions of our life style to come must be near term linear extrapolations of what we have now. Thus we have political pundits, stock market analysts, weather people and Chinese fortune cookies.

To contemplate what it is that we don’t know that we don’t know, we have to go non-linear. And that very quickly blows us right off the chart.

The unknowable has always been considered the realm of religion by the responsible thinkers and the realm of magic by the irresponsible. So, is it meaningful to consider scientific research into the unknowable? Do we, as researchers, dare to venture down a path between those two?
We actually approach this already in some lines of study. The time-matter warp of relativity requires a very unique mindset in rarefied mathematics. But even among the technically gifted, relativity is accepted on rigor by many and on faith by others. Even though it is obscure jargon to most of the rest of us, we accept the reality of a force that we cannot even imagine because we can’t do or understand everything and must accept much of it on faith in those we respect.
Let us now consider the unknowable in a field that is nearer and dearer to our hearts, the computer. We like to think that all computer functioning is nothing more than the switching of bi-stable states from which we model our arithmetic-logic system from which we model our human way of thinking and working..

But as we build larger and faster machines could something evolve from the act of performing all those operations? Our human intelligence and presumably the decision making, communication operations of all neuron based organisms is a non-physical force that evolves from the electrolysis operations of large numbers of interconnected bi-stable neural cells. All the signal passing that goes on among the brain cells comes from chemicals flowing through membranes or not flowing through membranes. When the membrane is breached, that signal is passed on to many other brain cells. From all this comes our most remarkable awareness of activity, emotion, contemplation, evaluation, pleasure, and all the others that make up our experience in this existence.

Could it be that the enormous number of operations done by the computer generates some other sort of intangible, non-physical force? Computers can be designed and built to function something like brain cells, but there is no reason to believe that such a machine would in any way function like a neural based organism. It would be a waste of time and money to try to make the computer something that it isn’t. But there is a force that evolves from the physical actions of billions of brain cells working away in a human, or even a garden slug, that comes from, but is different from, the generating elements.

Is there something in the operation of machines that evolves in a similar manner? As organic entities, we are incapable of knowing, and therein lies the challenge.