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#3973·Dennis Hackethal, 9 months agoBy definition, there is nothing in the unknowable, since it can't be known.
This isn’t true. There are unknowable things. Look up uncomputable functions, see eg
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_function#Uncomputable_functions_and_unsolvable_problems
- https://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/2s2wgy/what_is_an_uncomputable_function/.
So there are things that computers like our brains can never access – there are fundamental, natural limitations.
In this context, I think of mysticism as restricting criticism and preventing error correction, ie creating a man-made barrier for reason. That’s different.
It is unclear to me why uncomputable should mean unknowable. The halting problem shows that no algorithm can correctly decide, for every program and input, whether the program will halt. Yet we can understand why such an algorithm is impossible, and we can determine the answer in particular cases. Are you equating the impossibility of a universal computational procedure with the impossibility of knowledge? What exactly is being claimed to be unknowable here?