Is there a limit to the intellectual knowledge?

The achievements of the intellect seems to have no limit, the era of knowledge is coming, as the successor to the current information age, which in turn happens to the industrial era. Will we have the answers to all the questions? Who knows ... but in my humble opinion, the mere intellectual knowledge has its limits, and in fact we have already achieved. Let me explain.

Intellectual knowledge
What is intellectual knowledge? Well, answer this question is an issue that goes into the field of philosophy of knowledge, but this raid will be no problem, since the aim of this blog is to explore the area located between Science and Philosophy. For the purposes of this post I'm content to give a brief definition, otherwise a full discussion of intellectual knowledge would lead us not only to fill the post, but a long series of them. Simply to say:

Intellectual knowledge is objective, it is based on the creation and use of mental objects. The intellect has the cognitive capacity: the intellectual subject generates an abstraction of the external object, called cognitive image. In addition, the rational capacity of the intellect is able to relate objects of knowledge, discovering causes and effects between them, which leads to generate new knowledge independently of the outside world.

As an example of this definition, we have the scientific knowledge, which from empirical, objective and verifiable data, concepts such as laws of nature, equations are generated, etc. Linking these laws, scientific rational capacity produces new theoretical knowledge, which subsequently attempts to verify experimentally.

Are there other knowledge than intellectual knowledge?
Before raising the limits of intellectual knowledge, naturally the question of whether there really is another kind of knowledge, a difficult question to answer ... it arises from an intellectual perspective. Well. Put your attention on a seed, any seed. A seed is a plant but potentially; the germination process is automatically triggered when the appropriate circumstances arise for it; and is a complex process of creation of highly specialized and highly organized cells cooperate to keep the plant alive. We know this complex process is scheduled, encoded in the DNA of the plant; ie that the seed contains a development program contains complex information, structured, it contains the exact knowledge of how to create a plant from the soil, air and the sunlight. This knowledge, existing in the seed, is not intellectual, has not been generated by applying any rational capacity, instead, was generated in the course of evolution of life, and was generated before there on our planet any rational being . Another thing is that the scientist, using their rational capacity, understand the germination process, acquiring intellectual knowledge about the process. But the process itself needs no intellect at all.

Natural Sciences and Technology
We see that Nature gives us a clear example of not intellectual knowledge, as indeed all creation around us, not only the germination of a seed, it contains huge amounts of not intellectual knowledge. Our own body is another complex example; Medical science is studied, streamlining its processes, work is not yet finished, because there are still many open questions. The universe has its own laws, there is a knowledge for to be discovered. As the reader may have noticed, one of the theses that I maintain here is that:

Intellect does not create knowledge about Nature, it really does it is try to convert a natural knowledge, no rational, to a rational form, identifying the Nature's knowledge, and strives to rationalize, to give a rational way with which to we can understand.

We discover laws of nature and give them a rational way, we do not create laws of nature.

Of course, I am speaking of scientific knowledge, as in the technique does exist intellectual knowledge creation: when, for example, Antonio Meucci invented the telephone, he did not discover anything that previously existed, but applying his rational capacity created a new concept and a new technological advance.

In the limit of intellectual knowledge?
Since the early twentieth century physical science, in his exploration of the limits of matter and energy, began to discover some natural laws which are unintelligible, that is, events that go beyond the cognitive ability of the intellect, we can say that we don't really understand the new laws. Until then this had never happened: all the discoveries are rationalized and understood, there were no laws of nature that could not be understood rationally. But in the last hundred years the progress of mathematical physics toward laws which defy our common sense has been unstoppable. Currently, a professional physicist does not really understand many of the laws he do use daily, simply accept them as a working tool, in an absolutely pragmatic way.

Who understands, really, that time itself does not exist? It exists as a counterpart to the physical reality known by the name of space-time. In fact, neither the space-time has an independent existence, but is related to the presence of matter and with a mysterious force of nature, gravity. We have equations describing all this as a result of the rationalization of empirical observations, and discovery, also rationally, theoretical relationships between equations. But we've lost along the way, so to speak, intellectual understanding.

Who understands, really, quantum mechanics? As the Nobel Prize in Physics Richard Feynman said, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics ... then you do not understand quantum mechanics." We have the same: equations, we have streamlined a truly baroque behaviour of matter and energy on a very small scale, which is itself an impressive achievement of the intellect, but instead we had to give to understand it.

It is for this reason that I dare say that we have reached a tipping point where the rational capacity is generating knowledge that is no longer understandable, even for experts in the field. What sense is not understandable? If we consider the understanding as the rational capacity to relate the subjective contents of the mind with the perceived external reality, and integrate them into a structure with meaning, then the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics are not fully understood, as we can not relate such knowledge with our reality; even more, its claims collide head-on with our empirical experience of everyday life. For us, time and space exist as separate entities.

In a way it is logically so, because the intellect are exploring areas of knowledge that are far beyond the original scope which is intended: the nearby world of objects that surround us. We do not have the ability to really imagine what it must be a black hole in space, a region of the universe where space-time collapses, because it is a very strange concept to our usual environment. This leads, in my opinion, to ask two important questions for their consequences:

1. Is it possible that our intellect, or our brain, or both, evolve in the future so that we can really understand the physical aspects of reality that are beyond our understanding now?
2. If, however, it is not possible to understand new discoveries, so this limitation will in future be decisive, and prevent us advance knowledge of reality?

As for the first question renowned physicist Leonard Susskind formulated an idea: the brain and the mind also are highly customizable, so the idea may be well founded.

The second question is what causes this post; in fact as we have said the last one hundred years we have made new discoveries in fields that are not intelligible, in the sense that has been exposed. It therefore appears that it is not necessary to understand the nature for you to discover its laws. The scientific rational method is able to create theories that represent very well the behavior of the universe even without really understanding it. However, the conceptual "rarity" of current theories seems a problem for the average citizen from, that at most only have a glimpse of them in a science fiction books and movies, which frequently are not good references. Do not forget the science books, including bestsellers by Stephen Hawking ... if they have read, they understood really?

Why is it so complicated?
Besides the "strangeness" of physical theories, there is another aspect that catches my attention, and I present here: why is it so complicated to understand nature? And now we are no longer talking only about the scope of physics, but science in general. Even the most trivial events, when they want fully understood rationally, become so complicated that we need to study a career and become specialists in the subject, and even then often we will find difficulties. Some examples:

• We remove the cap of a water reservoir; a swirl around the drain is formed: a vortex. The exact details of the swirl, diameter, length, speed of water on it, etc, are complicated. They can be treated reasonably well in certain special cases, but overall it is an open problem, which even made conferences and symposia problem (see eg International Conference on Vortex Flows and Vortex Models).
• We observe how a seed germinates; broadly understood is a phenomenon, at least superficially, since antiquity, but to know the exact details need advanced knowledge of genetics and biochemistry.
• We see a sunrise, the sun lights up again another day; but really, how the sun produces light? Again, you must have advanced knowledge of nuclear physics and astrophysics to respond.

Watching this complexity of reality, at least from a rational point of view, raises some questions about the intellect:

• The complexity we see, is inherent, intrinsic, or only apparent? Perhaps our intellect is not ready to understand exactly all the issues, because it is only a little precision instrument; because of this, we need years of training in a college dedicated to learning limited to a field of expertise that have taken millennia to occur knowledge. Therefore, we see the complexity would be produced by the inadequacy of the instrument used.
• Are there other possible ways of gaining knowledge that are more affordable, less expensive, to our understanding?

I leave open to consideration these last two questions. Finally, one last example of technical complexity to describe electricity and magnetism in the presence of gravity:

Equations of electromagnetism in the presence of gravity, using tensor magnitudes are differential and partial differential equations.