Immanel Kant, Types of Truths, And Why We'll Never Talk With Aliens

Immanuel Kant, eminent German philosopher and key player in the Enlightenment, postulated that we humans possess a priori “rules” for processing and understanding the universe around us. We perceive events occurring in time and space according to our own mental capacities. This means that “truth” can only exist for us insofar as our constitution allows us to perceive it. What’s true for us, whether it be a physical law or the existence of a particular color, is our truth, inseparable from our ability to recognize it.

Which brings me to life beyond Earth. If our constitution is such that we perceive truths that an animal could never conceive of, wouldn’t an “alien” similarly perceive truths that we could never conceive of? And, given the discrepancy in understanding between creatures on Earth — a relatively small, constrained area considering the size of the universe — doesn’t in stand to reason that a being from a distant galaxy would have a constitution that separates it from us even more than our faculties separate us from a fruit fly?

In our hubris, we often fail to acknowledge the very limited scope of our understanding. Theorists and physicists seem to think we could “figure it all out,” with some even championing the possibility of a unified “theory of everything.” Really? Everything? It seems patently absurd. 

We are indeed a remarkable species, aware of our own consciousness and mortality in ways apparently unique among life on Earth. But it’s safe to assume there are truths inherent to the universe that exist beyond what we’re capable of grasping. We can “understand” reality to the best of our ability, just as a fruit fly can understand its buzzing around a jar of raspberry jam, but that understanding is likely to far far short of what a greater being would be capable of, a greater being for whom communication with us would be as pointless as us talking philosophy with an insect.

This isn’t to belittle humanity or its achievements. It’s just to instill a sense of perspective. 

“Truth” is still an important concept (perhaps the most important concept), but it clearly exists in levels or degrees. There are relative truths (“Democracy is preferable to autocracy”), which are derived from human experience; scientific truths (“For any system closed to all transfers of matter and energy, the mass of the system must remain constant over time”), empirically derived and representing as solid a picture of physical reality as we can muster; and absolute truths, which exist hopelessly beyond our understanding, reason, and language.

Beyond our understanding...but there may be other creatures in the universe who carve their own relative and scientific truths from reality. But the real, absolute truth? It’s almost certainly unknowable by any conscious mind, which makes it a strange sort of truth, indeed.