I was going to read Peter van Inwagen’s “An Essay on Free Will” what I thought was, as they say, real quick.

It’s 248 pages.

An essay is not 248 pages.

An essay is like 10 pages, 15 pages, max.

Someone really needs sit home slice down and explain an essay to him.

(Yes, I realize there is not-commonly-used sense of the word “essay” that he might be using here. I’ve read at least three different dictionaries. But still. No one uses it that way, not even some crusty old philosophy professor.)

The strange thing about big data and the devolution of most scientific fields solely into math that only a few practitioners (somewhat) understand is that as complexity grows, the less you know about what you actually know. Or are sure that you know it.

Something knows it, sure, but is it you? Who or what here is doing the knowing? Some algorithm that has long ago surpassed human mental capacity? And what does it mean that we know something if no one human can understand anything save a small piece of it?

Right now humanity is poised in some strange state of pre-cybernetic and/or genetic intellectual enhancement where we can build semi-automata that can produce results far more complicated than we can understand because none of that created system is integrated into our simian brain.

We can produce “truths” that are beyond any verification, using tools that we built but can’t truly grasp the operations thereof.