Thoughts We Cannot Think

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Quote of the Day

There are wavelengths we cannot see. There are sounds we cannot hear. So why, then, would there not be thoughts we cannot think?

Richard Hamming*
1996
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Chapter 5 — “You and Your Research”

This was in the context of the dual nature (particle and wave) of photons and electrons. He suggested, perhaps these baffling dual characteristics are just one thing which we cannot really comprehend. He arrived at this hypothesis by observing that after decades of research and thinking by some of the most brilliant minds on the planet no one can really explain what it is that has these dual properties. They just have mathematic equations that can describe them in different circumstances. With all the effort put into trying to figure out what is really going on, yet always failing, perhaps it is because our minds just can’t think those thoughts.

I don’t know for certain quantum object thoughts are beyond everyone, but I do know there some thoughts beyond some people.

* The name Richard Hamming might not mean anything to most people. But to an Electrical Engineering communication theory person (me) he is near god-like. He invented error correction codes.

He worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan project and helped with the computer simulations of the spherical implosion nuke.

He did the computer simulations on the Nike missiles and was the first to realize it was counterproductive to launch them at an angle. It was better to launch them straight up, get to the less dense air with the minimum distance in the thick air, then make the turn to get to the target. The distance saved by being launched at an angle consumed more fuel than getting to the thin air and then turning.

He worked for Bell Labs for 30 years. He worked with some of the very first computers. In the beginning they programed computers in binary. Not even assembly language. When assembly language was developed, many programmers refused to use it, “That is for sissies!” Those people did not have long careers.

Hamming wrote one of the first books on digital filters.

And Hamming Distance has nothing to do with the distance between the pig slaughterhouse and the ham smoke house. It measures the minimum number of substitutions required to change one string into the other, or equivalently, the minimum number of errors that could have transformed one string into the other.

I found the book fascinating. I wish I had read it when it came out in 1996. He was born in 1915 and died in 1998.

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9 thoughts on “Thoughts We Cannot Think”

  1. I can’t rule out the possibility that there are thoughts we can’t think. However, I can apply Occam’s Razor, and conclude that the particle/wave problem is simply that we don’t have enough information to understand the seeming paradox yet.

    Just like the Michelson-Morley experiment seemed to show that the earth was stationary, up until Einstein explained things first with the Special, then the General Theory of Relativity, we just have not yet got the full mathematical explanation.

  2. I thought this was going to be a post about political correctness and totalitarian control… but this was much better.

    Of course, if we ever found a way to MAKE things into “thoughts we cannot think”, the totalitarians might just think they’d achieved their version of heaven (which is hell for everyone but them, of course).

      • It’s an excellent dual-use concept. Translations are hard because there are ideas that don’t translate well with a word or phrase, you really need a whole descriptive paragraph or five. PC requires that you not think certain things, and so they manipulate the language and force you to use it. Thinking totally new thoughts in ANY area is hard (and often gets you ostracized), and toddlers not having the language ability to express themselves is the reason for no small number of melt-downs.

        But I think (‘scuse me while I adjust my tinfoil) that there are areas of math and physics (and medicine/health, souls, etc) that very smart people are steered away from so they waste all their time on pointless research known to be a dead-end because research into what’s actually there would be a major threat to the powers that be, or at least their profits. Can’t earn billions on cancer treatments if $10 of OTC dewormer will fix it, can’t have people investigating anti-grav if it means that they could easily jury-rig a thing to lift up and drop a mountain on a city or accelerate something to relativistic speed as a weapon, can’t have people developing FTL communications that can’t be tapped into so they can’t be spied on, etc. That’s why everything was “string theory!!🤡 ZOMG!!” for so long while going nowhere while sounding smart and things outside “acceptable” boxes were never funded, and so many other things seems to just sort of stall out rather than progressing as it’s been. Also why there is so much political weirdness in basic research; I mean, how much has been spent on cancer research in my lifetime?) How many really smart genius-level people just get shut down or disappear?

  3. there are thoughts we cannot translate from one language to another.
    How many translations to English exist of, say, the Odyssey?
    So of course there are thoughts we cannot think, in the language in which we were raised.

  4. My sophomore year of high school I took the second part of drafting. CAD was a brand new thing then. The class actually involved some very clever problem solving that can be done using drawings, ratios, proportions, and plotting functions. Mathematica wasn’t a thing yet either. During the class, as an exercise, the teacher had us draw a representation of a tesseract. A four dimensional cube. Some of the drawings were quite elaborate and stunningly clever. These were all STEM track students who were in pre-calculus and calculus, but of course no one could “get it right”. That was the point of the exercise, to show us that none of our bright young minds could really understand 4th physical dimension geometry. We could work with its shadows as drawings. We could calculate using multiple variables representiing dimensions accurately, but the human mind can never really comprehend it.

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