The doctor did a very strangething; he pulled out a gun andshot himself through the head.UNTHINKABLE
By ROG PHILLIPS
If Nature suddenly began to behavedifferently, what we consider obvious andelementary today might become—unthinkable.
In the story THE DESPOILERS in the October1947 Amazing Stories I raised the question,"Is there anything absolutely beyond human comprehension?"In that story I gave humanity athousand years to give birth to one man whocould comprehend the incomprehensible.
The incomprehensible is harder to portray in astory than is merely the unknown. If we denoteanything incomprehensible by the symbol X, wecan describe what X is to a certain extent byknowing what it is not. We can, gradually, gaina certain insight into what it is by comparing itto what IS comprehensible.
In the last analysis the universe of normalcyis incomprehensible. We have made progress incomprehending it because we have isolated it intosmall bundles of events that can be dealt with bythe human intellect.
We have arrived at certain basic pictures ofthe behavior of the incomprehensible. We havefound a certain stability existing in the picturewe have built up. We have searched the heavensand found that stars are made up of the sameelements as the Earth—with a few exceptions.And with those exceptions we have brought theminto the framework of our picture of the Universeby postulating "dense matter."
We have, slowly, come to the belief that thesame laws operate throughout the entire Universe,just as they do here on the Earth. This is theUniformity Postulate.
In that story THE DESPOILERS the UniformityPostulate was not denied. The incomprehensiblein that story was the mind of a Despoiler.It, to the human mind, was incomprehensible;and to the Despoiler, the human mind was incomprehensible.
Each viewed the Universe differently due to adifference in whatever lies at the foundations ofthe thinking processes. In other words, uniformityof the principle of thought was denied there.
Both the Despoilers and Man had mechanicalcivilization and science, but due to their differentminds neither could comprehend completely theviewpoint of the other ON THE SAME THING.Each had applied his REASON to the disorderof nature and constructed what to him was aREASONABLE PICTURE.
The type of mentality I attributed to the Despoilermay be impossible. It may be that if thehuman race eventually reaches out and encountersother intelligent races it will find that thebasic principles which result in thought as weknow it are the ONLY basic principles that cangive rise to thinking intelligence, so that whereverwe find civilization we will find creatures thatthink the same as we do, and have seen the samepattern in nature that we have.
There is another possibility besides the encounteringof incomprehensible minds. That is thepossibility of encountering incomprehensible "islands"of reality.
One thing we have discovered about nature thatmakes such "islands" possible—or that makes itpossible WE are living in such an "island"—isthat matter has a habit of "reacting" to sometypes of energy patterns, and "totally ignoring"others.
Perhaps you can better understand what I meanby the following analogous position: Kah is anintelligent entity fixed at a certain point. He canonly derive a picture of reality from what he sees.He can only see a foot in front of him. In allhis existence he has seen only one type of