If we go back to the history of human knowledge, it is in line with the history of civilization. The book “Fundamentals of Knowledge (by David Neerunberg, translated by Ricardo L. Neerunberg, translated by Lee Seung-hee, released by Kim Min-hyung, arte (2021))” is a book that examines the history of knowledge while exploring the foundations of knowledge formation. As the book has 600 pages in thickness, it is a typical brick book that feels burdensome at first. And the title is also terrifying. It is the “Fundamentals of Knowledge.” Is this book really trying to cover all knowledge that has come from the history of human intelligence as well as its overwhelming thickness? By digging into the basics of knowledge one by one.

Of course, no matter how thick this book is, it is only possible for an encyclopedia to make such attempts. Furthermore, it would be very difficult to get to grips with the numerous intellectual achievements of the East and the West and the long history of intelligence. This book is not about such an encyclopedic approach, but about the core principles underlying knowledge. Beyond simply exploring, we look back on the various disciplines of how the two opposing concepts of “identity” and “difference” have evolved in the history of human intelligence over 3,000 years. The father-son authors take a multidisciplinary approach such as mathematics, history, theology, physics, biology, and social sciences, pointing to ancient Greece, ancient Islamic mysticism in the Near East, the study of academic groups, medieval Europe, modern science and industrial revolution, and various philosophical trends and scientific academic achievements throughout the first and mid-20th centuries, and constantly try to explain why the core of knowledge can eventually be abbreviated into two simple concepts and what their limitations are and why they are dangerous.

This book can be easily viewed as a kind of big history narrative about knowledge. Of course, intellectual history cannot be as large as a big history that deals with the universe or human civilization as a whole. However, the process of contemplating why humans perceive themselves in the first place, and why they perceive the community, society, nature, and the universe beyond themselves, and whether or not the universe as an object of recognition and humans as subjects of recognition are the same requires a scale that is as overwhelming as the big history of dealing with the universe and civilization, and rather requires deeper (human) reflection. However, what the authors are trying to convey to us through this thick book is one step ahead.

Beyond conveying the fact that the two opposing concepts of ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ form the basis of knowledge, it would be a stern warning that sticking to this dichotomy or closed idea could eventually turn off the flame of human intelligence. The authors do not try to unilaterally support these two opposing ideas or teach them to readers. Rather, the authors emphasize that there is a dangerous cliff between the opposing ideas, which have made sufficient progress in their respective camps over 3,000 years, and at the same time have brought clear limitations. In particular, after the birth of quantum mechanics and relativity in physics after the 20th century, and after realizing that the nature of human nature and the universe can no longer be established solely on the hard basis of mathematics, the authors continue to send a warning sign to readers that this sense of crisis is gradually eating away at the source of human intelligence.

In fact, for most modern people who have to live a busy life every day, the immediate problems of eating and living, practical tasks, career and family problems, and financial and health problems are far more important. However, what these problems have in common is that it is a matter of time, and the authors say that time is one of the key problems that humans have been contemplating and exploring for so long. Is the perception of ourselves or the nature around us as we perceive ‘now’ part of the time in the continuum? Or can it be separated from it and reorganized into some kind of axiom in our idea? According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, time has already been reborn as a new idea of space-time rather than the existing one, but since time must still be viewed as a continuum in physics, time, and space-time, in the end, must be described as a device that can mathematically deal with the continuum in the context of set theory. Of course, the discipline or knowledge that enforces it is physics. The authors question whether this notion of time must consist solely of a fixed notion of physics, namely the notion of mathematics or numbers that make up axioms that do not change time or space-time.

These are the issues that the authors focus on throughout this book. Human knowledge progress has continued from subjective and detailed to increasingly objective and identical, that is, approaching a system of axioms. There is a solid logic behind it in mathematics, but it is reasonable to extend and reconstruct it to all human thoughts and lives, as well as the universe and society around humans recognized by humans, and humans themselves. To this end, the authors trace, compare, and analyze the thoughts of various thinkers and scholars across history, religion, ancient Greek and Islamic philosophy, mathematics and number theory, physics and biology, economics and psychology, history, and eventually ethics. Sometimes numerous scholars act as a group, and sometimes scholars who fight the world alone, like 1:N.

In modern society, there is a clear belief that artificial intelligence will go beyond a part of human intelligence to take charge of the whole thing and even surpass it. After the AlphaGo incident in 2016, the majority of people believe that the emergence of ChatGPT-like LLM-based artificial intelligence (AGI) and possibly strong artificial intelligence (AGI) based on it in 2022 is only a matter of time. However, it is necessary to first think about what is at the core of such artificial intelligence. Naturally, it is the thousands of intellectual activities of humans that AI algorithms are targeting for learning. Most of them remain characters, symbols, some of them electromagnetic media, etc., and if they are converted into digital signals and converted back into electrical signals consisting of zero and one, the electronic computer can calculate them and update the parameters of the algorithm to optimize them. This single sentence contains all the concerns of the authors of this book. ‘Will all human intellectual activities be measurable, and can they all be reconstructed within the framework of mathematics?’ and ‘Are we missing something in the process?’ “Can both human intelligence and knowledge be transformed into digital signals?” These questions are also possible. “Just because there is data that artificial intelligence cannot recognize, what axioms is the data incompatible with?” The authors do not side with either of these two questions. However, it only appears to show a little more resistance to the movement to cut and reconstruct everything mainly from number theory to utilization.

Now let’s take a look at the authors’ approach one by one.

First of all, it is important to understand the concept of ‘identity’ that the authors define. This is because it is a very important concept in mathematics. As soon as 1+1 is defined as 2, the concept of a natural number can continue to be established as 1+2 = 1+(1+1) = 3, and the concept of an integer can be established again. Identification is an idea that stems from a kind of phenomenon reasoning based on pattern recognition. Recognizing that since yesterday’s sun came out, today’s sun will rise, and that the two years are essentially no different. This will be explained again first in a limited language, then in an abstract mathematical concept rather than an ideological language as mathematics advances, but the core of identity remains unchanged. In other words, the desire for certainty is that. This is evident in human history, where people essentially try to avoid uncertainty and, in particular, to understand patterns to reduce the fear of uncertainty that comes from vast nature. This belief in mathematics has long impressed many scholars with its clarity and powerful explanations and predictive abilities, and adventurous scholars wanted to extend and utilize this clarity and power beyond the boundaries of mathematics to natural sciences, to engineering, to social sciences, or beyond. Kant was fascinated by the power of mathematical explanations that stemmed from Newton’s mechanics of the time and wanted to explore whether it could explain not only natural phenomena or the universe, but also the human mind. In other words, he explored whether the axioms of reason (the principle of identity, non-contradiction, reason for satisfaction, etc.) could be applied to the inner world, ethics, and emotions and thoughts of humans. Kant believed that it could be, which provided the philosophical basis for later attempts at mathematical theory or modeling into social sciences such as politics, economics, and psychology. This is a characteristic called the “extension of success,” as the authors put it. In other words, because mathematics performed strongly in certain areas (e.g., physics), it meant the desire to apply the theory or principle to other aspects by making the same assumptions. This leads to a way of explaining the nature of the whole by decomposing other phenomena into indivisible axioms and then combining them back together, much like viewing the constituent units of matter as atoms, splitting matter into atoms, or combining them back to form matter. Interestingly, this approach is exactly the same as the calculus principle invented by Newton and Leibniz at the time.

The authors describe these two ideas as apathy, derived from the etymology of apates