# The Interfinity Mark and The Unanswerable ### **Interfinity, Infinity, and Interestingness** Radim Pesko’s typefaces include a unique “interrogative punctuation mark” which is formed by “superimposing a vertical infinity mark (∞) with a question mark (?)”. Here, I want to consider how it should and should not be used. The ideas that the interfinity mark represents are certainly inspiring, and while my remarks in what follows will sometimes push back against some of the ways Pesko suggests it should be used, I hope they will be taken in the spirit in which they are intended. That is, as exploratory, playful, and interested. If we consider ordinary punctuation marks, part of their meaning, part of what gives them value to writers and readers, is their proper and prudent use. A poorly placed fullstop. Or comma or, question mark can ruin the flow of a sentence? I suggest we should be just as cautious in our application of the interfinity mark: it should be used sparingly and appropriately. How then should it be used? Kyes and Pesko give the following advice: An interfinity question is a question that has both an infinite number of answers and no answer at all. Interfinity allows opposites to coexist. It could be said that an interfinity question is always more interesting than its response; and, conversely, that the response to an interfinity question is always more interesting that the question itself. In written conversation the interfinity mark indicates that the question should be understood on a secondary level in which interrogative and infinite expressions are combined. The interfinity mark differs from the short-lived percontation point, invented in the late sixteenth century to indicate rhetorical questions, in that it denotes everlasting and ever-occurring questions: (Pesko & Kyes 2014\) Note that while interfinity questions are conceived of as questions with an infinite number of answers, or no answer at all, the authors also suggest that the interfinity mark should be used to signify *interesting* questions, with interesting answers. This excludes questions such as: What are all the numbers? How long do circles sleep? While the first has an infinite number of answers –a proper response to it would be to go on counting indefinitely– and the second has no answer at all, neither is even slightly interesting. Reciting an endless series of numbers, or pontificating about the sleeping habits of circles are both thoroughly tedious activities, and so too, therefore, are the questions which give rise to them. Let us turn to Pesko and Kyes’ positive requirements about when to use the interfinity mark, and consider how they might be refined. First, notice that questions “with no answer at all” do not necessarily correspond to questions with an “infinite number of answers”. The authors suggest the following questions as examples for when the interfinity mark is appropriate: Is there life beyond planet Earth? Does God exist? Am I awake or am I dreaming? Do such questions really have an infinite number of answers? While “Is there life beyond planet Earth?” is certainly interesting, it could be answered quite straightforwardly with either a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. At this point in human history we do not know which answer is correct, but it is possible that we will know at some point in our future. The second and third questions are of a fundamentally different type to the first, but, again, it is not obvious that there are an infinite number of ways that they could be answered. “Am I awake or am I dreaming?”, has, it seems to me, only two possible answers: “Yes” or “No”. “Does God exist” might afford slightly more: “Yes” “No”, and, perhaps, “It depends what you mean by God” . Where the latter two questions do seem to differ from the first is that the correct answer might be *unknowable*. The human race could survive until the end of time (if time has an end) and still be no closer to giving a correct response to them. They are questions which can, potentially, be *engaged with* infinitely. In what follows my focus will be on these types of question. If we are going to use the interfinity sign appropriately, we need to know which questions are unanswerable. How can we discover this? ### **Can we ever be Sure?** When confronted with a difficult question, we should not be too hasty in labeling it unanswerable. That is, we should be careful not to be *automatically* *sceptical*. When people discover that I am a philosopher they often say something like: Well, we can never know anything for sure, right? This sort of thing is a surefire way of annoying philosophers, as we certainly do think we can know things for sure. The word ‘philosophy’ derives from the greek *philosophia* meaning literally ‘love of wisdom’. But if there is no truth, if there is nothing we can know for sure, then there is no wisdom to love: all philosophers would be broken hearted. Conversations in philosophy departments do not end with a shrug of the shoulders and an admission that “I guess we'll never really know”. Instead, philosophers engage in intense and passionate arguments about how difficult questions should be answered. Tempers are lost over the answers to questions like “Does time really pass?”, and “Do colours exist?”. It is interesting to ask why many people’s automatic response to difficult or philosophical questions is one of scepticism. It could be the entirely understandable fear of being wrong. The types of question that might deserve an interfinity sign are difficult and profound, and so it might seem better to withhold judgement than to risk backing the wrong horse. It could also be for a less admirable reason. I sometimes think that automatic scepticism betrays a sort of false modesty. By claiming that we can never know the answer to a hard question, we are implicitly saying something like: “I am smart because I know we can never really know (and am smarter than anyone who thinks that they do really know something)”. I think automatic scepticism should be resisted. We should not be afraid of giving answers to hard questions, nor think that proclaiming ignorance is what clever people do. This is not to say that there are no interesting, unanswerable, questions, we will return to that later, but we should certainly be careful of giving up too easily. First, notice that saying “We don’t really know anything” is self defeating. By saying that we know nothing, we are saying that we know something: we are saying that we *know* that we know nothing. But if we know that we know nothing, then we know something. To make such a claim is to risk falling into a paradox. Unless we want to oscillate endlessly between truth and falsity, we should avoid saying that we are absolutely ignorant. Second, while it might be easy to *say* that we do not know anything for sure, if we consider how we act in the world, what we *do*, we always behave as if we know things, and know them for sure. This is shown quite nicely in the following lines from a Tim Minchin “beat poem” called “Storm” –in which the author argues with a sceptic named Storm: So i resist the urge to ask storm Whether knowledge is so loose-weave Of a morning When deciding whether to leave Her apartment by the front door Or a window on her second floor. (Minchin 2014\) It is easy to say “Well we don’t know *for sure* what will happen if I jump out of the window window –maybe I crash down on the pavement, but maybe, just maybe, I will fly into the air and soar through the clouds like an eagle”. But we never actually do this, we always take the door, and we do so because we know for certain that humans cannot fly. The same is true for ethical questions. Even a moral relativist, someone who says that there is no real right and wrong, will start to have very strong moral opinions if I pour ketchup on his pizza, or punch his dog. Third, some questions can seem impossible to answer, but once we think about them a little harder this turns out not to be true at all. Consider the following puzzle: Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person? Yes No We don’t know. When first encountering this question, most people (myself included) will say that we do not have enough information about the situation to decide between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’, so the answer must be ‘We don’t know’. This is incorrect, see if you can work out why before reading on. The answer is ‘Yes’. There are only two possible ways this situation could play out. In the first, Anne is married, and, as Anne is looking at George, a married person is looking at an unmarried person. In the second, Anne is not married, and as Jack is looking at Anne, a married person is looking at an unmarried person. Not only does this question have an answer, it has a very simple one, which is obvious after a moment’s reflection. The moral of this story is that we should not give up too easily in the face of seemingly difficult questions. What I hope to have shown so far is that we should not overuse the interfinity mark. It is not that we should never use it. but we should think hard as to whether it is truly meritted by the question we are asking or answering. ### **Dreams and the Unaskable** Let us return to two of Kyes and Pesko’s questions: Am I awake or am I dreaming? Does God exist? I said above that, arguably, these do not have infinite answers, but we might still suspect that they are questions we will never be able to give an answer to. They might, as Kyes and Pesko put it, be “everlasting and ever-occurring”. Why is this? Consider dreams. At any moment at which we are conscious, there is a fact of the matter as to whether we are dreaming or whether we are awake. In fact, researchers on dreams have discovered that there are tests we can do to check whether we are dreaming. One test is to flick a light switch off and on a few times. If you are awake then the light will switch off and on at the same time as you flick the switch off and on, at least it will until you blow the fuse. Dreams, however, do not seem to be able to simulate this simple cause and effect. The light will not switch off, or will not switch off and on in sync with your switching. Dreams also have a problem with clocks, watches, and written text. To test whether you are dreaming you can check your watch or open a newspaper, then turn away before looking again. If you are dreaming, the words or numbers you see will be different the second time you look. It seems that “Am I awake or am I dreaming?” is a question which can be answered, but if this is true why do we so often think we are awake when in actual fact we are dreaming? The problem here is not that the question is unanswerable, but that when we are dreaming the question is very often *unaskable*. We are usually too caught up in what we are dreaming, and insufficiently in control of our thoughts to be able to say to ourselves “Hey\! Am I dreaming?”. Perhaps there are similarly unaskable questions in our normal waking lives? In a dream there are limitations to what we can think, which disappear once we wake up, but other, unknown limitations might remain when we are awake. There might be interesting and important questions about ourselves and the universe which, simply never enter our heads. If there are, however, it is still not obvious that they warrant the interfinity mark. “Am I dreaming?” has a straightforward answer, we just cannot ask it when we need to, if there are unaskable questions in our waking lives, they might have easy answers too. ### **God, Consciousness, and the Unanswerable** The question of whether God exists is not unaskable –people have spent their entire lives worrying about it– but I am going to suggest here that it is unanswerable for the same sort of reasons that the question “I am dreaming” is unaskable. That is, the reason why “Does God exist?” is everlasting and ever-occurring, is because the idea of what God could be, is not a thought that human minds are capable of entertaining. A good analogy here is with animals. Some animal behaviour is exceedingly smart: some apes can use tools, bees can tell other bees the location of a flower by dancing in front of them, bowerbirds create works of art to impress potential mates. However, it also seems right to say that none of these animals will ever understand that they are on a planet orbiting the sun, or Pythagoras’ theorem, or that they will one day die. Concepts like these are just not the type of thought that creatures like this can hold in their heads. It is possible that the question of whether God exists is unanswerable for exactly the same reasons. Despite the extraordinary things that human minds can do, the concept of an omnipotent being is, arguably, not something that we will ever truly comprehend. The idea that the questions we can answer are restricted by the limitations of our minds can be brought into sharper focus by turning to another philosophical question, one that preoccupies many contemporary philosophers: How does the brain generate consciousness? ‘Consciousness’ in this case does not mean *self-consciousness*, the ability to think the thought “I am thinking”, but rather refers to the qualitative *feel* of experience. If I look at a red apple, this visual experience *feels like* something. If you tell me you are going to punch me in the face (perhaps because I just punched your dog), I do not coldly think “oh no”, but instead *feel* scared. And if you then make good on you promise and punch me, I will *feel* pain. Compare this to robots: we can certainly build machines which detect red light or the presence of objects (automatic doors can ‘see’ whether you are standing in front of them), make a prediction that their body will soon be damaged, or detect that damage to their bodies once it has occurred. But it is not obvious that they have *experiences* of colours, emotions, and feelings in the same way that we do. This of course is controversial. Perhaps we could build beings which have experiences from silicon –science fiction plays with this question all the time. The reason why our intuitions fail us when we think about robo-consciousness is because we do not have any idea how *we* have consciousness. Modern neuroscience has provided an enormous amount of information about how the brain works, which part of the brain is responsible for visual perception, or imagination, or emotion,but it is *nowhere near* giving us an answer to the question of why conscious arises. We cannot simply say “the brain is really complex, so that’s where consciousness comes from”, because we can build extremely complex computer systems (with better processing power and memory than human brains) but it is not obvious that they are conscious. Neither can we say that the reason we get consciousness from brains but not silicon is that brains are organic rather than artificial material, because we do not have an explanation as to why organic material is special. Why should feeling come from meat? Some philosophers, known as *mysterians*, have argued that we will never be able to solve this problem, never be able to explain why brain meat produces experience. Our minds are incapable of comprehending how this could be possible in the same way that bees cannot comprehend our planet orbiting the sun. Mysterians argue that this should not be that surprising. Our brains evolved to solve certain problems connected to our survival: how to get food, how to stay safe, how to attract a mate. Questions like whether God exists, or how consciousness appears, did not affect whether our ancestors survived, so we should not expect our brains to be able to answer them. ### **Knowing Our Limits?** My aim here has been to try work out when it is appropriate to use the interfinity mark. I have argued that we should be careful of overusing it: a hard question is not the same as an unanswerable question, and questions which might seem as though they have infinite answers, or no answer, might turn out to be more straightforward than we would have expected. Limiting the cases in which interfinity is signified, I have argued, is a good thing: the meaning of a mark can be diluted through overuse, or through misuse. We have seen that even the question “Am I awake or dreaming?” might be answered, but only if we manage to ask the question. I suggest that the interfinity mark is best used for questions such as “Does God exist?” and “How does the brain generate consciousness?”. Those which humans can ask, but which we do not have the evolved mental capacity to answer. The last line of Wittgenstein’s *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus* is: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (1922/1961), and we might think that this is an appropriate idea to have in mind when thinking about the interfinity mark. It should be used not for hard questions, but for questions the answers to which we cannot speak about, and cannot think about, because they go beyond the capacities of the human mind. However, before we can pass over the unanswerable we need to be able to recognise it, and before we can recognise it we need to know our limits. I have just suggested that questions about God and about consciousness might go beyond our mental aptitude, but this is a controversial claim. Not all philosophers are mysterians. Some, while still accepting that our minds have been shaped by the evolutionary needs of our ancestors, point to the fact that we as a species have moved very far beyond these origins. Our specious has commandeered the basic mental skills that evolution has provided and responded to questions which in the past might have seemed unanswerable. We now know *that* our planet moves around the sun, *why* objects fall to the ground when we drop them, *what* the stars are, and *how* to fly. There remains then a tension as to how and when the interfinity mark should be used. It seems outrageous to claim that there is no limit to the questions we can answer, but history shows us that time and again we should not have stayed silent: the interfinite often becomes intelligible. If this is correct, then we come upon a new question, one which itself might or might not be answerable: Can we know what we will never know? Whether this question merits an interfinity mark remains to be seen. ### **References** Kyes, Z. and Pesko, R (2014, May 23\) *Question Marque*, retrieved from https://www.grafik.net/category/letterform/question-marque Minchin, T. (2014). *Storm* Hachette UK. Wittgenstein, L. (1922/1961) *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicas*, Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. ### **Biographical Information** I am a postdoctoral researcher and adjunct coordinator at the Centre for the Philosophy of Time at the University of Milan. My PhD research focused on auditory perception and I am currently working on a new project entitled ‘Time and the Emotions’.