Original Reality Theory

2.3 Depth, Abstraction, and the Limits of Understanding

A theory that spans different fields of knowledge faces an unavoidable difficulty before it even begins: no one can master, in depth, every specialty whose knowledge they will need to draw on.

Contemporary science has grown too vast to fit within a single mind. Physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and many other fields branch into specialties that require years of training and, often, a lifetime of work. Even within a single discipline, specialists continually rely on findings produced by other specialists.

This is not a failure of science. It is a consequence of its development. Knowledge has grown through a division of cognitive labor: different people pursue different problems in depth, develop their own methods, test hypotheses, and produce findings that become part of a shared body of knowledge.

An integrative theory works in a different direction. Rather than delving ever deeper into a single specialty, it seeks relationships among findings from different specialties. These two operations are not equivalent and should not be confused.

Specialists increase resolution. They need to understand details that may be decisive within their domain: methods, calculations, controversies, experimental limitations, technical definitions, and the history of the problem within the field. An integrative inquiry often needs to move in the opposite direction: reduce resolution to compare structures, relationships, and findings across different domains.

Reducing resolution, however, does not mean becoming independent of the disciplines that produced those findings.

A conclusion used by ORT still belongs to the field that produced it and remains bounded by what that field actually warrants. Abstraction can leave out details that are unnecessary for the question being examined; it cannot add certainty that the original knowledge did not provide.

This distinction can be summarized in a rule:

ORT may reduce resolution. It must not increase certainty.

Consider a map. To walk down a street, we need a scale at which streets, intersections, and buildings are visible. To understand the relationships between cities, that same resolution can become an obstacle: we need to zoom out. In doing so, we lose details but gain relationships that were not apparent when we were looking at a single street corner.

No scale is universally superior. The appropriate resolution depends on the question.

The same applies when we move across fields of knowledge. We do not need to master all of population genetics to use a well-established conclusion about biological evolution, just as we do not need to reconstruct all of semiconductor physics to understand that computers depend on the physical properties of matter. But using a conclusion is not the same as mastering the entire mechanism that produced it.

This boundary matters because our own sense of what we know can mislead us.

Experiments in cognitive psychology have shown that people often believe they understand mechanisms far more deeply than they can demonstrate when asked to explain them in detail. This phenomenon became known as the illusion of explanatory depth. Understanding a clear description, recognizing the terms used, or following an explanation without difficulty can create a sense of mastery that disappears when we have to reconstruct the mechanism.

A related risk also arises: ease of processing can be mistaken for learning or understanding. A fluent explanation seems easier to understand, and technologies that provide immediate answers make this feeling particularly relevant. Today, it is possible to move through physics, biology, psychology, and sociology in a matter of minutes, receiving a coherent explanation at every step. The speed of that journey does not, by itself, turn the sequence into mastery of the disciplines it covers.

ORT needs to acknowledge this risk explicitly.

But acknowledging the risk does not mean that every inquiry across disciplines is necessarily superficial. Scientific work itself depends on different levels of expertise and epistemic dependence. A researcher may understand findings from another specialty well enough to use them without having the expertise required to make a technical contribution to that field. No individual mind personally reconstructs the entire chain of knowledge on which it depends.

The problem, then, is not reliance on knowledge produced by others. The problem is losing sight of the limits of that reliance.

Legitimate integration requires knowing what is being brought in. It requires distinguishing a widely established finding from a disputed hypothesis, an explanation intended for teaching from a technical conclusion, an analogy from a structural equivalence, and one’s own inference from what the original discipline has actually demonstrated.

Finding similar words in different fields is not enough. “Relation,” “information,” “energy,” “organization,” and “system” can appear in many fields without meaning exactly the same thing. Similar wording may suggest a line of inquiry; it cannot serve as proof of the relationship one seeks to establish.

For this reason, interdisciplinarity is not simply juxtaposition. Placing a conclusion from physics alongside one from biology and another from sociology does not automatically produce a broader understanding. It is necessary to show what is being compared, at what level of abstraction, which properties remain relevant after resolution is reduced, and which differences must not be erased.

This care calls for more than a movement away from detail.

An inquiry may begin within a specialty, draw on a finding, move to a higher level of abstraction, and compare it with findings from other fields. If that comparison yields a conclusion whose validity depends on a specialized detail, the inquiry must retrace its steps: increase resolution again, consult the relevant technical knowledge, and check whether the proposed relationship still holds.

The process can be represented as follows:

specialty → finding → abstraction → integration → doubt → return to the specialty → verification → renewed integration.

There is no final point at which a general inquiry becomes independent of the specialties. It continually depends on them.

This also sets a boundary of responsibility for ORT. When a proposition requires technical expertise beyond what is available, the appropriate response is not to fill the gap with rhetorical confidence. It is to acknowledge the limit, seek specialized literature, turn to calculations, experiments, data, or specialists when necessary, and keep the conclusion provisional until verification is available.

The goal of an integrative theory is not to replace physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, or any other discipline. It is to seek relationships that may remain invisible when each field is viewed in isolation and to test whether those relationships hold up when revisited in light of the specialized knowledge from which they arose.

This allows us to distinguish two different forms of depth.

There is the vertical depth of an inquiry that delves into a specialized problem. And there is a relational depth, produced when findings from different fields are brought together and reveal structures that would not be visible within a single discipline.

One does not replace the other.

The second is possible only because the first exists.

Readers of ORT therefore do not need to accept the legitimacy of its abstractions in advance. They can test them. They can ask whether the theory attributes something to a discipline that it has not demonstrated, whether it has erased a necessary difference to make two structures look alike, whether it has turned an analogy into an identity, or whether it has increased certainty while reducing resolution.

If this happens, the abstraction has failed.

The purpose of this method is not to shield ORT from these criticisms. It is to make them possible.

A theory that aims to cross different domains of knowledge must accept that each crossing can be retraced in the opposite direction. Integration becomes stronger not by distancing itself from the specialties, but by being able to return to them without contradicting the knowledge it used as its starting point.

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