OK, sorry, but there is no such thing as absolute knowing. We perceive, within the severe limitations of our physcal senses, and we theorise. We cannot know because we are trapped inside our own minds and the constructs they create. A tree falls in the forest and does not make a noise because 'noise' is a sign for a sensation in the human brain caused by the vibration of air molecules. The fall of the tree makes the molecules vibrate, but the noise does not exist outside the head of any human within range.
Intelligence is one thing, it is a survival tool asnd many animals have a degree of it. The quirk of humanity is imagination, the ability to conceive of something which does not exist, coupled with the manual dexterity to make it exist. It starts by turning a stick into a lethal weapon by sharpening one end or fastening a stone to it, and it ends with a climate crisis which can only be resolved by either abandoning our civilisation and becoming extinct or by developing new technology which reverses the effects of the older.
Without that imagination, we would have remained just another ape. Omnivorous scavengers scrabbling for scraps between other, more powerful species and prey for larger predators. With it, we became an apex predator.
But the combination of imagination and curiosity has left us in a unique situation. A need to find things out and to assimilate what we find out into a meaningful structure. Now much of that structure has been developed with the aim of firstly ensuring our survival and secondly making life better and easier. But other people have sought other meanings - a meaning and purpose for life, for human life, in the Universe at large. But the more we discover or theorise, the more we become aware that there is neither meaning nor purpose in the Universe. That it is simply there, doing what it does. That matter and energy interact in certain ways - many of which we have yet to discover or understand -and end up producing stars, planets, life, black holes, galaxies and so forth. All for no reason and with no purpose.
So, do we surrender and become insensate matter, subhumans? Or challenge and become Transhuman, inventing a purpose for ourselves either as a group, a Collective or gestalt, or as individuals, Nietzsches' Overman?
