We often speak about science and technology as though they are the same thing. They are not.
Science asks us to submit our beliefs to reality. Technology allows us to exercise our will within reality. Science discovers what is; technology explores what we can do with what we have discovered.
Throughout this essay, “we” refers to conscious beings who perceive, interpret, and act—the observers. “Reality,” refers to what exists independently of our individual perceptions or beliefs—the metaphorical elephant. But there is an important distinction between the reality we experience and ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is not another object within the universe. It is the objective reference against which everything that exists can be evaluated: singular, external, non-derived, invariant, independent, and universally applicable. The universe is what we experience and investigate; ultimate reality is what provides the stable point by which our experience can be objectively evaluated. Those six conditions define the objective position for our access to truth to be possible in any given context—even at the level of existence itself.
That difference reveals something important about human freedom.
Science begins with humility. We may have an idea about how reality works, but reality ultimately gets the final vote. We can construct a hypothesis/hold a belief, perform an experiment, and defend a theory, but none of that gives us authority over what is actually true. If reality contradicts our theory, the theory must change, not reality.
The scientist then begins by saying, in effect, “I will not make reality conform to my preference. I will conform my understanding to reality.” This is why science is fundamentally an act of submission.
Technology reverses the direction. Once we understand something about reality, we can use that knowledge to change our circumstances. We discover how electricity behaves, and we build machines. We understand materials, and we construct buildings. We understand aerodynamics, and we build airplanes.
But notice what has actually happened. The airplane does not defeat gravity. It does not abolish aerodynamics. It does not rewrite the laws of physics. It succeeds because we have learned enough about reality to work within its constraints.
Technology therefore does not represent freedom from reality. It represents freedom within reality. This gives us a simple relationship:
Science discovers the conditions. Technology exercises freedom within those conditions.
The distinction matters because technology can create the illusion that human beings have become masters of reality itself. The danger begins when technology forgets its dependence on science.
Science quietly depends upon an objective reality that is independent of our minds. Secularism, then, cannot consistently appeal to this reality for science while refusing to examine those six conditions—singularity, externality, invariance, non-derivation, independence and universality—that make objective reality recognizable.
The same intellectual humility that requires us to question our assumptions in science should also apply to our assumptions about ultimate reality in order to remain coherent. Yet secularism often treats questions about the relationship between objectivity and ultimate reality as belonging exclusively to theology, while elevating positions such as atheism, agnosticism, and deism as ways of maintaining uncertainty or redirecting attention away from the deeper ontological question. The focus shifts from examining the six conditions that ontologically define objectivity to debating the certainty of our beliefs surrounding ultimate reality.
The result is an imbalance: we demand submission to objective reality when studying the world within the hard sciences, but hesitate to apply that same standard when examining what conditions make objective reality recognizable in the first place.
Technology does not generate the conditions that make it possible. It inherits them. Every technological achievement depends on the assumption that reality is stable, intelligible, and independent of our preferences. If those assumptions are abandoned, science loses the very foundation that allows it to function.
A scientist can only discover something because there is something independent to discover. An experiment only means something because reality responds consistently because it remains invariant, non-derivative and therefore fully independent. A theory can only be corrected because there is an objective standard beyond the scientist’s preference.
If we stop respecting the objective structure of reality—the singular, external, non-derived, invariant, independent, and universally applicable reference point—we no longer have science in its proper sense because we have lost our orientation towards truth. We have only competing interpretations, preferences, and systems of power.
At that point, technology becomes detached from the discipline that gave rise to it. Instead of asking, “What does reality allow us to do?” we begin asking, “How can we use our power to make our preferred reality exist?”
This is the inversion. Science begins with submission:
“Reality determines what is true.”
Technology begins with possibility:
“Given what is true, what can we do?”
But when technology separates itself from submission, it reverses the relationship:
“Given what we want, how can we reshape reality to accommodate us?”
That is no longer the pursuit of knowledge or a commitment to truth. It is the attempt to make preference authoritative, the delusion that we are the masters or that there are masters rather than an objective reality that we participate within.
We can rearrange matter, but we cannot create the conditions that make matter possible. We can manipulate biological processes, but we did not create the existence of life. We can construct artificial environments, but those environments remain dependent upon the reality outside them. We can create institutions, currencies, languages, technologies, and social conventions, but their existence remains contingent upon conditions we did not establish.
We can construct our world without constructing reality itself. We can simulate reality but we cannot redefine what reality ultimately is. This is where we need to distinguish between changing reality and changing our position within reality. This distinction is important because one interpretation explains why facts are a phenomenon and the other gaslights the phenomenon of truth itself by explaining away facts as inventions of the mind rather than recognizing them as constraints imposed by reality.
Human beings are remarkably capable of changing what is contingent. We can transform a forest into a city, raw materials into a computer, sunlight into electricity, or an injured body through medicine. There is nothing inherently wrong with changing what is given to us. In many cases, that ability is precisely what allows us to flourish.
The problem begins when our ability to manipulate contingent reality is mistaken for authority over ultimate reality. There is a boundary between what we can construct and what we must accept.
We can change the arrangement of things. We cannot simply redefine the conditions under which arrangement is possible. We can invent a new game, but we cannot make contradictions stop being contradictions. We can create a new measurement system, but the physical quantity being measured does not change because we renamed the unit. We can construct a new social convention, but convention does not become ultimate reality merely because everyone agrees to it. Consensus can establish a convention. It cannot establish what is ultimately true.
This gives human freedom a necessary limit. Freedom is often imagined as the ability to do whatever we want. But that definition quietly treats reality as an obstacle to freedom. If something prevents us from doing what we want, we call it a limitation.
Yet reality is not merely a limitation on freedom. Reality is the condition that makes meaningful freedom possible. A sailor does not become more free by denying the existence of wind and water. The sailor becomes more capable by understanding them. A pilot does not become free by ignoring gravity. The pilot becomes free to fly precisely because gravity and aerodynamics have been understood.
Knowledge of necessity expands practical freedom. The constraint is not always the enemy of freedom. Sometimes the constraint is what makes freedom possible.
This is why science and technology should not be understood as enemies of human agency. They are two stages of disciplined agency.
Science says:
“I will not tell reality what it is. I will discover what it is.”
Technology says:
“Now that I understand what reality permits, I will choose what to do within those possibilities.”
The problem arises when the second statement is separated from the first. Technology without submission becomes hubris.
It begins with the question, “What can we do?” and quietly assumes that whatever can be done should be done.
But possibility is not the same thing as legitimacy. A technology can work and still be destructive. It can be profitable and still be unsustainable. It can solve a problem at one level while creating a larger problem at another.
Plastic surgery provides an interesting example. There is an obvious difference between reconstructive surgery that restores function after an injury and an industry that can become entangled with insecurity, social comparison, and an ever-changing ideal of appearance.
The issue is not simply whether the technology is “natural” or “unnatural.” Humans have always used technology to alter their circumstances. The deeper question is whether technology is helping us respond to reality or helping us construct a self-referencing reality of our own.
Consider how the cycle can develop:
Insecurity → technological intervention → changed expectations → greater insecurity → greater demand for intervention.
At first, the technology appears to be solving a problem. But as the intervention changes what people expect from themselves and each other, those new expectations become the basis for creating the next demand. The system begins to reference itself.
More people participate, so the standard appears more normal. The standard appears more normal, so more people feel pressure to meet it. That pressure creates more demand, and the growing demand is then treated as evidence that the standard is legitimate.
That is consensus. To the untrained eye, it may appear as coherence. But this is merely intersubjectivity mimicking coherence. It is not coherence because it fails to correspond to the greater reality in order to reorient towards truth rather than succumb to herd mentality.
Everyone inside the system can agree, reinforce one another, and produce increasingly sophisticated technology while never stepping outside the system to ask whether the standard itself is grounded in anything beyond the system.
Coherence is different. Coherence requires an independent point of reference that can constrain the self-referencing bubble. It gives us somewhere outside the loop from which to ask whether the system actually corresponds to reality.
Technology can therefore become extremely effective while remaining trapped inside a consensus bubble. It can give people exactly what they collectively decide they want without ever answering whether what they want is grounded in what is actually true. Are we operating within a sophisticated web of consensus, or is there constraint standing independently of us that provides us with the necessary coherence we need?
The question is not simply whether the technology works. The question is whether the reality it is helping us construct remains accountable to a reality we did not construct.
This distinction is crucial. A technology can be locally successful while being globally destructive. It can achieve its immediate objective while undermining the larger system upon which that objective depends.
That is why technological progress cannot simply mean an increase in our ability to manipulate reality. More power is not automatically more progress. Therefore, the question must become:
What are we doing with the power we have gained, and does what we are doing remain compatible with the objective reality that continually sustains us?
This introduces a third dimension beyond science and technology: wisdom.
Science asks: What is true?
Technology asks: What can we do?
Wisdom asks: What should we do with what we can do?
And sustainability asks another question: Can what we are doing remain coherent with reality over time?
These questions cannot be collapsed into one another. They must remain distinct. Science cannot tell us every moral consequence of a technology merely by describing how the technology works. Technology cannot determine its own proper use merely because it is technologically successful. And human preference cannot transform a contingent desire into an ultimate truth.
We therefore need a hierarchy to keep us accountable to truth. At the highest level is ultimate reality: whatever is necessarily the case, independent of our preferences, beliefs, and constructions. Its essence is beyond our complete comprehension because it is unlike anything that exists within contingent reality. However, we can discern its necessary characteristics: it must be singular, external, non-derived, invariant, and independent of everything that exists.
Every fact, every instance of coherence, and every feature of reality that reflects truth ultimately depends upon and points back to this foundational reality.
Below that is the contingent reality in which we live: physical bodies, ecosystems, societies, resources, institutions, and circumstances.
Contingent reality can be further distinguished between what precedes us and what we deliberately construct. The world we inherit—such as physical matter, biological systems, ecosystems, and natural processes—exists prior to our choices. The world we create—such as technologies, buildings, institutions, conventions, and tools—exists because of our choices. These are commonly described as the distinction between the natural and the artificial. Our choices are made within a reality that we did not create. Reality continually constrains and sustains what we construct, while the objective position provides the independent reference point by which our constructions can be evaluated. Because that reference is singular, external, non-derived, invariant, independent, and universally applicable, it provides the most stable basis for distinguishing what is merely believed from what is actually true.
The mistake is to allow something created at the lowest level to claim authority over the highest. We can construct our world, but we cannot construct the foundation upon which our construction depends. We can create technology, but technology cannot create the reality that makes technology possible.
This establishes a boundary around human creativity. We are free to change what is contingent. We are not free to redefine what is ultimately necessary.
That is not an insult to human freedom. It is what gives human freedom a coherent place within reality. Our freedom is real, but it is not ultimate. Our creativity is real, but it is not sovereign. Our ability to transform contingent reality is real, but our ability to transform contingent reality does not give us authority to determine what ultimate reality is.
This recognition is what keeps truth attainable. It is what keeps us sane. This also explains why science requires humility even when technology gives us extraordinary power.
The more powerful our technology becomes, the more dangerous it becomes to confuse capacity with authority. A child may have the capacity to break a machine. That does not mean the child understands the machine. Likewise, humanity’s ability to manipulate something does not prove that humanity has understood its full significance.
Power can increase faster than understanding. When power outruns understanding, technology becomes dangerous precisely because it works.
The greatest technological failure may therefore not be a machine that refuses to obey us. It may be a machine that obeys us perfectly when we have framed the question incoherently.
This returns us to science. Science places reality above preference. It forces us to accept that the world is not obligated to conform to what we want it to be. Our theories must answer to reality. Our measurements must answer to reality. Our predictions must answer to reality. And reality, objectively, is singular, external, non-derived, invariant, independent and universally applicable to contingent reality—to what exists.
Technology should retain the same discipline. Free will should retain the same discipline. It should because we do not own truth, we answer to truth. At the same time, our very same free will can certainly refuse to retain the prioritization towards truth. But that refusal comes with consequences. If we do not respect the technology that science hands us, then science will cease to procure knowledge if truth is not respected. Before asking whether we can change something, we should understand what it is, what it depends upon, what else depends upon it, and what happens when we change it.
The proper relationship is therefore not human will versus reality. It is:
reality → understanding → choice → action → consequence → renewed submission to reality.
We encounter reality. We submit our beliefs to it and allow reality to correct us. That submission produces knowledge through process of elimination. Knowledge reveals both constraints and possibilities. Within those possibilities, we exercise free will. Our choices produce consequences. Those consequences encounter reality again. And reality tells us whether we were right.
This cycle is the foundation of responsible technological progress. The scientist who refuses to submit to evidence breaks the cycle at understanding. The technologist who refuses to recognize limits breaks it at action. The person who refuses to learn from consequences breaks it at the end. In every case, the underlying error is the same: treating human preference as though it were the final authority.
We are not the authors of reality. We are participants invited to participate within it. Perhaps that is the proper balance between submission and freedom.
Science teaches us what we cannot choose. Technology gives us the ability to choose what we can. Wisdom teaches us how to choose. And ultimate reality remains the final authority over all three.
The more accurately we align our reasoning with the objective structure of reality—the singular, external, non-derived, invariant, independent, and universally applicable reference point—the more intelligently we can exercise our freedom within it.
Freedom does not come from escaping constraints. It comes from understanding which constraints are objectively real and learning how to act within them. That is not the defeat of human agency. It is its proper place.