Despite huge advances in science over the past century, our understanding of nature is still far from complete.
Thesought afterTheory of Everything continues to elude us.
And there are other outstanding puzzles, too, such as how consciousness arises from mere matter.
Will science ever be able to provide all the answers?
Human brains are the product of blind and unguided evolution.
Human science will therefore one day hit a hard limit and may already have done so.
Some questions may be doomed to remain what the American linguist and philosopherNoam Chomskycalled mysteries.
But does this argument really hold up?
Consider that human brains did not evolve to discover their own origins either.
And yet somehow we managed to do just that.
Perhaps the pessimists are missing something.
Mysterian arguments
Mysterian thinkersgive a prominent role to biological arguments and analogies.
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Either we have cognitive access or we suffer from closure.
Another possibility, however, which mysterians often overlook, is one of slowly diminishing returns.
Reaching the limits of inquiry might feel less like hitting a wall than getting bogged down in a quagmire.
Mysterians often conflate those two possibilities.
But then again, some people would argue that this is already true of a theory like quantum mechanics.
Even the quantum physicistRichard Feynman admitted, I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.
Would the mysterians say that we humans are cognitively closed to the quantum world?
While this is extremely hard to make sense of, quantum theory leads to incredibly accurate predictions.
Mysterians also tend to forget how mindboggling some earlier scientific theories and concepts were when initially proposed.
Nothing in our cognitive make-up prepared us for relativity theory, evolutionary biology or heliocentrism.
Are we cognitively closed to cosmology?
McCauleys astute observation provides reason for optimism, not pessimism.
Mind extensions
But can our puny brains really answer all conceivable questions and understand all problems?
This depends on whether we are talking about bare, unaided brains or not.
Theres a lot of things you cant do with your naked brain.
ButHomo Sapiensis a tool-making species, and this includes a range of cognitive tools.
For example, our unaided sense organs cannot detect UV-light, ultrasound waves, X-rays or gravitational waves.
But if youre equipped with some fancy technology youcandetect all those things.
So are we perceptually closed to UV light?
In one sense, yes.
But not if you take into account all our technological equipment and measuring devices.
Thats exactly why we have constructed mathematical models and computers to do the heavy lifting for us.
What makes our species unique is that we are capable of culture, in particular cumulative cultural knowledge.
A population of human brains is much smarter than any individual brain in isolation.
And the collaborative enterprise par excellence is science.
But collectively, they do.
As Isaac Newton wrote, he could see further by standing on the shoulders of giants.
But is there any good reason to suppose that these problems will forever remain out of reach?
Or that our sense of bafflement when thinking of them will never diminish?
Is this notion really plausible (or even coherent)?
Alien anthropologists
To see how these arguments come together, lets do a thought experiment.
There was no writing, no mathematics, no artificial devices for extending the range of our sense organs.
Weve come a long way,.
iurii/Shuttestock
However, these creatures are completely oblivious to anything that falls outside their narrow perceptual range.
In conclusion, were sorry to report that most of the cosmos is simply beyond their ken.
But those extraterrestrials would have been dead wrong.
We also know about non-Euclidean geometry and space-time curvature, courtesy ofEinsteins general theory of relativity.
By using various tricks and tools, humans have vastly extended their grasp on the world.
Who knows what other mind-extending devices we will hit upon to overcome our biological limitations?
Biology is not destiny.
Take McGinnsconfident pronouncementthat the mindbody problem is an ultimate mystery that we will never unravel.
I think its time to turn the tables on the mysterians.
That is a taller order than most mysterians have acknowledged.
In the first category belong the things that we know we dont know.
We can frame the right questions, but we havent found the answers yet.
And then there are the things that we dont know we dont know.
For these unknown unknowns, we cant even frame the questions yet.
But the important thing to note about these unknown unknowns is that nothing can be said about them.
