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Is scientific knowledge limited in principle?

Are there limits to what human beings can know and understand?

I think that everybody agrees that there are not only "known unknowns" like dark matter or the question of how and where life originated. These are "unknowns" knowable in principle given our cognitive capacities. The question is: Are there "unknown unknowns" that are in principle off-limits to Homo sapiens and its scientific mind?

Some people - I would call them "epistemic optimists" - argue that the limitations of our mind and its most noble and successful occupation - i.e. science - are not fixed, and as we gain knowledge regarding the universe and the phenomena by which we are surrounded, the realm of science (including our ability to reason on the relevant subjects) continues to expand.
The crucial question about the limits of science is: Can we keep expanding our circle of knowledge until it covers the totality of reality (not only "our reality" but Reality as such), or are there realms and dimensions of reality that are in principle off-limits to our curiosity?

What I mean by "unknown unknowns" is not a question of degree but of kind. Just imagine a chimp. You can teach a chimp to count to 10 or 20 or maybe even 100. But a chimp will never resolve or even understand the Riemann hypothesis, because chimpanzees' brains are not built (by evolution) to understand these kind of questions, let alone answer them. Higher math (and many other domains) are in principle beyond what an ape can possibly understand ( in this respect, I am closer to a chimp than to a mathematician, but my brain is certainly not the pinnacle of human evolution).

In the world of the epistemic optimists the human mind has a truly unlimited potential: we'll keep expanding our knowledge and then, some day, we will understand and know everything that can be understood and known.

HOMO DEUS - an omniscient animal? I don't think so. I am sure that there are dimensions of Reality inaccessible to our cognitive/epistemic faculties, just as there are realms of knowledge inaccessible to the cognition of all (!) other animals. Homo sapiens may be very smart and knowledgeable, but even to our minds there are aspects of reality as inaccessible as the Riemann hypothesis is to a dog or a chimp (or to me)

Matias 8 Sep 27
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30 comments (26 - 30)

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I suspect really thinking in higher dimensions might be beyond us. We grow up in a world where the natural expression of dimensionality is 3D space, we have some inkling of time, and have managed to figure out space-time, but I think truly thinking in the 11 dimensions that some physicists have posited is just too unnatural, our brains are not evolved to cope.

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Yes I think there are limits to what the human mind can know and understand. And I think there will be limits to what AIs will be able to understand.
For instance, I personally can't see how time and space are merged in spacetime. I mean, I know that they are merged, mathematically, but I can't feel/see/intuit it. I wonder if that's the same for everyone.

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I think overtime humans would eventually start modying DNA to be able to select for higher intelligence to process more complex information than we are able to at this current point in time or we could potentially integrate our conciousness with artificial intelligence to give us exponentially growth in our ability to percieve or process information....so I think we do potentially have an unlimited scope for growth.

Apparently the intelligent of our species are less likely to want children. I think that may affect IQ somewhat.

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To plumb the depths of nature's mysteries is bound to take longer than the time it takes to pluck a chicken. And it's gonna require some pretty sophisticated, precision equipment. The kind of stuff that only a highly technological society can produce. All that goes out the window if civilization collapses. Now let's see. What could possibly bring about the demise of this shining city on a hill? Greed? Corruption? Racism? Superstition? Atavistic tribalism? How about a mix of all those lovely ingredients together with some feedback loop spiking global temperatures, some crop failures, a squeeze of jihad and a dash of thermonuclear war. That'd do it. Tick tock.

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it we be impossible to reach a point of knowing if something we can't observe exists, so I am not sure if that's what you mean, but if so, then yes, Science is limited to our ability to observe, and nothing we can't observe can ever be known to us. I call those things basically "meaningless" to our every day lives, since without being able to measure any effect, observe any reaction, we cannot know what any of it is or means.

if you mean "could we eventually observe everything", then yeah, sure, so long as everything is measurable. IF the world is purely quantum interaction, then we can eventually observe every effect and draw accurate conclusions from them. IF there are aspects of the world beyond those things, we can't, and we won't ever know if they exist or not.

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