Highly important approach. The key to scientific breakthroughs lays in understanding its limitations. Also, these are the limits of the human mind which are reflected. Question is whether we would be smart enough just to become progressively smarter. This, without taking into account deeper limits of any knowledge system.
During the recent protest march against the Pope in London, I noticed one sign which read “I believe in science”. This made no sense. The point about science is you don’t have to believe in it. Perhaps the bearer of the sign meant he believed in the power of science to make him happy or fulfilled. Or perhaps he just meant he didn’t believe in God.
Nonsensical posturing about science has become commonplace. This is caused, I think, by the triumphalist tone of the wave, now abating, of popular science books started by Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Physicists used to crow they were on the verge of a “Theory of Everything”, biologists said they had cracked the code of life and neuroscientists, accompanied by certain philosophers, claimed the mystery of consciousness would soon yield.
None of these things was, or is, true. They are not true because all these problems have proved far more complex than anybody expected. But are they also not true for a more profound reason? Are they not true because they are insoluble, because the human mind is incapable of understanding the world fully?
The physicist Russell Stannard thinks this may be the case. He believes that science will eventually come to an end, and that we are living in a “transient age of human development” in which scientific discoveries can be made. But science won’t end because we know everything; it will end because we know everything we can know.
Science, he says, may well not crack, among other things, the problems of consciousness and free will, the ultimate divisibility of space and time, and the true status of mathematics. It may not even be able to establish the existence of the world. An extreme interpretation of quantum theory says that because all we know of the world is obtained by our acts of observation, and because these determine the world we see, we cannot be sure of the existence of anything between those observations. In fact, strictly speaking, the world ceases to exist in this gap.
This, therefore, is an anti-triumphalist book. The more of it you read, the less you discover we know. Stannard argues that there are certain to be limits to science. This raises the further question: are these ultimate limits, or just the limits of the human mind? In other words, could a superior intelligence solve the problems? That is doubly unknowable.
Stannard makes the idea of a limited science more accessible simply by pointing out its actual rather than its conceptual limitations. He pinpoints, for example, the critical difficulty of contemporary neuroscience - that researchers must still rely on the subjective reports of its subjects to match the pictures of the brain seen with fMRI machines with mental events. “There is nothing about these physical patterns of behaviour that in [itself informs] us that they are accompanied by someone having a mental experience.”
Read more at www.newstatesman.com
