Limits of Understanding Pt. 2

Tuesday, November 26

From Robert Sapolsky’s Circling the Blanket for God, an essay in The Trouble with Testosterone:

But there is an even stronger reason why I am not afraid that scientists will inadvertently go and explain everything — it will never happen. While in certain realms, it may prove to be the case that science can explain anything, it will never explain everything. … As part of the scientific process, for every question answered, a dozen newer ones are generated. And they are usually far more puzzling, more challenging than than the prior problems. This was stated wonderfully in a quote by a geneticist named Haldane earlier in the century: "Life is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine." We will never have our flames extinguished by knowledge. The purpose of science is not to cure us of our sense of mystery and wonder, but to constantly reinvent and reinvigorate it.

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Is it sad that we’ll necessarily leave much of the world unknown and undiscovered? Yesterday, I claimed it was.

But then comes Sapolsky’s counterpoint: maybe mystery and uncertainty aren’t deprivations, but rather gifts.