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To believe that everything can be explained is an expression of faith not reason. Our brains are very good at tricking us into thinking they are universal unde
by JackFr 6y ago
To believe that everything can be explained is an expression of faith not reason.
Our brains are very good at tricking us into thinking they are universal understanders. They are not.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoPart of the job mathematics does in science is developing tools for describing patterns - any patterns. We've also learned to deal with uncertainty, so we can now describe approximate, probabilistic patterns as well. Thanks to this, if there's any pattern about a phenomenon to be found, we likely can describe it already; if not, there's no good reason to believe we won't be able to describe it in the future. That is the first step towards an explanation (second being tying the pattern to theories that fit other observable evidence, and that have predictive power). If there's absolutely no pattern to be found in a phenomenon, then it implies the phenomenon doesn't have any consequences on anything - which implies it isn't even observable in the first place. From that follows it isn't even worth thinking about.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y agoWhy would you assume that all patterns and relationships are comprehensible by humans - not just in terms of complexity, but in terms of root qualia? Cats can't count. They seem to understand quantity, but they have no concept of integers. It seems extremely rash and naive to assume that humans don't suffer from some related conceptual handicaps. And of course we're not aware of them, by definition.
- SargeZT 6y agoHumans were also unaware of numbers and counting until we discovered/invented them in antiquity. We may be unaware of limitations that we have now, but we seem to be in a unique position in the animal kingdom to be able to overcome those conceptual limitations once a need for those concepts is identified.
- mrmincent 6y agoI wouldn’t say humans are unique, My Labrador didn’t understand the concept of a handshake until she realised treats were available :)
- nitrogen 6y agoThe greatest human invention is the ability to participate in a massive distributed consensus algorithm ("the zeitgeist"). Humanity as a whole understands things that no single human does.
- techbio 6y agoThe equivalency in math and some hard sciences between "understanding" and "describing symbolically" has never sat very well with me.
- rafaelvasco 6y agoThat's why I mentioned the blocks. Everything can be explained. But we as humans in our current state can only understand a very limited portion of everything.
- warrenpj 6y agoHow can we know if something has yet to be explained, or is in fact inexplicable? Obviously, we can't. To declare that something is inexplicable is equivalent to saying it's supernatural. Naturalism is the philosophy that everything is ultimately governed by physical laws and is therefore explicable.