Lunch at the Labs

When discussing with scientists topics like free will, when/how did the universe begin, does it have an end, what was there before the beginning, etc, they usually disagree with my point of view that these questions are beyond the capabilities of our brains to comprehend. Instead most think it's just a matter of time (albeit maybe a long time) before we can understand everything. It seems obvious to me that this cannot be true, because we and our brains have evolved over time so that we can think and understand things lower animals cannot. But evolution will continue so humans and their brains will no longer be the top rung of the ladder and other species will evolve that can understand things we cannot. Along these line I was glad to see that Lord Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, expresses similar thoughts in Financial Times Magazine:

"Thinking about life on Earth, most people see us as the culmination but we know the sun is only halfway through its life," he says. "There is no reason to think that we're the culmination. Even if there's no life beyond Earth now, we can imagine a post-human species spreading far beyond Earth. Moreover, any [human] evolution in the future will be on the technological timescale of centuries rather than the Darwinian timescale of millions of years."

. . .

Mind-boggling concepts such as the multiverse, string theory, dark energy, supersymmetry and hidden dimensions of space and time raise the question of whether we can ever grasp the deep realities of nature. Rees thinks not.

"It is remarkable that our brains, which have changed little since our ancestors roamed the African savannah, have allowed us to understand the counterintuitive worlds of the quantum and the cosmos," he says. But there is no reason to think that our comprehension is matched to an understanding of all key features of reality.

"Some of these insights may have to wait for post-human intelligence. There may be phenomena, crucial to our long-term destiny, which we are not aware of -- any more than a monkey comprehends the nature of stars and galaxies."