There is one thing that seems obvious to me but most scientists disagree. Namely that the human brain cannot understand everything about the world we live in. Not just because we haven't figured it out yet, but because our brains are a product of evolution. Since most agree that other mammals, even those with large brains, cannot understand the world as humans do, isn't it presumptuous to think some species won't come after us that makes us look similarly dumb?
So I was happy to see on Edge.org, in a response to it's question of the year for 2014: What Scientific Idea Is Ready For Retirement? by Martin Rees one of the world's leading astronomers and cosmologists:
We'll Never Hit Barriers To Scientific Understanding (NOT)
It begins,
There's a widely-held presumption that our insight will deepen indefinitely -- that all scientific problems will eventually yield to attack. But I think we may need to abandon this optimism. The human intellect may hit the buffers -- even though in most fields of science, there's surely a long way to go before this happens.
And ends with,
We humans haven't changed much since our remote ancestors roamed the African savannah. Our brains evolved to cope with the human-scale environment. So it is surely remarkable that we can make sense of phenomena that confound everyday intuition: in particular, the minuscule atoms we're made of, and the vast cosmos that surrounds us.
Nonetheless -- and here I'm sticking my neck out -- maybe some aspects of reality are intrinsically beyond us, in that their comprehension would require some post-human intellect -- just as Euclidean geometry is beyond non-human primates. . . .
It would be unduly anthropocentric to believe that all of science -- and a proper concept of all aspects of reality -- is within human mental powers to grasp. Whether the really long-range future lies with organic post-humans or with intelligent machines is a matter for debate -- but either way, there will be insights into reality left for them to discover.
That is just the way I see it.