As the island of knowledge grows, so does the perimeter of the horizon where knowledge ends, says Marcelo Gleiser, a particle cosmologist at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. “The more we know, the more exposed we are to our ignorance, and the more we know to ask”, he writes 1
1 Gleiser, M. The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2014).
As neurobiologist and historian Matthew Cobb at the University of Manchester, UK, writes, “no major conceptual innovation has been made in our overall understanding of how the brain works for over half a century” 7
7 Cobb, M. The Idea of the Brain (Profile, in the press).
The history of science tells us that some of the toughest questions will be addressed not by being answered but by being replaced with better questions. Among those haunting us today that might deserve this fate are: what is life? What is consciousness? What makes individuals who they are? Why does our Universe seem fine-tuned for our existence? How did it all begin? It will take creative and diverse thinking to improve on them — for the view over the horizon might not be the one we anticipated.
1 Gleiser, M. The Island of Knowledge: The Limits of Science and the Search for Meaning (Basic Books, 2014).
7 Cobb, M. The Idea of the Brain (Profile, in the press).
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03307-8
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