“What if our faith in nature’s knowability is just an illusion, a trick of the overconfident human mind?” he writes. “That’s the working assumption behind a school of thought known as mysterianism. Situated at the fruitful if sometimes fraught intersection of scientific and philosophic inquiry … the mysterians propose that human intellect has boundaries and that some of nature’s mysteries may forever lie beyond our comprehension.
“Mysterianism is most closely associated with the so-called hard problem of consciousness: How can the inanimate matter of the brain produce subjective feelings? The mysterians argue that the human mind may be incapable of understanding itself, that we will never understand how consciousness works. … As the philsopher Colin McGinn has suggested, ‘It may be that nothing in nature is fully intelligible to us.’”
Dang. Email me at rrollins@coxohio.com.
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