To paraphrase some old greek dude, the more we know the more we realize how little we know.
Can human beings ever understand the universe. Is the way our brain works, the way we see and interpret things a limitation that the science can never overcome? If our descendents evolve into something more, something that is enough levels of magnitude higher than our current capacity for understanding, will this change or not?
For instance, sequentiality seems to be hardwired in us. We cannot really understand something without a beginning or an end. At most, we can understand the concept in terms of it being opposed to finity* and maybe manipulate abstractions of it in fields such as mathematics, but in the end, all we ever see are equivalents of those plastic atom and electron pieces used in highschool chem class, not the real deal.
Which leads me to the topic question: “what do you think is required to understand the universe ?”.**
if it’s not a word, it should be.
** Assuming that question itself is not faulty and inherently unanswerable.
Doubtful. At least, it’s not doable by people who refuse to believe that they may not actually know everything and that humans are limited in understanding. It’s a point I try to make in theist vs atheist threads and it falls on deaf ears. Humans who believe in scientism won’t ever grok the universe. I think the best we might manage is to gather a vague awareness of what it is we don’t understand and why we may never understand it.
Where I think we lose all capability is when we get into issues of multiple dimensions. We are three; we live in three, we understand three. I don’t think you could really understand four or fifteen or twenty-nine unless you were a creature of the topmost or last or whatever the superior one would be.
Can you cite a single person in any of these threads you refer to who has claimed that they know everything or who believes that humans definitely have unlimited understanding?
Or maybe your point isn’t as strong or as accurately aimed as you think it is. You don’t know everything, you know.
Everything that exists. Everything that is different from utter nothingness.
Understanding the universe means you no longer have questions to be answered about how and why you and everything else you know came to exist, at that particular moment of time or state of the universe or whatever. Ontop of that your understanding of the laws of physics must be perfect so that there is no phenomenon that surprises you. (kinda like a programmer can understand any code written in a language he knows perfectly).
Well, for starters, the prevention of governments that limit knowledge. North Korea and China comes to mind. It doesn’t even have to be cosmological knowledge, but knowledge in general. I’m of the belief that knowledge from all aspects of life can breed new knowledge. When you’ve got someone watching your back and you’re told not to learn something or a subject, that limits you in all areas of your life in terms of thinking independently and being creative. This is also my issue with religion. If you seriously believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, you simply cannot comprehend the “big picture” IMO. That’s a problem.
And discerning patterns; always questioning, and having a time frame of answers to be well-explored. And, always, re-explored.
That’s what I mean about Graciousness, too. The Universe is a place we live in, and we have to, by definition, have to obey certain rules to survive, whether we understand them or not. The universe grants us those rules as gracious, meaning, that’s what we need to survive. That seems to me as pretty Absolute, or we wouldn’t be here at all. This is my term, but don’t have a problem with anyone disputing that.
My point is; this Earth has given us -humans-everything to survive, and Gracious in that respect, so , I guess, also in Universal aspect, as well.
I’m very open to telling me why this isn’t appropriate thought.
I think this is Czarcasm’s point, but on reading the OP, the thing which struck me as the biggest barrier is the paucity of data. We’re limited to snippets of radiation traveling through space that happen to hit our little blue marble during a fairly short interval in which we’ve been taking measurements.
The Universe I get. He should define 'understand."
And I’m not joking. There is an understanding we get from examining and manipulating the mathematics that seems to desacribe the universe, which gives us insights we can’t seem to get intuitively. Then there is our intuitive understanding of it. I don’t think we can understand the universe intuitively, since our intuition evolved for quite a different reason.
As an example, consider the number of people here who can’t grasp a non-causal physics. It’s not surprising, since our grasp that things had causes was crucially important to our survival. As another, who can intuit 9 dimensions? (I have problems with 3.) Mathematically, it is easy to handle, intuitively, almost impossible.