What Happens When We Reach the Limits of Science?

[C C]

[Magical Realist]

We'll have to wait until AI takes the torch of science from us and carries it past what we could ever conceive. Whole new fields will open up dealing with mathematics and psychology and language and technology. Knowledge will become a vast archive of barely scrutable facts and theories that we will just have to take on faith, as if we aren't largely doing this already with science. But implication after implication will trickle down to us spurring a new age of enlightenment and creative postmodern anarchism.

[Syne]

Knowledge will become a vast archive of barely scrutable facts and theories that we will just have to take on faith, as if we aren't largely doing this already with science.

This explains a lot about your notions of evidence and epistemology. No wonder you so readily accept the anomalous.

[Yazata]

What happens when we reach the limits of science?

I don't really anticipate us ever running out of questions.

But... we might conceivably run out of questions that we are in a position to answer.

Many of the particle-physics problems that theoretical physicists love so much seem to require greater and greater energies that might not be realizable given the limits of technology. Astrophysics might demand the ability to observe the very-early universe up close or the ability to peer inside a black hole. Biology (in the big universal sense) might require observation of other sorts of possible 'life' that only exist on planets orbiting distant stars.  Fully understanding life here on Earth would seemingly require the ability to observe of the initial origin of life almost 4 billion years ago.

Our spatial-temporal circumstances and limitations in our abilities to generate exotic physical states are inevitably going to limit what we can know.

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We'll have to wait until AI takes the torch of science from us and carries it past what we could ever conceive.

Yes, another of the limitations that human beings face is the limitations of human cognition itself.

No other animal on earth has the cognitive ability to understand the science that humans produce. So what's to say that some other hypothetical intelligence couldn't have the same relation to human cognition that we have to the cognition of 'lower' animals?

Might there be whole aspects of reality that are as unsuspected and incomprehensible to us, as relativistic astrophysics is to a dog?

Knowledge will become a vast archive of barely scrutable facts and theories that we will just have to take on faith, as if we aren't largely doing this already with science.

We would see the AI, the bio-engineered post-human, or the superior space-alien producing results, but we would never be able to understand how. We would just have to accept they they have ways of knowing and conceptualizing things that we will never be able to comprehend.

I think that it was Arthur Clarke who wrote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

[Syne]

We've already reached many limits of science. The industry of speculative science seems largely unfazed.