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The best argument for mysterianism

#1
Magical Realist Offline
I guess I'm somewhat of a mysterian. There are limits to what we can understand..

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/27017

"By leaps, steps, and stumbles, science progresses. Its seemingly inexorable advance promotes a sense that everything can be known and will be known. Through observation and experiment, and lots of hard thinking, we will come to explain even the murkiest and most complicated of nature’s secrets: consciousness, dark matter, time, the full story of the universe.

But what if our faith in nature’s knowability is just an illusion, a trick of the overconfident human mind? 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 mysterianist view has been promulgated, in different ways, by many respected thinkers, from the philosopher Colin McGinn to the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. 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. But if mysterianism applies to the workings of the mind, there’s no reason it shouldn’t also apply to the workings of nature in general. As McGinn has suggested, “It may be that nothing in nature is fully intelligible to us.”

The simplest and best argument for mysterianism is founded on evolutionary evidence. When we examine any other living creature, we understand immediately that its intellect is limited. Even the brightest, most curious dog is not going to master arithmetic. Even the wisest of owls knows nothing of the anatomy of the field mouse it devours. If all the minds that evolution has produced have bounded comprehension, then it’s only logical that our own minds, also products of evolution, would have limits as well. As Pinker has observed, “The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours.” To assume that there are no limits to human understanding is to believe in a level of human exceptionalism that seems miraculous, if not mystical.

Mysterianism, it’s important to emphasize, is not inconsistent with materialism. The mysterians don’t suggest that what’s unknowable must be spiritual. They posit that matter itself has complexities that lie beyond our ken. Like every other animal on earth, we humans are just not smart enough to understand all of nature’s laws and workings.

What’s truly disconcerting about mysterianism is that, if our intellect is bounded, we can never know how much of existence lies beyond our grasp. What we know or may in the future know may be trifling compared with the unknowable unknowns. “As to myself,” remarked Isaac Newton in his old age, “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” It may be that we are all like that child on the strand, playing with the odd pebble or shell—and fated to remain so.

Mysterianism teaches us humility. Through science, we have come to understand much about nature, but much more may remain outside the scope of our perception and comprehension. If the mysterians are right, science’s ultimate achievement may be to reveal to us its own limits."
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#2
Syne Offline
That's a native feature of the hard sciences, where we freely admit we cannot know the truth of things like the conditions at the Big Bang...due to the finite speed of light. There, it needs no other name than objectivity. But the soft sciences tend to lack a degree of methodological rigor to definitively state what is objective. There, it seems to be a struggle between scientism and skepticism, with the latter being the more scientific approach...accepting the null hypothesis until sufficiently shown otherwise.
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#3
Zinjanthropos Offline
IMHO....If one can't comprehend then belief is sure to follow. How does one explain knowledge of a belief? If you want a mystery then there you have it. It's what happens when knowledge is limited. I've never heard a better argument for the pursuit of knowledge than Mysterianism as it is described in MR's OP.
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#4
C C Offline
(1) Concerning "mysterian" feelings oriented in some metaphysical direction (like "what makes nature or its fundamentals possible"):

Reason outputs multiple candidates for what is conceived as prior-in-rank to our phenomenally "given" life and the modern practice of staying confined to using the latter's own contents as a wide, circular web of reciprocal causes and explanations for each other. (I.e., the natural or scientific approach which augments / supplements the everyday experience or realm.)

Since such metempirical affairs outrun observation and experiment (they are objects and recreations of reason / inference rather than sensation)... Then there is no way to cull out hypotheses, doctrines, and speculations in that genre. Apart from demonstrating internal consistencies in an offering (i.e., a framework does not hang together well according to its own elements and maxims). Epistemological pessimism is warranted in that direction due to little or no progress.

(2) Concerning "mysterian" feelings oriented "inward" to our phenomenally "given" life (however questionable it might be at times that such isn't actually flirting with or straying into metempirical territory):

Explicit knowledge usually boils down to formal description (sometimes demonstration). Even tacit knowledge is held / stored as patterns or guided potential in some manner that amounts to non-artificial representation, so as to be released / executed as abilities of the body.

The problem is that representations (which mediate information) cannot capture the original "stuff" and potency of the world or experiences which they were abstracted from. The phrase "red racing sports car" does not exhibit a car, its actions and environmental effect, and the property of red. Also the visually exploded diagram of such a vehicle merely depicts the the organization of its parts inter-dependency (the working structure) rather than replicating all the reality and tangible impact of the concrete machine.

Merely abstracting and measuring "arrangements in space" and "changes in time" cannot provide all the "characteristics, governing powers, and substantive agency" of the situations in the world as actually encountered. A computer simulation is much better than nonfigurative language and symbols at "explaining" why something is or works because it tries to reproduce on a screen the situation in terms of spatial configuration and formula-conforming behavior / actions. But as John Searle once put it, you still can't eat a computer simulation of a pizza (food converted into an information structure or this overall knowledge game approach).

Two thousand pages of documents using specialized technical language and graphics to convey: a schema of structural and functional relationships; a systemic mapping of causes / effects; a model of the organization of inter-dependent components in play; etc... Cannot deliver everything that made the original event, object, or situation possible. What can't be strictly accounted for by various networks of explanation (like that) gets delegated to probability and interpretations of quantitative data. The latter limited to prediction and the constraints of concept handling (generalizations, principles or management by background theories) rather than offering actual origins or reasons for _X_.

~
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