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Is Science Infinite?

Can science keep giving us profound insights into the world forever? Or will it inevitably bump up against limits? David Deutsch, an iconoclastic British physicist, made the case for boundlessness in his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch recently told me: “I think nothing worth understanding will always remain a mystery. And consciousness (qualia, creativity, free will etc.) seems eminently worth understanding.”

At a meeting in Switzerland last month, “The Enigma of Human Consciousness,” philosophers and journalists (including me) chatted about animal consciousness, machine consciousness and related puzzles. One speaker, British physicist Martin Rees, challenged Deutsch’s optimism. Rees reiterated points he made in a recent essay, “Is There a Limit to Scientific Understanding?” Rees called Beginning of Infinity “provocative and excellent” but disputed Deutsch’s central claim that science is boundless. Science “will hit the buffers at some point,” Rees warned. He continued:

There are two reasons why this might happen. The optimistic one is that we clean up and codify certain areas (such as atomic physics) to the point that there’s no more to say. A second, more worrying possibility is that we’ll reach the limits of what our brains can grasp. There might be concepts, crucial to a full understanding of physical reality, that we aren’t aware of, any more than a monkey comprehends Darwinism or meteorology… Efforts to understand very complex systems, such as our own brains, might well be the first to hit such limits. Perhaps complex aggregates of atoms, whether brains or electronic machines, can never know all there is to know about themselves. 

I agree with Rees that the brain and by implication consciousness will probably resist complete understanding. The riddle of consciousness is a microcosm of the riddle of humanity. What are we, really? For most of our history, religion has given us the answer. We are immortal souls, children of a loving god, striving to reach heaven or nirvana.

Modern scientists reject these religious explanations, but they cannot agree on an alternative. They have proposed a bewildering variety of answers to the question of what we really are. We are clusters of neurons awash in chemicals, genes shaped by natural selection, egos keeping a lid on ids, software programs, nodes of information in a cosmic web, quantum wave functions.

Science will never converge on a final, objectively true theory of what we are, because we are too protean, too creative, to be captured by a single theory. Science itself keeps transforming us, with technologies like brain implants and gene therapy and paradigms like quantum mechanics and information theory. To be human means to be a work in progress.

Deutsch’s claim that science is infinite also has a contradiction at its core. He wants science to solve the deepest mysteries, like consciousness, and yet to have more mysteries to solve, forever. That is a radical claim about the structure of nature, which to my mind reflects wishful thinking rather than hardheaded realism.

Deutsch is both wrong and right in his view of science. He is wrong that science can solve every mystery, and especially consciousness. We will never understand, once and for all, who we are. But he is right that science is potentially infinite. As long as we remain mysteries to ourselves, our quest for knowledge will persist.

John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally posted on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”

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