without enhancement some problems are just to hard for humans.
Without the enhancement of a computer or at least external memory like pen and paper, can you compute the n-th roots of pi to arbitrary decimal places? I can’t, so it seems plain that Dawkins was correct. But it’s a mighty big jump from there to “and there are processes in the universe which no constructible tools could ever let us explain, even in principle”.
Humans with our enhancements haven’t yet found any aspect of the universe which we have good reason to believe will always continue to escape explanation. That lack of evidence is weak evidence in favor of nothing remaining permanently and necessarily mysterious.
I agree that it should all be possible with enhancement, but I’m not sure he was saying that. To your second point, I don’t think dogs walk around with the knowledge that they’re too stupid to comprehend the universe.
Humans with our enhancements haven’t yet found any aspect of the universe which we have good reason to believe will always continue to escape explanation.
What would you say would actually constitute evidence for such a thing existing?
I can imagine encountering a living organism composed of “subtle matter” not reducible to molecular machinery, or a fundamental particle that spontaneously and stochastically changed its velocity, or an Oracle that announced the solution to the halting problem for any given piece of code.
Without the enhancement of a computer or at least external memory like pen and paper, can you compute the n-th roots of pi to arbitrary decimal places? I can’t, so it seems plain that Dawkins was correct. But it’s a mighty big jump from there to “and there are processes in the universe which no constructible tools could ever let us explain, even in principle”.
Humans with our enhancements haven’t yet found any aspect of the universe which we have good reason to believe will always continue to escape explanation. That lack of evidence is weak evidence in favor of nothing remaining permanently and necessarily mysterious.
I agree that it should all be possible with enhancement, but I’m not sure he was saying that. To your second point, I don’t think dogs walk around with the knowledge that they’re too stupid to comprehend the universe.
What would you say would actually constitute evidence for such a thing existing?
I can imagine encountering a living organism composed of “subtle matter” not reducible to molecular machinery, or a fundamental particle that spontaneously and stochastically changed its velocity, or an Oracle that announced the solution to the halting problem for any given piece of code.
That’s an easy one.
Finding something that you can’t explain.
Finding that other smart people can’t explain something.
Finding other things are easy to explain.
Becoming smarter and still being unable to explain something.
As for what would constitute strong evidence...