...the best lesson our readers can learn is to give up the childish notion that everything that is interesting about nature can be understood… It might be interesting to know how cognition (whatever that is) arose and spread and changed, but we cannot know. Tough luck.
That isn’t what the quote is saying though. It is claiming that we know for a fact that we cannot ever understand cognition. Ironically, that is itself a hubristic claim of positive knowledge about a topic (what may eventually be possible for humans to know) where we should be more modest about claims.
Richard Lewontin
Is this an ironic rationality quote?
The world is allowed to be too much for you to handle. (But you should try anyway.)
That isn’t what the quote is saying though. It is claiming that we know for a fact that we cannot ever understand cognition. Ironically, that is itself a hubristic claim of positive knowledge about a topic (what may eventually be possible for humans to know) where we should be more modest about claims.
Agreed.