Will humans one day have the power to understand any concept?

No, we will always be human.

I think that depends on how infinite the universe of concepts is. It seems that each time we understand a new concept, the door opens to a whole new set of concepts. For example, when we understood the concept of atoms, we asked what makes up an atom? When we understood protons and electrons, we asked what makes up a proton? I assume that the particle zoo comes from asking what makes up the things that make up the things that make up protons and neutrons. “It’s turtles, all the way down”

Man seems to question the obvious and strive for the unattainable like an alchemist who wants to make gold from silver.

Nah.. we will destroy ourselves first.

Yes, we will one day be able to understand everything. And then, as knowledge is power, we will become the God that many people try so dearly to find. Humans will not always be humans. We are on the brink of being able to manipulate our own DNA. Already we have the option to screen embryos for diseases or debilitating illnesses, and to take steps to reduce the occurrence of people with such a disease. Soon, we will be able to understand what all of the genes do, and start to muck around with designing the next version of humanity.

@GAMBIT I’m not sure about questioning just the obvious, but we do have a tendency to ask a lot of questions. Strikes me as a good thing. BTW, out of of alchemy came chemistry. It’s just a question of how many questions had to be asked.

@Grisson – yes when we strive for the unattainable we reach many goals and when we start from the obvious we have a foundation to stand on.

I’ve heard it said that the human brain is not comlpex enough to understand how complex the human brain is.

I heard it in context of Artificial Intelligence. The concept was that no ‘device’ that understands can be built complex enough to understand its own complexity.

I disagree. I think we will someday understand the processes of how we think.

But again, what doors will that open?

I suppose it depends on what we mean by “understand.” If we have a set of rules that model all behavior in the universe, I suppose we can be said to understand everything. However, I am pretty sure we can’t have such a model without having the universe as a model. So, to understand everything, we’d have to be able to be the universe. I can’t see that happening, ever. The universe is too big.

Now, it also depends on what we mean by “concept.” If we are talking about human concepts, then it’s a question of whether any one human can grok all human concepts. If you’re asking whether humanity can understand all human concepts, well, by definition, we do. I mean, a human concept can’t exist if a human didn’t create it.

So, the second way makes no sense. You must be talking about the universe of concepts, and obviously, humans could never understand all of them. Even if we were the universe, I don’t think we’d understand them all. I mean, we are human, but we don’t understand ourselves very completely.

If we confine ourselves to mathematics then Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem implies that we may not be able to understand all of mathematics. At the very least it implies that we can never design a machine to systematically discover all the theorems in a given sufficiently complex area. I am hoping that there will always be mysteries beyond our grasp. Call me a romantic if you will but I find very unsettling the idea that we will be able to explain it all. I am even hoping that it will never be possible to unify all the laws of physics. I certainly hope that there will always be limits to our understanding of human behavior.

@LostInParadise said, “I am hoping that there will always be mysteries beyond our grasp.”
I am hoping that we will always persue them, regardless.

This is turning into a very interesting discussion – thank you. Let me put a slightly different slant on this. In the Renaissance it was felt that some very intelligent people knew everything that was knowable about the world at that time.

As the world continues to change and our knowledge of things grows as a species, do you think there could ever be a time when the human brain would not have the capacity to (theoretically) know everything there was to be known?

@davidshoukry Personally, I believe that the human brain will adapt and evolve to continue to know and understand.

@davidshoukry – Your second question seems like asking can one person process all the information that is on the internet. So I will have to respecfully say no unless we put a computer chip in our brains, which we may do in the future.

I don’t think there will be much more (if any) evolution of the human mind or body (excluding, perhaps, man’s blood in response to a changing external environment). Man has reached the point where he no longer changes to adapt to his environment. Instead, he changes his environment to adapt to him.

When I was in Junior High school, I had a Professor who felt that man would eventually develop a 6th finger to deal with the advances in electronics in order to handle the miniature components. Since that time, we’ve developed magnifiers to see these components with and tools to handle them with. We’ve even developed robotics to address surgeries. So much for the 6th finger.

@dynamicduo Yadda, yadda, yadda. All the stuff you listed and we still let children starve to death all over the world everyday, we still murder each other every day—we don’t even know what’s at the bottom of our own ocean!! If, and this is a big if, we manage to survive another few hundred thousand years, maybe we’ll be able to answer most of the questions we now ponder, but as someone already noted, for every question we answer more new questions will arise. Do you really think we’ll ever get to the final question of “where does the universe end/begin?” Or “what was here before the big bang?” The fact that some people think we will someday answer all the questions, only shows how little we know and how limited our brains are. And there just may be some things that our human brain may not be capable of answering. Hell, for that matter, there are certainly things that we are not even able to conceive of, questions that we cannot even think of, let alone answer! Our brains are not unlimited, they are designed to function w/in their realm, our reality, but that certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t things out there that we cannot perceive—and I’m speaking srictly in scientific terms here. So, even if we do somehow reach our full potential, there will still be things we can never understand b/c it is simply beyond us even to ask, let alone answer. And we will always have emotions. We will always be human.

@tb1570: you know, it’s somewhat offensive to start off your post with “yadda yadda yadda”, because I interpreted that as you meaning my comment was long and kept going on, and thus tainted my reading of your comment. But, I am a logical person, so I superseded my emotions with logic (that’s a pretty Vulcan trait now isn’t it?) and continued reading your comment regardless.

I do believe that humanity is capable of learning everything. The more we learn, the more we learn what we don’t learn, and thus add it to the “to learn” pile. Eventually this pile will be empty. The question is, can humanity keep it’s shit together long enough to get to this point? That’s the big question. Does humanity destroy itself before becoming enlightened to the point of never destroying itself? Back in the 1800s I would have said yes, humanity destroys itself. As time goes on though, my answer leans more in the other direction.

@dynamicduo Apologies. Did not mean to offend. However, I still think maybe you missed my point. My point is, we will never “know it all” b/c we are simply not capable of knowing everything. There are things that we will never comprehend, but maybe we won’t know we don’t know them b/c we cannot even see the question. Think of it this way: we can’t answer the writing on the wall, b/c we can’t even perceive the wall! Or think of a creature like the Great White Shark. Here is an animal that, after tens of millions of years of evolution has basically reached its peak—it has not evolved significantly in millions of years, yet it remains the apex predator in its environment. It has no natural predators. It is a shining example of an almost perfect evolution to suit its environment. Yet, it cannot solve 2×2, it cannot even conceive of the question, and it has almost certainly never looked around and wondered “Who am I? Why am I here? What’s the purpose of life?” It swims in its environment, and it is perfectly suited for it’s environment, but there are things it will never understand, no matter how hard it tries, simply b/c it cannot understand them, cannot even perceive them, b/c its brain is not designed to think like that—it simply does not have the capability; it is physically impossible. It swims in the ocean, unaware of what lies outside the ocean. Do you see the metaphor here? As I said before, even if we did manage to make it as long as it takes for our evolution to reach it’s full potential (think millions of years—something we really cannot comprehend), there will still be things we cannot know b/c our brains are not designed to know them. We will still be walking around, only able to perceive what our brains are capable of perceiving, only able to answer the questions we can think of. Everything we see, everything we do, everything we think, every story we write, every possibility we can conceive of, only comes from our senses, our brains, which are not perfect. Try as hard as we might , we will never be able to think beyond our brain, b/c our brain is what gives us perception of our brain. Our mind is what tells us we exist, but our minds are not perfect and not capable of seeing or perceiving everything around us. Just like that shark—try as hard as she might, she will never know the answer to 2–1=__? And she will never know what lies beyond the ocean.

I really really hope that we never reach the point where we know and understand everything….I think that’s when society will start to decline

So many people dedicate their lives to expanding the scope of human knowledge and I really can’t imagine that this scope is something so finite that we will reach the end of it and suddenly be left standing and saying “Well…that’s that…we know everything.” I also think that if we DO reach this point we will decline because it is this constant forward quest that keeps us progressing as a species. The speculation of religion and morality alone will not sustain our society if their isn’t anything tangible left to prove or change.

@tb1570 Thanks for your recent comment. It’s a great comment, first off, and you do raise some interesting points which I will address in a more broken down format.

Regarding the fact that we cannot see the wall: This is true. However, we are capable of making tools that can compensate for our flaws. For example, consider the electromagnetic spectrum. Humans can only directly perceive a very small fragment of this spectrum. However, we have created tools that let us indirectly perceive the remainder of the spectrum. Humans, unlike sharks, have proved that we have the capacity to develop beyond our limitations. It is not unreasonable to think that we could create other tools as we encounter the question after the next one.

You get into an interesting point about the limitations of our brains. However, we are continuously “exceeding our original programming”, whether it’s our brains or our bodies. For instance, humans have a very hard time conceptualizing truly large and truly small numbers, such as the size of the universe, or the sheer tininess of a proton. Our brains simply weren’t built to understand large or small scale numbers. After all, it serves no purpose when we live on Earth and our only goals are to live until we are able to produce offspring and consume any nutrient. However, despite this limitation, scientists still do deal with large and small numbers. We have developed tools that help us with it. Mathematics is one such tool. Unit powers is another. And this is not something that evolution has caused us to develop, we have developed it ourselves, such that even the basic principles of mathematics (adding, dividing) are known to virtually every first and second world person. This is essentially forced evolution: we are forcing our children to gain knowledge that will give then an advantage. This is also known as culture. It’s much more effective than natural selection when it comes to passing down valuable rules and information, but can lead to passing down non-valuable information too. Regardless, it is a clear example which I feel disproves your point about the limitations of our brains.

Regarding the fact that great white sharks cannot count: and as a sidenote, there have been some studies to show that some aquatic creatures, namely dolphins can in fact understand basic mathematics. You might have wanted to use dolphins in your example as they are generally accepted to be the closest to “sea humans” in terms of intelligence, self-awareness, etc. Yes, if we gave great white sharks nuclear submarines, they would not know what to do with them. However, if great white sharks had evolved such that they themselves had created the nuclear submarine, they would certainly have the capability to understand them as they created them. But comparing a sea animal to a land animal is totally different and not really worthy of comparison, because we have different needs and live in totally different environments, thus totally different patterns of evolution are followed. What is helpful to our ancestors (standing upright, so as to leave our hands free for manipulating tools) is not necessarily helpful to an aquatic creature (the aquatic creature doesn’t need to wield tools as it has tools built into itself (tusks, poison), thus no need for appendages, and appendages really are one of the fundamental reasons why humans amongst all other animals evolved to where we are now). Then again, aquatic creatures have developed some of the most interesting attack, defense, camouflage, and all other mechanisms to ensure their survival (such as how whales gain nutrients by filtering sea water through their filters, thus effectively eating while also moving and doing other tasks). Given a few more thousand million years, could dolphins have evolved to become an aware, sentient species such as humans? Possibly.

@dynamicduo Thanks for taking the time to respond. But, the shark was just an example. We could use any ancient animal as an example. And I still think you’re not grasping the essence of what I’m saying. And any “tools” we make, naturally, must be made by us and report back to us in terms we can understand using the limitations of our brains.

Anyway, there are two ways to approach this question, biological/scientific, and philosophical, and neither is currently answerable. If we’re still around in “a few more thousand million years,” let’s get together and talk then…

The Fermi Paradox leads me to believe that, even if we reach a level of truly advanced intelligence, we will
1. destroy ourselves, or
2. move into some form of existence that does not generate significant EM energy, and/or
3. not be too concerned about colonizing the galaxy.

I don’t think we ever will understand everything, because I don’t think that is really a goal of humanity. For the most part, we seem more content with making up our own answers to giver ourselves a sense of self-importance. If we ever gained true understanding, we’d reject it instantaneously, because it would be so life-denying.

I don’t think we ever will, but my reasoning isn’t as complex as others. I don’t think we will because life itself is a paradox and I sometimes truly believe that there simply isn’t an answer for everything.

@tb1570 Sounds great :)

Could you repeat the question, I didn’t understand it the first time.

I hope not! Part of what’s great about being imperfect is that we are able to turn misunderstandings into new ideas. Life would be so boring if we never had a reason to ask questions.