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Is science infinite? Can it keep giving us profound insights into the world

游客2024-03-08  36
问题     Is science infinite? Can it keep giving us profound insights into the world forever? Or is it already bumping into limits? In his 2011 book The Beginning of Infinity physicist David Deutsch made the case for boundlessness. When I asked him about consciousness, he replied; "I think nothing worth understanding will always remain a mystery. And consciousness seems apparently worth understanding. "
    At a meeting I just attended in Switzerland, " The Mystery of Human Consciousness," another famous British physicist, Martin Rees, challenged Deutsch’s optimism. In that essay Rees calls The Beginning of Infinity "provocative and excellent" but disputes Deutsch’s central claim that science is boundless. Science "will hit the buffers (缓冲区) at some point," Rees warns.
    There are two reasons why this might happen. The optimistic one is that we clean up and understand 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. Efforts to understand very complex systems, such as our own brains, might well be the first to hit such limits. Perhaps complex collectives of atoms, whether brains or electronic machines, can never know all there is to know about themselves.
    The riddle of consciousness is a synecdoche for 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. Most 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.
    Science will never resolve these disagreements and converge on a single, true theory of what we are, for two reasons. One is that we will never have a "consciousness meter," an objective means of measuring consciousness in non-human things. The other is that we are too varying, too creative, to be captured by single theory. Science itself keeps transforming us, with technologies as diverse as brain implants, genetic therapy and ideas as diverse as queer theory and integrated 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 assertion about the structure of nature, which to my mind reflects wishful thinking rather than hard-headed realism.
    Deutsch is both wrong and right. He is wrong that science can solve every mystery, and especially consciousness. We will never understand, once and for all, who we are. But Deutsch is right that science is potentially infinite, if infinite means never-ending. It is precisely because we can never achieve total self-knowledge that we will keep seeking it forever. [br] The real reason for science to "hit the buffers" may be that________.
选项 A、science will inevitably experience its bottleneck period
B、the cognitive ability of humanity cannot be boundless
C、people are over-optimistic about the development of science
D、complicated systems are unable to be fully understood
答案 B
解析 由题干中的hit the buffers定位到原文第二段最后一句和第三段。事实细节题。本题考查科学“进入缓冲区”的原因。第三段提到了两个可能的原因，第一个是我们已经将一些领域理清并理解，达到了言尽于此的地步，而第二个原因是人类将会达到大脑认知的极限，故答案为B)。A)“科学将不可避免地进入瓶颈期”，从原文相关段落来看，作者所讨论的问题是科学是否会到达极限的问题，而不是瓶颈期，故排除；C)“人们对科学的发展过于乐观”，由原文可知，人们的态度并不是科学是否会“进入缓冲区”的原因，故排除；D)“复杂的体系是无法被完全了解清楚的”只是作者给出的第二个原因所导致的结果，该项混淆了因果关系，故排除。
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