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

游客2024-03-07  20
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. 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] Which of the following statements may David Deutsch agree with?
选项 A、The case study of physics should be unlimited.
B、The scientific mysteries are worth understanding.
C、The puzzle of consciousness will be worked out.
D、Science will finally hit a bottleneck somewhere.
答案 C
解析 由题干中的人名关键词David Deutsch定位到原文第一段。推理判断题。本题考查对戴维.多伊奇的观点的理解。由定位段可知，戴维.多伊奇认为科学是无极限的，更详细的解释在第一段最后两句对他原话的引用。他的原话可以理解为，所有值得理解的事情都终将会被弄清楚，而意识就是这样值得弄清楚的谜题。可见他认为意识这一谜题是会被弄清楚的，故C为答案。A“物理学的个案研究是没有止境的”在原文没有提及，故排除；B“科学谜题是值得理解的”是对文章引用的戴维.多伊奇的原话的误解，多伊奇的意思是说只要值得理解的事情都会被科学弄清楚，故排除；D“科学最终会在某处遭遇瓶颈”与戴维.多伊奇的观点恰好相反，故排除。
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