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

游客2024-03-08  30
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] According to the author, the riddle of consciousness________.
选项 A、has been properly worked out by religious theories
B、is made more perplexed by modern science
C、will be solved in science’s debate against religion
D、is the utmost challenge of human understanding
答案 D
解析 由题干中的the riddle of consciousness定位到原文第四段第一句。事实细节题。本题考查作者对人类意识之谜的看法。定位句说，意识之谜是人类之谜的代表，而对这句话的理解要上溯到上一段最后一句。作者指出，复杂的原子集合体，无论是我们的大脑还是电子仪器，根本无法完全了解它们自身。可知，人类意识是人类认知中最难以解答的谜题，故答案为D)。A)“宗教理论已经恰当地对其进行了解释”是对第四段第三句的误解，作者虽然提到了宗教的解释，但并没有评判这些解释是否可以接受，故排除；B)“被现代科学弄得更加复杂”，作者在定位段第五句提到现代科学家没有达成一致的看法，但并不是说这个问题就变得更加复杂了，故排除；C)“将会在科学与宗教的辩论中得到解决”原文中并未提及，故排除。
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