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

游客2024-03-08  52
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] What does the author mean by saying "To be human means to be a work in progress. " (Lines 5 -6, Para. 5)?
选项 A、Human consciousness is hard to be measured.
B、Human consciousness is forever advancing.
C、Humanity is working hard to make progress.
D、Humanity is always changing and developing.
答案 D
解析 由题干提示定位到原文第五段最后一句。语义理解题。本题考查结合上下文对特定语句的理解。第五段最后三句指出，人类太变化无常，太富有创造力，而科学本身也在不断地改变人类，人类就是一个处于持续创作中的作品。也就是说，人类是不断发展变化的，故答案为D)。A)“人类的意识是难以测量的”，这是作者提出的人类无法弄清楚自己是什么的两个原因之一，但从上下文位置关系就可以判断，这不是对本段最后一句的解释，故排除；B)“人类的意识是永远进步的”恰恰与作者的观点相悖，作者认为人类的意识可能是有极限的，故排除；C)“人类一直努力工作以取得进步”说法过于宽泛，故排除。
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