"Yet there's no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate vessels for the voyage towards that answer."
— Burkeman, Oliver (b. 1975)
Author
Date
January 21, 2015
Metaphor
"Yet there's no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate vessels for the voyage towards that answer."
Metaphor in Context
It would be poetic -- albeit deeply frustrating -- were it ultimately to prove that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself. An answer must be out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, one could argue that nothing else could ever matter more -- since anything at all that matters, in life, only does so as a consequence of its impact on conscious brains. Yet there's no reason to assume that our brains will be adequate vessels for the voyage towards that answer. Nor that, were we to stumble on a solution to the Hard Problem, on some distant shore where neuroscience meets philosophy, we would even recognise that we'd found it.
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Oliver Burkeman, Consciousness: The Long Read (January 21, 2015). <Link to Guardian.com>
Date of Entry
02/10/2015
