I was affected by asthma as a young child and was pretty short of breath a lot of the time, not able to run that well or keep up with my friends riding a bike. My determination to beat this physical limitation not only lead to a life in medicine,  but caused me to engage in physical aerobic exercise throughout my life. I have since noticed that active aerobic physical exercises like running a swimming are commonly pursued by childhood asthmatics.

Humans have cognitive limitations too.   In another post I mentioned Martin Gardner’s observation about the limits of human understanding.  As he said, you can’t  teach a chimpanzee the square root of 2.   According to one school of thought there are questions permanently beyond human understanding,  such as the origin of Everything and comprehending consciousness, Gardner’s main examples.  You must be humble and know your limitations. Your stereotypical priest tries to comfort the mother of a lost a child by saying God’s mysteries are  far beyond human understanding.  Human brains are only three times the volume of a chimpanzee’s which endows us with finite cognitive capacity. Maimonides, the great Jewish physician/philosopher, made this point  forcefully when he said that God isn’t just some enormous genie with a shoe size of 24, He isn’t fathomable by any human conception or measure at all. Your failure to understand and especially what you ridicule, reflects your own profound mental incapacity.

As much as I admire Maimonides, there is ample support for the opposite opinion.  Noting how knowledge accumulates, and driven by wonder, men build on the discoveries of the past to learn progressively new things, see further standing on the shoulders of giants as Einstein put it. Much of what we take for granted today was out of bounds one hundred years ago,  such as knowledge of the smallest small and largest large. The human brain, though of finite size, has breached a threshold which allows the storage and compounding of knowledge passed through generations and from person to person. We bootstrap our ability,  such that we can climb any mountain. We store libraries worth of data on tiny discs and have devised all manner of extra-cerebral memory enhancements.  In Beyond Biology (2010) I noted how we humans use electromagnetic waves invisible to the eye, like radio waves, gamma rays, and microwaves, surpassing biological endowment.  I went on to use this as a metaphor for the soul as human ability has  far surpassed physical limitations.

The inadequacy of biological tools we were born with is most acute when it comes to sensory function. As we all know humans imagine, understand and use concepts that our simple senses fail to respond to, exemplified in the use of non-visible electromagnetic frequencies. The associative brain function allows us to imagine a reality never experienced, seen, felt or heard. As Johannes Kepler put wrote:

“In all acquisition of knowledge it happens that, starting out from those things which impinge on the senses, we are carried by the operation of the mind to higher things which cannot be grasped by any sharpness of the senses. The same thing happens also in the business of astronomy,  in which we we first of all perceive with our eyes the various positions of the planets at different times, and reasoning  then imposes itself on these observations  and leads the mind to recognition of the form of the universe.”

-Johannes Kepler as quoted in  The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi the World’s Most Astonishing Number by Mario Livio

Visible Light is a small part of the entire electromagnetic spectrum

Today we are as gods, and might well have been treated as gods by our human forebears, imprisoned  as they were by their bodies.   I was amused when I was young by Mark Twain’s story, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.  Just consider a visit  by a modern twenty-first century American with all of his contrivances to a medieval court.

Not only is human intellectual and physical ability now unlimited as so many modern writers point out, the three functions of the brain, afferent, associative and efferent, which are the general areas of human ability, have now reached a point that they are bound to expand not linearly but geometrically. That is characteristic of how enlightenment spreads out through at the very least, the three spatial dimensions. Only minutes ago I was reading about new drugs for Hepatitis C in the New England Journal of Medicine. . There was much anxiety about how these treatments that currently cost about $80,000 could spread to poorer societies where there are most of the cases. How will we save them? But I immediately thought to myself, “Don’t worry.” These simple chemicals given by mouth, will soon enough be available to the poorest poor, the model being the HIV drugs that are now available for the most needy.  Please excuse my ethnocentricity in comparing this to the spread of enlightenment into bastions of darkness and ignorance, but I cannot think of it as anything else. In thousands of other ways. light is spreading over our planet. This  tip of the iceberg is expressed in increased quality and length of life surpassing the lives of  kings of previous generations.

It doesn’t stop with planet earth.  For a person who reads what I do, and I am not even an avid science fiction fan, I come across certain ideas almost daily like Ray Kurzeil’s visions of converting  dark solid matter, the rocks of planets, into quantum computers, memory and thought creation devices, that dwarf human intellectual capacities. That’s not all. Kurzeil, Michio Kaku, Max Tegmark, everybody it seems, is talking about metastasizing nanobots. The idea is launching these tiny bots onto rocks in outer space where they set up shop and make copies of themselves which launch onto other planets bootstrapping themselves out over the entire universe. When you figure things out, the rate limiting step of their spreading colonization happens to be their speed of travel, which is only the speed of light. All are confident that someone will eventually figure out how to travel faster than light speed in which case  our entire universe including all of its dark matter and dark energy or even other parallel universes should they exist, on account of us humans with our limited little 1.3 liter brains, will convert Everything from being dark and dumb to light and eloquent.