Sure, our three-pound brains might be inadequate to understand the universe. But perhaps they're just good enough to build something that can.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We can certainly go further than cats, but why should it be that our brains are somehow so suited to the universe that our brains will be able to understand the deepest workings?
Our brains are continuing to evolve, and perhaps a few tens of thousands of years from now, our descendants will walk around with five pound brains, allowing them insights that we can't imagine.
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.
If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't.
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the pinnacle of Creation - the cleverest critters in the cosmos? If we learn the answer is 'no,' that would affect our philosophies forever.
No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists.
The brain is the most complicated organ in the universe. We have learned a lot about other human organs. We know how the heart pumps and how the kidney does what it does. To a certain degree, we have read the letters of the human genome. But the brain has 100 billion neurons. Each one of those has about 10,000 connections.
We could have human intelligence in orbit around Mars, building things there.
No opposing quotes found.