A new working paper: No End in Sight: John Horgan’s End of Science, Redux. Download at:
Academia: https://www.academia.edu/47836887/No_End_in_Sight_John_Horgan_s_End_of_Science_Redux
SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3837921
Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/351250338_No_End_in_Sight_No_End_in_Sight_End_of_Science
Abstract: It has been 25 years since John Horgan published The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (1996). Horgan still believes that science is, in some sense, at an end. I disagreed with him then and I disagree with him now. Horgan suggested that we face biological limits to our cognitive capacities. I argue that, thought a succession of inventions – speech, writing, calculation, and computation – culture has allowed us transcend our primate biology. We have no reason to believe that we have run out of inventiveness. Topics examined: problems with the foundations of physics, Horgan’s ironic style of argument, coming to understand the human mind – “How, exactly, does a chunk of meat make a mind?” – and the long-term development of human culture. I suggest that what Horgan sees as the end is, paradoxically, an effect of the accelerating pace of cultural evolution, which is now up against a limit imposed by the human life cycle. Velocity is capped, but not motion. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.23438.69443
Contents
Introduction: What’s changed in 25 years? 2
Has investigation of the foundations of physics bottomed out? 3
A close reading of Horgan’s text: Ironic framing for ironic science 5
“Meat that thinks,” my personal quest 10
Mind-culture coevolution
17
A million points of light along the via negativa 22
