The article, “The End of Science? On Human Cognitive Limitations and How to Overcome
Them” written by Maarten Boudry, Michael Vlerick, and Taner Edis, debunks the idea that
humans are cognitively closed. New-mysterians believe that the capabilities of the human mind are
limited, leaving many questions of the universe we live in unanswered. Naturalists disagree,
believing that we are able to extend the reach of our minds and come to understand the world we
live in over time. By looking at the difference between representational access and imaginative
understanding, as well as the different modalities of cognitive limitations, naturalists aim to prove
that it is still too early to determine what the limitations of human understanding are.
Looking back into representational access vs imaginative understanding we can see how
humans are never completely cognitively closed. Mathematicians cannot imagine a tesseract, but
they can make sense of what a tesseract is by having their own representations of the world. This
has allowed them to derive geometric properties such as the number of faces. Students during an
exam tend to feel very overwhelmed because they feel like they must know every single detail on
the exam. Students push themselves to memorize so much that when it comes to the day of the
exam, they forget the important information. Instead, students should focus on understanding the
major concepts and then use these concepts they have in their minds to answer questions that relate
to that specific concept. This allows students to study smart instead of studying hard.
When analyzing the various elements that contribute to cognitive limitations, the
Mysterians focused on the constraints of an isolated human brain. The Naturalists, on the other
hand, built their case on the concept of distributed cognition, which is the idea that a network of
human brains can achieve a higher level of understanding than a single brain. This ability to share
our cognitive resources, according to cultural evolution scholars, is the key to our success as a
society since it permits the emergence of a cultural design that is more intelligent than any human
agent. According to the Naturalist ideology, there appears to be no limit to what human
intelligence can achieve collectively, so it is reasonable to think that even the most inconceivable
questions will still have an answer. Furthermore, technological improvements have transformed
physical processes into information that is accessible to our human senses, making it an important
tool for broadening our minds and gaining knowledge.
Naturalists, being optimistic, aim to prove that it is too early to make a statement on
whether or not science will come to a halt. The naturalists make a thought-provoking statement in
which they explain that if aliens were to visit and study humans 40,000 years ago and have the
mindset of the mysterians the aliens would believe that we would not have the mental capacity to
reach the scientific levels we have today. Human brains changing minimally throughout that time
period to now can be the answer to how we will reach new heights into the future. Naturalists
suppose that with ever-growing technology extending the range of our senses we can overcome the
difficulties we may face in coming times in the field of science.