Are some important questions simply un-answerable by humans due to the type of biological beings we are? Philosophers such as Kant thought so. But humanity’s thirst for knowledge makes us unhappy with not knowing. In an age where person-engineering technologies such as Crispr and Neuralink are becoming a reality, enhancing our biology might illuminate the answers to some of life’s deepest questions writes Mark Walker.
Today we are at the cusp of our most profound crisis—what I call the “über crisis”. The antecedents of this crisis can be traced back at least to Heraclitus, one of the early Greek philosophers, who wrote,
“The wisest man will appear an ape in relation to God, both in wisdom and beauty and everything else.”
Heraclitus offers an early formulation of what I call ‘noetic skepticism’. When applied to any species, noetic skepticism says that there are biological limits to its ability to grasp important truths. If Heraclitus is correct, Homo sapiens are permanently cut off from important truths. So, if we want to discover all those important truths, we will have to change our biology. A perilous thought for sure, but history is replete with stories of humans taking great risks for sake of greater knowledge: Pandora’s box, the tree of knowledge, and the travails of Dr. Faust.
Join the conversation