Question If everything that physically exists is indeed the result of primordial coincidence, is there any way of statistically measuring the chances that human beings (in our present state of development and after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution) would be able to comprehend the origin and nature of the universe? In other words, when I think about the organic lump of brain in my head understanding the universe, or anything at all, it seems absurdly unlikely. That lump of tissue seems to me more like a pancreas than than a super-computer, and I have a hard time understanding how organic tissue is able to reach conclusions about the universe or existence.

Accepted:
June 29, 2010

Comments

I think the simple answer is that any probabilities we come up with here are pretty much meaningless. Probability calculations ade only as good as the information we feed into them, and it's hard to see what a well-formed question would be like here - not least since it would require some way of quantifying how hard the universe is to understand.

Perhaps there's some clever way to come up with a calculation, but let me turn to your other issue - the brain/pancreas thing. To my inexpert eye, brains and pancreases hace a certain superficial resemblance, but neuroscientists will be able to tell you in a good deal of detail why the brain is better suited to computing than the pancreas is. The real point here is that our casual impressions on such matters aren't really worth very much. After all, a casual look at my iPad makes it pretty mysterious that it could be used to write this response, but that's exaclry what it let me do.