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Comment by yodon | Hacker News Reader

It's extremely unlikely the phenomena "can't be explained" and far more likely that it "hasn't been explained."

Science is like that. It's why discoveries are fun.

The article goes through a list of known cosmic phenomena trying to see if this observation can be explained by each, and concludes it’s unlikely. “Can’t be explained” clearly means “can’t be a explained by a known phenomenon”.

Human language is a beautiful and powerful and (sometimes) ambiguous tool. We could write everything in terms that are completely unambiguous —- like some awful formally-verified programming language —- so people on HN couldn’t possibly adopt an absurdist interpretation and spend time knocking it down. Or alternatively, we can just use common sense and the world can be a slightly more interesting and mysterious place.

Or we can attempt to preserve the meanings of simple words such as "can't" and "haven't" that exist for use in exactly these circumstances. They aren't hard words, and they have a role to play in even the most minimally intelligent conversation.

We should probably count ourselves fortunate that the title wasn't more directly contradicted by the first sentence of the article explaining it. I've noticed this a few times recently.

Sometimes things "can't be explained" with the current theories. We need new theories before we can explain things.

So, in this sense, I'd say it's correct to say that "things can't be explained".

I wholeheartedly agree that discoveries like these are fun. They challenge us to develop new theories, try to make new predictions and then prove these wrong. :D

Yeah, everything can be explained. The only blocking factors are language to express it and/or knowledge to understand it.

There is a limit to what can be understood by our human minds. It is arrogance to assume that we are somehow the frontier and limitation of what intelligence is.

It is far likely that we are the fish in the koi pond. Absolute in our belief that there is no up or down, only forward, backwards and sideways.

So many weird things that we see in our dimension that doesn't make sense. Imagine if you picked up a fish and dropped it behind another fish. It is pure magic, teleporation, act of god to the occupants of the koi pond. It would never understand what is outside the pond and why.

Simlarily, it is the common belief that we humans are also those fish in the koi ponds, desperate to explain away and make sense of the unknowable.

Humans evolved from fish, we've come a long way, and so far there's no limit in sight.

Whatever limits we have as individuals are generally invisible to us. It’s fairly easy for us to see those limits in other humans. By extension I have no doubt other humans can see limits in my range of thoughts, and I expect there to be thoughts that no human is able to think.

I don't think worrying about limits is a good thing for us as individuals or as a species. Sure some things are harder to comprehend, but we haven't come across anything incomprehensible yet, let's cross that bridge when we get there.

Usually when I see "limits" in other people it's not so much that they can't possibly comprehend something, it's that it would take an impractical amount of effort and time to have them comprehend it. With better teaching technology it may be more feasible for them to understand these things that were incomprehensible to them, and if not there's always the next generation.

> we haven't come across anything incomprehensible yet

If we had, we wouldn’t necessarily be aware that we had. Our minds are good at making models, and it’s always possible to make an incorrect model.

> but we haven't come across anything incomprehensible yet

Life, the universe, infinity, big numbers, quantum mechanics

To cite a few that personally come to my mind

We've identified these concepts, we can quantify them, we can study them, we can use them.

I would take that as an indication that we do comprehend them, if we don't then it doesn't seem to matter.

To believe that everything can be explained is an expression of faith not reason.

Our brains are very good at tricking us into thinking they are universal understanders. They are not.

Part of the job mathematics does in science is developing tools for describing patterns - any patterns. We've also learned to deal with uncertainty, so we can now describe approximate, probabilistic patterns as well.

Thanks to this, if there's any pattern about a phenomenon to be found, we likely can describe it already; if not, there's no good reason to believe we won't be able to describe it in the future. That is the first step towards an explanation (second being tying the pattern to theories that fit other observable evidence, and that have predictive power).

If there's absolutely no pattern to be found in a phenomenon, then it implies the phenomenon doesn't have any consequences on anything - which implies it isn't even observable in the first place. From that follows it isn't even worth thinking about.

Why would you assume that all patterns and relationships are comprehensible by humans - not just in terms of complexity, but in terms of root qualia?

Cats can't count. They seem to understand quantity, but they have no concept of integers.

It seems extremely rash and naive to assume that humans don't suffer from some related conceptual handicaps.

And of course we're not aware of them, by definition.

The greatest human invention is the ability to participate in a massive distributed consensus algorithm ("the zeitgeist"). Humanity as a whole understands things that no single human does.

Humans were also unaware of numbers and counting until we discovered/invented them in antiquity. We may be unaware of limitations that we have now, but we seem to be in a unique position in the animal kingdom to be able to overcome those conceptual limitations once a need for those concepts is identified.

I wouldn’t say humans are unique, My Labrador didn’t understand the concept of a handshake until she realised treats were available :)

The equivalency in math and some hard sciences between "understanding" and "describing symbolically" has never sat very well with me.

How can we know if something has yet to be explained, or is in fact inexplicable? Obviously, we can't.

To declare that something is inexplicable is equivalent to saying it's supernatural.

Naturalism is the philosophy that everything is ultimately governed by physical laws and is therefore explicable.

That's why I mentioned the blocks. Everything can be explained. But we as humans in our current state can only understand a very limited portion of everything.

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