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Comment by dbspin | Hacker News Reader

> there is nothing known that we can't approach with our tools of intelligence, so to speak.

Such things may necessarily be unknowable. If there are classes of observations that we are unable to make, or problems that we are unable to comprehend, its absolutely plausible that they would be cognitive blindspots.

In fact there's a whole theoretical strand in cognitive science / ontology that suggests this. We perceive and act only against a model of the world tuned for fitness rather than accuracy. i.e.: we are not perceiving objective reality at any scale, but rather a mental representation of it which is tailored to fitness. This is deeply unintuitive, but of course it would be since it relates to the limits on our ability to intuit.

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even hypothetically this is only partially possible. for sure what you talk about would be something that is purely an abstract / logical problem, because if something we effectively "can't think" originates somehow in the real world, we would be able to observe it and realize that we can't reason about it.

and even when we have exhausted everything there is to know in the universe and solved every type of problem, we still can't be sure that there isn't a magic gap that we can't see using our intelligence.

but this is completely a god of the gaps argument, i.e. a religious argument, and thus not worth considering until we get actual evidence of such a thing.

This is incorrect. It’s not hypothetical, is fully possible, and is very much in the scientific arena. Evolutionary game theory, among other tools, has been used to demonstrate that it's highly probably that human beings do not perceive objective reality as it truly is. See “The Case Against Reality” by Donald Hoffman.

Edit: more precise language.

This has already been replied to but no, this is not a 'God of the gaps' argument. As I mentioned it's a thread in ongoing research on cognition. There's a good summary of some of the perspectives in this space here - https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...

What's your definition of fitness in this case?

Survival of the fittest?

Here's a background on some of the arguments - https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-evolutionary-argument-aga...

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