I'm not sure why anyone would believe that all things can be known by finite human minds either. I don't see anyone that made such a statement.
What I was saying is that I see no limitation in what humans can cognitively accomplish in the understanding of consciousness. In other words, there is nothing in the known laws of physics that limits our potential to someday understand consciousness.
To broaden it further, I see no limitation to our understanding anything sometime in the future. Even if our brains are still finite in the future. Understanding anything is very different from understanding everything. I never said all things can be known all at the same time by a finite mind.
I'm not so sure.
How would you go about explaining calculus to a cat? Would a cat's brain ever be capable of understanding it?
Or let's go with something closer to a human: A chimp.
Explain the Large Hadron Collider to a chimp. Will it ever understand how it works? Will it ever know why it's important?
Our brains aren't some magical apex-of-existence assemblies. They're a bunch of neurons stuffed together and arranged in such a way that it permits regulation of bodily functions, permits analysis of information concerning our surroundings, and retains and processes a representation of the environment and past experiences.
I think that there are things out there that the human mind simply can't figure out. It's not sufficiently capable, in the same way that a chicken brain lacks the capacity to construct a machine to get live chickens to Mars and back again. They're not even capable of comprehending that sort of problem description in the first place.
Or you've got some large birds in the Galapagos Islands that suffer from smaller birds that break their skin and lap up the blood. It's a problem that the larger birds are not able to properly address, perhaps by simply watching each others backs, and biting the smaller birds to death when they show up.
Humans can conceive of such a solution, in part because of our naturally gregarious behavior. Not all animals see others as cooperative helpers that can be used to work toward a common goal. Collaboration is something that we do well.
We face problems as well for which we can't figure out a good solution.
- We're constantly fighting with one another. Reading our history on a long timescale, wars and deadly conflicts appear as frequently as commas.
- Most of the planet's population lives in poverty.
- Wacky things happen with the climate that we can't figure out.
- Gravity doesn't make sense with respect to other fundamental forces.
- We're genetically programmed to propagate our genes as much as possible, such to the point that we're facing depletion of resources - the same depletions that affect many other species when
they rapidly reproduce in the presence of abundant resources. Yet we lack the willpower or ability to do anything about it.
- Asteroids have caused mass extinctions in the past, yet it's seen as a non-issue. This is likely because of our comparatively tiny lifespans. There's a good chance of it happening again, but a low chance of it happening during one person's lifetime, therefore they deem it to be inconsequential. (Tunguska was just at the start of the 1900s and could have devastated a large city. Simple luck of the draw is that >70% of Earth's surface is uninhabited. Chelyabinsk was just in the past 2 years. That one happened to blow up high in the atmosphere, but it still manage to cause damage and injuries.)
- ??? - Like the chicken's mission to Mars, there are likely problems out there that we cannot identify. Our brains can't comprehend them. The unknown unknowns.
To go even further still, admittedly into territory I don't know, how do we know humans will never achieve omniscience?
If we define omniscience as all knowing, that doesn't mean infinite knowing since all knowing may be applied to a finite amount of information that exists anywhere, anytime in this universe or others if there is a multiverse.
Now if a physicist were to chime in with a proof that an infinite amount of information is impossible because it would violate some laws of physics, I'd be all set in claiming omniscience is attainable, so is possible. Of course it could be argued that those laws of physics are incomplete and could be wrong, but then I'd argue the onus of such proof lies with the claimant of incorrectness of laws of physics that have so far stood on very solid ground and can be used to make predictions to very high degrees of accuracy.
To be clear, I am defining omniscience as all knowing in a multiverse of finite information. Then a finite mind can attain that.
Maybe we'll manage to create something that will exceed our intelligence.
We'll also have to define "omniscience" in a manner that we can quantify and test for. (How can you call something "omniscient" for sure if you
can't do those things?)
Look at the difference in intelligence between a dog and a human, and the difference in what our respective species can do. Our technology is simply absurd. We've abused the laws of physics in some very specific and unusual ways, using them to do our bidding. A dog can't figure out those sorts of things.
Now imagine a life form or computer system that's as far ahead of us as we are of dogs. It would damn well
seem to be either omniscient or outright magical. But neither would be the case. It would just be very intelligent and advanced.