ABSTRACT
The intellectual reach of most species seems to be limited by their basic biological endowment. No amount of training or education will teach a cat (not even Schrödinger’s cat) to appreciate quantum theory. Is the same true of us humans? Are there truths we will never be able to appreciate, simply because our biological enhdowment cannot comprehend them? This chapter argues that human minds are different from most other animal minds in this respect. Thanks to our unusual propensity to create and exploit cognitive tools, such as calculators, computers, smartphones, and (most recently) generative AIs such as ChatGPT, we humans are potentially unlimited in the scope of our understanding. By bouts of repeated epistemic self-engineering, we (both individually but also, and perhaps more importantly, in our future functioning as cognitive collectives including both natural and artificial intelligence) become a succession of different thinking systems, able to grasp and comprehend the universe in ways not limited by our basic biological toolkit. The chapter ends by defending this claim against some objections, especially the worry that unlimited increases in control and engineering might indeed occur but at the expense of any satisfying and intuitive grasp of why they work.
