Date:
     October 13-14, 2006
Location:
      Public Service Program Center
     Binghamton University
     Binghamton, New York

Symposium Schedule

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Symposium Theme:

  Science's growing acceptance of the discovery of important, but unanswerable questions, and the affect this discovery is having on science, specifically, and the growth of human knowledge, generally.

Conference Co-Chairs:

   Professor Eric Dietrich
   Philosophy Department and CPIC

   Professor Stephen David Ross
   Program in Philosophy,
  Interpretation, and Culture,
  Comparative Literature, and CPIC

Invited Speakers:

     Lee Worth Bailey, Religion
     Department of Philosophy and Religion
     Ithaca College
     Ithaca, New York

     Gregory J Chaitin, Mathematics
     IBM Research, P O Box 218
     Yorktown Heights, NY

     Terrence Deacon, Biology
     Biological Anthropology and Linguistics
     Department of Anthropology
     329 Kroeber Hall
     UC Berkeley,
     Berkeley, CA

     Jay Garfield, Philosophy
     Department of Philosophy
     Dewey Front Parlor
     Smith College
     Northampton, Massachusetts

    

 
“My own suspicion is that the universe is not only
queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

~J.B.S. Haldane,
20th century, British scientific polymath

   At a conference in July, 2005, the distinguished biologist Richard Dawkins contended that the universe may be too strange to understand. This sentiment is becoming increasingly wide-spread throughout the sciences. Many scientists and other researchers have come to accept that there may well be crucial questions we need answered, but which we can never answer. Such questions, therefore become enduring mysteries.

   That there are unanswerable, but important questions is not a new notion. Mathematics and computer science have well-established theorems placing exact limits on what can and cannot be known in certain precisely delimited areas. Physics, too, is comfortable with the idea that there are limits on human understanding, which make the universe at least a puzzling place, if not quite mysterious. What is new is that limits on human knowledge are showing up in sciences that more directly study humans—from biology to psychology. And these new limits seem to be much stronger than mere puzzles. As mysteries, they link science and philosophy, religion and science, and all of these with the arts and humanities. Furthermore, they reopen the question posed by Max Weber about the disenchantment of the world as the defining condition of modern science.

   This symposium will bring together scientists, philosophers, artists, poets, and lay-people to explore these emerging mysteries and to question what they might mean both to human-centered scientific research and to being human. There are three impetuses for this symposium. First, science is often seen as a monolithic structure ruining the beauty of life, specifically, and of the universe, generally. Scientific explanations are seen as gutting the world of its mystery, turning everything into numbers or equations. But new discoveries of limits to scientific explanations, coupled with the old ones, paint a very different picture of science. Science, in the long run, produces mysteries – and enduring mysteries, at that. Furthermore, such mysteries frequently lay the groundwork for scientific advances. This symposium will help dissolve the view of science as a destroyer of mystery and beauty. Second, there might be something all the emerging limits have in common. Finding out what this is, if it exists, is itself a kind of scientific inquiry which would shed much-needed light on human knowledge, human psychology, and human understanding. If not, that might tell us something about the notion of mystery in modern thought itself. Third, the reasons for the new, emerging limits could be due to either human cognitive limitations or to intrinsic, structural facts about the universe. There is much sharp debate in the sciences and in philosophy over which of these two explains the existence of the limits (the limits discovered in the mathematics and computer science are of the latter variety – they are intrinsic to the universe, hence they will be limits throughout the universe).