Bounded by Bones

All this talk of neuroplasticity and the limits of the brain has left me pondering as to the boundaries of human ability. Personally, on a deeper level, I simply don't believe in this stuff. Before you ask, no, I am not rejecting science. But when it comes to the brain, I think science is in over its head. If the brain does indeed control our consciousness, our logic, and is the unquestionable source of our sentience, then where are we to search for true objectivity? Will not our judgment be clouded by the very subject we are attempting to understand? The whole thing is circular. To understand something, we must be able to exist outside of its environment. We must be able to control it. As it is, we are bounded by the limits of our own awareness. The important questions will never be asked because we will never think to ask them. Furthermore, I am of the opinion that the price of the truth will be no less than a sacrifice of individual sanity. You will be rewarded a brief glimpse within Pandora's Box, immediately after which the spongy clump of a hundred billion neurons inside your skull will fry from information overload, effectively rendering you the most clairvoyant vegetable in human history.

Another reason we will never fully realize our species's capabilities has naught to do with cognitive limitations but rather with our social nature. Human beings are naturally communal animals. We construct ideas such as civilization and view ourselves as members of such populations. We bound ourselves with laws and taboos such that we ostracize the nonsubscribers and punish those who are different. It is no wonder then, that we show nearly identical boundaries in our mental capacity. If our neocortex is indeed an undifferentiated sheet of neurons capable of processing any regular signal, then perhaps we are crowding out potential novel abilities with socially dominant ones such as langauge and music. With similar stress and practice, could one not learn to appreciate with equal sensitivity the likes of temperature, pressure, or even radio waves? The line between fiction and potential reality has never been very clearly drawn. Sadly, if given the choice, I suspect that few of us would choose to be a living satellite dish over our coherent, though less impressive selves. To agree to this would require a selflessness that is, ironically, inhuman.