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of the old doctrine of ignoramus et ignorabimus—“we do not know and will not know.”
This is a pessimistic view. I prefer the Deutsch / Popper version which is put in my terms like this: "we will never know anything for certain but there is no limit to the growth of our knowledge". Given there are no barriers to what we can know / discover, certainty isn't the prize here, freedom and the ever increasing utility of our knowledge and understanding is. No matter when a person is born, there will never be a moment in which society can tell them "we know all there is to know". This will mean creativity will never be leashed within people.
experimentum crucis—which would show me whether in fact I’d gone mad and was at the mercy of phantoms created by my own imagination, or whether, however absurd and improbable they were, these experiences were in fact real.
Love this "experimentum crucis" concept.
A human being is capable of taking in very few things at one time; we see only what is happening in front of us, here and now. Visualizing a simultaneous multiplicity of processes, however they may be interconnected, however they may complement one another, is beyond us. We experience this even with relatively simple phenomena. The fate of a single person can mean many things, the fate of several hundred is hard to encompass; but the history of thousands, millions, means essentially nothing at all. A symmetriad is millions, no, billions, to the nth power; it is unimaginability itself. What of
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Human understanding can (and must) abstract from low level details and processes. If low level processes are purely random then we can treat them as such. However if they show non random behaviours then there must be an explanation for the non randomness. The only thing needed to find the explanation is conjecture and criticism and this is ultimately all science is - attempting to increment on explanatory models. See Karl Popper.
Human beings set out to encounter other worlds, other civilizations, without having fully gotten to know their own hidden recesses, their blind alleys, well shafts, dark barricaded doors.
Good quote. This applies to one's internal / self not just one's planet.
was rejected by solaricists, the same way the faithful reject arguments that would subvert the underpinnings of their faith.
Muntus - unfair comparison to religion. Solaris is physically real and so in principle reachable within the domain of science and its endeavours.
