Cognitive Limits Quotes

I can explain this to you, but I cannot comprehend it for you.

Philosophy limits the thinkable and therefore the unthinkable.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

There may be things that are completely unknowable to us, so we must be careful not to treat the limits of our knowledge as sure guides to the limit of what there is.

As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things.

I don't think it's meant for man to know everything at once.

All our knowledge - past, present, and future - is nothing compared to what we will never know.

To tell you the truth, I've never met anybody who can envision more than three dimensions. There are some who claim they can, and maybe they can; it's hard to say.

If a hundred-foot oak tree had the mind of a human, it would only grow to be ten feet tall!

The limits of thought are not so much set from outside, by the fullness or poverty of experiences that meet the mind, as from within, by the power of conception, the wealth of formulative notions with which the mind meets experiences.

The last thing that man will understand in nature is the performance of his brain.

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

The one thing we do not know is the limit of the knowable.

Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows thatthe Will's need to will is no less strong than Reason's need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.

Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.

Veronica solves little puzzles because she, like all of us, cannot unravel the bigger ones.

I have a much easier time imagining how we would understand the big bang, even though we can't do it yet, than I can imagine understanding consciousness.

Human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending all its powers, it is also not able to answer.

I have lived to see that being seventeen is no protection against becoming seventy, but to know this needs the experience of a lifetime, for no imagination copes with it.

I find the universe so staggering that I just don't have any faith in my ability to grasp it.

Can you use the rational mind to transcend itself?

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.

What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say what we cannot think.

Even a cat has things it can do that AI cannot.

Reality is never more than a first step towards an unknown on the road to which one can never progress very far.