Just because something isn't intelligible now, doesn't mean it never will be

While reading this chapter, I was particularly intrigued by Mason's question "is intelligibility a characteristic of things or does it depend on us?" (60) It reminds me of Lynch's point that we can never find objective truth, because we can only view the truth through our own eyes and not a God's eye perspective. Intelligibility, though it is also dependent on our interpretation, differs from truth in that it is judged by a particular society's understanding at a given time, whereas the truthfulness of something is more concrete. Something either is true, or it isn't. But something that is not currently understood could possibly come to be understood at a later point in time, so it does not make sense to call something "unintelligible in principle" (63).

In another class that I am taking, we are discussing the hard problem of consciousness, which is how physical processes of the brain create subjective experience. Right now nobody really knows. Some philosophers and psychologists have developed theories that explain away consciousness, others have said that we are not capable of understanding consciousness at all, but still others have pointed out that although we cannot currently understand consciousness, we may be able to achieve an understanding of it in the future. Those who hold the latter idea would agree with Mason's final sentence on page 65: "There is no point in thinking of nature as unintelligible; but there may be ways in which it is intelligible that we do not understand (yet, if you are an optimist)."

I'm with them.