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Feeling Human

This quote from Rebecca Goldstein in Annaka Harris's book Conscious: A Brief Guide to the Fundamental Mystery of the Mind made me feel better about my own lack of real scientific education and even vindicated my whole-hearted support for J getting a humanities degree: 

It is somewhat depressing to think of an absolute limit on our science: to know that there are things we can never know. . . . Mathematical physics has yielded knowledge of so many of the properties of matter. However, the fact that we material objects have experiences should convince us that it cannot, alas, yield knowledge of them all. Unless a new Galileo appears, who offers us a way of getting at properties of matter that need not be mathematically expressible, we will never make any scientific progress on the hard problem of consciousness.

The "hard problem of consciousness" while not solved and explained in a scientific way can be approached from a non-scientific perspective. Maybe a humanities education allows a person to observe the many manifestations of human consciousness more acutely and discern the foundational elements that make it up. 

I grew up around a lot of artsy, non-scientific people who appeared to have a richer inner-life compared to those who went the traditional route of math, science and engineering education - there were plenty of those in my family. While I was not so bold as to follow the "whimsical" artsy path - my need for early independence and financial security was too compelling for that. But I always remained enamored of a solid humanities education. Maybe that vibrant inner-life that I observed came from understanding something deeper about human consciousness that math and science could not explain - it made them more alive and interesting as people.

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