I would probably say that we do have the answers to every “fundamental question” from 2000 years ago. How the earth was formed, how humans came to be, what causes illness and weather, what the stars are…
We have moved on to even more fundamental questions that they couldn’t have even conceived of back then, like “what is dark energy” and “is the universe curved”
We certainly have lots of answers now, but I don’t think your giving enough credit to our ancestors.
I think questions such as what is the nature of consciousness, how did life originate, are we alone in the universe, what instigated the creation of the universe, have been asked since prehistory.
These questions weren’t asked with the same words and worldview as us, but the essence of these questions was the same.
It’s debatable for sure. But let’s take “how did life originate” as an example. The two things we don’t know are how the first single celled lifeform came into being, and exactly how we made the jump to multicellular life. So yes, you can say “we still don’t know how life originated” but what we do know outweighs what we don’t by a lot. And our ancestors weren’t asking those two questions we still have left. I think this is actually a great example that illustrates my point. We know that all living things are connected and have a common ancestor. We know that DNA is the language of life. We know that natural selection drove its diversity, not some designer. We know that modern humans have only been on the earth for some 200k years. This really covers the questions of 01 A.D. and we’ve simply moved on to more fundamental questions. No one was asking “Okay so amino acids and lipid chains assemble spontaneously in sunlight but how do you get from that to a cell?” And that’s really all we have left to answer.
I don’t consider “what is the nature of consciousness” to be an actual question.
I would probably say that we do have the answers to every “fundamental question” from 2000 years ago. How the earth was formed, how humans came to be, what causes illness and weather, what the stars are…
We have moved on to even more fundamental questions that they couldn’t have even conceived of back then, like “what is dark energy” and “is the universe curved”
We certainly have lots of answers now, but I don’t think your giving enough credit to our ancestors.
I think questions such as what is the nature of consciousness, how did life originate, are we alone in the universe, what instigated the creation of the universe, have been asked since prehistory.
These questions weren’t asked with the same words and worldview as us, but the essence of these questions was the same.
It’s debatable for sure. But let’s take “how did life originate” as an example. The two things we don’t know are how the first single celled lifeform came into being, and exactly how we made the jump to multicellular life. So yes, you can say “we still don’t know how life originated” but what we do know outweighs what we don’t by a lot. And our ancestors weren’t asking those two questions we still have left. I think this is actually a great example that illustrates my point. We know that all living things are connected and have a common ancestor. We know that DNA is the language of life. We know that natural selection drove its diversity, not some designer. We know that modern humans have only been on the earth for some 200k years. This really covers the questions of 01 A.D. and we’ve simply moved on to more fundamental questions. No one was asking “Okay so amino acids and lipid chains assemble spontaneously in sunlight but how do you get from that to a cell?” And that’s really all we have left to answer.
I don’t consider “what is the nature of consciousness” to be an actual question.