I found this quote attributed to Albert Einstein (1879-1955):
“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”
In describing the comprehensibility of the world as an eternal mystery, Einstein implies that it is a mystery that will persist forever and cannot be something he or his successors would ever explain. While the stuff in the universe can be described and explained in a material sense, that cannot be described as a complete comprehension. Comprehensibility is also inherently partial.
Making sense of the world, understanding it at a deeper level than the merely descriptive, is something most people overlook. A lot of our experiences in daily life are simply taken for granted or glossed over. People just get on with getting on. In this quote, Einstein has gone, I think, another step deeper still when he asks why it is that we can make sense of things at all. Is this a question for the physicist or the neuroscientist – or for a philosopher with interest in both camps? I think it is a question we all should stop to consider. We are often aware of what we do not or cannot know. We miss the fact that we are even able to know anything in the first place. Why is that?
