The ethical limits on our quest to understand the brain.

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©2021 Mark Humphries, reprinted with permission from Princeton University Press.
We are facing a hard limit to how well we can understand the human brain. Not a limit created by the impassable boundaries of the physical world, like how the size of the observable universe is defined by the distance that light could have travelled since the Big Bang. Nor is it a limit of our technological prowess that we can aspire to overcome, like the challenge of developing near-weightless spacecraft that can travel at one-fifth of the speed of light to fulfill the dream of sending probes to Alpha Centauri within our lifetime. Rather, it is a limit we give ourselves, set by the ethical boundaries of what we will permit to be done to another human.

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