The Future of Wisdom
I wonder how long the human species will survive. Perhaps disasters such as epidemics, drastic
climate change, or nuclear war will prevent Homo sapiens from enjoying the few million years that
most vertebrate species last. More optimistically, given our intelligence and adaptive powers, we
may be able to hang on for the five billion years or so before the sun starts to die from lack of
hydrogen. If scientific knowledge continues to expand at the increasingly rapid rate of the past few
centuries, humans may even have the capability to move on to other solar systems.
Much more immediately, we can look forward to a far richer understanding of how the brain
produces the mental processes that I have discussed in this book. Within the next decade or two, I
hope to see major neuroscientific advances concerning the kinds of thinking people do to know
reality, feel emotions, make decisions, act morally, and lead meaningful lives. I expect to see
continuing rapid progress concerning the neural mechanisms responsible for basic cognitive
processes such as perception, memory, learning, and inference. I hope to see a deeper understanding
of how scientific thinking works, especially the most creative processes in which new hypotheses and
concepts are generated. New neurocomputational models should shed light on the nature of people's
understanding of causality