"we cannot escape our brain's structure"

A common belief among scientists, especially biologists, is that they can achieve a noninvolved, objective, nonhuman observer status, nonanthropocentric, nonanthropomorphic. This belief must go the way of the illusions promulgated in the name of human religions. As participants in Earth's ecology, we are anthropocentric observers: quite humanly centered without communication with other species in our ecology.

The further scientific research progresses, the more we learn that we are not anything but that which we are discovering that we are. We are a species of mammals with a particular kind of brain and a particular kind of organization of the programming within that brain organized as individuals in a human consensus reality.

We tend to say that our language, our languages, can express anything and everything. The more progress we make in our scientific research, the more we learn of our own limits, not, as yet, defined in our languages. We cannot escape our brain's structure, nor can we escape its programming by the human consensus reality during a relatively short lifetime. The illusion that somehow we can get outside ourselves and look at ourselves as if we were not human, not humanly organized and limited, must go the way of "omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence."

…from:
"The Possible Existence of Nonhuman Languages"
by John C. Lilly, M.D.
a 1976 talk collected in Communication Between Man and Dolphin: The Possibilities of Talking with Other Species (1978)

drawing by doug millison