[Brain_Thief]

> At no point did I argue that we understand everything about nature. My point is just that every single thing in nature has turned out to be eventually accessible to rational modeling and understanding.

I'm having a hard time following this explanation / statement - it seems to contradict itself and yet is used to justify your subsequent point:

> To carve out a niche for certain areas and argue that these will eventually turn out to not follow that pattern has been a losing strategy throughout the history of science.

However, we have the obvious examples of pre-big bang ontology, as well as the origins of life and the evolutionary process, as "things in nature" that arose and yet do not appear accessible to our methods of understanding.

The observation "if you don't know how to do it, then you don't know how to do it with a computer" comes to mind here. I've yet to see any research indicating that we have or are on the verge of having a theory that describes a consciousness-generating mechanized process; assertions to the contrary seem to rely upon enlarging the definition of the word "machine" to a scale of abstraction that renders it unintelligible.