/sci/ - Science & Math

>>15097175
However, the very best argument against sensory systems being selected for based on veracity comes from humans' extreme difficulty in understanding how the world works at very large and very small scales, i.e. relativity and quantum mechanics. Why should models of the real world be so hard to grasp and challenge our intuitions so badly?

The obvious explanation is that evolution selected for a system that works for the scales we do encounter, that's hard to deny. However, if our sensory systems so badly represents very large and very small scales as they actually are, why would we take as a given, as obvious, that the medium sized objects of our daily experience are represented "as they are?"

And there is plenty of evidence to suggest they don't. We experience still air as a nullity, but have sensory experiences of fog, and many different types of gases. Why is air and many of its components represented as equivalent to vacuum visually (thing of looking at a cylinder) when optical systems and other sensory systems could easily have evolved to represent these items and the many differences that occur between them (e.g. density, CO2 vs oxygen vs nitrogen). Indeed, some animals do have sensory organs for determining between relative gas concentrations in the air around them.

This is a clear example of a huge amount of information being mostly purged from sense experience. So the question is, if you can have this large of a gap in something the body is surrounded by at all times, why assume other basic intutions are grounded in fact?

Pic related makes a similar argument from the direction of math and physics.

>>14733993
BTW, Wilczek's The Lightness of Being is a great intro to how energy begets matter. It is an accessible intro to quantum chromodynamics and local symmetry.

Pic related gets at the idealism hypothesis in Hoffman from another angle, the author is a mathematician.