Limitations of human brains

[DMB]

I always seem to be several weeks behind in reading New Scientist, so at the moment I on the edition of 14 February. So apologies if this is very stale for everybody else.

I've been reading an article by Martin Rees called "Take me to your mathematician" about maths as the language of science and cosmological theory. I was struck by this:

A fish may be barely aware of the medium in which it lives and swims; certainly it has no intellectual powers to comprehend that water consists of interlocked atoms of hydorgen and oxygen. The microstructure of empty space could, likewise, be far too complex for unaided human brains to grasp.

What are your bets on how easy or difficult it ought to be to understand a theory of everything if one were to show up today?

[Ray Moscow]

I have a friend who works in particle physics research. Occasionally I'll see something in the science news and email him about it -- and he sometimes replies by sending me a paper on the subject.

And I usually don't understand these papers since I don't have nearly enough math, despite my engineering degree (and a bit more maths I did on the side).

And so I don't think I'm going to understand the UFT, either, unless it turns out to be something a lot simpler than what's required in current physics research.

[Izmir Stinger]

I don't think there is an objective limit on what we can comprehend because some of the capabilities our brains DO have is the ability to abstract, reason by analogy and formulate models. With sufficient abstraction and modeling, anything can be understood, if not necessarily groked.

[dancer_rnb]

We can't sense EM fields, but we can see their effects.

[Izmir Stinger]

We can't sense EM fields, but we can see their effects.

Great example. We abstract their measured effects as concepts, covert them to symbols then use those symbols to create a model constructed entirely out of things we can sense (usually pigment on paper or, more recently, patterns of light emitted by a display device) that we can sense, and thus, we understand them indirectly.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a6/Solenoid.svg/490px-Solenoid.svg.png

I don't think anything can be immune to this sort of process. Of course, if there was such a thing, I would be incapable of imagining it, so...

[DMB]

Notice that in the article he is talking about unaided human brains. He is suggesting elsewhere that at some point what he calls "hypercomputers" will go far beyond what we can do ourselves.

[Ray Moscow]

There's no real reason to expect ultimate reality to be comprehensible, although of course we hope it will be. We didn't evolve to deal with it.

QM is only partly comprehensible.

[ofro]

It seems to me, as we dig deeper into subatomic physics, things get less and less intuitive for us. I suspect that at some point things will only make logical sense if one understands the math and is willing to forgo our natural understanding of nature (and being able to explain it to your non-physicist friend).

We may already be there in trying to understanding and popularizing entanglement.

[Steviepinhead]

I feel peculiarly qualified to discourse on this subject matter.






Well, except that I've forgotten what I meant to say.

[Garrett]

Stop it, Stevie! It hurts to laugh right now.

[DMB]

Does anyone else ever feel a bit odd about the prospect of computers becoming super prosthetic brains? The methodology may be quite different, but there's no doubt that Deep Blue did beat Kasparov at chess. And we are such a short time into the computer age. The first ones were made in my lifetime.

When I was a teenager, the word "computer" was not heard and in those days they were referred to as "electronic brains", a bit ironic, considering that in those days they were huge, clunky things with very limited capacity.

[lpetrich]

I think that such limitations are what has made science a collaborative or collective enterprise -- and one dependent on the most advanced technology available. It is for good reason that there is a "scientific community".

There is no way that one can know everything or be expert in everything, so for maximum effect, it is necessary to get people with different fields of expertise to work together. And the scientific community has been successful in doing that.

[DMB]

I think that such limitations are what has made science a collaborative or collective enterprise -- and one dependent on the most advanced technology available. It is for good reason that there is a "scientific community".

There is no way that one can know everything or be expert in everything, so for maximum effect, it is necessary to get people with different fields of expertise to work together. And the scientific community has been successful in doing that.

Very good point.

[Steviepinhead]

Stop it, Stevie! It hurts to laugh right now.
So sorry I am that so sore are you! :(

By the way, did I mention that the thread title appears to be one word too long? :dunno:

Just sayin'....

[His Noodly Appendage]

It strikes me that the best way to comprehend QM stuff is to stop trying to think of it in terms of the things it attempts to explain.

It was actually an SF story (Ted Chiang, can't recall the title) that brought home to me the concept that a particle isn't hopping madly between all the places where it probably is; a particle is the zone of maximum probability.

http://xkcd.com/505

[BWE]

There's no real reason to expect ultimate reality to be comprehensible, although of course we hope it will be. We didn't evolve to deal with it.

QM is only partly comprehensible.

Ultimate? I'm thinking that we're looking at recursive issues. At each level of ultimate, we have another above that.

:dunno:

[Christina]

Rie's off topic post has been moved to here. (http://www.secularcafe.org/showthread.php?t=4723). Before anyone replies to someone in this thread they should know that it was necromanced from last March.