There is a real, material universe, not some weird spirit realm. However, our ability to accurately model this reality is severely limited, in that evolution has designed our cognitive apparatus to work in a quick and dirty way, so our personal models are excellent at avoiding sabre tooth tigers and mating, but not so good at discerning what lies behind. Science and maths let us get deeper in, but the picture of reality that emerges becomes, inevitably, more and more distant from the personal cognitive models that have worked so well in a survival sense.
A bit tedious, but some good stuff:
The idea that we see what is out there has been destroyed a long time ago. It is now known as the Cartesian theatre. It leads to nothing except infinite regress.
I like the analogy involving gerbils and beer bottles, but unless my Google-fu has failed me, it's one of those myths the internet is particularly good at distributing far and wide. Not to worry, though. Donald Hoffman has illustrated how our vision keeps getting things wrong with plenty of other examples.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. - Stephen J. Gould
I cannot but agree that "what we see is not what is out there", but I keep coming back to this idea; if our everyday working model of reality was not at least a reasonable working approximation, we could not survive. Starting from there, evidence based science can make the model a better take on the universe as it is, although our eventual mathematical abstractions, as good at prediction as they may be, may not engage well with hominid cognitive processes...
I cannot but agree that "what we see is not what is out there", but I keep coming back to this idea; if our everyday working model of reality was not at least a reasonable working approximation, we could not survive.
We probably could, under the appropriate care - but we couldn't remain sane.
Starting from there, evidence based science can make the model a better take on the universe as it is, although our eventual mathematical abstractions, as good at prediction as they may be, may not engage well with hominid cognitive processes...
Constructing the Adamsian super computer, resulting in an answer of 42?
