Is it possible we are not equiped to understand the universe

[Rum]

A Newtonian universe is pretty straightforward to understand. It also works well with the sort of mental apparatus, senses and so on we have. This is pretty understandable, because it was those which led us to look at the universe in the way we did.

A Relativistic Universe is harder to comprehend - 'apprehend' might be a better world, but we can just about imagine it, and it certainly makes sense with the physical and mental apparatus at out disposal.

A quantum universe is counter intuitive, 'illogical' and cannot, I would argue, be apprehended at all easily with the physical and mental equipment at out disposal. The logic of the quantum world is the total illogic, or nonsense of our everyday take on it.

It would seem that the universe turns out to be really very weird and my question is this. Given that it may be totally bizarre from a human perspective, is it possible that we will never be able to do more than imagine what it 'looks' like, even if we get some mathematical grasp of it? Perhaps we do not have the capability to apprehend the universe as it truly is.

[Nickel]

You know, I think you're right. There's so much stuff we can't wrap out primitive monkey heads around yet. Maybe after a few centuries of having researched quantum forces, and a few centuries of sailing the stars for ourselves, we might have a little bit more understanding. Nothing is understood completely when you're new to it - so I'm sure the madness of things at the quantum scale will become apparent one day.

But to be honest, I think that H.P. Lovecraft was right on this:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Hopefully we won't go mad and stop the science, because that would be a tremendous shame.

[Animavore]

So poignant.

HPL FTW!

[BlackBart]

Wow, Total perspective Vortex, man!

[Fact-Man]

You know, I think you're right. There's so much stuff we can't wrap out primitive monkey heads around yet. Maybe after a few centuries of having researched quantum forces, and a few centuries of sailing the stars for ourselves, we might have a little bit more understanding. Nothing is understood completely when you're new to it - so I'm sure the madness of things at the quantum scale will become apparent one day.

But to be honest, I think that H.P. Lovecraft was right on this:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Hopefully we won't go mad and stop the science, because that would be a tremendous shame.

"... and it was not meant that we should voyage far."

I wonder about this; it seems to me that we're destined to voyage as far as we might manage to get, albeit I think exploring space beyond the solar system is a challenge that awaits those who live 500 or a thousand years from today, assuming we don't finish the job of destroying the planet that is.

Truth is as well that there's little practical need for nearly all humans to perceive the universe as a quantum system. That day may come but I think it's a very long way off if it does. Today's perception serves most of us just fine. Researchers may venture beyond and that's fine, fund them and let them go see what they might find. But for us commoners, even those of us who are avid fans of science and scientific undertandings and knowledge, current views serve rather well.

We're not taking very good care of our planet as it is and in fact the British Sustainability Commission has reported that we've "destroyed or badly degraded 60 per cent of Earth's ecosystems" so we're halfway there right now and, we are in the midst of an enormois extinction event as well.

Plus we face onrushing climate change (owing to our profligate consumption of fossil carbon) that's very likely to alter the world in ways that will make it difficult to sustain civilization as we know it, and we're doing exactly nothing about it.

Perspective is everything.

[Azathoth]

You know, I think you're right. There's so much stuff we can't wrap out primitive monkey heads around yet. Maybe after a few centuries of having researched quantum forces, and a few centuries of sailing the stars for ourselves, we might have a little bit more understanding. Nothing is understood completely when you're new to it - so I'm sure the madness of things at the quantum scale will become apparent one day.

But to be honest, I think that H.P. Lovecraft was right on this:

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Hopefully we won't go mad and stop the science, because that would be a tremendous shame.

I like you. Pull up a shoggoth and toast yourself a cultist.

[blackarmada]

I reckon there would be some who could, they would of course be out bred by those who don't and want to use God as the shortcut answer though.

[Salviati]

Noam Chomsky has put forward the idea that because our language follows rules of a universal grammar, we ought not be able to conceive of concepts that can only be expressible by sentences lying outside of that framework.

Total nonsense, of course. "Thief, clumsy, jail" is not a sentence in universal grammar, nor is almost any concept you can find in a typical advanced book on mathematics.

[FBM]

Consider that 99.9999999999999% (that should be 13 9s after the decimal) of atoms are empty space, and that 96% of the universe is made of stuff that we can't detect and know jack shit about. We don't know dick about the universe.

[AshtonBlack]

I don't think I really understand the question. You mean as an abstract concept or a literal "what it looks like"?

[Trinoc]

I'm inclined towards Turing's idea that once a machine passes a certain complexity it can in principle compute anything that can be computed ... provided of course that it is an "infinite machine", which fortunately doesn't mean it really has to be infinite in size, only that there is no theoretical limit on how much memory it can access (if you run out, add more). We already use writing, computers, etc., to allow our brains to process far more than we could hold in our heads at a time, so I can't see any reason why we shouldn't be able to do more of the same to understand whatever the universe can throw at us. The only sort of universe we could not, in principle, understand would be one that is completely random and therefore requires the universe itself to describe it. Fortunately the universe is not random and obeys some nice laws, so I am optimistic it can be understood.

In a sense we can already do this with mathematics, but as a maths numpty I would really like to be able to visualise quantum stuff and not just take it on trust that the equations make sense.

[piscator]

Great Question!
a couple thoughts while i formulate a more prosaic response:


"You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm."

[Gawdzilla Sama]

We don't even understand each other. Pretentious monkey is pretentious.

[goodboyCerberus]

What would an absurd, unknowable universe look like? Would its denizens know science?

I believe the universe is fundamentally knowable by minds. That is the first premise of science.



Who could have guessed a group of apes could have gotten so far by imagination, foresight, and trial and error? We've gotten this far, we've come up against high walls before, but we've found ways past them.

If not us, then our descendants will - whether that is humans, "Neo sapiens", or A.I. I guess you could see that as an admission that it is "possible we are not equipped to understand the universe", but I said "I believe the universe is fundamentally knowable by minds". I didn't specify that those minds had to be human ones.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

We haven't done too bad a job of painting a picture of our house while locked inside the bathroom so far. I think we will continue to improve our understanding but always be left wondering about a few things - not that they are beyond our understanding, just that what we learn shows us more things that we don't know... yet.