Is the macro "crazy" related to the micro "crazy"?, page 1

reply to post by soldita

To answer these questions, or even to ask them, we have to make an enormous assumption: namely, that the way humans have evolved to perceive their environment is a true and accurate representation of reality.

But we already know this assumption is false. Humans cannot perceive objects in quantum superposition or make intuitive sense of relativistic effects. We experience time as unidirectional, which it probably isn’t; and somehow we all seem to experience the same moment in time simultaneously, which is a strange and weird coincidence for which there is no explanation. Our senses and brains are simply unable to process information about such phenomena in any way except intellectually – and that, of course, is no use at all.

There is also a great deal going on in the universe that we cannot perceive at all because we lack the sensory equipment. We are blind to radio waves and most of the rest of the electromagnetic spectrum; we have no specifically electric or magnetic senses either, as far as we know; nor can we perceive the products of radioactive decay until they start killing us. That’s scarcely a comprehensive list, but it will do to be going on with.

Given these obvious shortcomings of our perceptual and conceptual capabilities, the questions in your OP may not be useful for an understanding of reality. Most probably, they exist because our perceptions and concepts of reality are just models, and bear as much relation to the real world as Plato’s shadows to the world outside his Cave. To insist on answers, and to condemn either science or religion for not being able to provide them, may be to miss the point altogether.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask the questions. However, they really are rather tired and threadbare, especially in this forum, where someone or other – usually someone with religious doubts he is trying to quell by projecting them onto others such as atheists and evolutionists – is forever asking them.

The correct answer to all the questions you ask in your OP is We Don’t Know. That doesn’t mean that the answers supplied by religion are true. In fact, it suggests strongly that they are false – answers that have been fabricated purely because the question exists and needs, or seems to need, answering.

edit on 15/11/11 by Astyanax because: we don’t know.