Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
We can over come the deficiencies to a degree, but is it enough?
No matter what, humans are still bound by our limited senses to experience the world. Sure, we can artificially heighten some of them so that we can experience things that we otherwise couldn't. For example, we can experience types of radiation outside our normal optic range. However, the only reason we had a hunch that they were there to begin with is because we could see and feel their effects. I find it hard to believe that in a universe as vast and complex as ours, that it can be experienced exclusively with the 5 senses that evolution has allowed us to have. There are likely phenomena all around us that we will never be able to understand or even conceive of because our minds and senses haven't evolved in that way.
I remember a thread on here about the possibility of aliens and one person commented on how if there are aliens, there is a good chance that we would never be able to communicate with them. They could have totally different senses, and they could have evolved in such a way that notions we take for granted; like 'up and down' or 'left and right' might not mean anything to them.
Ah, I'm kind of loosing the direction of the topic, but the point is just that there are aspects to the natural world that I doubt we'll ever be able to comprehend no matter how far we advance in science. They might even be things that are relatively simple in the complexity, but we just haven't evolved in a way that allows us to think on that level. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but it does make me uneasy trusting it 100%.
|
We already measure things that are completely beyond our five senses. The weak force, the strong force, time dilation and lorenz contraction, dark energy, casmir force, and many others. What of the five senses led us to discover quantum entanglement? Which of the five senses can we use to "see" the force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerated pace? We didn't discover time dilation because it was directly experienced.
These things fall outside our five senses, but they do share something in common, and the part I bolded in your quote speaks to that. If something is real, if it is part of our reality, our existence, then it has an impact on that reality. Not everything that is real can be directly observed, some things are inferred from observation with instruments that give us other senses, or expand our senses far beyond their original capabilities.
To say we have a good grip on reality is hubris, but if something is real, eventually we will find a way to test it, measure it, understand it, because it is real. If there's no way to interact with it, then its existence is a philosophical question.
Weather we'll truly be able to understand everything, that's a good question, but it may not be a necessary one. No one really understands the quantum world, we have models which describe and predict the behaviour of things at that level, it's a highly successful model, one of the best ever conceived by humanity.
We may be relinquished for a long time to simply using the math to describe the reality and not understanding the underlying mechanisms (I won't say forever because forever is a long time and a million years of living with quantum theory may allow us to eventually really understand it), however not understanding it doesn't make it any less real or make the theory any less correct. The theory still makes predictions that continue to be confirmed, even if we haven't a good idea of the underlying structure.