middle range of speeds.
We are at home with objects ranging in size from a few kilometres
(the view from a mountaintop) to about a tenth of a millimetre
(the point of a pin).
Outside this range even our imagination is handicapped, and we need the help of instruments and of mathematics - which, fortunately, we can learn to deploy. The range of sizes, distances or speeds with which our imaginations are comfortable is a tiny band, set in the midst of a gigantic range of the possible, from the scale of quantum strangeness at the smaller end to the scale of Einsteinian cosmology at the larger.
Our imaginations are forlornly under-equipped to cope with distances outside the narrow middle range of the ancestrally familiar. We try to visualize an electron as a tiny ball, in orbit around a larger cluster of balls representing protons and neutrons. That isn't what it is like at all. Electrons are not like little balls. They are not like anything we recognize. It isn't clear that 'like' even means anything when we try to fly too close to reality's further horizons. Our imaginations are not yet tooled-up to penetrate the neighbourhood of the quantum. Nothing at that scale behaves in the way matter - as we are evolved to think - ought to behave. Nor can we cope with the behaviour of objects that move at some appreciable fraction of the speed of light. Common sense lets us down, because common sense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large...
[T]he way we see the world, and the reason why we find some things intuitively easy to grasp and others hard, is that our brains are themselves evolved organs: on-board computers, evolved to help us survive in a world - I shall use the name Middle World - where the objects that mattered to our survival were neither very large nor very small; a world where things either stood still or moved slowly compared with the speed of light; and where the very improbable could safely be treated as impossible. Our mental... [sensory] ...window is narrow because it didn't need to be any wider in order to assist our ancestors to survive...
Our brains have evolved to help our bodies find their way around the world on the scale at which those bodies operate. We never evolved to navigate the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands because our hands can't penetrate them. The reason they can't penetrate them is unconnected with the sizes and separations of the particles that constitute matter. Instead, it has to do with the force fields that are associated with those widely spaced particles in 'solid' matter. It is useful for our brains to construct notions like solidity and impenetrability, because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through a world in which objects - which we call solid - cannot occupy the same space as each other...
We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors, who couldn't walk through rocks, so our 'really' is a 'really' in which rocks are solid. 'Really', for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be, in order to assist its survival. And because different species live in such different worlds, there will be a troubling variety of 'reallys'.
What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished real world but a model of the real world, regulated and adjusted by sense data - a model that is constructed so that it is useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of that model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of world model from a walking, a climbing or a swimming animal. Predators need a different kind of model from prey, even though their worlds necessarily overlap. A monkey's brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional maze of branches and trunks... ...The general form of the mind model - is an adaptation to the animal's way of life, no less than its wings, legs and tail are...
The metaphor of Middle World applies to yet other scales or 'spectrums'. We can construct a scale of improbabilities, with a similarly narrow window through which our intuition and imagination are capable of going. ...Science flings open the narrow window through which we are accustomed to viewing the spectrum of possibilities. We are liberated by calculation and reason to visit regions of possibility that had once seemed out of bounds or inhabited by dragons.
From the Last Chapter of The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
http://amazon.com/The-God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/
https://richarddawkins.net/
Strange science in the middle world
MJ STONE
Are quantum mechanics and natural selection linked? If human survival skills are dependent upon our perceptions, how can an unseen molecular world relate to human evolution?
During the traditional Homecoming Beatty Lecture on Oct. 21, controversial British ethologist and evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins spoke to a packed auditorium about these paradoxes. The address, titled "Queerer than We Suppose: The Strangeness of Science," focused on the constructs of our brains and our inability to grasp the reality exists beyond our perceptions.
Prof. Dawkins, who holds the Charles Simonyi Chair in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, opened the lecture by leaping straight into quantum mechanics. The mathematical theory is so baffling it cannot be grasped by the human brain. In describing quantum theory, physicists have resorted to paradoxical interpretations. Unfortunately, Dawkins noted, such paradoxes fail to satisfy human concepts or intuition. "What more macho physicists say is that this is of no matter. The mathematics works, the experimental predictions are fulfilled... however, most of us are just too wimpish to follow it."
Dawkins insists that we are wimpish for a sound reason, noting that all science is a form of violence against common understanding. "Although the scientific method is grounded in a trained and informed common sense, greater scientists deploy a wildness of imagination, which, in the case of an Einstein or Heisenberg, outclasses the best science fiction." Illustrating the point with humour, Dawkins pointed out that probability theory suggests that when we drink a glass of water, we are imbibing at least one molecule that has passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell.
Shifting gears, Dawkins moved from the world of molecular matter into the realm of evolution. "Natural selection is the non-random survival of coded instructions for building bodies that make more instructions like the originals." What this copying mechanism serves to advance, Dawkins said, is an "arms race" between predator and prey that pushes organisms to ever more extravagant survival techniques to outwit one another.
If the universe is queerer than we suppose, it is because we have been naturally selected to suppose what we need to suppose, Dawkins said. He maintained that our brains have evolved to help our bodies find our way around the world we perceive. "We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms... we operate in a middle world — perceiving a reality somewhere between the atomic world and the cosmic world."
Demonstrating how this unseen world plays out in and around us, Dawkins invited the audience to recall a childhood memory. "Something you remember vividly, something you can see see, feel... as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at that moment. How else could you remember it? But here's the bombshell — you weren't there... not a single atom that is in your body today is the same as when that event took place."
Closing the lecture with a question, Dawkins pondered on the shape of human evolution as it relates to quantum theory. "Could we, through training and practice, emancipate ourselves from the middle world and achieve an intuitive understanding, not just a mathematical one, of the very small and very large?" A quantum leap for a species. Dawkins suggested that if we can ever break free of the box containing our perceptions, human evolution just might advance accordingly.
https://www.reporter-archive.mcgill.ca/39/05/dawkins/index.html
https://medium.com/@forever_becoming/middle-world-146f253e041d
https://secularhumanism.org/2024/01/science-the-poetry-of-reality-jewel-in-humanitys-crown/
Why psychology is harder than it seems
https://www.progressfocused.com/2015/05/why-psychology-is-harder-than-it-seems.html
https://michaelshermer.com/sciam-columns/folk-numeracy-middle-land/
https://scievangelist.com/2013/12/31/the-middle-world-and-the-failure-of-intuition/
