Fact and Fiction

Thoughts about a funny old world, and what is real, and what is not. Comments are welcome, but please keep them on topic.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Possible worlds

I have just finished Richard Dawkins book The God Delusion, the last paragraph of which reads as follows:

How should we interpret Haldane's 'queerer than we can suppose'? Queerer than can, in principle, be supposed? Or just queerer than we can suppose, given the limitation of our brains' evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World, tear off our black burka, and achieve some sort of intuitive - as well as just mathematical - understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast? I genuinely don't know the answer, but I am thrilled to be alive at a time when humanity is pushing against the limits of understanding. Even better, we may eventually discover that there are no limits.

Some of the above terminology needs to be explained by citing its earlier use in the last chapter of the book:
  1. ... the universe is not only queerer than we can suppose ...
  2. ... our brains ... 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 ...
  3. ... I want to use the narrow slit in the veil [i.e. burka] as a symbol of something else. Our eyes see the world through a narrow slit in the electromagnetic spectrum ... The metaphor of the narrow window of light ... serves us in other areas of science ...

I had one of those eerie feelings of déjà vu when I read the paragraph quoted above. Its message is spookily similar to what I was saying in my earlier posting Demystifying hard subjects, which was itself based on thoughts that I had long before I read The God Delusion.

Anyway, my message to Richard Dawkins is we can "achieve some sort of intuitive - as well as just mathematical - understanding of the very small, the very large, and the very fast". The trick is to bang the right sort of mental rocks together.

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