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Perhaps we don't have the capacity to understand how the universe works? I can't remember where I read it but someone made the point that no matter how hard yo
by jahnu 11y ago
Perhaps we don't have the capacity to understand how the universe works?
I can't remember where I read it but someone made the point that no matter how hard you try you can never teach a mouse to understand French.
- trhway 11y ago>no matter how hard you try you can never teach a mouse to understand French. humans couldn't so far teach mouse a human language. That doesn't mean that mouse doesn't have something like several thousands or tens of thousands of basic sounds and combinations of them into meaningful (for mouse) sequences. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/catch-the-wave-decoding-the-prairie-doge28099s-contagious-jump-yips/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/catch-the... After all as a mouse says to another mouse - "no matter how hard you try you can never teach a human to understand mouse language". The same is through the history of physics/mathematics. It takes a change in fundamental point of view. The notion of derivative took decades of work to develop by geniuses of that time. Imagine how physics/mathematics looked without it. When i look at strings theory of today i see epicycles, a very intricate and complex system of epicycles in 11 dimensions :) We need a genius like Newton or Einstein to again see and tell us what is behind that apparent complexity.
- jstanley 11y agoNo but the point is a mouse simply does not have the capacity to understand French. Maybe humans do not have the capacity to understand the complete workings of physics.
- trhway 11y ago>a mouse simply does not have the capacity to understand French. we don't really know what capacity is required to do it. 1PFlops? 1P neuron synapse transfers/minute? What capacity and in what units mouse brain is? Our human brain evolution has abused low efficiency size increase approach. As result we're using only like 10% of capacity of our brain. This dog knows 1000 words in human language. That's more than i know in Chinese, and the task of learning a 1000 Chinese hieroglyphs scares the hell out of me: https://www.thedodo.com/worlds-smartest-dog-chaser-752002926.html https://www.thedodo.com/worlds-smartest-dog-chaser-752002926... >Maybe humans do not have the capacity to understand the complete workings of physics. why would it be so? So far the physics has been pretty simple (any abnormal complexity has been usually an indication of our lack of understanding and has been successfully cleared with time) , and even several orders of magnitude complexity increase will fit into our brain. Edit: to the comment below on 10% - there is a difference between 10% capacity and 10% neurons. The fact that most of our brain is physiologically participating while producing that little capacity most of the time in most of the people is exactly the low efficiency i was talking about.
- Ygg2 11y ago> As result we're using only like 10% of capacity of our brain. This myth needs to die in a fire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_the_brain_myth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_percent_of_the_brain_myth
- _kst_ 11y agoIt's been said (I don't know how accurately) that some people do use 100% of their brains. They just happen to be in the midst of a grand mal epileptic seizure.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago> This dog knows 1000 words in human language. That's more than i know in Chinese, and the task of learning a 1000 Chinese hieroglyphs scares the hell out of me. Okay; but that dog can't have a conversation. It doesn't know what they mean, it just knows that follows a certain stimulus. It's like saying I understand cloud language, because I can tell when it's going to rain after looking at the sky. And even if that dog "understands" a thousand words, and you're scared of learning a thousand Chinese characters, you still have the capacity for learning Chinese. Or French. Or Spanish, or Esperanto, or Russian, or Thai. You could spend a year learning Russian, and we could have this conversation in that language; I will never be able to explain this conversation to a dog, in any language.
- trhway 11y ago>Okay; but that dog can't have a conversation. dogs do have conversations. And other animals too. Check the link on the prairie dogs for example. >I will never be able to explain this conversation to a dog, in any language. it is the deficiency of human-to-dog communication, not the dog's lack of mental capacity to handle the complexity of conversation.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoChinese characters are not 'hieroglyphs.'
- wlievens 11y agoBut that could only be the case if those laws are very, very complicated. So far physical laws have been on the side of "understandable if you invest a couple years of study as a reaonably intelligent person".
- jp555 11y agoDoes a human have the capacity to understand the complete workings of an Intel CPU? I doubt it. But we augment our capacities with tools, something mice don't do.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago> After all as a mouse says to another mouse - "no matter how hard you try you can never teach a human to understand mouse language". But mice don't say that. They can't. jahnu's statement wasn't a parable.
- trhway 11y ago>But mice don't say that. check the various articles on animal language decoding. Mice and other animals do say that or similar complexity things. >They can't. That just an empty statement of belief unsubstantiated by facts. Again check the articles. In general, the "only humans have language" is simply the religious "only humans have soul" dogma in disguise.
- pavel_lishin 11y agoIt doesn't look like they're having conversations. It looks like they're seeing some sort of stimulus, and are making relevant noises. It's a pretty impressive reflex, but it's not a conversation - it's an announcement. It's no more of a conversation than a hungry baby crying. > Mice and other animals do say that Okay, find me a link that says mice complain about humans not learning their language.
- kamaal 11y ago>>check the various articles on animal language decoding. Mice and other animals do say that or similar complexity things. You aren't stating the solution, you are stating the problem. You didn't get the point. If all of humanity had limited capabilities to speak and express. Say we could all utter only 3 kinds of sounds namely x,y,z- due to that sheer limitation our language and written systems have to be expressed in permutations and combinations of x, y, z. That sort of stuff works only for simple things. The moment you start venturing into any complexity, trying to express those concepts in only 3 ways will lead to verbosity and interplay that will blow up beyond practical ability to grasp, given limited resources to interpret them. And take note if the animal has no means of recording information somewhere and check over time, keeping that level of verbosity in one's brain and workout complex physics is just out of question.
- fengwick3 11y agoWell, the irony is that string theory IS the attempt at the elegance behind the apparent complexity of the standard model. But I agree with you that dark matter and dark energy are undoubtedly works in progress (if that's what you were trying to say)
- renox 11y ago> Perhaps we don't have the capacity to understand how the universe works? We don't understand QM but we can still use the equations to make predictions.. You're suggesting that we can't create better equations which explain more the universe? That's quite a bit early to say that.. I'm more worried about our possibility of creating experiments which can be used then to select which equation is the right one.
- drdeca 11y agoI think they meant that maybe we can't discover the final entirely correct ones.
- jerf 11y agoSo I'll zig to your several replier's zags and suggest a mechanism that could potentially explain that effect. Right now we believe that the universe has an approximate spatial granularity of Planck's distance, which is ~1.6E-36, and approximate temporal granularity of 1E-43 seconds. (Unless you can improve upon those numbers by a good 40 or 50 orders of magnitude, please don't quibble in the replies. I am aware it's not a "grid" or something, but that is the approximate resolution.) Our best theories of the universe will have to work at that level, or even potentially below it in the case of string theory. A full theory of the universe ought to be able to describe how everything works down there. However, all the phenomena we care about and have concrete data about are literally 40 orders of magnitude bigger, at a minimum, in spatial and temporal extent. We have proposals for how the simplest elements of the universe work. Heck, for all we know one of them may even be right. But proving that is extraordinarily difficult because of this huge order-of-magnitude gap. You'd love to be able to just plug in the theory, set yourself up a universe, and start computing, but the incredible gulf of magnitudes makes that essentially impossible. And the theories are sufficiently complicated that attempts to approximate break down in various rather distressing ways. Even if the Great Simulator simply handed us the equations that our universe is based on, could we verify that claim? Honestly, my guess is that with enough effort, yes... but even with the answer it could well be extraordinarily difficult. Without the answer it's even harder.
- rthomas6 11y agoThat depends on how long the mouse has to be taught. If we had 1,000 years I bet we could do it.
- jacquesm 11y agoI don't think mice live for 1,000 years so there is a slight problem with your theory.
- rthomas6 11y agoMy point was that humans can pass acquired knowledge to future generations. Given enough time, we can figure out things that would take too long for any one generation to understand on their own.
- jacquesm 11y agoYes, but your example is both irrational, poorly chosen and simply will not work, no matter how much time we have since it requires the co-operation of the subject which simply does not have the neural apparatus to comprehend speech as we generally understand it. So no, given 1,000 years we will not be able to teach mice French, nor Russian, Chinese, English or any other human language. There's more to that than simply wanting it to be so, no matter how much information we can pass on to future generations.
- ftchirou 11y ago> no matter how hard you try you can never teach a mouse to understand French. Maybe because a mouse is not even aware of "French". At least, humans are aware of the universe, they may not understand it completely but they are aware of it.
- geuis 11y agoThat point of view is inherently untrue. We have an extremely good understanding of how the universe works. The Standard Model has been worked on since the 40's and has been experimentally proven and refined ever since. There are things the SM doesn't account for yet, such as dark energy, dark matter, and gravity. That doesn't mean it's beyond human understanding, just that there's more to the universe we haven't discovered yet. In the worst case, those things will have interesting but not surprising answers. Slight modifications to the SM to account for some new particle types, etc. In the best case, they turn out to be something completely unexpected and the SM turns out to be the equivalent of Newtonian theory. Perfectly good and accurate theories about the nature of the universe that are just a subset of a wider physics model, like how Newtonian theory exists within the Standard Model.
- anigbrowl 11y agoIndividually, probably not, but as a eusocial organismwe quite likely do.