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Noam Chomsky usually has this point, that the human mind seems limited in its "native understanding" to a mechanistic view of the world - that is the only kind
by simiones 8y ago
Noam Chomsky usually has this point, that the human mind seems limited in its "native understanding" to a mechanistic view of the world - that is the only kind of model that is truly satisfactory to us.
He also points out that, ever since Newton, the dream of mechanistic world was shattered, and with it, any hope that science would help us "make sense of the world" in a truly satisfying sense. Instead, we have become content with modelling the world mathematically and predicting how it will evolve.
Of course, space-time and quantum mechanics have driven additional nails in the coffin of a truly understandable world.
- AgentME 8y ago>Of course, space-time and quantum mechanics have driven additional nails in the coffin of a truly understandable world. I'd think the opposite. The fact the world can work at least as strangely as relativity and quantum mechanics suggest, and we still figured those out as much as we have so far, reassures me in our ability to figure out the world we exist in.
- simiones 8y agoWhat I meant was: quantum mechanics and relativity have shown that not only is the physical world slightly different from the kind of world our mind can picture (e.g. "mechanistic, but with the universal attraction force"), it is in fact nowhere near our built-in mechanistic model, and we can never hope to build a real intuition about the world. However, we can still hope to model and predict it more accurately than we would have ever hoped before, so there is that :)