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The generic response to your type of reasoning is that you might need to rethink what you think "why" and "how" and "have a clue" are defined :) The human mind

The generic response to your type of reasoning is that you might need to rethink what you think "why" and "how" and "have a clue" are defined :) The human mind really wants to understand things in terms of the paltry slow coarse-grained 3D world we inhabit, despite 100 years of QM and QFT-based experiments showing that the world simply doesn't work that way. Can't other realms have other "why"'s? Tens of thousands of professional solid state physicists and QM researchers would probably not refer to their field as "not having a clue" for example, any more than anybody working in a field dominated by Newtonian mechanics would have a clue at least. In fact, if you make a simulated world in a computer game, it's trivial to come up with algorithms that do alternative physics in the game that can create interesting behaviour, despite being far from explanatory for a being inside the sim.. I'm rather amazed the reality we inhabit is so easy to comprehend as it is even despite QM/QFT being pretty far from Newtonian.

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
Well I'm far from an expert on physics, to be fair, so apologies for misrepresenting how phycisists see their field. I think what you're saying is that it may be impossible to fully understand the world in the same way that we have tried to, in all of science, until now. I agree, in fact I suspect we probably can't, because it's obvious to me our intelligence is limited (as a species) and we're going to hit our limit sooner or later, if we haven't indeed hit it already. But that's not for me a reason to stop trying to understand as much as we can, neither is it a good reason to replace understanding with ... something else. Because the day when we finally hit our limit of understanding is the day our civilisation stops dead in its tracks. I for one am not prepared to go gently into that good night, any time soon.
- l33tman 4y ago
  Yeah I agree with you here, it might very well be that the next breakthrough level has to come from even more non-intuitive (from a human standpoint) rules. After all Newtonian mechanics is intuitive just because humans evolved in a macroscopic world ruled by it. We can resort to math (like we have done in the last 100 years with QM) because while we rely on math being stringent we don't rely on it having to be intuitive on the level of our own experiences. On the other hand, even in a mathematical treatment of QM/QFT a lot of "classical" intuition and terminology is still used even though it, in my opinion, is hurting. For example the insistence to apply properties like position and momentum to particles in the same physical framework even though QM/QFT has consistently shown for 100 years that conceptually you should pick one of them, the other is a dual, and failure to get rid of that baggage leads you into "weird" things like Heisenberg's uncertainty relation which is only mysterious when you insist on mapping properties to the classical world one by one. That is certainly one aspect where humans just can't seem to shake off the classical notions..

YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago

Well I'm far from an expert on physics, to be fair, so apologies for misrepresenting how phycisists see their field. I think what you're saying is that it may be impossible to fully understand the world in the same way that we have tried to, in all of science, until now. I agree, in fact I suspect we probably can't, because it's obvious to me our intelligence is limited (as a species) and we're going to hit our limit sooner or later, if we haven't indeed hit it already. But that's not for me a reason to stop trying to understand as much as we can, neither is it a good reason to replace understanding with ... something else. Because the day when we finally hit our limit of understanding is the day our civilisation stops dead in its tracks. I for one am not prepared to go gently into that good night, any time soon.

l33tman 4y ago
Yeah I agree with you here, it might very well be that the next breakthrough level has to come from even more non-intuitive (from a human standpoint) rules. After all Newtonian mechanics is intuitive just because humans evolved in a macroscopic world ruled by it. We can resort to math (like we have done in the last 100 years with QM) because while we rely on math being stringent we don't rely on it having to be intuitive on the level of our own experiences. On the other hand, even in a mathematical treatment of QM/QFT a lot of "classical" intuition and terminology is still used even though it, in my opinion, is hurting. For example the insistence to apply properties like position and momentum to particles in the same physical framework even though QM/QFT has consistently shown for 100 years that conceptually you should pick one of them, the other is a dual, and failure to get rid of that baggage leads you into "weird" things like Heisenberg's uncertainty relation which is only mysterious when you insist on mapping properties to the classical world one by one. That is certainly one aspect where humans just can't seem to shake off the classical notions..