Richard Dawkins gives one of my favorite talks on how our minds reason about the physical universe. We’ve evolved to reason about a middle-sized world, or “middle world” as he puts it, that creates useful fictions like matter and solidity that are really only relevant to our perception of the universe. For example, a water strider likely doesn’t need to reason in three dimensions the way we do. Or the fact that atoms are mostly empty space, yet a rock is solid to us.
Most of the universe exists at scales that simply don’t make sense to our “middle world” minds. In this way it makes sense that exploration towards the edges of our middle world reality in relativity theory or quantum physics are not just extremely odd, but even incompatible with each other. Unless we can train ourselves to intuitively reason and perceive our universe at those scales, we will always be limited to reasoning about them with our extremely limited model of the middle world.
Dawkins also touches on how mechanistically our academic and scientific class think, and how poorly it tends to work with complex purposeful systems, such as people.
For the past few years, Kevin Kelly has been deeply involved in a well-deserved philosophical exploration of technology. This visualized talk focuses mostly on the conclusions of this exploration, such as the “agenda” of technology, which relates to the previous post on plants. In other talks, Kevin talks more about technology as the 7th Kingdom of Life because it shares many of the characteristics of living, biological systems.
This talk attempts to link the recent topic of pitfalls in overly economic thinking with the recent topic of our brains being socially and emotionally hardwired. Paul Seabright talks about trust and risk in systems like our banking system, and the way our brains have evolved to be vulnerable during economic prosperity.
As usual, I’ve trimmed the interesting but long-winded introduction and the re-iterative discussion at the end, giving you the meat of the talk in 20 minutes. However you can watch the full talk here.
