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.
