benlehman

Seattlites: There is an amazing new Thai Place in the ID. The Stranger review is %100 correct. Go!

Interesting post on Andrew Sullivan's blog is a pretty good summary of one of the fundamental issues of science. In short, there is no particular reason to believe that our scientific models will ever match reality 1-to-1, given that we have a finite brain capacity that is much smaller than the universe as a whole and that our brain capacity is, of course, evolved for a pretty specific niche that doesn't actually include physics or cosmology.

A restatement would be: no matter what, you cannot teach a duck calculus. The duck simply does not have the brain capacity to understand it. Given that we also have finite brain capacity, it stands to reason we should also have similar limitations in our mathematical/rational* abilities.

It strikes me that this is quite possibly asking the wrong question. We can basically take for granted that there are huge swaths of the world which we cannot really perceive or understand, in the same way that a duck cannot understand a lunar lander. The real question is: can our mathematical/rational* models extend to the subset of the universe that we are capable of perceiving. This is really a question about the human brain, rather than the universe, and thus it seems to me to be considerably more soluble.

My hunch is that, yes, if we can perceive something we can also discovered/invent** a predictive pattern for it†.
( footnotes )