Peeve of the day
Kevin LeBleu said...
Tom: I don't think "make sense" is a very good measure. Our brains are only built to make sense of what they'd encounter in a natural/wild environment, without the aid of technology much more advanced than stone tools. Even then they only had to make enough sense of stuff to out-survive the other guy.
Perhaps "have supporting evidence" would be a better measure?
A few examples of things that don't make sense, but are well supported by evidence are General Relativity, Special relativity and Quantum Electro Dynamics.
Another problem with the "make sense" approach is that deity "makes sense" to a lot of people, because our brain is built for understanding how other people think and finding patterns. Unfortunately, it makes it easy for our brain to try and interpret naturally occurring events as having a human-like intelligence behind them.
May 4, 2009 10:43 AM
... "I don't think "make sense" is a very good measure" ...
What does make sense ... actually means.
Certainly there is a valid point ... in what Kevin LeBleu mentions that ...
"Our brains are only built to make sense of what they'd encounter in a natural/wild environment, without the aid of technology much more advanced than stone tools."
Our brains, and not even our minds, are built to make sense and by that I take it, as our senses, our sense organs, all of them, will confer to what it makes sense. Implicates our sense organs. The sense we make, is what our sense organs, allows us to.
It brings into my mind the thoughts I had contemplated upon the range of stimuli our sense organs can detect, upon which, our brains and our minds will make sense out of. Our brains will only see the narrow range of what is going on around us, that our own human resolving time allow us to detect and from them to pick the stimuli and use to make sense. Anything else is obscured, it is not there, practically equivalent to, it does not exist, as our brains and the minds we make sense with, do not take it into consideration.
The thought Kevin LeBleu expressed
"... without the aid of technology much more advanced than stone tools"
it reminded me what I read about our human resolving times compared with the resolving time of a fast electronic device
"For the human eye and ear, resolving time is about 0.1 s, while a fast electronic device might have a resolving time of 10 billionths of a sec (10^-10 s)."
This idea alone made me think how many events are taking place around us, that our senses can not distinguish and built experience, as our resolving time is not small enough to separate them into the distinct entities they are. How much information is lost. Technology makes it possible to overcome this limitation, as the recent scientific breakthrough about the world's fastest camera.
To what extent people are taking on board these fundamental limitations of our brains, when they try to make sense out of any new ideas they come across.
Is it not an overindulgence, being over-optimistically proud of what we consciously know, and with such unfounded fervour, try to pass along what sense we make?
That kind of attitude is not different, from the ridicule (I can certainly imagine so) suffered by the individual who invented the wheel, by his fellow stone-age contemporaries, or any other innovation that run counter to what individuals made sense of.
for me ... this is not, in any way different, for any idea that comes along.
What if our human resolving time was on a par with the resolving time of a fast electronic device?
Though, the thought above it would require drastic human alterations, not feasible, however it raises the question of how much more there is around the matter of our experience, the information we take in, that there is experience still to be had.
Would it not then our brains, with our senses, equipped with the resolving times of fast electronic devices, be able to resolve between events, that now we experience as taking place simultaneously, as been distinct from one another? How would this alter our perception? The sense we make out of things around us?
Do we rely too much in what we consciously know and make sense out of. There is loads of information out there, from which we have only the knowledge of the tip of the iceberg.
Is it wise to dismiss any new ideas that are coming forth on the grounds of what it makes sense, for us right now?
