Sunday, September 28, 2008

Richard Dawkins - The Strangeness of Science

There are more things in heaven/earth, than more that can be dreamed of in any philosophy

Quantum Theory must be true, but their assumptions are very mysterious

The worst thing you can say about it, is that it is wasteful -

What makes us capable for us to suppose? Will we always never know things about the universe? Ungraspable to any mind?

We are used to the idea of the earth spinning, its hard to imagine how shattering that revolution was.

Science taught us that solid things, are entirely composed of empty space
The hardest, solidest, denseness rock is empty space

Why do they look and feel solid? Our brains have evolved to help us survive, because we never evolved to see science

its useful for our brains to evolve ideas, because those notions help us navigate through the middle sized road, otherwise we would understand Einstein

It limits what we are capable of understanding because we are middle road thinkers

Our priority is gravity, but small organisms think about surface tension the most


Waves in a vacuum seem unreal, we find real matter comoforting as solids, where matter is more of a thing

We are more like a wave, than a permament thing -- like, our childhood memories of smell etc.
Matter flows from place to place, and momentry brings us together now.

Variety of "really's" depends on what we need to survive -- its regulated and adjusted by data, and constructed for dealing in the real world. A fly needs a different model then a swimming model, and has different software to its daily needs

Bats could smell in color .. Just as dogs and smell various fatty acids with their nose, much like we can tell you how long and thick a piano string is by hearing a note.. bats can smell to see the color

Middle road is the narrow range of reality, we consider normal --

A marble model could wave and say hi to us, and it could because the atoms are moving the whole time, and the atoms could move at the same time in the same way, and we could see it moving at us -- its not probable in middle world, but it could happen

There are 100 billion billion planets out there

If life only arise once, that planet has to be us. So we are allowed to postulate chemical events which have a really low probability .. but he thinks life is common, but it could be so rare that no form of life will encounter another

He argues that our kids, should start playing computer games to help develop middle brains to understand quantum physics

Mechanistic view of mind, we are wired the same way, but if our neural anatomy was different we would be different -- but we are incosistent, we act differently in situations

the reason we personify things, like cars etc .. we live in a social world. We are evolved to second guess the behavior of others..

Its a great way to model humans..

If the universe is so weird, is it because we programed our brains to think so? or can we train ourselves to break out of the box, or are there so things soo queer that not even humans can dream of?

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