| | Charles,
Thanks for stepping in. I got sidetracked by once again attempting the folly of trying to talk sense to a troll. (One day I will learn.) You wrote:
The article really does not make it very clear how pessimistic Dawkins is, in that it does not discuss what he actually thinks the limits of our understanding will be.
Not only that, Dawkins, based on this short article alone, never says that we will not be able to understand the universe. He asks a question about it to get the ball rolling.
Most every allusion he made to metaphysical size involves sensory perception, not the making of concepts. His jargon certainly is not Objectivist jargon, and when he says that human beings "invent" their own reality just like other species do, that causes a knee-jerk reaction in many Objectivists.
However, if we look into what he is trying to say and maybe try to put it into our language, it is quite interesting. A good example in our own experience is a species that has no hearing. In the "reality" of that species (which in our language would translate as "perception of reality of that species"), sound does not exist, or extremely intense sound waves are perceived as tingling. This does not mean that sound does not exist, only that this species does not perceive it.
If that species were to develop a conceptual capacity, understanding just what sound is would necessitate the invention of instruments able to detect it - and that would start with a vague idea of "there is something more out there than what I perceive," to "I observe things that make no sense to me like reactions of other living organisms to an apparent stimuli," to "there exists a facet of reality that I do not have a sense organ for," to "I have invented a device to identify and measure such facet in perceptual-conceptual terms that I can understand, such as sight (i.e. images of sound waves) and concepts."
In the case of translating one sensory phenomenon into another, we humans already do that with graphs, sound spectrum analyzers, etc. since sight is a much more highly developed sense than hearing for determining precision.
When you apply this example to the human experience, the reality we perceive is mid-size, and the attributes that come through to our mid-size sense organs (like the hardness of crystal) are reflections of higher "bonding" properties of certain atoms, not the primary properties of the atoms themselves. We experience hardness as a primary, however it is based on a non-perceived primary. Our perception is misleading at times due to the the size of our sense organs.
That is how I understand what Dawkins is talking about.
It is even a good guess that there exist attributes of reality for which human beings have not yet developed sense organs, just as in the example of the species without the sense of hearing. Will we one day understand them? I think so, but such aspects will involve a great deal of conceptual work and inventing of instruments.
That is one of the magical (in the metaphorical sense) attributes of concepts - they allow us to understand what we cannot discern otherwise through our senses.
The other possibility I mentioned, which I believe is hinted at in the article, is to physically alter a brain and sense organs to have a more micro or macro perception, or to encounter a life form that does.
(There already exists a small example of such life form in the everyday experience of practically all humans - dogs. They have many more smell points in their noses than human beings do - and notice that they have no adverse reaction to bad smells other than indifferent rejection - they do not even vomit from an extremely intense stench.)
The real objection I have with Dawkins at this point is with his jargon, not with his ideas in themselves - which are fascinating. As I said, though, I am not that familiar with his work.
Michael
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