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If the sensory metaphor hypothesis is "true" model of the way humans construct knowledge [1] then it begs the question: "...how do we understand things that are not accessible to our senses?"
Clearly, we've done this for many aspects of modern life. We cannot directly access electromagnetic radiation outside of the limited range of the wavelengths of visible light. But we can, and do, use that experienced sensation to extrapolate to the entire spectrum. We routinely use machines that examine some aspect of the "real world" and record, measure, and convert that aspect into some representation form that our sense can access. These representation forms are always (of course) some combination of visual, audial, tactile, ofactory, and gustatory (taste) sensation [2]. That said, there are many puzzling aspects of the micro and macro universe that are, at least currently, on the boundary of or even outside our ability to observe, measure, and even understand.
Not coincidentally, many of these hard-to-understand topics occur at the far edges of size and hence are furthest away from our expeienced life: the quantum behavior of very, very small things [3], and the macro behavior of aspects of the wider universe [4]
Quantum Mechanics: the behavior of very small matter at the sub-atomic level is not only complex (meaning the models we have constructed are complicated), it is intrisically hard to understand. How can electrons transition from one energy level to another without passing through intermediate levels? How can an electron be in more than one place at a time?...
Wave/Particle Duality: as mentioned earlier,... are photons waves or particles? They can behave like either under different situations. Or, more correctly, our wave models and our particle models map closely onto certain observed behavior under certain circumstances.
Subatomic Particles and Forces: The "Standard Model" of particle physics has been quite sucessful. But has resulted in the postulation of a whole basket of particle families:
Fermions: quarks with their assorted "flavors" [5] and the ephemeral leptons such as neutrinos,
Bosons: considered to be the "force-carrying" particles such as photons and the more abstruse gluons and W and Z bosons which only act within atomic nucleii, and the...
Higgs boson considered to be the "source" of the mass of other particles
Gravity: an extremely weak force (compared to electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces) which nevertheless seems to be responsible for much of the behavior of the macro universe. The inability of the aforentioned Standard Model to account for this force is considered to be the biggest "gap" in the model [6]
Dark Matter and Dark Energy: two opposing concepts of the universe that have been floated to explain higher-than-expected observed levels of gravity (dark matter) and further-than-expected distances of stars that indicate the universe is not only expanding, but the expansion is accelerating (dark energy). Since we are very limited in our ability to detect or measure these things, they are, indeed dark [7]. Even more profoundly, we have very little idea of what they actually are. Meaning, of course, we have not developed sensory-based metaphorical mental models that map at all onto what they might be.
These are just a few of the aspects of the universe about which we have First Order Ignorance (1OI). We know enough about them to know that we don't know enough about them.
To which, we might then wonder: what about our Second Order Ignorance?...
We will try to deal with this later. But first, some considerations of process, software and otherwise...
FOOTNOTES
[1] This is not as paradoxical as it might first appear. While we may not be able to access the "true nature" of the universe (whatever that might mean), any model that helps us understand things is de facto a useful model. Truth, in a model sense, is a measure of the span of the model across observed experience; models which appear to have a bijective mapping from the model tenets to a wide range of observations are more useful and may be considered to be more "correct" or "true" than models which present gaps, ambiguities, and contradictions to observations.
[2] There are "senses" that are sometimes added to the classical five, such as balance, proprioception, pain, and temperature sense, but these can be considered to be variations of the tactile sense. Spatial awareness, another sometimes suggested "sense", is often a combination of perceptions from the sight, hearing, and tactile senses. Certain spiritual disciplines assert there are other "senses" that are not included in the classical five, though sceptics might consider these to be primarily a function of complex internal thought processes. For moment, I will stick to the original five.
[3] As physicist Niels Bohr noted: "...if you aren't shocked by quantum theory, you haven't understood it yet..." to which Richard Feynman added: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics"
[4] Continuing in this vein, English astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington once stated: "Not only is the unverse stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
[5] Here, the sensory basis of knowledge is front and center. Clearly, there is no way to determine the "taste" of a quark, but it's a metaphoric label that moves the proposed behavior of this "particle" into a realm of our understanding.
[6] Since the days of Isaac Newton, we've had a good handle on what gravity does but we are still wrestling with what gravity is. Currently, the model in most favor is that gravity is a "bending" of three dimensional space. This is something that we 3D beings struggle to understand and we usually fall back on a picture of the bending of a two-dimensional plane into three dimensions to visualize it.
[7] ...aaaand we're back to our sensory metaphor. We cannot really experience and understand things we cannot see; hence "dark".
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