Experience

 I am reading a book about how though in may areas changed in America after the Civil War. The war probably influenced some of the changes, but so did the rise of science. After all, a lot changed with publication on On the Origin of Species. I wasn't aware of some of the changes, including the influence of science on the restructuring of American universities.

I find it sad that much of America still has no understanding of evolution. Darwin contributed to this, but so did many others. After all, Darwin didn't know the source of the variations among individuals in a population, and didn't know the details of inheritance patterns, either. We should not be debating about whether to teach children and college students about theories of evolution. Perhaps we should be debating whether there is any value in discussing Christianity in the modern world, as the history is quite dark in many ways, and contribution to knowledge has often come from heresies that were punished and suppressed as long as possible.

Still, many of the leaders of change in philosophy, science, and politics in America in that period were quite racist, sexist, and religious, and even some who were not were believers in some supernatural or spiritual realm on which our experience reality depended. Ah, the arrogance of humans.

My thinking about this is that the universe seems to have existed long before any human mind did, and I see no need for any mind to understand existence for it to exist. It is only our understanding the requires a mind, and that is only our mind because it is our understanding. Reality is probably more than an abstract concept.

Our minds have developed in ways that were conducive to biological success of our ancestors. We experience the world as continuous and three dimensional because it is, so our perception presents it to use that way as well as it can. That seems to have bothered some thinkers back in the 1880's; they had figured out that the retina of the eye is more or less flat and that signaling to the brain was episodic, so what our brains "see" and record are moments, or frames, of sensory input, so they didn't understand why our perception isn't like that. On the other hand, I doubt they could come up with any utility in such perception, flipping frame by frame slowly enough for us to notice each change of frame. We don't make movies that way because if we want to catch dinner, we have to follow the actual movement of our next meal, and not the true frames we catch.

I have read that engineers have been trying to make robots with "true" depth perception like what we seem to experience, but haven't been able to create it artificially. So the forces of evolution still have a few tricks hidden from us. I expect it is due to speed of processing and complexity of processing. I don't know how fast modern robots can catch and process frames of visible input, or actually how fast signaling occurs in the visual pathways of the human nervous system. I recently read that new observations of neurons show that there is a whole level of processing in dendrites of neurons, which basically adds at least an order of magnitude to the computing capability of the brain to previous models. Let the robots figure that one out.