Apr 26, 2017 2:21pm
I would say that our senses cover a wide range of the energy spectrum, and other than temperature or sensitivity we are not lacking in available senses nor information processing power.
I would say that it certainly appears that we can sense everything that we can act upon or react to. Which is all evolution can do for us. Our achievements have been in extending our ability to perceive and act at increasing scales, through the use of cooperation and instrumentation
I would say that we evolved our reason in concert with our language, and that the limitation of serial utterance of language, and the relatively high cost of speech determines the utility of using stories (think ‘parallelization’) that make use of context (high free association ), and that precision (low context high precision) is the result of our general need to increase sense perception cognition decidability, and retention in concert with our increase in scales of cooperation and instrumentation. ergo: our minds evolved to be limited by our speech.
As far as I know the demonstrated difference in intellectual performance over the past few centuries has been the conversion of recipe-thinking to general-rule-thinking. And that this has demonstrated that changes in the method of thought dramatically improve the structure of the brain and therefore mind, and the mind’s ability to process information by association. Ergo, seemingly burdensome training of the mind can dramatically increase processing power through the application of new general rules more correspondent with the scale of concepts we utilize. Storytelling, symbols, measures, writing and literacy, reason, rationalism, empiricism, and now testimonialism, all rewire the brain and the mind to use the tools at their disposal – admittedly at some cost of acquisition.
We observe differences (changes). The limit is information given reaction time, and limit in causal relations. We evolved when we could make lots of use of time. We can process absurd informational density. I am not even sure if we know how to measure it. We can REASON with limited ability.
So given that some portion of people can master higher precision and greater scale, and some lower precision and lower scale, the question is merely how to construct cooperation among people with different abilities, and we encounter one solution: voluntary exchange, and one problem: dispute resolution. While voluntary cooperation scales indefinitely, dispute resolution is limited to a maximum difference between individuals ability to judge (ergo, dunning kruger).
Now, the universe cannot ‘lie’. Our imaginations and our brains are filled with folly we increasingly succeed in purging through the development of rules, operations, objects, relations, and values, and saturating the common folk in context and therefore eliminating their need for calculative(rational) equivalency. (environment, information, norms, institutions.
Ergo some of us can create institutions, norms, information, and environment that the less cognitively able can depend upon as means of obviating their limited ability to calculate, and decreasing the cost of their acquisition of those patterns.
But an individual regardless of his abilities CAN perform due diligence to the BEST of his abilities. And in fact, that is what we do. And we provide prior restraint in the form of institutions, procedures, laws, norms and traditions to both limit his ability to cause harm to others out of ignorance, and provide contextual, procedural and educational means of enabling him to act within those limits. We do this and always have done it whether it be baby, child, youth, adult, mature adult, or barbarian, slave, serf, freeman, citizen, sovereign.
Of course, we always seek discounts, and particularly discounts that suit our biases and wishful thinking, and facilitate our use of suggestion, obscurantism and deceit within the limits we can get away with.
To leap ahead, and seize your concern, The question might be instead, “why does one have the right to ignorance, error, bias, wishful thinking, suggestion, obscurantism, fictionalism, and deceit if cooperation and non conflict increasingly requires we eliminate them?
I appreciate your concern for the common man. But in each era, the defenders of the anchors of the prior order of ideas and therefore man, attempt to preserve it – always wrongly. The test is simple: are we adding to the information processing of man or we constraining or reducing it?