We have a skewed thinking of scale.
We live in a specific range and evolution optimized us to perceive it best for survival. We see things from almost a millimeter big to (depending on point and field of view) kilometers. And we perceive time in seconds to years.
Our brains have adapted to reality at this scale. But this is not the only scale that exists. There are things much smaller and much larger, there is time much smaller and much greater. There are (seven?) other dimensions besides 3D and time. And if we perceived these scales, our “knowledge” of what is and what is not – would have been different.
This skewed perception makes us “fill the gaps” of what we “see” that does not fit the scale with made-up explanations and intuitions. It is how our brain works – filling the gaps in order to “move on” towards the next challenge which was – in most of human existence – existential.
This skewed perception of reality to the scale we exist in makes us tend toward making things we “perceive” as the only “truth”. As “given”. But we need to realize it only comes from our lens of scale.
Let’s take a time and decision example. If we were a creature that has a 1,000 years life span – we would have looked differently at every-day risk-taking. If crossing the road in the US can kill you in a 1:485 chance over your ordinary life span it means over a 1,000 years – your chances drop to 1:5 (rounding our current life span to 80). That’s for crossing the street. Driving? That would be completely out of the question. At 1:0.7 it is all but a certainty of death.
It is difficult for us to think of how small and insignificant we are in the universe (my kids loved this illustration) and through time. It is difficult to perceive how super complex systems can “spontaneously” emerge from an apparently random array of tiny building blocks – without any planning, design or forethought.
We look at our current knowledge and state of things and imagine “this is it” – this is how the world is. We forget only a few centuries and even decades back – we had no idea the microscopic world, DNA, much of physics, psychology and much of what today we take as granted even existed.
Even what we know as English – which we take as understood among people fluent in it – would be completely unintelligible for the same people 1,000 years ago. English changed so much in just a single millennia. And good luck with reading until 1,300 years ago – when putting a space between words was first invented.
