And that’s why the brain processes and encodes things hierarchically. There are statistical regularities in most systems at multiple levels of abstraction that we naturally take advantage of as we build up our intuitive mental models of the world.
It seems like there’s a default level of abstraction that most humans work at when reasoning about causality. Somewhere above the level of raw pixels or individual sound frequencies (great artists should be able to deal competently at this level); somewhere below the level of global political, economic, and ecological phenomena (great leaders should be able to deal competently at this level); somewhere around the level of individual social interactions and simple tool use (just using the words “individual” and “simple” should indicate that this is the default level).
It takes a lot of scientific inquiry and accumulated knowledge to dig beneath these levels to a more reductionist view of reality. And even then, our brains simply lack the raw processing power to extract practical insights from running mental simulations of bedrock-level causality (not even supercomputers can do that for most problems of interest).
Abstraction is inescapable, even when we know that reality is technically reducible.
And that’s why the brain processes and encodes things hierarchically. There are statistical regularities in most systems at multiple levels of abstraction that we naturally take advantage of as we build up our intuitive mental models of the world.
It seems like there’s a default level of abstraction that most humans work at when reasoning about causality. Somewhere above the level of raw pixels or individual sound frequencies (great artists should be able to deal competently at this level); somewhere below the level of global political, economic, and ecological phenomena (great leaders should be able to deal competently at this level); somewhere around the level of individual social interactions and simple tool use (just using the words “individual” and “simple” should indicate that this is the default level).
It takes a lot of scientific inquiry and accumulated knowledge to dig beneath these levels to a more reductionist view of reality. And even then, our brains simply lack the raw processing power to extract practical insights from running mental simulations of bedrock-level causality (not even supercomputers can do that for most problems of interest).
Abstraction is inescapable, even when we know that reality is technically reducible.