The only purpose of a man in exercising his reason is to become a more animalistic man than a beast. - Goethe
Even if they hear it, they don't understand it, like deafness. —Heraclitus
Parmenides said, yes, Socrates; That's because you're still young. If I'm good, then one day philosophy will hold you more firmly, and then you won't despise even the most humble things. — Plato
Man is an extremely sophisticated machine, far from being as Descartes understood, and can be illustrated with simple mechanical principles. But the question for the time being is not whether man is a machine or something else, but why did he naturally form such a precise physiological structure.
Look only at the inner ear of the person - the human ear is divided into the outer ear, the middle ear and the inner ear. The inner ear is as small as a bean grain, but it has to hold two important organs, one is the cochlea that manages hearing, and the other is a receptor specializing in spatial position and motion sensation, called the "vestibular".
The function of the vestibular is particularly sensitive, and one of its functions is to maintain the balance of the body posture, even if the eyes are closed, the slightest tilt of the human body can not hide it. This is of course a very important function, without which it is impossible for a person to remain upright and athletic.
But once the sensitivity of the function exceeds the limit, it is also troublesome, for example, there is a common disease called "Meniere's disease", which is caused by the loss of the vestibular membrane and water, the patient can only lie flat on the bed, dare not move slightly, and even the eyes cannot be opened, otherwise it will feel the sky spinning, turning the river upside down, so that it makes nausea and vomiting, restlessness, so dim and unable to sustain itself, how to live?
However, as the earth flips at a high speed, the sensitive vestibule has no feeling about it, resulting in millions of years of empty life and not knowing that the earth under their feet is a self-rotating sphere. In ancient China, the earth was like a tablet on the back of a turtle and turtle, so there was a saying of "the end of the world", which actually coincided with the human senses.
The Greek astronomer, mathematician, and geographer Ptolemy, in the 2nd century AD, put forward a systematic geocentric theory, which is a big progress, he at least knew that the earth is a circular sphere like other celestial bodies, and seeing the sun and the moon rising in the east and falling in the west, the planets and stars in the sky are orbiting the earth, the geocentric theory is both in line with the truth of the senses, but also in line with the sublimation of reason, how can it not be convincing and spread all over the world?
The Earth's rotation speed is 465.18 m/s
Only Copernicus's heliocentric said that at first it was really confusing, because the rotation and rotation of the earth at a speed of tens of kilometers or even hundreds of kilometers per minute is really contrary to the daily feeling brought to us by the vestibular organs. Therefore, although it was only a hundred years later that Galileo gave Copernicus a belated praise, in the end he was unable to avoid house arrest and reprimand by the Inquisition, and to be fair, I am afraid we cannot blame only the church and the monks for their ignorance.
The question should be posed in reverse to be more interesting: If our vestibules failed to perceive both the rotation of the Earth (the sense of spatial position) and the rotation (the sense of movement), wouldn't everyone be born a brilliant Copernicus? And why did the spring of science have to wait until the 16th century? In other words, Copernicus, who opened the prelude to the history of human science, to a large extent, only filled the incapacitation of the small vestibular organ, which is really a regrettable thing that can make all mankind sigh!
However, there are two doubts here that are worth pondering: First, is the dullness of the senses not a necessary protective mechanism? Second, if this is the case, what will it mean for reason to transcend sensation?
The first suspicion is obvious: if we had been in an accurate perception of the earth's rotational motion all day long, that is, under the turmoil far more severe than that of Meniere's disease, I am afraid that the dizzy and nightly human beings would have lost their minds.
That is to say, the establishment of our sensory functions is limited only by the maintenance of the body's own steady-state existence, beyond which it is bound to cause harm and is intolerable, even if this transcendence can lead us to obtain more real and richer information.
Therefore, our vestibular organs will never allow people to directly harvest the laws of the movement of the celestial bodies, and it will rather deceive us so that even if the humble human beings live foolishly, they must not make any noble ending of "devotion to the pursuit of truth".
In fact, the structure and function of the vestibular are based on the physical principles of gravity, which guarantee only one-dimensional coordination of motion between the organism and the earth, and is not responsible. The reason is that, with the exception of the sun and the moon, the influence of other celestial bodies on surface life is negligible, and the care for the sun and moon can be left to other senses to be disposed of by other means, and does not have to be taken care of by vestibular organs.
If this is the case, why should Copernicus, who represents the intention of mankind, skip the vestibule to seek advanced development? This is precisely the question that the second doubt asks for. Looking at the history of human civilization, this question is not an isolated event, it is actually a common feature of all human intellectual activity.
For example, in the 5th century BC, the "atomism" proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Liu Qibe in order to investigate the cause of all things is still a frontier topic in particle physics. However, this subject is largely caused by some kind of defect in microscopic vision or microscopic sensation, and it should be noted that for the most primitive cosmic states such as electrons or protons (everything in the world, including us humans, are descendants of the evolution of these elementary particles), this is an extremely simple processing object, which only needs to borrow its own inherent physical induction properties (such as electromagnetic forces, etc.) to grasp any relevant tiny particles, such as protons borrowing their positive charge to obtain and negative electrons.
The "sensibility", "intellect" (shared by animals) and "rationality" (unique to humans) that gradually evolved in the biological field may actually be just the product of the gain and development of the "inductive" properties of primitive physics. Moreover, high-level attributes always have to suppress and obscure low-level attributes, so that the rise in cognitive ability tends to become more and more light. That is to say, the rational wisdom and instruments that we humans now have to borrow are probably only to make up for the original "feelings" that have been lost.
For example, biologists have found that many insects (such as bees), birds (such as geese), and even some mammals (such as monkeys) can see ultraviolet rays that exceed the human horizon; Many aquatic animals (such as dolphins, whales, etc.) can hear infrasound waves with vibration frequencies below 16 Hz; Bats can hear ultrasonic waves with vibration frequencies higher than 20,000 hertz; These are all areas of human sensory disability or sensory inattention.
Thus, we have painstakingly (rationally) created a variety of tools such as spectrometers and oscillators, and the result is nothing more than reconstructing or tracing some primitive dependencies, which at best amount to supplementing the sum of the original lower perceptions of those ancestors.
In other words, we are using a series of more complex and laborious ways to deal with objects and problems that may otherwise be extraordinarily simple. However, your transcendence does not seem to bring you more knowledge, but makes you more and more unclear about the source of knowledge, the higher your level of perception sublimates, the farther away from your root-seeking ability, which is like the electromagnetic induction ability that can sense particles or atoms, in fact, it is not completely separated from your body, it is only precipitated in the deep layers of cell metabolism (such as membrane ion exchange), and even it lurks under your mental activity (such as neural polarization reactions), but unfortunately you can't get it out anyway Let it appear as intuition or thought, otherwise, wouldn't all the deep investigations and problems in the history of science make you finish it all in one fell swoop?
Therefore, the reverse retrograde was not successful, and people had to move forward, and they were afraid of running so fast that Nietzsche rebuked the common people and called "Superman". As everyone knows, the farther you run forward, the more you lose in the backward direction, anyway, the total amount of knowledge in nature will not overflow the limited range of cosmic events after all, why are you bitter like a blind bear pulling the bud valley, picking up and abandoning, in vain?
The problem may not stop there. In view of the current intelligent leap and scientific and technological progress, which has led to the destruction of the earth's environment and the overall survival of mankind, we have to start planning how to fly to the outside world and find a new foothold, for which of course we must first thank Copernicus, an astrologer who surpassed the vestibule and started science.
However, have people ever wondered that if we crossed the sensory limits, opened the temple of wisdom, and clarified the relationship between the earth and other celestial bodies, and the result was only to destroy the earth and flee to other places, would it be better to simply accept the limitations of the vestibular organs in the first place, and perhaps today and in the future human beings would live more safely?
Remember, humans have been around for 3 million years, 2.99 million of which have lived under strict sensory control. Although this seems to be a bit of a nest, the overall living conditions are safe and sound, and there is no danger of extinction. Now that we have only been usurping the limits of our senses for thousands or even hundreds of years, but we are already panicking about the precursors of extinction, if you think about it, does the naturally prescribed sensory threshold have an intriguing deep meaning?
Wandering Earth