GrimCO: Explanations are still sought to this day...
If space is curved by the mass of objects, what actually is being curved and what is space composed of?
Often right questions are theoretically proven to have no answers. But when you ask the wrong questions to start with, you are certain not to get any meaningfull answers.
The categories - and words in human languages - like space, time, "object", matter, "composed", etc. are inherent to human mind. They - language and concepts - evolved spontaneously as a result of darwinian and memetic selection in such way that allowed the certain breed of apes to survive and prosper.
In order to do so, those concepts must have somewhat matched the reality those apes inhabited - the reality of sense qualities.
At the same time there was no reason to believe that those concepts have any meaning when it comes to the real nature of the world. They are dealing with "world" way beyong that affecting evolution if primates, so they have to come up with radically new concepts.
Scientists often draw some analogies for popular representation of science - like comparing vacuum with emptyness or electron with a ball flying circles around the nucleus or time with distance, or interaction with movement, etc. That does not mean things are really like that and that scientists think like that doing their research.
In many cases they can find no possible analogy to be expressed in the human mind terms and all we have are systems of equations.
midnight Target: One of my students was a savant. She would ask you your birthdate, and immediately tell you how old you were to the day, as well as the day of the week you were born, but she couldn't add 3 + 3 without using her fingers.
The case of so called "idiot-savants" is really one of mental deficiency that gives affected people access to certain abilities at the expense of the higher-level abilities - unlike autism which is a lack of some abilities irrelevant to the function of other.
The miraculous things that savants do - intricate calculations, memorisation and reproduction of images, memory retrieval, etc. - we all have that. Our brains are extremely sophisticated computing devices that work 99.9999% of the time without us noticing.
There was good reason why we evolved in such way that we do not have concious access to those resources. In some people that layer of concious control is broken.
They can draw a picture like the best camera - not in a way a human would do it from general outline through detalisation, but like a mechanical prolling device - or compute something quick because they have short-circuit from conciousness into the relevant brain structure. But they have trouble ordering the other parts of their brain around.
GrimCO: It's just amazing to me that with all the modern technology we have these days, we can't figure out how the human mind works. It is truly an amazing computer with a "mind" of it's own.
According to some theoretical considerations, the problem of human mind understanding it's own operation is unsolveable. In the very least, it would involve a paradox of having to know more than one knows at any given moment.
Another one is that our concious thinking is just a miniscule fraction of our mind's though process.
We can understand some basic principles of mind's operation. We could conceivably write some detailed explanations of human mind working that would be model of that mind on paper and even allow to reproduce it in a computer. Even map every atom or cell, etc. But a human mind still would not be able to comprehend that as a whole.
miko
