| | Hi Jana,
Your restatement is exactly what I expected. The point I am addressing (not trying to make) is a very subtle one, and not the one most people think of. For example, you think the point is this:
It is possible that there are aspects of reality our five senses are not able to perceive.
In fact, there are more things we cannot perceive than there are that we can, but it is irrelevant.
The point is, there is nothing human beings can know that we do not know, directly or indirectly, from what we are directly conscious of. The only things we cannot know that way, we cannot know at all, which I will address in a moment.
In both of your examples, the knowledge is derived, if it is knowledge, from what can be directly perceptually observed. Superstrings (a hypothesis, not a theory) are an attempt to explain certain observed phenomena. If the phenomena were never observed, the hypothesis would never have been posited. If we could no perceptually observe geese and their behavior, the knowledge they can recognize each other would be impossible. That knowledge is derived from what can be observed at the perceptual level. Ultimately all knowledge is only about the world we directly perceive, or it is not knowledge at all.
Here is one of the things wrong with the idea that sensory limitations place limits on our knowledge of reality. If you and another student study the same things your entire life, assuming you both have similar mental abilities and apply yourselves equally, which will have the better understanding of reality? But suppose one of you is blind.
This brings me to what we cannot know. If you are the blind student, you will never know what I mean by "red" as I perceive it. For that matter, you cannot know what I mean by "red" as I perceive it, even if you are not blind, because we cannot consciously perceive anyone else's subjective experiences. Or, for that matter, we can never know what the perceptual experiences of any living creature actually are.
"Limits to knowledge," is not the same thing as saying, "imperfectly in touch with reality," unless all you mean is we are not omniscient or infallible. We cannot be in prefect, or even imperfect touch with all of reality, but we can be and usually are in perfect touch with all the reality we need to be in touch with to live successfully in this world. The child that has learned the difference between oranges and lemons and knows he likes the taste of oranges, but not the taste of lemons, is in perfect touch with that part of reality.
Uncertainty Principle and the constancy of the speed of light seem to suggest that there are limits to knowledge.
Our knowledge of the uncertainty principle and our knowledge of the constancy of the speed of light (which presently is in some doubt), in fact, suggest the limits to our knowledge have not been discovered in the scientific realm, and there is nothing to suggest we will not continually push back the limits of our knowledge in this area.
As for the uncertainty principle, the limit is not one of knowledge at all, it is a limit of our current method of dealing with certain scientific experimental data. Since "particles" are described as "wave phenomena" and the behavior can be described using the same formulas by which waves can be described (e.g. fourier transforms), but cannot be simultaneously conceived as both particles and waves (which are dynamic, that is, have no steady state), the attempt to determine at any precise "location" a particle's momentum (which must be static in some way, that is, have some steady state) by means of wave formulas is impossible. The importance of this is terribly overblown. It only means, "by this method," we cannot make this determination.
Regi
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