Daniel Whiteson

It's not simultaneously a particle and a wave.

It's neither.

It's something new that's somehow kind of captured by this and that.

It's like you eat a new fruit and you're like, I have sensing notes of cranberry.

I'm sensing notes of an apple.

It's not sometimes an apple and sometimes a cranberry.

It's some new weird thing that's kind of reminiscent of things you're familiar with.

And so we tend to have this language in our minds of ideas we know how to play with and talk about and think about things that make sense to us.

And I do think that that limits our capacity to explore the universe already, even without aliens coming and giving us crazy ideas.

You know, quantum mechanics is already pushing us maybe to the edge of being able to understand that.

We can use mathematics, we can use philosophy, we can talk about it, we can build our society based on understanding of quantum mechanics, but we may never like really truly grok it because of fundamental limits in the way our brains work.

And

I think that comes out of our intuitive experience.

You know, the things you interact with when you were a child, I think it comes out of our senses, you know, the things, the ways we see the universe, the tiny slice of the universe that we are actually able to perceive and interact with.

It must shape the way that our minds work.

and this primitive language of intuitive objects that we demand everything get translated into, which is terribly confining.

I mean, it's very powerful, but it's also really confining.

I'm glad you've mentioned that, because when you think about certain birds using cryptochromes in their eyes to entangle and see the magnetic field of the Earth, that's bananas.

It's incredible.

So it's possible there are senses that we just don't have them.