Our knowledge of the world is expanding into radically unknown worlds. We began with what we perceive with our five senses, mainly sight and hearing. This is every child’s preNewtonian world, beyond the Piaget stage of “formal operations”. (I am following the scheme outlined in my essay The Unfinished Road Into Knowledge.) Beyond that, even Newton’s theories (laws of motion and gravitation) are somewhat counter-intuitive, beyond “common sense” (e.g. a force causes acceleration, not motion itself).

However, beyond Newton, our notions and theories are forced to become ever more “weird”. special relativity theory 5hows that two observers moving with respect to each other cannot establish the simultaneity of events, because both space and time change to a different frame of reference – only the velocity of light is the same for all; space and time fuse into four-dimensional space-time; and matter and energy are interconvertible, with only their sum conserved.

General relativity theory goes beyond this, to identify accelerated motion with gravity and in turn with curvature of space-time. Where is our common sense now? Yet predictions of the theory prove to be true, thus confirming its reality.

Quantum theory shows additional conundrums: superposition of quantum states, the uncertainty principle, entanglement, wave-particle complementarity. Our sense experience knows nothing about this micro-world which underlies our everyday experience. But again, experiments confirm it.

So much is already in the previously quoted essay. But the cosmology of near-Big Bang states, theory of Black Holes, superstring and M-brane theories, have now gone far beyond this. Talk about 11 or 26 space dimensions leave us baffled. This is a micro-micro world and a macro-macro world totally beyond our conception, let alone perception. “The world is not only stranger than we think, it’s stranger than we CAN think.” (Quote by Wheeler, I believe.)

Backing up a bit (back to the previous essay), there is thermodynamics and its micro-version, statistical dynamics. There is nothing counter-intuitive about the arrow of time and the unidirectionality of entropy; we are all familiar with these notions in our everyday experience. However, when we get into entropy decreases in complexity theory and the theories of life, things get almost miraculous, even if we can get “order for free” and feel “at home in the Universe”, as Stuart Kauffman says. This is not counter-intuitive, not a paradox, but it feels like a miracle. We are alive, after all, but it is fantastic that we manage it. Or that the Universe managed it.

And then, of course, there are mental phenomena, which we do know from experience, but still don’t know how they are generated by the brain – what is that mysterious link?

We don’t know how consciousness is generated, or what sleep is, although we do it every night. And some supermental phenomena, if they really exist, need to be studied. Andspirituality, meditation, different states of consciousness, do exist, but again the links to ordinary consciousness are largely unknown. When mystics communicate with God, do they really? I have no reason to doubt, but it is beyond my experience.