BUILDING A LOGICAL MIND --- Episode 6

                CAN WE LIVE IN A COMMONSENSE WORLD
                YET "KNOW" MANY ABSTRACT TRUTHS ? 

      Never before have there been so many gaping chasms between what the world seems to be and what science tells us it is. "Us"meaning laymen. It's like a million Copernican Revolutions all happening at the same time. As in for instance we "know," as high-school graduates and readers of Newsweek, that time is relative, that quantum particles can be both there and not, that space is curved, that colors do not inhere in objects themselves, that astronomic singularities have infinite density, that or love for our children is evolutionarily programmed, that there is a blind spot in the center of our vision that our brains automatically fill in. We "know" that our thoughts and feelings are really just chemical transfers in 2.8 pounds of electrified pudding. We "know" we are mostly water, and water is mostly hydrogen, and hydrogen is flammable, and yet we are not flammable. We "know" a near-infinity of truths that contradict our immediate commonsense experience of the world. And yet we have to live and function in the world. So we abstract, compartmentalize : there's stuff we know and stuff we "KNOW" : I "know" my love for my child is a function of natural selection,but I know I love him, and I feel and act on what I know. Viewed objectively, the whole thing is extremely schizoid ; yet the fact of the matter is that as subjective laymen we don't feel the conflict. Because of course our lives are 99.9% concretely operational, and we operate concretely on what we know, not on what we "KNOW." 
   Understand that we talking about laymen like you and me, not about giants of philosophy and math, many of whom had well-documented trouble navigating the real world----Einstein leaving home in his pajamas,  Kurt Godel (genius logician and mathematician) unable to feed himself, and so on. To appreciate what the inner lives of great scientists / mathematicians / metaphysicians are like, we need only sit in a quiet spot and try to form a truly rigorous and coherent idea --- as opposed to a fuzzy or Newsweekish idea --- of what we really mean by "omnipotent," "three," or "finite but unbounded." I.E., to try to do some disciplined or directed ABSTRACT thinking. There's a very definite but inarticulable strain on the seams of the mind involved in this kind of thinking. One of the quickest routes to to this feeling is to try to think hard about dimension. There is something we "KNOW," which is that spatial dimensions beyond the Big 3 exist. Some can even construct a tesseract or hypercube out of cardboard. A weird sort of cube-within-a-cube, a tesseract is a 3-D projection of a 4-D object. The trick is imagining the tesseract's relevant lines and planes at 90 degrees to each other, because the 4th spatial dimension is one that somehow exists at perfect right angles to the length, width, and depth of our regular visual field. We"KNOW" all this, but now try to rally and truly picture it concretely. You can feel. almost immediately, a strain at the very root of yourself, the first popped threads of a mind starting to give at the seams.