Jonah Lehrer has a short essay explaining how neuroscientist's underestimate this complexity. But they are slowly coming in terms with this reality. If not, these lines should help break that illusion of our omnipotence:
"Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, "highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable." The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds."
This is true in other aspects of life as well. We tend to fall for cognitive fluency when reality is chaotic and on the other hand we look for complexities in order to rationalize our inability to accept simplicity. We tend to dwell in this self created paradox.
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