Crutches for brains

When he can pull himself away from, for example, being "rather worried" by "violent action against property" (and my god, even if you are going to take that ludicrous construction seriously as something to be worried about, does spray painting a billboard even count?), PZ Myers is occasionally able to say something interesting.

The article is about the limitations of the human brain, many of which I was familiar with already. If you aren't, I don't recommend starting with this brief, snotty article; I'd say go for a book by V.S. Ramachandran or someone like him, who unlike friend Myers is genuinely, consistently interesting, and feels no need to be a dick to make up for his own inadequacies as a human being.

What I like here is this brief passage, ignoring the miserably failed attempt at goofy humor that concludes it:

We even build crutches for brains. Math is a crutch. Science is a crutch. Philosophy is a crutch. Artists, too, use learned heuristics to get their minds to operate reliably in that unnatural mode. We rely utterly on these kinds of intellectual tools to focus our brains efficiently on problem solving, rather than doing what comes naturally, which usually involves snarfing down cheeseburgers and having wild monkey sex with other bipeds.

This might make me dumb, but I had never, ever thought to frame things that way. Leaving aside the art and philosophy for the moment, I was of course aware of the essential incompleteness and blundering nature of scientific inquiry, and I've long had a layman's fascination for the mystery of how it is that math, an abstract, constructed system totally disconnected from reality, seems to be very, very good at describing the way the universe works. But it never occurred to me to think of these things as crutches, with all that implies.

Imagine, being able to see the workings of the universe we live in directly, without the assistance of math and science. To be able to just understand. It's kind of a breathtaking thought.