But history is full of examples of superior minds operating in widely varying environments, many quite savage and primitive by our standards, who were able to accomplish great deeds.

The founding fathers were statesmen, soldiers, merchants, farmers, and well educated in the philosophy and science of their day. That their educations and experiences were limited with respect to ours, and handicapped by the ideas of their time, did not necessarily make them helpless and ignorant of their world. But they would probably be as lost in ours as we would be in theirs.

It doesn’t matter where you go in history, you find men who were exceptional politicians, warriors, leaders, businessmen, who conducted great enterprises based on philosophies we today would consider hopelessly wrong. They believed in religions, theories of statecraft, science, world views we now univrsally agree to be mistaken. People like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Bonaparte, Lenin, Hitler and many others were able to make things happen. We may not like what they did, and many of them ended in catastrophic failure, but they nevertheless made things happen. And they had no single theory of reality, and certainly not the same world, to transform.

I submit that knowing exactly how the world works isn’t as important as having a working theory that can be adapted to it. The world is constantly changing, no single understanding of it will always hold, indeed, no no single understanding of it need necessarily hold. Sometimes even totally contradictory world-views can achieve unimaginable but equally significant results; Stalin and Hitler, for example.

We have a tendency to patronize the past, to see the personlities of history in terms of “what could they have accomplished if they lived today?” The great movers and shakers of history might have been fish out of water today, and vice versa. Our science is demonstrably better, and we are certainly convinced our politics is more humane than theirs was, and that our religious views are more enlightened, our social organization more equitable. But what do we really know? All we can really say is “we don’t believe that any more.”

The fisherman knows how to sail his boat and keep it in good repair, knows which sea creatures are dangerous and poisonous, knows how to avoid pirates and he’s a good swimmer. He can also mend nets, hold his own in a waterfront tavern brawl, or bargain a good price for his catch in the market.

The courtier knows palace politics, how to charm the ladies by playing his lute and dancing the minuet, how to handle a rapier, and how to dress to impress the king and his ministers, and which scullery maid can be bribed safely to get useful gossip..

Each has equally legitimate survival skills to navigate and exploit his own personal subjective environment and to survive in it. Neither has any use for the skills and knowledge of the other, and in fact, probably has nothing but contempt for them. And neither needs to know whether Ptolemy, Kepler, Galileo, Newton or Einstein had the right cosmology. The “real world” has a lot more to do with who YOU are than what IT is. You may argue I have “rigged” my metaphor in order to prove my point, but that is exactly my point. The human mind is designed to rig its metaphors of reality in order to function effectively in a physical universe it simply is not equipped to fully understand.

Democritus was only partially right, everything we see and live is only by convention, by personal imagination and individual creation, and perhaps mutual agreement with our fellows. It is only outside our consciousness that ‘nothing really exists but atoms and the void’.

If you have the feeling that there’s an important scientific principle to be learned if you can just get close enough to a lightening bolt…

There’s a hell of a lot of stark reality in this universe above the level of basic physics, waves and space/time.

We don’t all create the same subjective universe, we all build different ones, and natural selection determines which ones work best for any given situation. The successful ones survive, they are memes passed on with a life of their own.

The courtier in the palace and the fisherman on his boat live in different universes, neither could survive long in the other’s world. Which one is real and which is artificial? If you are still asking that question, you’re not really catching on.

By evolving minds capable of divising varied subjective responses to the same objective external universe, DNA maximizes the probability that some subjective model of reality has survival value, and the race, and culture, evolves.