The Redhead Has Nothing To Do With This Post...

I just like her. She seems to have a low level of complexity, which feature I'm learning to appreciate. All of which makes more sense when.....well, ok, let's just get on with it.
-------------------------------
How many variables can humans process?

Three. Maybe Four.

No. Really. It's an experimental fact.

"The conceptual complexity of problems was manipulated to probe the limits of human information processing capacity. Participants were asked to interpret graphically displayed statistical interactions. In such problems, all independent variables need to be considered together, so that decomposition into smaller subtasks is constrained, and thus the order of the interaction directly determines conceptual complexity. As the order of the interaction increases, the number of variables increases. Results showed a significant decline in accuracy and speed of solution from three-way to four-way interactions. Furthermore, performance on a five-way interaction was at chance level. These findings suggest that a structure defined on four variables is at the limit of human processing capacity."

Abstract of Research Publication: "How many variables can humans process?"
Halford GS, Baker R, McCredden JE, Bain JD., School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/ps/mind_variables.pdf

----------------

We are capable of perceiving three dimensions, four if you count what we do with time as perception. However, for some number of years now, it's been pretty clear that multidimensional thinking is required to understand even some fairly common features of our universe. Matrix math was invented essentially to deal with simultaneous solutions of large wads of variables in multiple equations, which turns out to be pretty useful in describing features of multiple dimensions.

So, our math permits us to calculate the volume of an n-dimensional polyhedron, but we still can't really grasp the concept of something actually existing in n-dimensional space. We simply haven't got the mental horsepower to "see" the solution like we can with 3-D objects.

In every direction, from the very large to the very small, from deep time to micro-time, and in every scientific endeavor, we are bumping up against limits that we have simply not evolved to deal with. 

The problem is that we've outrun ourselves.

Our hunter-gatherer brains, evolved over a million or so years to accurately evaluate threats or opportunities based on about four different variables. By the time we're evaluating a situation with five variables, we're doing no better than chance at doing something that's going to have a positive outcome. That was plenty in most of our 150,000 years of hunter-gatherer history, but that's not the case anymore. 

Never mind cosmology and quantum events - we're dealing with stuff that directly affects us, like global politics, economics, nuclear strategy, and on, and on...even the climate, which has thousands on thousands of complex, poorly understood, and generally chaotic variables. The odds that humans (even Holy Man/Prophet AlGore) have any foggiest notion what the results of our attempts to "fix" it will be is as near to zero as anything in the universe.

We are on the verge, in short, not of running out of questions - we still have a lot of those - but of running out of the capacity to understand the answers. We have maxed out our cognitive abilities, and it is incredibly likely that we will soon be literally unable to even theoretically or conceptually make the mental leap necessary to answer whatever the next question is, or grasp even a vague understanding of the answer even if we happen to stumble across it. This is not to say that we don't THINK we know how to come up with an answer. All this is directly related to the frankly horribly bad capabilities of humans in estimating risk in even the most trivial exercises.

As the complexity of our lives increases, along with the new variables and populations, there are going to be an increasingly large number of questions, the answers to which we will be no more even theoretically able to understand than a field mouse is to understand cosmic red-shift. We are simply out of brainpower, and none new appears to have made an appearance.

Machines can probably do it. Machines believe whatever they're told without question, and are just as happy considering quantum level effects in 11-dimensional string space as they are calculating the time/space projections of the arc of an artillery round or the forces acting on an apple falling on Newton's head, and have zero difficulty in conceptualizing the data.

In fact, it's been demonstrated that a certain class of machines (the so-called Eureka machines) which have no information as to physics, mass, or gravity, can watch a pendulum and within a few hours use only those observations to derive simple laws of the universe, like "F=ma." If that doesn't sound too impressive, keep in mind that derivation took more-or-less humans some fairly broad hints and about 150,000 years to come up with.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2009/apr/02/eureka-machine-artificial-intelligence

Further, after cogitating on certain multi-body chaotic events, they've come up with equations to describe how to predict that certain things will happen. And they work. And we do NOT understand why they work. The machines simply say "This is the answer."  If they had a bit more sentience, they'd probably add, "You cannot grasp how this answer is derived, nor how the physics of it works. Use this formula, and you'll get an answer. Just trust us."

So, what can we take from this? I don't know. Which version do you like? That we've created a world that we are utterly incapable of controlling, and have therefore evolved to the end of our fitness to survive?

Probably.

But it's remotely possible that we're in the middle of the next evolutionary step. All of our Androids and iThingies, our phones, our computers and devices...they've become extensions of us, part of us. We are about .10 inch from being cyborgs. We have, in short, supplemented our brains with gigantic world-wide servers which will eventually feed us the answers to multi-phase, multi-complexity, multi-variable questions in near-instinctive time that we will rely on to be correct, much as our (very) recent ancestors did when they had to evaluate four variables in real time. We have instant knowledge, instant memory, instant records at our fingertips, faster than thought. For the first time in history, access to the most obscure fact, calculation, opinion, and communication is part of our gestalt.

In short, we may be well into our evolution from a purely biological life-form to -- something else.

It remains to be seen whether this new version of us is better suited to pass our genes to the next Darwinian level than our Kalahari-Desert brethren who're still living subsistence lives in their 4-factor-variable universe.

In Our Next Episode: