p122

“What is phenomenology?” An important additional comment

The text reads:

“... these effects do not pop up haphazardly, but show up rather systematically at restricted places. The phenomenological way to see the world is to see it exploiting this special feature of the world.”

 Actually, a very importance characteristic of phenomenological understanding is not clearly mentioned: we do not pay any attention to the existence of the disparate scales. This is noted in Preface and Introduction, but should be emphasized again here.

 Of course, this usually means that we are indifferent to the underlying microscopic world

“ The world tolerates phenomenological understanding”

 Why?

 It must be clearly noted that in this book this is regarded as an empirical fact. Therefore, without thinking why, the fact is fully utilized. Especially, this is unabashedly combined with the so-called anthropic principle, because it is hardly thinkable that intelligent capability in general is meaningful in the world where phenomenological understanding is impossible. We could emerge in this world, because the world allows phenomenological understanding. Consequently, inevitably, the world we observe allows phenomenological descriptions. However, still, it is highly interesting to understand the `mechanism’ of the world that tolerates phenomenological understanding.

 In the world made of atoms and molecules, the size of intelligent organisms must be at least 10^{-3}m/10^{-10}m = 10^7 times as large as the atomic scale (Chapter 1, footnote 17 on p10). This is a scale at which thermal fluctuations may be regarded sufficiently small. In other words, intelligent organisms live in the world describable in terms of collective coordinates; thanks to the law of large numbers, slowly changing phenomena dominate in such a world. As is stated in foot note 4 of this page, it must be advantageous to the organisms to recognize stable features of the world properly. For example, organisms that correctly recognize that a variable that can affect their lives, say, temperature does not usually change extremely rapidly and those failing to recognize the tendency would have different direction of investment of their resources and the latter are more likely to be selected out. Thus, intelligence is forced to evolve in the direction to recognize collective features of the environment first. Organisms become more intelligent if they live in the world richer in phenomena understandable phenomenologically. Or, we could say the world produces intelligent organisms commensurate with its phenomenological diversity.