Our intelligence is limited to our scale. David rappaport is intelligent enough to get a psychology degree because for his ancient ancestors that intelligence allowed for survival in the premodern environment. Yet it is still scale limited. Ancient humans see a buffalo that could be killed for food or a rock they can hold in one hand and use as a tool, but they are blind to things they might also see that aren't at the human scale level. E.G. that rock is coated in bacteria, can a premodern human see that and understand it? Nope. That rock also tumbled down a mountain side. Does the premodern human see the rock and immediately understand how tectonic plates or erosion work? Nope. Do we modern humans even fully understand these things today? Not really.
We have managed to hack our own limited intelligence by using collective memory so we aren't starting from zero every generation, but we still aren't naturally inclined to come up to things we readily understand at our scale and grasp what they might represent on much smaller or larger scales than our own. Even for people trained in these fields it is extremely challenging due to the problems with scale and our frame of reference. We had to develop things like microscopes and telescopes to take objects small and large and either magnify them or reduce them to something we can actually begin to make guesses about at our scale.
Right. So that is about perspective, in the sense of ability to observe things.
This seems separate from capacity to understand them, after gaining the ability to observe them.
I'm not convinced by the second part, about human knowledge becoming too gnarly for humans to cope with except by group effort. This a breadth vs. depth question, but depth is the winner over time I think.
We have managed to hack our own limited intelligence by using collective memory so we aren't starting from zero every generation, but we still aren't naturally inclined to come up to things we readily understand at our scale and grasp what they might represent on much smaller or larger scales than our own. Even for people trained in these fields it is extremely challenging due to the problems with scale and our frame of reference. We had to develop things like microscopes and telescopes to take objects small and large and either magnify them or reduce them to something we can actually begin to make guesses about at our scale.