"In order to attain an
adequate conceptual grasp of the unitary nature of physical reality, it is
necessary to achieve a complete theoretical suspension of the image of the
world derived from perceptual intuition. In other words, physical theory has to effect a rigorously
mathematical circumvention of those imaginative limitations inherent in the
physiologically rooted cognitive apparatus with which an aleatory evolutionary
history has saddled us. Thus, the chief obstacle standing in the way of a
proper scientific understanding of the physical world would seem to be that of
our species’ inbuilt tendency to process information via epistemic mechanisms which invariably involve an
operation of subtraction from the imperceptible physical whole. Phenomenology
remains a function of physiology. Perhaps not least among the many startling
philosophical consequences of superstring theory is the way in which it seems
to provide a rigorously physicalist vindication of Plato: phenomenological
perception would seem to be akin to that of the prisoner in the cave who
mistakes flickering shadows for ‘the things themselves’." - Ray Brassier, Alien Theory
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