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pragmatist comments on Superintelligence Reading Group - Section 1: Past Developments and Present Capabilities - Less Wrong
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I'll take a stab at it.
We are now used to saying that light is both a particle and a wave. We can use that proposition to make all sorts of useful predictions and calculations. But if you stop and really ponder that for a second, you'll see that it is so far out of the realm of human experience that one cannot "understand" that dual nature in the sense that you "understand" the motion of planets around the sun. "Understanding" in the way I mean is the basis for making accurate analogies and insight. Thus I would argue Kepler was able to use light as an analogy to 'gravity' because he understood both (even though he didn't yet have the math for planetary motion)
Perhaps an even better example is the idea of quantum entanglement: theory may predict, and we may observe quarks "communicating" at a distance faster than light, but (for now at least) I don't think we have really incorporate it into our (pre-symbolic) conception of the world.
The apparent mystery in particle-wave dualism is simply an artifact of using bad categories. It is a misleading historical accident that we hear things like "light is both a particle and a wave" in quantum physics lectures. Really what teachers should be saying is that 'particle' and 'wave' are both bad ways of conceptualizing the nature of microscopic entities. It turns out that the correct representation of these entities is neither as particles nor as waves, traditionally construed, but as quantum states (which I think can be understood reasonably well, although there are of course huge questions regarding the probabilistic nature of observed outcomes). It turns out that in certain experiments quantum states produce outcomes similar to what we would expect from particles, and in other experiments they produce outcomes similar to what we would expect from waves, but that is surely not enough to declare that they are both particles and waves.
I do agree with you that entanglement is a bigger conceptual hurdle.