Roger Malina - limits of cognition

Malina is a scientist who is currently building telescopes to look at dark matter. Malina argues that the way we think at the moment is not the right way to think. This is because outerspace is fundamentally different and so we can't "think it". this is mainly because it is not in our scale. He is spending 10 yrs building a new hubble-like telescope to look at dark matter.
Argues we need to name new kinds of things and develop new linguistic systems, this is because we cannot extrapolate!! it is dangerous and misleading.
If you want to know something new you have to change yourself. So follows maturana saying that system can only know new things if it redesigns itself from the inside - aka stelarc.
"Reality has to do with causation and our notions of reality arise from out abilities to change the world." ian hacking.
astronomers cannot do experiments on the universe - must build simulations - hayles difference between pre-diction and retro-diction. experiments on simulations and not on the world. Abstraction is what the scientist does, immersion is what the artist does.
the senses - augmentation - martian robot - extended touch.
hubble picture 2m diametre pupil - augmented sight.
this is an instrumentalist perspective - makes instruments in order to be able to understand things.
Key problem is the inadequacy of human cognition... training set on prior experience, langauge as a pre-condition.
Maturana " how we are organised structures what we can know and how we can know it."
Interesting that the telescope is unimaginable to leonadro da vinci - this is because he would not know how to pull it apart.
So what we need to do is build a new sensuality and new cognition. following new leonardo book: "the hidden sense" Van Campen 2007.
And we need a more intimate science: we need to own the data about our own environment. - ie. tap the barometer rather than watch the news to find out what the weather is.
we really only know what we need to know to survive.

What is space? = it is a construct of our perceptual system. Our perceptual system creates objects and relationships between objects.