At a fundamental level, physical reality defies our most basic intuitions about causality and locality, which is to say about time and space. Our senses and perceptions evolved to evade tigers and catch food, not to understand the properties of photons and subatomic particles. Despite more than 100 years of effort by the world’s leading physicists and philosophers, the quantum realm remains incomprehensibly bizarre. The fact that we cannot comprehend it is a form of environmental mismatch.
We may face a similar type of conceptual difficulty in grappling with a pandemic. Our brains may not be naturally suited to dealing with problems of this scale or nature. Even our language, our concepts, are inapt tools, artifacts of our previous reality.
From a good discussion of current events by Charles Yu in The Atlantic.
