Pedro Domingos

Your brain’s knowledge of physics is in many ways more sophisticated than any physics textbook’s.

Yes, but only at certain narrow ranges of time, space, energy, and only visible phenomena. Human intuition totally fails at fluid behavior on small scales and is blind to most electromagnetism (other than visible light). Human intuitive physics only sees a small part of reality.

But if you applied the brain’s physics inference engine to the full range of observations, it would blow Einstein away.

But only for the type of physical phenomena which were relevant for the evolution of brains. For other phenomena (at non-human scales, or for electromagnetism, molecular, atomic, quantum, ...) math is our only window to reality. Still created by human brains, though.

Our current math is about as sophisticated as retina + V1 + V2 (which is why that’s all we can - barely - understand). Your full visual cortex etc. would leave QFT in the dust if it was evolutionarily useful.

Yes, but it wasn't. And, nevertheless, we developed QFT, QED, QCD, ..., which are certainly not based on intuition. Other parts of our (collective) brain opened up windows to reality way beyond our perception and intuition.

My point is that our brains running on microscopic data would leave QFT in the dust.

Not *our* brains, which evolution hardwired to work at certain space-time scales and with certain innate physicas (e.g. locality, "objectiness", some space-time equivariance,...). For that to work, we would have to re-evolve different brains and (very) different senses.