Pedro Domingos

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.

Moreover, what brains and physics do is qualitatively different. Brains are prediction machines, unworried about explanations/models. Physics aims at building "good explanations" (as Deutsch puts it). An "intuitive understanding" and a "formal explanation" are different things.

Brains and physics are both predictive and explanatory. And your brain is a better mathematical machine than any math used in physics. (“Intuitive” is a misleading word.)

Not true, sorry. Humans have used arrows and catapults successfully for 1000s of years. However, only 4 centuries ago Galileu explained that all objects suffer the same gravitational acceleration and Newton (using math) explained that arrow trajectories are parabolas.