From Interface to Abstraction: On the Non-Intuitiveness of Scientific Progress and the Structure of Models of Reality

Scientific progress is often accompanied by a decrease in intuitive comprehensibility. Modern physical theories—such as quantum mechanics and relativity—exhibit structures that conflict with everyday experience. This paper argues that this phenomenon is not accidental but follows from the transition between two fundamentally different modes of representation: the sensory interface and abstract scientific models. Sensory experience is interpreted as an evolutionarily optimized interface, while scientific theories are treated as operational reconstructions that extend beyond this interface. On this basis, the paper formulates the principle of non-intuitive progress and the cognitive distance paradox, and argues that scientific theories should be understood as partially overlapping models rather than mutually exclusive descriptions of reality.