Morning, Sriram,
I am talking about the natural limitations of our intellect because it is linked to our senses and our brain structure. It is not 'meant' to understand the universe and all its complexity. Our perceptions and the actual reality could be at variance. And this is only about the physical universe. What lies behind the physical world and what kind of phenomena drive the universe we have no way of knowing at all.
Intellect is certainly linked to our brain structure, I would agree, just as, I would contend, is the 'spiritual' part of our nature. However all sorts of information feed into the brain from a variety of sources, which are certainly not limited to our so called 5 senses. One of the qualities that our brains possess is trying to understand the reasons for all sorts of phenomena(both internal and external). This is most likely driven by our innate curiosity. I personally would not use the word 'meant' because it implies some sort of outside direction, when there is no evidence that any except evolutionary demands are present. Whether our brains are capable of understanding all the complexities of the physical world is a question which I do not think it is possible to answer as I cannot possibly see that far into the future. Certainly we have come a long way in being able to explain how the physical universe works, although, of course, many difficult and puzzling questions remain. I would rephrase your last sentence here in this way:
"What, if anything, lies behind the physical world we have no way of knowing at all and what kind of phenomena drives the universe we still have much to learn."
Secondly, this intellectual need that we feel for understanding the world is just an extended or perhaps even perverted need that we are unable to control. Instead of being a part of the world we could be actually separating ourselves from it as though we are different from it. .
The intellectual need, as you put it, seems to be the result of a natural urge within human beings. Also, I would strongly disagree with your idea that this tends to lead to some sort of alienation. On the contrary, by examining the natural world and by trying to explain it by using our intellect, we increasingly see that we are part of this natural world, not separate from it.
There is a part of us that in actuality deals with many complex mechanisms in our lives though we don't understand them. Take the case of the birds that ippy talked of. Like the birds....all plants and animals and all of us use complex 'quantum' mechanisms in our daily lives. We have been doing so for millennia before we understood what QM even means. There could be many more such complexities that we are not even aware of yet.
Of course, the human species, like every other species, has been able to manipulate all sorts of natural phenomena without being aware of it. That goes without saying. The fact that birds, as well as plants etc. seem to be able to use quantum phenomena(in the case of the robin, quantum entanglement based upon cryptochrome in the eye creating a chemical compass where photons are able to respond to magnetoreception) is fascinating and hugely complex, but, as you say, many of these complex processes have only been discovered very recently. Of course there will be many complexities that we are not aware of yet. So. What is wrong with seeking to understand complex phenomena such as the above when we can identify them?
It is paradoxical that our intellect is struggling to understand what we use naturally every day.....even such obvious matters as the brain and our body functions. What is that part of us that performs such complex tasks every day and what is that part of us that is trying to understand it?
I don't think that it is paradoxical at all. The more we discover how the world works, the more likely we are to see how we fit into the overall picture and the more we can discover about ourselves as physical entities, which, to my mind, includes both the intellectual and the spiritual side. As far as the last question goes, maybe it has something to do with the various areas of the brain interacting and communicating with each other through EM activity. Certainly, for instance, recent experiments have suggested that the synchronicity of nerve firing correlates with a conscious state.
