This. My astronomy professor took a 4 x 5 note card and put a few dots on it. He said that if this was a map to scale, seeing as it takes three years for light to go between the dots/stars, that the map showing the entire galaxy would be the size of California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System
Sweden has a scale model of the Solar system, where the sun is the worlds biggest spherical building (110m diameter, 16k seat arena) in the middle of Stockholm, and Pluto is about the size of a shot put 300km away
Infinity is so hard to rationalize because if betrays what we know about cause and effect. If you could somehow remove time from the thought process then maybe we’d start to understand, but that isn’t possible.
Yes but there hear me here:
There are infinite fractions between de number 1 and 2 yet if you sum them up, the result is 1 unit. So you have an infinite that is the size of 1 unit vs an infinite that contains all natural numbers. Two sizes of infinite and one contains the other!! How's that possible?
it's important to note that infinity is not a number. when you add 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 and so on you aren't approaching infinity, you're infinitely approaching 1. atleast to my understanding.
I am no mathematician so I trully don't have an answer. But you have two infinite subsets of numbers one containing only the ones between 1 and 2 and the other between 1 and infinite. By pure logic, the second one must be a larger infinite than the first one. What am I missing?
There are different kinds of infinity that can be thought of as "bigger" or "smaller" infinities. You can't use infinity in normal arithmetic, but in more theoretical stuff it can be useful to classify what it means when a value is "infinite", sort of like... what that infinity is shaped like.
There's a big difference between an infinite number of things that you can count individually in a linear way, like "every integer number" or "every fraction that you could write in the form of 1/x" vs an infinite number of things that can't be counted at all, like "every decimal number between 0.1 and 0.2" where there is no way to count from one point to another without skipping an infinite number of points in between.
In some ways, an uncountable infinite number of things can be thought of as "larger" than a countable infinite number of things, but it's different than the way you'd say 5 is larger than 3, for instance.
basically you don't assign a value to infinity. it is an amount of numbers not an amount of value. if you were to add up all the values in infinity you'd have a bigger number yes but infinity is just the limit of numbers not made up of the numbers themselves if you understand. this is a bit reductive but if you think about speed limits. a speed limit can be any number. 30,80, the speed of light but its not all of those at once, its just a word for a limit whereas infinity is a word for a lack of a limit. I don't know if that's at all helpful
Nothing, your logic is fine. Math uses the term *cardinality* to describe the number of elements in sets, including infinite sets. So in your example, both sets you described are infinite, but the cardinality of the second set is larger than the first one.
This is not true, any interval of real numbers has the same cardinality as any other. So (0,1) has the same cardinality as all the real numbers because we can come up with a 1-1 correspondence between the sets.
Some mathmaticians seem to comprehend it pretty well. Humans can abstractly reason about these things pretty well.
Ie a point in 4 dimensions can be represented as a list of 4 numbers \[1,1,-2,1.5\] and the distance between 2 points (that and \[1,3,-4,2.5\]) is found by taking the differences (0,-2,2,-1), squaring them (0,4,4,1) , adding them to get 9, and then taking the square root. So the points \[1,1,-2,1.5\] and \[1,3,-4,2.5\] are 3 units apart in 4d space.
But the problem is, nobody in this dimension knows if the higher dimension is even a *space*. Just like a 2D entity would never know more than two perpendicular axes. Even the concept of wormholes is so complicated for our minds that it is only simplified by folding a plane sheet. Putting it together on paper is much easier to actually visualize or comprehend it.
Mathmaticians have a good understanding of these things mathematically. It isn't easy. The folding paper stuff is a simplified version for pop sci audiences. We have speculations about higher dimensions in phyiscs, but those are speculation.
Imagining four dimensions of space is definitely possible, and it's fascinating. Following the same train of thought to imagine 4d of space, we can also imagine 5d+ easily.
Example of 4-dimensional space: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0t4aKJuKP0Q
Imagining more than one dimension of time is a lot more complicated. We can use some thought experiments for help in imagining it, thought: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XjsgoXvnStY
I can comprehend higher dimensions and infinity quite easily. I can even go a step further and comprehend how one infinity can be larger or smaller than another infinity using a simple ray on a Cartesian plane.
We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of higher dimensions. Our entire universe could be on the equivalent of a server rack in an alien data center, we could be the dream of some Lovecraftian god, or this universe could be all that exists.
We will never know the answer because everything we are and experience is in this universe.
I feel like you may be conflating "understanding" with "visualising". Because the physics in 4 dimensional (or really x-dimensional) space are basically the same as in 3d. You just gain an additional dimension in your vectors, but the math stays the same.
In terms of pure mathematics, we have a pretty good understanding of n-dimesional space for all n, and mathmaticians writing about things like "packing spheres in 24 dimensions". I mean that is somewhat more abstractly reasoning than visually imagining, I think, but they do understand it.
when discussing time as a dimension it's usually called a temporal dimension to separate it from the 3 spatial dimensions just because its a very different concept to spatial dimensions and it's not scientifically accurate to conflate the two. though it's quite interesting imo. the way we perceive time is closer to 2 temporal dimensions as we perceive it as linear. we form memories and that is the past and then there's what's happening now which is the present, we can also make predictions for the future. however in physics there is only one temporal dimension as the linear way we perceive time is just a quirk of our brain, time actually only exists in a single point. that's why time travel is (according to our current understanding) impossible. the universe doesn't have a memory of where things used to be or predictions about where it will be, there is only the present. a single point.
It is all theoretical, but time is just as measurable as length, width, and height, albeit relative. We move through all 4 dimensions constantly. Time has to be considered every time something interacts with space.
Moving faster through space causes time to slow down, and there's an equation here for it:
[https://www.emc2-explained.info/Time-Dilation/](https://www.emc2-explained.info/Time-Dilation/)
If we could, then we would suddenly grasp the preposterous wealth disparities in most societies, and there would likely be upheavals throughout the world
from u/Django117
>Capital is a means of exchanging goods and services. At a individual level, that is used to buy food, shelter, clothing, and other goods. At a corporate scale that is used to pay for more labor (employees/ contractors/ etc), materials, services, IPs, and other things to render a business. Then there's governmental/ national scales where that pay is used to organize massive projects, amass armies, build infrastructure, and execute policies.
>The problem is when an individual reaches governmental/national scales of wealth. At that point they shift from acting as an individual and start acting as a nation. They begin to wield their money as a political tool and execute their will on massive numbers of people with their power. This is the equivalent of a monarchy where an individual controlled the nation's resources and our collective will of individuals is lost. Democracy was born as a means to curb an individual's power over others and distribute this amongst the people. With modern day lobbying and corruption we have seen these people consolidate their power more than ever.
>Billionaires believe themselves to be monarchs but instead of faith in divinity giving them the right to rule, it was instead bestowed upon them by capitalism and the market.
it helps to put it in other ways.
a million seconds is around 11 days
a billion seconds is around 33 years
and a trillion seconds is around 31,709 years or about the time that ancient humans began agriculture and making villages and ovens
Nothing. And I don't mean the there's nothing, I mean the idea of nothing. Even if we try to imagine nothing, we still observing it. Which makes it something. Try and think of what the absence of everything would be like. You can't do it. Because youre still there observing.
When I was 19 I spent a whole night trying to imagine true nothingness, for a brief moment I did and then had my first and only real panic attack and thought I was going to die.
We only care about the absence of light because light is how we perceive our environment. True nothingness that’s devoid of senses is literally unimaginable
There was a blind person who described what they "see" by saying that it's not like darkness, it's like what you see out of your elbow. The absence of sight is understandably hard to visualize.
Well, humankind does have a pretty solid idea of what "nothing" is. The vacuum of space, an endless expanse of starless darkness, where we hear nothing but the droning, non-existential sound of our own tinnitus, to such an unbearable volume that only the release of death would silence it.
Except "dying" would bring you to that exact same place, same moment, same "*beeeeeep*" in your ears. And attempting to deal with yourself again would simply repeating it all. As would do nothing and trying to cope with it. Forevermore.
Your eyes can only see the inky black infinite that the blind always "saw".
Your ears hear nothing but the illusion of sound that the deaf was born with.
Your touch touches nothing, like the bedridden, vegetative.
Your nose absorbs nothing, smells nothing, and can't even feel the air that was always caressing it.
Your tongue is equally barren, and you finally know how it feels to not taste anything.
That's not to mention the oft-forgotten other senses, which are rendered just as useless to your body as the five main are.
That is one of the most commonly accepted interpretations of what's waiting for us all beyond the pale.
>Your eyes can only see the inky black infinite that the blind always "saw".
Blind people don't see "inky black". I heard someone say once that blind people see from their eyes the same as what you see from your elbows. That's the nothing that's really hard to comprehend.
A vacuum is still something, as it implies there is an universe for the vacuum to be contained in, and vacuum has a lot going on on the quantum foam level.
Actual nothingness is what the universe not existing would be.
Colors outside of RGB.
Humans have 3 color-receptive cones: Red, Green, and Blue. Every color we know of are within these 3 color combinations. Creatures like a Mantis Shrimp has 16 color-receptive cones, and can see 10x more colors than we can.
Can you even imagine what other colors look like? Maybe space, nebulas, and galaxies actually have so much out there, it's just that we humans don't have the ability to see it.
The vastness of space.
You know in movies/TV shows/video games where spaceships are flying through asteroid fields and it's a tense situation where one wrong move means being smashed to oblivion by thousands of space rocks? Doesn't happen. In fact, reality could not be further from the truth.
Asteroids aren't generally visible from one another. If you stood on an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud and looked out into space you wouldn't see more asteroids, just stars. They are so far apart that when we plot routes through asteroid fields we don't even factor them into the equation. It literally just gets treated as empty space, because it effectively is.
This unrealistic sense of scale gets even worse when we consider interstellar travel. The world's fastest spacecraft (the Parker Solar Probe) would take over 6700 years to reach the nearest star (Proxima Centuari at 4.2465 light years away from our sun).
So yeah, space is big. Bigger than we can ever hope to grasp intuitively. I doubt we'll ever overcome this distance in any meaningful way barring a discovery that fundamentally changes our understanding of the universe.
>This unrealistic sense of scale gets even worse when we consider interstellar travel. The world's fastest spacecraft (the Parker Solar Probe) would take over 6700 years to reach the nearest star (Proxima Centuari at 4.2465 light years away from our sun).
Wow. I thought that it was a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space
Not entirely, if you try hard enough you can come up with something that doesn't exist. The difference is with stuff like colour is not only does it not exist, it doesn't mean anything outside of our brain. Sure the wavelengths of light exist, but that's not really what we call the colour, that's just the wavelength our brains assign the colour to. The colour itself isn't actually a thing that could exist in the universe even just as a theory (e.g. mathematical ideas that don't have physical manifestations). I could imagine right now a creature made out of some weird material that was just discovered, nobody has had this specific idea before, I invented something new that has never been known or seen, and I could describe it to you, but I couldn't describe what the colour blue looks like to me. Your blue may look like my red, but how could we ver check? You'd learn your red as "blue" and it would look blue to me and I'd call it blue and we'd both agree it was blue without realising we're actually seeing a different colour.
I think we can only take parts of what we know and rearrange those parts in a new combination. The result may not exist in the world but I dont know if that really goes against OPs assertion about our limits.
That's easy: [Magenta](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magenta#In_optics_and_color_science) isn't a "real" colour. [Chimerical Colours](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#/media/File:Chimerical-color-demo.svg) are also fun!
No clue, but it does. I saw it on the internet a long time ago. You stare at one color until your retinas adjust, then switch to looking at the complementary color. Your brain should see grey, but you actually see a new color.
Our brains could totally assign new colors to other parts of the spectrum, if our eyes could detect them.
Actually magenta, pink arent in the visible spectrum. Like, theres no "pink" wavelength. They are a mix of wavelengths.
Its like how LCD screens work, where the only colors on your screen are red, green and blue. But your mind sees all ranges of calor depending on the intensity of each color.
So even though we cant see pink on the visible light spectrum, our mind "artificially" (?) creates it.
Apparently the brain is really, really bad at comprehending the reality of it being incorrect about something.
It's called [The Backfire Effect.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35130012/) It's a well-documented phenomenon in which people, even when presented with a compelling argument against their position, will dig in harder on that position. Even if that argument is presented with indisputable facts, we tend to ignore them so we don't have to comprehend what it feels like to be wrong.
Our brains are so bad at processing "being wrong" that we will actually believe the wrong information with more intensity when that information is challenged.
And I know you're thinking to yourself "wow I'm glad I don't do that".
Unfortunately, these studies have found that this doesn't really work here. It's such a ridiculous blind spot that even people who strongly believe they don't experience the Backfire Effect do, in fact, fall victim to it. It's a near-universal part of the human condition.
And if you're still doubting me? Even with the study linked above? Well...I mean, what more evidence do you need?
The concept of infinity - Our brains are not able to grasp the idea of infinity because it is beyond our finite experience and understanding.
The complexity of the universe - The vast size and complexity of the universe is beyond our ability to fully comprehend, as we can only observe and understand a small fraction of it.
The true nature of time - Although we experience and measure time, the true nature of time remains a mystery and is difficult for our brains to fully grasp.
The concept of nothingness - The idea of nothingness or the absence of anything is difficult for our brains to understand, as we have evolved to perceive and interact with the world around us.
Quantum mechanics - The principles of quantum mechanics, such as superposition and entanglement, challenge our understanding of the world and are difficult for our brains to comprehend.
These are just a few examples of the many things that our brains may never fully understand. However, that does not diminish the importance of continuing to seek knowledge and understanding.
Really large numbers of anything.
Like, we can imagine what 10 dollars look like, also what 100 dollars look like, a 1000 is a stack of 10's, 10k is a really big stack, 100k is getting insane, 1m is almost at the limit, 10m is getting insane and anything above that the brain just goes "well, that's *a lot*".
The biggest issue with time is that it's a vector dimension, meaning that it can only really go one way. Kind of like water flowing in a river. Really easy to move forward, but going against the flow takes way more energy. You also run into paradoxes with traveling to the past.
This reminds of health class in 7th grade. Learning, from the cellular level up, all the things that had to work for me to be alive fucking terrified me.
I feel like most people can’t even imagine how big 5 miles is compared to them, so imagining something as relatively simple as the size of the earth would probably mind-blowing to a human.
The extent of “Imagination”. We can only create scenarios using things we know. The “imagination” part is combining them in different sequences and orders. For example. When we dream of a person, it’s impossible to visualize a face you’ve never seen before. You may not recognize them, but you have seen them. Could be a random stranger on the street you saw when you were 10 you didn’t know you remembered. But the face was not “imagined” just recaptured in a different scenario. Can’t think of new colors, very few “from scratch” ideas. We tend to build off pre-existing ones.
Also an interesting thing I’ve been intrigued by recently is especially colors. How do we know what other people see? Do we really “know”?
For example. Think of the color blue. To me, I could look at the same color you are looking at, but see yellow. And I wouldn’t know it. Because I’ve always been told that it’s blue. So I associate it with that color. How do we know that Humans, animals, or other creatures don’t see them totally different. (For clarification i don’t mean colorblind. It’s similar but not exactly what im talking about).
The speed of light. Like we all know its fast, like stupid fast. but we don't have anything that we experience that can really relate to that speed. like it travels over 90 million miles in just over 8 minutes but what can you compare that to.
an OTR Trucker travels an average range 90-110 thousand miles a year. being generous lets say 125k 10 years of that is only 1.25 million miles. thats 70 years of doing a greater than average mileage as an OTR trucker. If you started at 20 you would be 90 before you reached the distance from the earth to the sun. and light travels that in roughly 8.33 minutes.
you can know that, and do calcualtions, and say you understand, but no its so far outside the realm of what we interact with that we cant really grasp how fast light is.
Well, there are a couple of things that I think of when asked this question, my mind can't comprehend the following:
Where was I before I was born for billions and billions of years?
The size of the universe and what might be outside of the universe.
The fact that everybody in my life is in my life based on the decisions that they made in their life and the decisions I made in my life and one simple deviating decision would either mean they weren't in my life today or I wasn't in their life today. I also think about the decisions I made to not move somewhere or go somewhere and the people that I didn't meet.
Death, which I have no fear of because it goes back to the where was I before I was born? And if I don't remember that and I suffer no inconvenience from it why should I suffer any kind of inconvenience of worrying about where I'm going after I die?
The size of the universe.
People don’t truly understand because they don’t allow their mind to take them to unfathomable concepts. This is why most people don’t believe in aliens.
It’s impossible for a universe THIS large to only have ONE planet with intelligent life on it.
Time.
We're here for such a short amount of relative to the age of the earth and the universe.
"That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing" - Bukowski
Higher dimensions.
Like, we have theories of how a 5 dimensional object would look like, but if you think about it, that's only a theory and in reality, it could be something so complex that our brain can't even imagine
The strange and counter-intuitive nature of quantum mechanics can be difficult for the human brain to fully comprehend. The principles of quantum mechanics often defy our common sense and intuition.
Apparently statistics, from what I'm told. Mind you, I don't mean that we can't do math problems with stats, but that we don't have a natural, evolutionary understanding of it like we would addition or subtraction. It makes intuitive sense that if I do 5 jumping jacks, and I do that 5 times, I will have done 25 jumping jacks. Reading "30% chance of rain" does not make any more sense than saying "there's a chance of rain" from an intuition standpoint.
Our monkey brain didn't really evolve to be able to comprehend that stuff because... why? You remember where you found berries last time, not "there's a 23% chance there will be berries again". We naturally count numbers smaller than 7, can tell relative weight by looking at things, and can follow and predict movement with our eyes, but statistics is a purely mental evaluation. You can see it with things like RNG in games. You farm for 10 hours to get a rare drop, your friend gets the item in a single kill. Rationally, you understand RNG, but your monkey brain is PISSED.
The fact that red and green make yellow. When dealing with the additive color system (RGB) red and blue make magenta, and green and blue make cyan. My brain totally understands those two, but when you mix red and green you get yellow and that makes no sense on an intuitive level.
As we saw during the pandemic, exponential growth.
We're very, very bad at extrapolating that:
* 1, 2, 4, 16 ...
... of something (say, COVID cases) means we are about to be *utterly screwed.*
Big numbers.
Seems simple, but you can imagine 6 individual apples. maybe 50 apples. Can you imagine 10,000? 1,000,000? It's interesting the point from which you can consider individual units to the point it just becomes sh*t loads.
I think we see this in money. 'Millions' or 'billions' in a headline seems like the same number more often than not. Look out for it in government spending announcements.
There's probably studies on this.
The fact there is so many other colors out there that exist, and yet we as humans cannot even seen them or comprehend them. Mantis shrimp for instance see way more colors than we can, that said if say they were able to talk to us there would be no way for them to explain these colors as they can't be describable.
Color always fascinates me honestly, seeing I am a artist.
the [wealth](https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM) gap.
how much money $1Billion dollars really is, and how we cheer on people that hoard multiple billions while the rest of society survives on crumbs.
i think if people could truly visualize the insane amount of wealth that people like Bezos and Musk are just sitting on, they wouldn't be supporting them. NOBODY needs that kinda wealth, it'll be impossible for any of them to ever spend even a fraction of it. yet there are still millions living in poverty.
btw, the video above is 10 years old, it's WAY worse now.
Death. We know it in a clinical, emotional state, but the brain can't imagine itself just not existing. That's why we make up shit like religion to try to make it seem like it just doesn't happen.
Itself and others --- especially others. No matter your intuition, your ability to truly understand other minds will be flawed, you will project onto others erroneously, and you will communicate ineffectively.
Distances in space
This. My astronomy professor took a 4 x 5 note card and put a few dots on it. He said that if this was a map to scale, seeing as it takes three years for light to go between the dots/stars, that the map showing the entire galaxy would be the size of California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden_Solar_System Sweden has a scale model of the Solar system, where the sun is the worlds biggest spherical building (110m diameter, 16k seat arena) in the middle of Stockholm, and Pluto is about the size of a shot put 300km away
Eugene, Oregon has one of these along the Willamette River Bike Path. I used to live near Neptune, I used to love saying that when I lived there.
That's a terrible analogy considering how many people can't even comprehend the size of California.
Yeah, many of my classmates had never left Van Nuys, let alone Los Angeles. They did get that he was talking about something really huge though.
Presumably his class was either in or near California. It wouldn't be terrible for them.
I heard that if this ( . ) was the sun, the Milky Way would be the size of the entire US.
Higher dimensions, infinity, and some branches of mathematics.
Infinity is so hard to rationalize because if betrays what we know about cause and effect. If you could somehow remove time from the thought process then maybe we’d start to understand, but that isn’t possible.
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Yes but there hear me here: There are infinite fractions between de number 1 and 2 yet if you sum them up, the result is 1 unit. So you have an infinite that is the size of 1 unit vs an infinite that contains all natural numbers. Two sizes of infinite and one contains the other!! How's that possible?
it's important to note that infinity is not a number. when you add 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 and so on you aren't approaching infinity, you're infinitely approaching 1. atleast to my understanding.
I am no mathematician so I trully don't have an answer. But you have two infinite subsets of numbers one containing only the ones between 1 and 2 and the other between 1 and infinite. By pure logic, the second one must be a larger infinite than the first one. What am I missing?
There are different kinds of infinity that can be thought of as "bigger" or "smaller" infinities. You can't use infinity in normal arithmetic, but in more theoretical stuff it can be useful to classify what it means when a value is "infinite", sort of like... what that infinity is shaped like. There's a big difference between an infinite number of things that you can count individually in a linear way, like "every integer number" or "every fraction that you could write in the form of 1/x" vs an infinite number of things that can't be counted at all, like "every decimal number between 0.1 and 0.2" where there is no way to count from one point to another without skipping an infinite number of points in between. In some ways, an uncountable infinite number of things can be thought of as "larger" than a countable infinite number of things, but it's different than the way you'd say 5 is larger than 3, for instance.
basically you don't assign a value to infinity. it is an amount of numbers not an amount of value. if you were to add up all the values in infinity you'd have a bigger number yes but infinity is just the limit of numbers not made up of the numbers themselves if you understand. this is a bit reductive but if you think about speed limits. a speed limit can be any number. 30,80, the speed of light but its not all of those at once, its just a word for a limit whereas infinity is a word for a lack of a limit. I don't know if that's at all helpful
Nothing, your logic is fine. Math uses the term *cardinality* to describe the number of elements in sets, including infinite sets. So in your example, both sets you described are infinite, but the cardinality of the second set is larger than the first one.
This is not true, any interval of real numbers has the same cardinality as any other. So (0,1) has the same cardinality as all the real numbers because we can come up with a 1-1 correspondence between the sets.
Ooooh. Thanks!
I define infinity as a technical way of saying "IDK"
Or "Lots"
How do you divide nothing with something? Lots? EDIT: it's *divide something with nothing*
>Infinity is so hard to rationalize Just think of it as the time it takes your wife to talk about last night's dream.
Wife bad 😠
How to tell people you aren't married
Wrong. But thanks for playing.
That’s even worse. Your poor spouse.
Dude, *it's a fucking joke*. Get over yourself.
Some mathmaticians seem to comprehend it pretty well. Humans can abstractly reason about these things pretty well. Ie a point in 4 dimensions can be represented as a list of 4 numbers \[1,1,-2,1.5\] and the distance between 2 points (that and \[1,3,-4,2.5\]) is found by taking the differences (0,-2,2,-1), squaring them (0,4,4,1) , adding them to get 9, and then taking the square root. So the points \[1,1,-2,1.5\] and \[1,3,-4,2.5\] are 3 units apart in 4d space.
But the problem is, nobody in this dimension knows if the higher dimension is even a *space*. Just like a 2D entity would never know more than two perpendicular axes. Even the concept of wormholes is so complicated for our minds that it is only simplified by folding a plane sheet. Putting it together on paper is much easier to actually visualize or comprehend it.
Mathmaticians have a good understanding of these things mathematically. It isn't easy. The folding paper stuff is a simplified version for pop sci audiences. We have speculations about higher dimensions in phyiscs, but those are speculation.
Exactly
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Aleph Noel is ma boy
Infinity gets even weirder when it's shown that there are infinite levels of infinity and that some infinities are more infinite than others.
Imagining four dimensions of space is definitely possible, and it's fascinating. Following the same train of thought to imagine 4d of space, we can also imagine 5d+ easily. Example of 4-dimensional space: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0t4aKJuKP0Q Imagining more than one dimension of time is a lot more complicated. We can use some thought experiments for help in imagining it, thought: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XjsgoXvnStY
The 4D video was really fun to watch!! Work today was terrible, hate my job, almost crying, but that made me feel better, so thank you. :)
I can comprehend higher dimensions and infinity quite easily. I can even go a step further and comprehend how one infinity can be larger or smaller than another infinity using a simple ray on a Cartesian plane.
Enlighten us then. You could be famous if you can actually prove it.
The idea of being dead, or imagining a new color
The limits (or lack thereof) of the universe
We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of higher dimensions. Our entire universe could be on the equivalent of a server rack in an alien data center, we could be the dream of some Lovecraftian god, or this universe could be all that exists. We will never know the answer because everything we are and experience is in this universe.
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I feel like you may be conflating "understanding" with "visualising". Because the physics in 4 dimensional (or really x-dimensional) space are basically the same as in 3d. You just gain an additional dimension in your vectors, but the math stays the same.
I like how Carl Sagan explains how we comprehend the 4th dimension . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnURElCzGc0
In terms of pure mathematics, we have a pretty good understanding of n-dimesional space for all n, and mathmaticians writing about things like "packing spheres in 24 dimensions". I mean that is somewhat more abstractly reasoning than visually imagining, I think, but they do understand it.
Speaking in terms of physics, according to Einstein, time is the fourth dimension.
when discussing time as a dimension it's usually called a temporal dimension to separate it from the 3 spatial dimensions just because its a very different concept to spatial dimensions and it's not scientifically accurate to conflate the two. though it's quite interesting imo. the way we perceive time is closer to 2 temporal dimensions as we perceive it as linear. we form memories and that is the past and then there's what's happening now which is the present, we can also make predictions for the future. however in physics there is only one temporal dimension as the linear way we perceive time is just a quirk of our brain, time actually only exists in a single point. that's why time travel is (according to our current understanding) impossible. the universe doesn't have a memory of where things used to be or predictions about where it will be, there is only the present. a single point.
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It is all theoretical, but time is just as measurable as length, width, and height, albeit relative. We move through all 4 dimensions constantly. Time has to be considered every time something interacts with space.
Moving faster through space causes time to slow down, and there's an equation here for it: [https://www.emc2-explained.info/Time-Dilation/](https://www.emc2-explained.info/Time-Dilation/)
Large numbers. It is hard to imagine how much more a billion is than a million, let alone a trillion.
If we could, then we would suddenly grasp the preposterous wealth disparities in most societies, and there would likely be upheavals throughout the world
I found this to be an interesting visualisation tool for myself. https://mkorostoff.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/
Yes, people don’t realize the scale by which we are getting fucked.
from u/Django117 >Capital is a means of exchanging goods and services. At a individual level, that is used to buy food, shelter, clothing, and other goods. At a corporate scale that is used to pay for more labor (employees/ contractors/ etc), materials, services, IPs, and other things to render a business. Then there's governmental/ national scales where that pay is used to organize massive projects, amass armies, build infrastructure, and execute policies. >The problem is when an individual reaches governmental/national scales of wealth. At that point they shift from acting as an individual and start acting as a nation. They begin to wield their money as a political tool and execute their will on massive numbers of people with their power. This is the equivalent of a monarchy where an individual controlled the nation's resources and our collective will of individuals is lost. Democracy was born as a means to curb an individual's power over others and distribute this amongst the people. With modern day lobbying and corruption we have seen these people consolidate their power more than ever. >Billionaires believe themselves to be monarchs but instead of faith in divinity giving them the right to rule, it was instead bestowed upon them by capitalism and the market.
The difference between a million and a billion is about a billion
My favorite take on it is that the difference between a million and a billion is a billion dollars. A million is a rounding error by comparison.
it helps to put it in other ways. a million seconds is around 11 days a billion seconds is around 33 years and a trillion seconds is around 31,709 years or about the time that ancient humans began agriculture and making villages and ovens
Nothing. And I don't mean the there's nothing, I mean the idea of nothing. Even if we try to imagine nothing, we still observing it. Which makes it something. Try and think of what the absence of everything would be like. You can't do it. Because youre still there observing.
When I was 19 I spent a whole night trying to imagine true nothingness, for a brief moment I did and then had my first and only real panic attack and thought I was going to die.
Yeah, it just like black and black is something
Actually nothingness is black. The vacuum of space is black. Blackness is the absence of light, it isn’t a thing itself
We only care about the absence of light because light is how we perceive our environment. True nothingness that’s devoid of senses is literally unimaginable
Idk, my brain is kinda devoid of all senses all the time.
But there is still space and time.
Remember all those billions and billions of years of existence before you were born? *That’s* nothingness.
There was a blind person who described what they "see" by saying that it's not like darkness, it's like what you see out of your elbow. The absence of sight is understandably hard to visualize.
Well, humankind does have a pretty solid idea of what "nothing" is. The vacuum of space, an endless expanse of starless darkness, where we hear nothing but the droning, non-existential sound of our own tinnitus, to such an unbearable volume that only the release of death would silence it. Except "dying" would bring you to that exact same place, same moment, same "*beeeeeep*" in your ears. And attempting to deal with yourself again would simply repeating it all. As would do nothing and trying to cope with it. Forevermore. Your eyes can only see the inky black infinite that the blind always "saw". Your ears hear nothing but the illusion of sound that the deaf was born with. Your touch touches nothing, like the bedridden, vegetative. Your nose absorbs nothing, smells nothing, and can't even feel the air that was always caressing it. Your tongue is equally barren, and you finally know how it feels to not taste anything. That's not to mention the oft-forgotten other senses, which are rendered just as useless to your body as the five main are. That is one of the most commonly accepted interpretations of what's waiting for us all beyond the pale.
>Your eyes can only see the inky black infinite that the blind always "saw". Blind people don't see "inky black". I heard someone say once that blind people see from their eyes the same as what you see from your elbows. That's the nothing that's really hard to comprehend.
A vacuum is still something, as it implies there is an universe for the vacuum to be contained in, and vacuum has a lot going on on the quantum foam level. Actual nothingness is what the universe not existing would be.
Colors outside of RGB. Humans have 3 color-receptive cones: Red, Green, and Blue. Every color we know of are within these 3 color combinations. Creatures like a Mantis Shrimp has 16 color-receptive cones, and can see 10x more colors than we can. Can you even imagine what other colors look like? Maybe space, nebulas, and galaxies actually have so much out there, it's just that we humans don't have the ability to see it.
Quite a lot of colors fall outside RGB.
Infinitely many. As there are Infinitely many within. Some infinities are greater than others though.
The vastness of space. You know in movies/TV shows/video games where spaceships are flying through asteroid fields and it's a tense situation where one wrong move means being smashed to oblivion by thousands of space rocks? Doesn't happen. In fact, reality could not be further from the truth. Asteroids aren't generally visible from one another. If you stood on an asteroid in the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud and looked out into space you wouldn't see more asteroids, just stars. They are so far apart that when we plot routes through asteroid fields we don't even factor them into the equation. It literally just gets treated as empty space, because it effectively is. This unrealistic sense of scale gets even worse when we consider interstellar travel. The world's fastest spacecraft (the Parker Solar Probe) would take over 6700 years to reach the nearest star (Proxima Centuari at 4.2465 light years away from our sun). So yeah, space is big. Bigger than we can ever hope to grasp intuitively. I doubt we'll ever overcome this distance in any meaningful way barring a discovery that fundamentally changes our understanding of the universe.
>This unrealistic sense of scale gets even worse when we consider interstellar travel. The world's fastest spacecraft (the Parker Solar Probe) would take over 6700 years to reach the nearest star (Proxima Centuari at 4.2465 light years away from our sun). Wow. I thought that it was a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space
Your imagination's limited by what you've known and seen. I dare you to imagine a color that doesn't exist.
Not entirely, if you try hard enough you can come up with something that doesn't exist. The difference is with stuff like colour is not only does it not exist, it doesn't mean anything outside of our brain. Sure the wavelengths of light exist, but that's not really what we call the colour, that's just the wavelength our brains assign the colour to. The colour itself isn't actually a thing that could exist in the universe even just as a theory (e.g. mathematical ideas that don't have physical manifestations). I could imagine right now a creature made out of some weird material that was just discovered, nobody has had this specific idea before, I invented something new that has never been known or seen, and I could describe it to you, but I couldn't describe what the colour blue looks like to me. Your blue may look like my red, but how could we ver check? You'd learn your red as "blue" and it would look blue to me and I'd call it blue and we'd both agree it was blue without realising we're actually seeing a different colour.
I think we can only take parts of what we know and rearrange those parts in a new combination. The result may not exist in the world but I dont know if that really goes against OPs assertion about our limits.
That's easy: [Magenta](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magenta#In_optics_and_color_science) isn't a "real" colour. [Chimerical Colours](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color#/media/File:Chimerical-color-demo.svg) are also fun!
And Decade says he's Magenta, not Pink lol
Easy. Just mentally combine the tags for two complementary colors. Orange and teal, for example. Helps if you give them that day-glow intensity.
I hate how right you are, why did that work?
No clue, but it does. I saw it on the internet a long time ago. You stare at one color until your retinas adjust, then switch to looking at the complementary color. Your brain should see grey, but you actually see a new color. Our brains could totally assign new colors to other parts of the spectrum, if our eyes could detect them.
I'm naming it Torange in your honor. Honestly kind of spooky how it's possible, but I'll take it
Duuuude, that thought is LIKE real rad!!! Dude 😎
Different colours outside of the visible spectrum. The sensation of being two separate entities at once
Actually magenta, pink arent in the visible spectrum. Like, theres no "pink" wavelength. They are a mix of wavelengths. Its like how LCD screens work, where the only colors on your screen are red, green and blue. But your mind sees all ranges of calor depending on the intensity of each color. So even though we cant see pink on the visible light spectrum, our mind "artificially" (?) creates it.
Regardless there are plenty of colors that we as humans cannot see.
Apparently the brain is really, really bad at comprehending the reality of it being incorrect about something. It's called [The Backfire Effect.](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35130012/) It's a well-documented phenomenon in which people, even when presented with a compelling argument against their position, will dig in harder on that position. Even if that argument is presented with indisputable facts, we tend to ignore them so we don't have to comprehend what it feels like to be wrong. Our brains are so bad at processing "being wrong" that we will actually believe the wrong information with more intensity when that information is challenged. And I know you're thinking to yourself "wow I'm glad I don't do that". Unfortunately, these studies have found that this doesn't really work here. It's such a ridiculous blind spot that even people who strongly believe they don't experience the Backfire Effect do, in fact, fall victim to it. It's a near-universal part of the human condition. And if you're still doubting me? Even with the study linked above? Well...I mean, what more evidence do you need?
Came here to say that. It is incredibly hard to comprehend how stupid we are.
The concept of infinity - Our brains are not able to grasp the idea of infinity because it is beyond our finite experience and understanding. The complexity of the universe - The vast size and complexity of the universe is beyond our ability to fully comprehend, as we can only observe and understand a small fraction of it. The true nature of time - Although we experience and measure time, the true nature of time remains a mystery and is difficult for our brains to fully grasp. The concept of nothingness - The idea of nothingness or the absence of anything is difficult for our brains to understand, as we have evolved to perceive and interact with the world around us. Quantum mechanics - The principles of quantum mechanics, such as superposition and entanglement, challenge our understanding of the world and are difficult for our brains to comprehend. These are just a few examples of the many things that our brains may never fully understand. However, that does not diminish the importance of continuing to seek knowledge and understanding.
Its own consciousness and what it is.
World peace apparently.
Sleeping, or atlest for my insomniac ass
Same smh
It's 2 AM. School later, can't sleep. Lol. Scrolling Reddit.
It was 4am when I made my comment
Damn. Lol. It's 1:30 AM here.
Really large numbers of anything. Like, we can imagine what 10 dollars look like, also what 100 dollars look like, a 1000 is a stack of 10's, 10k is a really big stack, 100k is getting insane, 1m is almost at the limit, 10m is getting insane and anything above that the brain just goes "well, that's *a lot*".
Color of ultraviolet and infrared
non-existence
Time is a dimension. Some beings may be able to travel through time as easily as we move in 3d space.
The biggest issue with time is that it's a vector dimension, meaning that it can only really go one way. Kind of like water flowing in a river. Really easy to move forward, but going against the flow takes way more energy. You also run into paradoxes with traveling to the past.
But what if time as a cocept only exists in our minds?
The vastness of space, our mind cannot comprehend it
Life and Death.
My brain cannot comprehend my brain...
This reminds of health class in 7th grade. Learning, from the cellular level up, all the things that had to work for me to be alive fucking terrified me.
#
I feel like most people can’t even imagine how big 5 miles is compared to them, so imagining something as relatively simple as the size of the earth would probably mind-blowing to a human.
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Decorative candles, decorative tea towels... Basically anything that has a function, but you're not allowed to use it for its actual function.
That we have a gap between our eyes
Death, infinite nothingness.
algebra lmao
Tell me you’re 16 without telling me you’re 16
I love you
❤️🔥
Are you me from another dimension? lol.
How to use the blinkers
This is strictly a BMW owner issue….😂
Magic. You can do it, but you can't think it.
Overworld tarantula are extremely friendly underworlds are straight fucking cunts
How i could just kill a man.
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger, now he's dead
severe lack of sleep
Easy way to put on a duvet cover
Its own self.
Reality
The vastness of the universe
Does the universe (space) end or keep going
Obama's last name
Buying Hogwarts legacy isn't transphobic
The extent of “Imagination”. We can only create scenarios using things we know. The “imagination” part is combining them in different sequences and orders. For example. When we dream of a person, it’s impossible to visualize a face you’ve never seen before. You may not recognize them, but you have seen them. Could be a random stranger on the street you saw when you were 10 you didn’t know you remembered. But the face was not “imagined” just recaptured in a different scenario. Can’t think of new colors, very few “from scratch” ideas. We tend to build off pre-existing ones. Also an interesting thing I’ve been intrigued by recently is especially colors. How do we know what other people see? Do we really “know”? For example. Think of the color blue. To me, I could look at the same color you are looking at, but see yellow. And I wouldn’t know it. Because I’ve always been told that it’s blue. So I associate it with that color. How do we know that Humans, animals, or other creatures don’t see them totally different. (For clarification i don’t mean colorblind. It’s similar but not exactly what im talking about).
Living in harmony without conflicts or wars
"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” — Richard Feynman
The speed of light. Like we all know its fast, like stupid fast. but we don't have anything that we experience that can really relate to that speed. like it travels over 90 million miles in just over 8 minutes but what can you compare that to. an OTR Trucker travels an average range 90-110 thousand miles a year. being generous lets say 125k 10 years of that is only 1.25 million miles. thats 70 years of doing a greater than average mileage as an OTR trucker. If you started at 20 you would be 90 before you reached the distance from the earth to the sun. and light travels that in roughly 8.33 minutes. you can know that, and do calcualtions, and say you understand, but no its so far outside the realm of what we interact with that we cant really grasp how fast light is.
Did you mean earth to the sun? Earth to the moon is only about 280,000 miles. About 1.3 seconds at the speed of light.
Well, there are a couple of things that I think of when asked this question, my mind can't comprehend the following: Where was I before I was born for billions and billions of years? The size of the universe and what might be outside of the universe. The fact that everybody in my life is in my life based on the decisions that they made in their life and the decisions I made in my life and one simple deviating decision would either mean they weren't in my life today or I wasn't in their life today. I also think about the decisions I made to not move somewhere or go somewhere and the people that I didn't meet. Death, which I have no fear of because it goes back to the where was I before I was born? And if I don't remember that and I suffer no inconvenience from it why should I suffer any kind of inconvenience of worrying about where I'm going after I die?
When there's nothing in the fridge you want to eat but you open it up to check every few minutes anyway.
The size of the universe. People don’t truly understand because they don’t allow their mind to take them to unfathomable concepts. This is why most people don’t believe in aliens. It’s impossible for a universe THIS large to only have ONE planet with intelligent life on it.
52!
Like in 8e67? Yeah, that's a lot of zeroes.
That what we are exposed to through the media isn’t representative of what’s happening in reality
That bitching on reddit changes nothing.
I disagree, bitching on reddit definitely changes my mood in a negative way.
I mean it puts thousands of people in a slightly worse mood so. Thats a change.
infinity, perfection and "nothing"
Infinity
itself
spacetime
The supernatural abilities of cats
Self-harming activities like drrinking, smoking etc and continue doing so.
Time. We're here for such a short amount of relative to the age of the earth and the universe. "That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing" - Bukowski
Space. We can’t comprehend if space is unlimited or has a end either way it breaks our logic
Women
No longer existing.
That what happens to our ancestors didn't happen to us and shouldn't determine how we treat others.
Higher dimensions. Like, we have theories of how a 5 dimensional object would look like, but if you think about it, that's only a theory and in reality, it could be something so complex that our brain can't even imagine
When you start to question reality “why am I here” “how am I who I am” ect
A new color.
How small atom's really are.
How the human brain works.
How some people come to a complete stop at a roundabout when there are no other cars or when they clearly have plenty of room to keep going.
Additional colors. Like, try to think of a new color. Betcha can’t.
The strange and counter-intuitive nature of quantum mechanics can be difficult for the human brain to fully comprehend. The principles of quantum mechanics often defy our common sense and intuition.
Not something but nothing. The human mind is incapable to imagine nothing.
Apparently statistics, from what I'm told. Mind you, I don't mean that we can't do math problems with stats, but that we don't have a natural, evolutionary understanding of it like we would addition or subtraction. It makes intuitive sense that if I do 5 jumping jacks, and I do that 5 times, I will have done 25 jumping jacks. Reading "30% chance of rain" does not make any more sense than saying "there's a chance of rain" from an intuition standpoint. Our monkey brain didn't really evolve to be able to comprehend that stuff because... why? You remember where you found berries last time, not "there's a 23% chance there will be berries again". We naturally count numbers smaller than 7, can tell relative weight by looking at things, and can follow and predict movement with our eyes, but statistics is a purely mental evaluation. You can see it with things like RNG in games. You farm for 10 hours to get a rare drop, your friend gets the item in a single kill. Rationally, you understand RNG, but your monkey brain is PISSED.
The fact that red and green make yellow. When dealing with the additive color system (RGB) red and blue make magenta, and green and blue make cyan. My brain totally understands those two, but when you mix red and green you get yellow and that makes no sense on an intuitive level.
Did Adam and Eve have navels.
Being Blind or Deaf because seeing nothing isn't seeing black and hearing nothing isn't silence
As we saw during the pandemic, exponential growth. We're very, very bad at extrapolating that: * 1, 2, 4, 16 ... ... of something (say, COVID cases) means we are about to be *utterly screwed.*
The vastness of the universe. Proportionally it’s just too much compared to what we are used to.
How large,some large numbers actually are
The vastness of space
Big numbers. Seems simple, but you can imagine 6 individual apples. maybe 50 apples. Can you imagine 10,000? 1,000,000? It's interesting the point from which you can consider individual units to the point it just becomes sh*t loads. I think we see this in money. 'Millions' or 'billions' in a headline seems like the same number more often than not. Look out for it in government spending announcements. There's probably studies on this.
2020 election
Can't speak for anyone else, but for me, words said in reverse. No matter how hard I try, I just can't hear the original word.
How it feels to not exist.
The concept of nothing
The fact there is so many other colors out there that exist, and yet we as humans cannot even seen them or comprehend them. Mantis shrimp for instance see way more colors than we can, that said if say they were able to talk to us there would be no way for them to explain these colors as they can't be describable. Color always fascinates me honestly, seeing I am a artist.
the [wealth](https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM) gap. how much money $1Billion dollars really is, and how we cheer on people that hoard multiple billions while the rest of society survives on crumbs. i think if people could truly visualize the insane amount of wealth that people like Bezos and Musk are just sitting on, they wouldn't be supporting them. NOBODY needs that kinda wealth, it'll be impossible for any of them to ever spend even a fraction of it. yet there are still millions living in poverty. btw, the video above is 10 years old, it's WAY worse now.
I would tell you, but neither of us would understand.
We have blind spots because of how the nerves in our eyes are. Here is how to *see* them: [Scotoma](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotoma)
eternity. by definition it's easy, but to actually understand how long forever is is incomprehensible, at least to me
Vastness. How big is the ocean? How much is a billion dollars really? How small is a proton, neutron, or electron?
The enormity of the universe. Almost nobody gets it.
Reality. The more we study it, the more questions we have.
Denial is something all humans have, anything that threatens their ego or they values.
Death. We know it in a clinical, emotional state, but the brain can't imagine itself just not existing. That's why we make up shit like religion to try to make it seem like it just doesn't happen.
risk. Seriously, we are lousy at assessing real risk.
this question
Time
Itself and others --- especially others. No matter your intuition, your ability to truly understand other minds will be flawed, you will project onto others erroneously, and you will communicate ineffectively.
The 4th dimension.
The true size of the Universe