RE: ¿Have you dreamed of this man?
You are viewing a single comment's thread:
" You basically can't imagine or clearly figure out what you didn't know or haven't experienced before."
I suspect it's a bit more subtle than we can't imagine anything we haven't experienced. Fiction obviously exists, but I struggled with the concept of spacetime for years, because we don't experience spacetime as it is, but experience space, which we perceive as a continuous expanse, and time, which we perceive as a discrete instant serially replaced chronologically, very differently from one another, which makes the actual fabric of reality, spacetime, difficult to wrap one's head around. One thing that makes me feel I have come to grips with spacetime is when I realized that the arrow of time can only point forwards, because there is no negative space. Despite all the maths that don't have this stricture, the physical universe does, and this is a weakness of physics, that it is so dependent on maths, because descriptions of things are not the things, and physicists seem to not understand this, or at least to a degree.
Of course, science fiction is replete with time travel, but my understanding of spacetime precludes the arrow of time being reversed. We can imagine all sorts of things, but that doesn't make those things real or accurate descriptions. I figured out the irreversibility of time despite not experiencing any new events about spacetime, so we can imagine and figure out things we haven't experienced - but it's not easy. Maths are just one language in which we can describe things, and like any language, we can lie in maths.
Consciousness is almost completely indescribable, we know so little about it. It isn't any form of energy we understand and that smart folks have devised laws by which they operate. We are trying to establish from where it originates, because we find that single celled creatures demonstrate consciousness, and that shows it doesn't originate from brains, which has been assumed. I compare the consciousness of a creature with a brain to a person with a calculator which they use to perform calculation. Consciousnesses in organisms with brains clearly use them to perform tasks that make having brains evolutionarily advantageous - but not so much that every multicellular creature has evolved brains.
It is strange to try to understand what consciousness is and where it comes from because we are more our consciousnesses than we even are our bodies, and are so intimately familiar with being a consciousness that it seems ridiculous not to know such fundamental things about it. The truth is we can't measure consciousness in any way, and can only even detect it indirectly, through conscious actions taken by creatures that can will themselves to move.
When (if) we finally figure out where it comes from and what it is what we learn will dramatically impact our understanding of the most fundamental reality about ourselves. The thing is, we can imagine all sorts of sources for it, but it is extremely difficult to imagine an undescribed form of energy, other than the physically described EMF, weak, and strong nuclear forces. It seems very important to creatures that survive preferentially depending on their intellectual capacity to have some understanding of their source of intellectual capacity, that such understanding would better enable reproduction. However, there seems not to be any such improved understanding naturally potential to us, so that hasn't been a factor increasing reproductive success and causing evolutionary pressure to increase understanding.
Yet. Maybe it will when (if) we get a handle on it. It's hard to say when we don't yet have any understanding of it at all. But consciousness is only proof there are things very fundamental to us and the universe we live in we barely even know are there, much less know much about them. There are clearly many, many things like that in existence, that we aren't comprised of, that we have no idea even exist at all.
We can imagine a lot, and anyone that has read much science fiction or fantasy comes across imagining a variety of fictional energies or sources of them, such as midichlorians that produce the Force in the Star Wars universe, or magics in many others. We can easily scoff and dismiss magic, for example because we have no evidence of it, but when confronted with our almost complete nescience regarding consciousness despite the probative nature of what experiential evidence we have, it seems an arrogant act of hubris to be so certain magic isn't real, for example.
Like how we experience space and time much differently than it actually is as spacetime, yet we can wrap our heads around the reality to some degree, I suspect that when we discover handles on yet undiscovered forces and things in the universe we will be able to cope,and do so usefully. However, time will tell, alone.
Edit: here's something you may find interesting.