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Thinking about what exists outside the universe always makes my brain feel weird. It seems impossible for your thoughts to imagine anything because your thought

Thinking about what exists outside the universe always makes my brain feel weird. It seems impossible for your thoughts to imagine anything because your thoughts themselves are bound by the universe itself.

komali2 9y ago
Well even worse, our thoughts are bound by some maximum distance of comprehension. We can abstract the stellar scale but we can't understand it like we understand the distance across the street or whatever. I find this frustrating :(
- ztjio 9y ago
  Well I think the implication that we can't understand/comprehend these things is itself frustrating and also wrong. Why does one assume that the scale of the universe and the scale of that street you refer to are any different? In both cases you are experiencing and considering an estimation of potentially infinite space at an almost metaphorical level as it relates to your experience, plans, and actions. Indeed, you can consider the universe as this thing which is maybe boundless and has so much stuff and might go on forever but for some reason you think it's any harder than realizing that the street may be infinite in space as well, by virtue of continuous subdivision. Before trying to dive in on any estimate of the smallest thing, do remember that smart people once thought atoms were the smallest thing, and then particles, and so on. And remember that the street itself, even just the stretch you're concerned about, is composed of a ludicrously large number of the "smallest" things we current are aware of. If we let go of this idea that at our own size, things are just some number of things that we can reason about (since that's clearly false, do you reason about the billions of living organisms in your own body right now? Could you?) then we can start to realize that smaller or bigger, we're merely consider a continuum at different scales and it's perfectly reasonable for the human mind to do so, it does so every day all the time.
  - komali2 9y ago
    I was thinking along the lines of evolutionary biology - I'm assuming my human brain is only capable of truly processing scales that realistically my ancestors would experience.
- ordu 9y ago
  > we can't understand Understanding is just a psychological phenomena. Its your brains who choose what ideas they mark as 'understood'. Thus its under your control what you understand and what you are not. Once beeing a drunk teenager I felt myself understaning all the things in the whole Universe. Its pretty hard I'd say, because I never felt like this thereafter. Though I didn't tried to repeat it. Probably alcohol is not the best fit for it, maybe there are some drugs that can make you to understand. I believe that somewhere in the brain there is some special spot, and all you need to understand everything is to thrust an electrode in that spot. If you live your brain as I do and prefer not to control your brains in possible harmful way, than (I'm pretty sure) if one get some special training on this he could come eventually to everything-understanding state of mind. Maybe it even allow to switch by volition between that state of mind and state of mind of Socrates, who used to claim that he understands nothing. I didn't try it myself because I'm not sure about arbitrarily control option, and generally prefer Socrates' way of thinking. But if you don't like to cheat, there is honest way to start understanding a very large distances. In general mind mark as understood all the things it is used to. You may train yourself at imagining large objects through some sort of succession. You should do all sorts of mental work with those objects in your imagination -- moving them, rotating, colliding, flying by or through them... Try to use different and constant kind of objects for every order of magnitude -- it might be really helpful. It will take time, but its still possible.
martin-adams 9y ago
I find such thoughts extremely fascinating. I've even toyed with the idea of podcasting this line of thinking. I put two test episodes up on Soundcloud for anyone who's interested. https://soundcloud.com/martin-adams-387371255/sets/lost-in-thought https://soundcloud.com/martin-adams-387371255/sets/lost-in-t...
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thibauts 9y ago
I think it feels weird because we define universe as having neither outside nor boundaries. There's a contradiction in terms. It ceases to feel strange as soon as you update the concept to something that has a boundary either in its spacial extension or through some kind of extra dimension.
- Baeocystin 9y ago
  The analogy I use to explain this to people is simply how it is impossible to go further south than the South Pole. There is no physical barrier stopping you from moving in any direction, but due to the shape of the Earth you have reached the southernmost point. It is likely the same with our universe, and its inherent morphology, too.
- raattgift 9y ago
  > we define universe as having neither outside nor boundaries Do we? > boundaries There's one at the Big Bang. You can go through contortions to try to remove it (Hartle & Hawking's "no boundary proposal"; Carroll & Chen's "two-ways-to-de-Sitter from arbitrary initial surface") but so far attempts have come at the cost of introducing a lot more conceptual baggage. > outside "more of mostly the same" unless you think that one metre or one light year or two hundred million light years beyond the Hubble radius the universe is vastly different from the stars and galaxies we have around here. What could have happened to early galaxies that 200 million years ago were in principle observable from the Milky Way, such that they wouldn't now resemble the descendants of early galaxies that are 200 million light years closer to us?

komali2 9y ago

Well even worse, our thoughts are bound by some maximum distance of comprehension. We can abstract the stellar scale but we can't understand it like we understand the distance across the street or whatever. I find this frustrating :(

ztjio 9y ago
Well I think the implication that we can't understand/comprehend these things is itself frustrating and also wrong. Why does one assume that the scale of the universe and the scale of that street you refer to are any different? In both cases you are experiencing and considering an estimation of potentially infinite space at an almost metaphorical level as it relates to your experience, plans, and actions. Indeed, you can consider the universe as this thing which is maybe boundless and has so much stuff and might go on forever but for some reason you think it's any harder than realizing that the street may be infinite in space as well, by virtue of continuous subdivision. Before trying to dive in on any estimate of the smallest thing, do remember that smart people once thought atoms were the smallest thing, and then particles, and so on. And remember that the street itself, even just the stretch you're concerned about, is composed of a ludicrously large number of the "smallest" things we current are aware of. If we let go of this idea that at our own size, things are just some number of things that we can reason about (since that's clearly false, do you reason about the billions of living organisms in your own body right now? Could you?) then we can start to realize that smaller or bigger, we're merely consider a continuum at different scales and it's perfectly reasonable for the human mind to do so, it does so every day all the time.
- komali2 9y ago
  I was thinking along the lines of evolutionary biology - I'm assuming my human brain is only capable of truly processing scales that realistically my ancestors would experience.
ordu 9y ago
> we can't understand Understanding is just a psychological phenomena. Its your brains who choose what ideas they mark as 'understood'. Thus its under your control what you understand and what you are not. Once beeing a drunk teenager I felt myself understaning all the things in the whole Universe. Its pretty hard I'd say, because I never felt like this thereafter. Though I didn't tried to repeat it. Probably alcohol is not the best fit for it, maybe there are some drugs that can make you to understand. I believe that somewhere in the brain there is some special spot, and all you need to understand everything is to thrust an electrode in that spot. If you live your brain as I do and prefer not to control your brains in possible harmful way, than (I'm pretty sure) if one get some special training on this he could come eventually to everything-understanding state of mind. Maybe it even allow to switch by volition between that state of mind and state of mind of Socrates, who used to claim that he understands nothing. I didn't try it myself because I'm not sure about arbitrarily control option, and generally prefer Socrates' way of thinking. But if you don't like to cheat, there is honest way to start understanding a very large distances. In general mind mark as understood all the things it is used to. You may train yourself at imagining large objects through some sort of succession. You should do all sorts of mental work with those objects in your imagination -- moving them, rotating, colliding, flying by or through them... Try to use different and constant kind of objects for every order of magnitude -- it might be really helpful. It will take time, but its still possible.

martin-adams 9y ago

I find such thoughts extremely fascinating. I've even toyed with the idea of podcasting this line of thinking. I put two test episodes up on Soundcloud for anyone who's interested. https://soundcloud.com/martin-adams-387371255/sets/lost-in-thought https://soundcloud.com/martin-adams-387371255/sets/lost-in-t...

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

thibauts 9y ago

I think it feels weird because we define universe as having neither outside nor boundaries. There's a contradiction in terms. It ceases to feel strange as soon as you update the concept to something that has a boundary either in its spacial extension or through some kind of extra dimension.

Baeocystin 9y ago
The analogy I use to explain this to people is simply how it is impossible to go further south than the South Pole. There is no physical barrier stopping you from moving in any direction, but due to the shape of the Earth you have reached the southernmost point. It is likely the same with our universe, and its inherent morphology, too.
raattgift 9y ago
> we define universe as having neither outside nor boundaries Do we? > boundaries There's one at the Big Bang. You can go through contortions to try to remove it (Hartle & Hawking's "no boundary proposal"; Carroll & Chen's "two-ways-to-de-Sitter from arbitrary initial surface") but so far attempts have come at the cost of introducing a lot more conceptual baggage. > outside "more of mostly the same" unless you think that one metre or one light year or two hundred million light years beyond the Hubble radius the universe is vastly different from the stars and galaxies we have around here. What could have happened to early galaxies that 200 million years ago were in principle observable from the Milky Way, such that they wouldn't now resemble the descendants of early galaxies that are 200 million light years closer to us?