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Comment by captain_crabs | Hacker News Reader

Haha, beautifully put, but I often wonder the opposite. What if our capacity to perceive and think is so limited and narrow that most of the underlying workings of reality are completely missed by us? The what if being, we are not so special as we think. The way an ant colony will bustle full of self-import and purpose, blissfully unaware of the giant people passing by. And the people pay it no mind, because they can't interact meaningfully with the ant colony, so while one is aware of the other and far more about the world, the reverse isn't true.

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Mix those thoughts with a healthy does of "human values don't necessarily have any relation to alien values, which may be just as incomprehensible to humanity as the true nature of the universe" and you've basically got the Cosmic Horror fiction genre.

and here I was trying to avoid an existential crisis today. There that goes.

Could be a dimensional thing too, what if you're like an exhibit in someone's living room like a hologram and you just live your life for someone's amusement. You'd never know but can you prove that it's happening?

Reminds me of The Thirteenth Floor.

Oh I like that movie, man haven't seen that in a while. I don't know, what makes something "real" or "more genuine"? I heard this podcast that mentioned this same concept regarding your brain acting like a computer perceiving sound as binary input through the little hairs in your ears... I don't know. What's real is this fear I feel from debt collectors haha.

That sounds a little like "The Principle of Mediocrity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle)

If so, think you're selling humans a bit short. Our capacity isn't really all that limited. As long as we are able to continuously apply new information to gain better insights into reality, we will improve. Maybe we are woefully behind other some other beings out there, but that doesn't mean we'll never get there. Our capacity for exceeding our physical limitations (ex, we can detect neutrinos despite having no ways to see them through evolutionary abilities) and create new physical realities (the coldest known temperature measured is not somewhere else in the universe, it's in a physicist's lab) shows that we are still on a path towards understanding so much more than we do today.

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