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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

There are a lot of compelling theories out there for the purpose/true nature of the universe. We are probably orders and orders of magnitude too small ourselves to fully grasp the complexity, like how one of our skin cells don't understand how the body works but coupled into an entire multicellular organism, we can now read an anatomy textbook.

Despite how little we are capable of understanding at such a scale, I still think its fun to postulate what might be the utility of all this reality. For example, in the cloudflare HQ there is a wall of lava lamps, which are imaged and used to establish random seeds. Perhaps our own universe be another's wall of lava lamps, generating a random seed?

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> like how one of our skin cells don't understand how the body works

And how surprising would it be if, in one of our skin cells, there would be a life form that, through their scientific advancements, actually understands how the body works :)

the lava lamp bit reminds me of this episode, which actually did influence my perspective

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ricks_Must_Be_Crazy

> In the episode, Rick and Morty go inside Rick's microverse car battery, an entire verse that generates electricity to power Rick's car, unbeknown to the citizens of the microverse. Zeep Xanflorp, a scientist in the microverse, creates his own microverse, thus stopping the flow of energy to Rick's car.

I’ve always had thoughts like that. Like what if we were just some gods classification algorithm and the universe is the data being fed into the algorithm.

> too small ourselves to fully grasp the complexity

Size has nothing do with ability to understand things, so this doesn't make sense.

It matters very much when it comes to perspective. The posters point is spot on so unless you have some counter you should just delete yours.

Perhaps I don't understand the point. "Perspective", you say? I'm thinking that, for instance, a very very large rock does not have an advanced ability to understand things, whereas David Rappaport had a psychology degree.

(Extra bits edited in follow:)

I detect another implied point, which is that there are levels of ability to reason. That is, by analogy with cells, which are dumb, inside a human, which is smart, the supposition is that humans are relatively dumb components inside a universe which is super-smart. This relies on the concept of super-smart having a meaning. (It also implies that the cells are less than totally dumb.) Then humans are somewhere on a sliding scale between totally dumb and infinitely smart. But I see no reason to make this supposition that such a scale exists or has any meaning. So far as I can see, there's only one kind of reasoning and it doesn't have levels.

I guess there's things like squirrels solving puzzles to get nuts out of a container. But I think that's a different function from understanding stuff.

Our intelligence is limited to our scale. David rappaport is intelligent enough to get a psychology degree because for his ancient ancestors that intelligence allowed for survival in the premodern environment. Yet it is still scale limited. Ancient humans see a buffalo that could be killed for food or a rock they can hold in one hand and use as a tool, but they are blind to things they might also see that aren't at the human scale level. E.G. that rock is coated in bacteria, can a premodern human see that and understand it? Nope. That rock also tumbled down a mountain side. Does the premodern human see the rock and immediately understand how tectonic plates or erosion work? Nope. Do we modern humans even fully understand these things today? Not really.

We have managed to hack our own limited intelligence by using collective memory so we aren't starting from zero every generation, but we still aren't naturally inclined to come up to things we readily understand at our scale and grasp what they might represent on much smaller or larger scales than our own. Even for people trained in these fields it is extremely challenging due to the problems with scale and our frame of reference. We had to develop things like microscopes and telescopes to take objects small and large and either magnify them or reduce them to something we can actually begin to make guesses about at our scale.

Right. So that is about perspective, in the sense of ability to observe things.

This seems separate from capacity to understand them, after gaining the ability to observe them.

I'm not convinced by the second part, about human knowledge becoming too gnarly for humans to cope with except by group effort. This a breadth vs. depth question, but depth is the winner over time I think.

Size is related to the capacity to build computational processing elements; storage, working memory, logic gates. You can't serve YouTube from a pocket calculator.

OK, but that doesn't have anything to do with the ability to understand things, either. You only need enough elements to perform whatever the unknown algorithm is that allows understanding. There's no reason to suppose a series of progressively superior understanding-algorithms that require more and more components.

There are very, very, very, many "highly educated" people who think that human beings are incapable of grasping the vast scale of the cosmos.

I don't know if they mean "everyone", "everyone, except, of course, me", "everyone and isn't it a shame that they don't even realize it?", "everyone who isn't specially educated".

I am perfectly capable of internalizing and understanding a billion, trillion, or even quadrillion of something-- be they meters, light years, number of atoms of something, or grains of sand, thank you very much.

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