What is it like not to know?

Most of us (sadly not all of us) are familiar with the experience of not knowing something. Few of us are intimately familiar with the concept that some things are objectively true or false but unknowable. Apart from purely religious word game, we rarely try to imagine how the simple fact of human architecture could prevent us from knowing ore even suspecting important facts about reality. This is not about our weak abilities of perception. It's about the limitations of what we can imagine. Trying to imaginine the unimaginable

Consider the poor Golden Doodle, lets call her HEX.

Doors and gates are super important to HEX. In fact they keep her alive in a way she cannot possibly understand. Yet she is always experiencing doors.

It's amusing to see her mind work as she tries to wrap her mind around this concept.

She knows, for example, that doors are a transition from one space to another. She has also figured out that she needs permission to go through a door. In a house she has never seen before, she will quickly learn which rooms she can enter and which are forbidden. She connects the god-like humans with doors in another way. She will find a human to open a door if she needs to go in or out of a door that, for mysterious reasons, needs human intervention to "work".

For HEX, humans are irrevocably tangled up in the "concept" of doors. Her ability to generalize is limited, so she needs to figure out that permission from one human is not the same as permission from another. For example, she will quickly come through the back door if my wife just opens it, but will need to be persuaded that it's OK to come through the same door if I am holding it open for her. She "believes" that it is OK to sleep in my bedroom but only if I am not looking. It is amusing but true to speak of dogs as "superstitious" - crammed with irrelevant "beliefs" and "connections" that form a tapestry of doggy theology about the world.

Enough about HEX.

Sometimes I think the problems I have wrapping my mind around the Big Bang and time starting at some point are the same kind of thing. Or perhaps the problems I have of imagining my own death. I'm also quite sure that there are hugely important things going on in the universe that I will live and die without suspecting.

Sometimes I stand at the door of reality and wonder "Why is there anything at all". Kinda waiting for somebody to open the door ...

Excuse me, must let the dog out ...