Remember the old maps with here be dragons warnings in the middle of the ocean?

When we try to think past the limits of our understanding, we always assume we would envision a blank space, a vast emptiness, but that’s not what actually happens.

We fill every gap in knowledge with weird versions of our familiar models.

It works for everything, from imagining what alien life forms might be like to what lies beyond the edges of our visible universe.

This goes a lot farther than people think. Not only can’t we imagine “different” we’ve never seen before, we can’t see it. We see variations on the theme of what we already know.

The universe is infinite, therefore what lies beyond the edges of our sight must be more universe.

We can’t conceive of a world without time, therefore before the universe began there must have been another universe.

No matter how powerful our telescopes get, all we see is more universe, like people walking through a hall of mirrors see endless copies of themselves.

From a historical perspective, whatever we extrapolate from existing knowledge has no connection to how things actually are: the foul humors theory did not come close to approximating microbiology, and the Flower of Venus is not an expression of the divine finding pleasure in beautiful geometry.

There is no such thing as color, just variations in light wavelengths. 

Parallel lines eventually meet. 

Retro-causality is a genuine phenomenon, scientifically replicable. 

Light bends. 

Water can stay liquid below its freezing point.

There is also the category of things we observe and take for granted, but don’t actually exist.

The horizon is not where the earth ends. What we see as four stars may be just one, mirrored by gravitational lensing, nowhere near that location. Bicycle wheels don’t start spinning backwards at certain speeds. Stars don’t change color to cause the red shift.

Two things our minds can’t process, nothing and infinity, so nothing had to become undifferentiated untapped potential for being and infinity always has a beginning and never veers off course.

There is no guarantee Pi’s decimal digits will not start repeating eventually, or stop altogether (I just figured I’d trigger the automatic response that starts with you don’t understand math and ends with non-Euclidean geometry). 

Just a simple example of more of the same, but different.

In conclusion, what are the points worth remembering?

1. The mind can’t process nothing and infinity, so it turned nothing into potential and infinity into beginning and filled both with slightly weirder versions of its familiar models.
2. Just because we observe things, that doesn’t mean they are really happening, as seen in gravitational lensing, bicycle wheels seeming to spin backwards, the redshift, sunrise and sunset.
3. Not only we can’t imagine things we haven’t experienced before, we can’t see them. The mind replaces them with models we can understand.
4. Our mental models often have no relationship to the real thing, but we take them for granted and use them until offered irrefutable proof to the contrary.
5. We see what we think is there. What you see is what you get.