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The existence of everything, ultimately, is subject to doubt. And yet, there are endless possibilities for the human mind to think. Everything is conceivable, everything suspicious.

I’ve always been fascinated by the tesseract—at least ever since I found out that it’s an actual real shape and not a Marvel myth. I’ve been fascinated by the existence of something we cannot fully comprehend, but that we can still imagine. It’s like we’re not made to look at it, to see it, but we’re made to think of it. And sometimes, that leads to me thinking that maybe it’s not at all about what we are and are not made to know, but what we allow ourselves to try to know that matters. 

Tesseract and Other Things That Lie Beyond 

So the Tesseract or a Hyper-cube is basically a four dimensional object in that it is made by combining cubes, just like a cube is made by combining squares along different angles. The shape itself looks fascinating, beautiful in its complexity. 

It is an extension of a cube, if you can call it that. It is a proof that we can reach beyond what is given to us with the brilliant thing that is our mind, and that we can conceive even if we cannot perceive it. It is not visible, but is is thinkable. It is our own way to reach a hand into the unknown space beyond and make what we can of it.

Imagine a dark room. You can’t see anything and everything that you know about this room, you know by touching things and by figuring out through the sense of touch what they might be. 

You don’t know how big this room is and you don’t know how it might appear if suddenly the lights are switched on. All you know, you know partially. On the basis of that little information, you assume things about the room and you make hypothesis and arguments and inferences. You imagine the room in your mind’s eye. 

You try to convince yourself that you can see what’s there. 

This is what quantum mechanics is, I think. It’s trying to gauge the layout in complete darkness, trying to find out the certainties by way of probabilities, trying to know without knowing what is to be known. And this is what we do in our mind every time we imagine and go beyond what we can merely see and touch and hear.

The Wonders Of Reality

The thing is, this world is so much more than it seems, and we should be frightened, we should be fascinated, we should be rendered immobile by the sheer fantasy of living a realistic life. And yet, all we do is dilute the wonders around us. We try to find their causes, we try to find explanations, and when we do find something like an explanation, our unending curiosity is satisfied and we become bored.

We are like children for most of our lives—asking questions, pointing at stuff and asking what? and why?

Like a child points an accusatory finger at the white rose or a purple leaf, we ask ‘why is it like that?’ and more often than not, we find some answer. We reach something that can be called a part of a reason, or an explanation. 

But the thing about children that makes them different is that they don’t stop with one answer. They don’t stop with a why. They follow it up with another why and then another and then they ask about something else or something similar but completely different. They are curious but they’ve not grown enough to make it a chore yet. 

We stifle our curiosity and push it into neat little boxes along with utility and productivity. We take the chaos of our thought and try to line them up to resemble something that looks like order, but it’s not that simple. 

For one thing, what order looks like and what order actually is are two very different things. What it looks like, to any ordinary person probably, are color coded stacks and boxes taped with category titles and neat little piles of things organized in way we can understand. What order actually is probably looks a lot like what we think chaos is. There is precision in every fiber of this universe, not neat lines and perfect stacks, but balance.

Everything is moving and is still all at once, and whenever I think of order, I think of the electrons in a system flitting about in a chaotic whirlwind of movement; but if anything was not as it is, the whole atom would collapse in on itself.

If there was even a slight difference in the gravitational force exerted by the sun on the earth or by the earth on the moon, then we wouldn’t be here right now. The planets would’ve collided, collapsed into the center long ago, and there would be no one talking about possibilities and their endlessness in blogs.

It is so precise, the way we exist and there is nothing boring about it. There can be nothing just reality about it. Our existence itself is a fantastic thing—a miracle, if you want to call it.

And yet, what we do is that we grow up, and we try to beat our unending curiosity into something that can be fit in a box. We try to rein it in, to make it more ordered, more productive, less of a whirlwind. We are an inherently curious species. It is what has let us survive and evolve, but sometimes we manage to even make that curiosity into something as dull as boredom. But sometimes, we also get time to think, and we do. 

And that’s why I like the concept of Tesseract—an object we cannot see, cannot touch but one that we can imagine, and that it is natural to go from a square to a cube and a cube to a hyper cube. It is so natural for us to take that next step, to stench the boundaries of the known just a little further.

The Limits of Thinking (Or Lack Thereof)

We’re always making progress, we’re always moving forward, because it so natural for us to move forward, not just externally or physically, but also mentally. I’ve never been the person I am today. The person you are while reading this is not the person you’ll be in an hour, or a day. You’ll be changed and you’ll be one step ahead, one step older—for lack of a better word. 

I love the word older. It implies a sort of progress without attaching the good or bad to it. No moral significance, no better or worse, but something less new, less young that you were a moment ago.

We’re always evolving, always becoming something other, something older, more adaptable to this reality. We’re always changing and it is our responsibility to make sure that this change is not for the worse. It is our responsibility to make sure that we use our mind for better.

We can—and we do—challenge the limits of our understanding. We’ve been doing it for centuries. We’ve been doing it since the beginning. We’ve been moving forward, one step at a time.

It’s like we’re in the Infinite Hotel.

The Infinite Hotel Paradox

The Infinite Hotel Paradox, or the Hilbert’s Paradox is named after David Hilbert who introduced the idea in a 1925 lecture.

Imagine a hotel with infinite number of rooms, and imagine that the hotel is completely occupied. There is no space left and yet the fact remains that it can still accommodate an infinite number of guests. Even if all the rooms are occupied, there be made room for each new guest.

But how to reach the top most room? If a person comes and wants to book a room, you can’t just put him on the lift and press the button on infinity. What you do instead is ask every person to move one room up. The person in Room 1 moved to Room 2, and so on. That way the room on the lowest floor gets empty and the hotel never gets full.

It’s like our mind is at the topmost floor, on the last room before infinity starts. We can’t ever reach the end, because there is no end. The end is something we need to make sense of the beginning. So we can’t ever go to the last room but we can go to the next one. And then the next. One room at a time. One step at a time. 

It is natural to go from one step to the next, from the square to the cube and then further. It is natural for our mind to think, then think more, then keep thinking. There’s no limit to thinking. The only limit is what we create in our own mind. We think we’re at the bottom of the stairs, looking up and up and for an end we can’t reach. We think we’re in Room 1 and that we can’t ever reach Room ∞. The problem is our thinking that we’re at the bottom.

We’re not. We stand at the edge of the cliff. We are toeing the line between the known and the unknown. We are using that line to skip rope like clueless kids. We are young, so young in a still young universe. It’s only 13.5 billion years. Maybe. We don’t even know that with as much accuracy as we’d like. We’ve been here for less than a heartbeat and we’re so insignificant and so important.

We’re curious and it’s the most brilliant thing ever. The only thing left to do is think, challenge the limits of our mind, and think for the better.

Here is another post like this if you’re interested in unlocking the limits of your mind further: Are We Free? Or Are We In A Cage?