The Limits of Reality

I have been thinking about how limited our understanding of reality actually is. We like to believe that what we perceive through our senses and mind is the full picture, but it is really just a thin slice of what is out there.

Let’s take examples of color and sound. What we call visible light is just a tiny strip, while the rest of it, like infrared and ultraviolet, moves through us all the time without us even knowing. Sound works the same way, our ears only catch a narrow range while dogs hear higher and elephants hear lower, and whole conversations are happening that we will never hear. It is like walking through a huge dark cave with a small flashlight and assuming whatever the beam touches is the whole place.

AI has its own version of this blindness. Most systems today are language models that work with text, predicting words and patterns, but they are not touching the world itself. Even the new wave of multimodal systems that can process images, sound, or tactile input from robotic hands are still only handling data. They do not see, hear, or feel in the way we do. It is like reading about the ocean, or looking at a chart of its currents, without ever standing in the water.

Humans and AI both try to widen the flashlight beam, but they do it in different ways. For us it means expanding awareness itself, noticing more of what is already here. Meditation showed me that directly. The first time I sat down I realized how noisy my mind was and how little of the present I was actually catching, and it felt like tuning into a channel that had been playing all along but I had never noticed. For AI it means expanding the scope of what it can process, adding new streams of data beyond text. One is about awareness, the other about data, but both are attempts to reach further than their original design allowed.

But sadly, neither “can easily” escape its natural limits. Humans are limited to biology and AI is limited to data and code, but maybe the point is not to escape at all, only to keep widening the light a little further.