Are there aspects of reality humans will never understand?

Our physical universe abounds with censorship limits such as the speed of light, the Compton Limit, Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. Evidence suggests that there is plenty of 'stuff' beyond what it is even possible to observe.

And ultimately Kant was right. The censorship problem begins at the limits of each individual's perspective. Each of us defines our own reality. Despite the dreams of science to uncover a set of descriptions of nature that any and every observer can agree is 'reality', there is NOT some objective reality underlying things. Every attempt to define such an 'absolute' reality is fraught with philosophical roadblocks.

When humans do not understand something, we give it a name. Then we make a dangerous mistake: we confuse naming something with explaining it. We use words like God, love, and hate to describe mysteries we may not fully understand. The word gives us comfort because it makes the unknown seem known. But a label is not an explanation.

The real danger begins when the word ends the question. “God did it” may sound like an answer, but if it stops us from asking how, why, and what evidence do we have?, it explains nothing. It simply gives our ignorance a name. Socrates understood this problem more than two thousand years ago. A life without questioning our own beliefs is an unexamined life. And when we stop examining what we believe, we become easy prey for superstition, propaganda, and nonsense.

Wisdom does not begin with having answers. It begins with having the courage to say, “I don’t know.”

Ignorance is not admitting that we do not know. Ignorance is pretending that a word means we do.

Of course there are aspects of reality humans will never understand. Are there aspects of reality that dogs will never understand? Human exceptionalism is really not a very good idea. Yes, we'll make progress and make lives better.

Science and Reality

I think it is wrong to assume that scientists through their work find the “absolute truth” about our universe. What they do is to construct “models” that allow us to predict the response of physical systems when the inputs or the environment around the system change. The simpler the model is, and the better its predictions describe the resulting responses, the closer we come to our “understanding” of the universe.

When we experimentally test whether the electron is a wave, we often discover that the answer is YES. And when we test whether the electron is a particle, we often find that the answer is YES.

But the electron is neither a wave nor a particle. It is something far more complicated! But we use models and concepts from our 3D world in which we have grown up to yield understandable descriptions of the more complicated components of our universe.

That is how humans “understand” any aspects of reality. If the predictions do not match with this "reality”, we refine our models to better match any predictions. This is how the model of four universe has developed from a “glass sphere” with attached stars (2000 years ago) to Kepler’s models with planets following elliptical trajectories; later to massive bodies that follow the gravitational forces, and to Einstein’s 4D space-time continuum.

And quite likely there will be further model refinements to incorporate “dark matter” and entanglements of particles over large distances.

What if dark matter is some kind of force (gravity?) from a 4th (or more) spatial dimension?

The universe does what it does. Modern science is based on building mathematical/computational models on how and why the universe or any piece of it, including the earth, behaves as it does. Models can be accurate if they describe the behavior or the universe exactly and also make predictions that can be verfied either observationally, experimentally and both. However, even if a model descirbes a system perfectly, it's still a model and not reality. The underlying reality may never be understood. Models are understandable but not the real thing. Karl Popper relied on falsibility, Inductive reasoning was questioned by David Hume, Realists believe that models are real, Instumentalists believe that reality doesn't matter, what matters is reading from instruments. Thomas Kuhn's historic relatitavism argues that science does not progress linearly but is overturned when anomalies are found and pile up enough to overturn the dominant paradigm. What is knowable and not may be inherent limitations on human perception.

Why is there something instead of nothing?

Is the universe infinite?

Is randomness real or just a way to manage lack of knowledge?

The plight of wildlife under human stress. Seeing a wild dog roaming a city of roads, cars and humans, I blame humans. The fact that wildlife exists in such a hostile environment, while humans are doing nothing to help wildlife, shows how backward humans have become. Humans fail to understand themselves and their relations to the natural world.

Sure. There are the numbers without causes, like the speed of light or mass of an electron. In another universe, they might be different.

Also, what if dark matter were tachyons? They would have imaginary mass, which would keep them dispersed. They wouldn't clump. Of course, Einstein's formula would require imaginary energy, which might help with another mystery. That's not original with me. Apparently, there is a dimension problem, with three time dimensions and one space dimension, which I don't understand.

Then, there's the question of where the antiparticles went.

Will we ever discover dark matter? It will discover us, but we won't live to regret it.

Are there certain things we'll never truly know or understand? Only one--ourselves.

What is the aim of science? To examine its own aims, and its role in human inquiry.

If our reality is a simulation and its creator mistyped one of the setup parameters, we may never come up with a consistent explanation for dark matter. Or could they have done this deliberately in order to see how long it might take us to work it out. Maybe somebody can work out which value would have to be wrong in order to produce this result.

From the very first instant our nascent universe required more gravitational strength than it possessed itself in order not to blow apart. This extra gravity could have been provided by a simultaneously generated other universe. This universe would have different natural laws and different kinds of matter, as Isaac Newton famously proposed. Thus, it would only interact with our universe through gravitation. By and by we shall learn a lot about this companion universe but we shall likely never be able to observe its material.

This is what we men by God. This is the word we use for what we cannot understand or explain. We will continue to probe the unknown with the tools we have and the new ones we will develop. But there will likely always be an edge to our knowledge. We can look forward to a lifetime of inquiry IF we don't destroy ourselves or are not destroyed by a virus we can't figure out. Love, Doc

And what is "reality"? We haven't figured out the brain/ cognition/ awareness/perception. And the brain is as close as can be to each of us.