The dog and the elevator

It’s a breezy morning, and you’re out for a walk with your dog—a ritual that is as much a part of your life as it is hers. She sniffs at the usual trees, leaves her mark on her favorite spots, and occasionally glances up at you with those big, trusting eyes. It’s a simple routine, but one that holds within it a fascinating mystery about the nature of perception and intelligence.

Your dog lives in a world that is, quite literally, flat. She moves around in a two-dimensional environment, where everything is about distance and direction. But then, you step into an elevator. As the doors close, she may glance up at you with curiosity or mild indifference. The box she just entered with you is still the same, isn’t it? Yet, a few moments later, when those doors open again, the world outside is inexplicably different. Your dog steps out, not onto the street she was sniffing a moment ago, but into a completely new space. For her, this must be a perplexing experience, akin to entering one world and exiting in another.

Dogs and the two-dimensional mind

The mind of a dog is a marvel in its own right, shaped by thousands of years of evolution. It’s a brain finely tuned to detect the slightest rustle in the bushes, to decipher the complex social cues of its pack, and to navigate vast territories by scent alone. But when it comes to understanding abstract concepts like a third dimension—or the idea that you can move up or down within space—there’s a hard limit.

Think about it: even the most intelligent dog will never grasp that an elevator moves vertically. To her, the world is flat, and the elevator is some sort of magic box. She might learn that stepping into this box leads to a different environment, but the mechanics of that transition are forever beyond her comprehension—a mental blind spot that no amount of training or exposure can overcome. And yet, we don’t fault our dogs for this; we simply accept that their brains aren’t wired to understand such complexities.

The elevator of human cognition

Now, let’s take a step back and consider the human mind. We pride ourselves on our intelligence, our ability to solve complex problems, to think in multiple dimensions—literally and metaphorically. But what if, like our dogs, we too are limited by the structure of our brains? What if there are “elevators” all around us—concepts, dimensions, or realities—that we can’t perceive or understand, no matter how smart we think we are?

This isn’t just idle speculation. The history of science and philosophy is filled with moments where humanity bumped up against the limits of understanding. For centuries, we believed the Earth was flat, only to discover that it’s a sphere floating in space. Later, we learned that our planet is just one of many in a vast, expanding universe. Each of these revelations was like stepping out of an elevator into a new dimension, a new understanding of reality.

But what if there are still doors we haven’t opened, or can’t open? Theoretical physics, particularly the work of Michio Kaku, suggests that there might be more than three spatial dimensions, that time itself could be just one of many dimensions, or that there are parallel universes coexisting with our own. These ideas are tantalizing, but they’re also incredibly difficult to wrap our heads around. Much like how a dog can’t comprehend vertical movement, our brains might simply be unequipped to fully grasp these higher dimensions.

This concept isn’t entirely new. In Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, prisoners are chained in a cave, only able to see shadows on a wall, which they take to be the entirety of reality. When one prisoner is freed and steps outside the cave, he’s blinded by the light of the sun—representing the truth—but gradually he comes to understand the real world, vastly different and more complex than the shadows he once knew. The allegory suggests that humans are often prisoners of their perceptions, limited by our cognitive frameworks. Plato’s cave, like the dog in the elevator, is a powerful metaphor for the limits of human understanding.

The limits of intelligence

This brings us to an uncomfortable but intriguing question: why do we resist the idea that there are cognitive limits we will never overcome? Humans are driven by curiosity, by a desire to know and understand everything. It’s what fuels our scientific endeavors, our art, our philosophy. But this very drive can blind us to our own limitations.

Consider the notion of infinity—a concept that has perplexed mathematicians and philosophers for centuries. We can describe it, work with it in equations, and even approximate it, but can we truly understand it? Or is it, like the elevator, something that exists beyond our cognitive reach?

Similarly, the concept of consciousness has puzzled scientists for decades. We know it exists, we experience it every day, but how and why it arises from the physical matter of the brain is still a mystery. Some theories suggest that consciousness could be a fundamental property of the universe, like gravity or electromagnetism. Others argue that it might be an emergent phenomenon that we can’t fully explain using our current scientific tools. In both cases, we’re faced with the possibility that our brains are simply not equipped to fully understand the very thing that makes us who we are.

Learning to use the stairs

If you’re a particularly smart dog, you might eventually learn to use the stairs. It’s not quite the same as understanding the elevator, but it’s a clever workaround that gets you from one place to another. Perhaps this is what humans have been doing throughout history—finding “stairs” to navigate the complexities of the universe. Mathematics, for example, is one such set of stairs. It allows us to describe and predict phenomena that we can’t directly perceive, like the curvature of space-time or the behavior of subatomic particles.

But even our most sophisticated intellectual tools have their limits. G?del’s incompleteness theorems, for instance, show that there are true mathematical statements that can’t be proven within a given system. This suggests that there are truths about the universe that we might never be able to prove or fully understand, no matter how advanced our tools become.

Acceptance and curiosity

So, where does this leave us? Should we give up on trying to understand the universe and accept our cognitive limitations? Not at all. Just as our dogs trust us to navigate the mysterious workings of the elevator, we must trust in our own capacity for discovery. The beauty of science and philosophy lies in the journey, in the pursuit of knowledge—even if we know that some doors might remain forever closed.

In the end, perhaps the most profound wisdom comes not from understanding everything but from recognizing the limits of our understanding. Like a dog learning to use the stairs, we can find creative ways to explore the unknown, even if we can’t fully grasp it. And who knows? Maybe, in some distant future, humanity will develop new ways of thinking, new “brains,” that can perceive the world in dimensions we can’t even imagine today.

Until then, let’s keep stepping into those elevators, embracing the mystery, and enjoying the ride—no matter where it might take us.

References

Damour, T. (2020).?Gravitation, Quantum Fields and Quantum Strings. Cambridge University Press.

Penrose, R. (2016).?Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. Princeton University Press.

Sacks, O. (2010).?The Mind’s Eye. Vintage.