Stu Mack The thing is: we really can’t. Our cognitive limitations hit much sooner than we would like to believe about ourselves
i’ve often thought about this: we can scale in magnitude but only in a sliding way: we travel in a log fashion able to see a range of scaling smaller and larger but then as we focus on the next scale, the smaller falls off the bottom and a new larger looms
I have a study someplace showing how we process scale from self all the way up to planet and what parts of the brain is used.
it really makes sense: hippocampus has our room sized scale which is objects in front of us and the inner boundaries of that space
but as we conceptualize further and further away, areas further back in the brain are used until you finally end up in the back part when we try to conceptualize planet or planets
room, house, neighborhood, state, country, planet I think were the divisions
and so I think if we were to start thinking of the planet as a room, we could then scale further to nebula or something and still hold onto the planet but we couldn’t then hold onto our room because it would be too small
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