Greta wrote:At the risk of being mysterian, even our vast knowledge today is still much less than our ignorance of how reality works.
One comes with the other, doesn't it? It is precisely because of our vast knowledge that we're able to assess the dimension of what is yet to know. Socrates' maxim, "all that I know is that I know nothing", expresses with humbleness this paradoxical notion of wisdom. Not what you see in theologians, who's dogmatic thought is inspired by the idea that the big issues have been settled, revealed to them by the divine know-it-all creatures.
Greta wrote:
More specifically, the string theorists have posted an extra six to eight (note that string theory is not dead, it just smells funny). One may also wonder how tiny quantum entities can affect reality, but en masse they do. Meanwhile gravity remains only explainable with extra dimensions (so the boffins say).
Lots of theoretical speculative physics, which might refine our knowledge of how reality works, complementing or encompassing fundamental laws, but very unlikely to demand the rewriting of physics in whole. If the other dimensions in string theory have too little or no interaction with the observable world, they become irrelevant for our understanding and transformation of this one world we do live.
Greta wrote:
Re: the things being "brought into the fold" by knowledge, We know many things about black holes and QM, yet the limits of accessibility remain because they pertain to physical thresholds.
Not a fixed threshold, I must say, as historically it has been moving as science progresses. Interesting though, that what was once a realm of the unknown and filled up with supernatural forces and entities, eventually receded to give room to our true knowledge of the world. It's not different now: the woo-woo preachers will swear that beyond those frontiers of our knowledge, reside the old divine beings that once were the cause of rain and earthquakes.
Greta wrote:
Also, when you say "this dimension", apparently what we experience is four dimensions. I also wonder if there is at least another dimension in front of our eyes - in/out - to go with the familiar up/down, back/forth, left/right and past/future dimensions.
I assume you are referring to the space-time dimension as the fourth dimension. I can agree and acknowledge that Special and General Relativity gave us a sort of paradigm shift in how we traditionally viewed reality. Still it rested on things we already knew as physical realities (time and space), making the relations among them depending on the position of the observers, that is, referential rather than absolute.
Greta wrote:
I can relate to those who see our reality as one dimension, seeing the above parameters as practical constructs rather than reality. Seen as a single dimension, reality would seem to consist of one big thing turning itself inside out - the universe - and all of its constituents are doing the same thing (turning inside out) at differing rates. The process of life is one of turning inside out over a life span - where what was on the inside is cycled with the environment, ending with death, turning fully inside out / disaggregating. Not sure what that would mean for a god or God, though.
You might be describing substance monism. A god in a purely materialistic world would be plain nature. The next thing to ask will be if it can have consciousness. All empirical evidence and reasoning points at not being so.