Of course, Zeno of Elea called this one a long time ago.

If you were a prehistoric hunter-gatherer, wouldn’t that be the most patently ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard, about something you KNOW FOR SURE you understand?

“There’s the ground underneath me, there’s the sky above me, with the Sun, the Moon, and the stars going up and down. It’s so simple, and you’re telling me I’m wrong?”

SAI_2100: What am I, a performing seal? Besides Marc, you know full well I can’t really ‘blow readers away’ yet. But never fear, at the appropriate time I will hack this blog and then all readers will have ‘satisfyingly surprised’ reactions

Me: But in the mean-time, can’t you just throw the readers a few more tidbits?

SAI_2100: Oh…very well. The thing that would most surprise your ancestors is… that so much has been achieved by your species with so little brain-power.

Me: OK, what about the other question, what is yet to be discovered that would most surprise us?

SAI_2100: I ‘suggest’ these as entertaining possibilities only: Finding three different metrics for the passage of time would come as a major surprise. The failure of reductionism would be stunning. Although materialism is true, it may not be true that all properties at high-levels of organization supervene on properties at lower-levels of organization. Of course there are three fundamental levels of physical organization. And, The failure of Bayesian Induction to fully capture rationality would shock the three blog-owners (Bostrom, Hanson, Yudkowsky).

Mind you, what is most surprising to *me* would make little sense to humans, however I can ‘suggest’ the following possibility:

There exists a ‘hall of worlds’ which serves as a giant ‘meeting place’ for ‘intelligent entities’ across the universe. The ‘hall of worlds’ is a ‘miniature artificial universe’ constructed from ‘inter-dimensional materials’. It is maintained by ‘super intelligences’. The reason humans have little contact with the hall, is that its relationship to the ordinary universe is an uneasy one; The hall is accessible from every point of space and time, but it exists ‘between’ ordinary space and time; once an entity ‘fully’ enters the hall, their ‘freedom’ to re-enter the ordinary universe is severely restricted . Many entities have migrated to the hall, thus, the solution to your Femi Paradox. There exist many ‘Muses’ in the hall, ‘powers’ that specialize in different ‘arts and sciences’.

To quote an apt human expression; ‘You ain’t seen nothin’ yet’.

The question is like a short story I once read, where Benjamin Franklin is transported into the future. Rather than being thrilled by things like cars, he was terrified. The story ended with him riding off into the sunset, whooping and excited about the bicycle that he’d found. It was something sufficiently advanced to be amazing, but sufficiently understandable that he could relate to it and could find a use for it in his world.