Remember: This text is purely fictional!
Ma En had an unusual interest in strange and bizarre things. The degree of this interest was far deeper than the attitude of ordinary people pursuing new and strange matters. Even so, he did not purchase too many peculiar gadgets, nor did he seek out things that would be considered grotesque in the eyes of ordinary people; he had little interest in outward absurdity or ancient artifacts with historical legends.
What he sought was an internal peculiarity, a distinctiveness presented by things not created by humans. However, in his short life, he had never discovered any non-man-made unusual things.
In the era of the information explosion, there would always be people presenting many puzzling and confusing images, videos, and rumors, but generally speaking, the horror and strangeness presented by these things were merely rooted in human nature, and were very far removed from what Ma En sought.
Ma En was actually long prepared for the difficulty of achieving his pursuit; he never spoke of or showed enthusiasm for this aspect to others, nor did he deliberately seek a different pace from others in life. Therefore, no one ever thought Ma En was a monster; they all just treated him as an ordinary person to interact with.
In a large sense, the Ma En of today was indeed not much different from an ordinary person, except for the fastidiousness of his interests.
The reason Ma En developed such an interest can be traced back to a long time ago, when he was still a child, a thought suddenly arose – a question to which no one has been able to give him a definite answer to this day.
When he was about five or six years old, his father brought him a children's popular science reader about human science as a birthday gift. Ma En still clearly remembered that it was a very beautifully packaged book, with gilt art fonts on the cover, and the exquisite and detailed illustrations inside the pages were very attractive to children's eyes. However, its textual content, looking back now, was actually not in-depth, nor could it be called substantial. Even so, he still remembered that his own thinking stemmed from a question touched upon in this book, yet not explicitly raised.
The book told children: Human senses are limited; for example, human ears can only hear sounds within an extremely narrow frequency, and the human nose can only smell odors within an extremely narrow range, inferior to most animals in the world. But, humans are good at summarizing and creating, manufacturing many instruments that allow information such as sounds and smells that human senses cannot reach, to become things people can know and understand.
Mathematics is great; beautiful mathematical formulas are as just and accurate as the theorems of the universe. Things that people cannot directly perceive and recognize can be known and understood through mathematics.
Content such as this, describing human limitations, as well as the greatness and pursuit of human science, ran through the entire book. However, after finishing reading it, or rather, before finishing reading it, Ma En couldn't help but have some hazy ideas.
If human senses are limited, and consequently, the functions of various parts, tissues, and organs of the human body all have limits, and even the cells that form the basic structure of the human body, as well as the more detailed carbon-based structure, also have their limits, such that things exceeding this limit range cannot be perceived or recognized at all. Then, what about the human brain?
Could it be that the human brain is independent? That the thinking behavior and bursts of inspiration that exist based on the human brain are the only exception in this 'human body' container full of limitations?
Could it be that the human brain, just like other senses, can only observe, feel, recognize, think about, and understand things within a certain range, and remains oblivious to things exceeding this range?
Could it be that human thought and inspiration can exceed this range of limitations? Rather than only being able to think about and generate inspiration regarding things within a certain range?
If the human brain is also limited, then, are science and mathematics, etc., the series of ways of knowing the world born from the human brain, restricted by the brain itself, and actually also full of limitations?
The beauty and progress of mathematics seem omnipotent, but is it possible that it is only perfect in relation to the 'range that the limitation-filled brain can recognize and think about'?
Is there such a possibility, that outside the range humans can recognize and think about, there is still a bizarre reality operating unknown to people? And humans, restricted by their own limitations, restricted by the limitations inherent in brain-based thinking and cognition itself, are thus unable to either recognize it or think about it?
The human perspective has blind spots. Humans, relying on instruments, seem to be able to break through this blind spot, but they haven't truly broken through. Even if machines monitor 360-degree images, what a person can see at the same time when viewing these images is still less than 360 degrees. Or, this 360-degree information must undergo some form of transformation, for example, being turned into a top-down view, consequently causing a reduction in information. People obtain seemingly clearer structured information through information reduction and information re-splicing. So, is thinking itself also like this?
Human science obtains a multitude of data in ways that surpass human physical limits, but, when people think about and understand this data, are they also similarly bound by their own limitations? When this information, imperceptible to the human body, is transcribed into information that can be recognized and understood by humans, becoming seemingly clearer and easier-to-understand information, is there a part, perhaps even a very large part, of the information that has already been lost in this process?
Among the people Ma En had encountered, there existed no one who could answer these questions. Or rather, most people were not interested in such thinking; they themselves were not interested in 'things they couldn't see or touch,' regarding them as meaningless.
However, Ma En was interested. Unlike people's interest in terrifying and mysterious things like demons and ghosts based on their own human nature, what interested him were things beyond the cognitive and thinking limitations brought about by humanity's own material basis.
Ma En also held a strong interest in any scientific theories claiming to be at the forefront of exploring the essence of the world. However, what he saw was that all science to date was aimed at transcribing more information about things beyond human limitations into information conforming to the human level – it itself did not break through human limitations, but merely changed the appearance of those things humans cannot directly perceive, allowing humans to perceive and understand them.
This did not solve Ma En's problem: in this process of transcription and change, was the information about the thing already flawed and incomplete? Is the data finally obtained by scientists truly complete in the full sense? Or is it the part that the scientist's brain basis determines he can recognize and receive, which he then considers 'complete'? Does he merely use mathematics to describe the meaning contained within this limitation-filled 'completeness'?
Perhaps, scientific thinking, mathematical formulas, and the meanings derived from these only exhibit beauty on the material basis of human existence, but are equally confined to the material structural basis of the human form.
From thing to instrument, and then from instrument to brain, humans cannot, in the true sense, obtain firsthand information about things. And in this process of information capture and transcription, people perhaps cannot imagine what they have lost, and how much they have lost – Ma En couldn't help but think this.
Although Ma En thought this way, he could not tell these thoughts to others, because he would be regarded by the ordinary people around him as a lunatic spouting nonsense, a person doing 'meaningless things'. Ma En was thinking, but he was very clear that his thinking was still based on 'him being a human'. Perhaps, thinking about things beyond humanity from the standpoint of a human was indeed a laughable and meaningless thing, because this approach was full of contradictions with the thoughts described above. No matter how much he thought, or for how long, his own limitations determined that thinking could not lead him to the answer.
Unless, he was no longer human.