Even through science and technology we can't get past the natural limitations of our primate's brain. We can only visualize three spatial dimensions (although there might be much more), we cannot really understand what a thousand million years might mean, and we certainly can only see the world in a very simplified way (we may be able to imagine how balls will behave in snooker, although not in the lottery - although the principles are the same).
This is in fact quite unavoidable: we think with our brains, but, as computers, our brains are rudimentary, they evolved to accomplish simple tasks, they are not very different from the brains of other primates. We cannot even calculate as fast or as precisely as a pocket calculator fueled by solar power. And, in fact, our very small individual intelligence is so small that most of us are not even aware of how dumb we individually are. We believe that we are much more intelligent than other species, and in fact our culture is so vastly superior that it is meaningless to compare our culture with that of the chimpanzees. Their culture is so rudimentary compared to our own that it seems almost nonexistent. We have in fact many reasons to be very proud of our culture, it is indeed our greatest achievement as a species, what allows for our vast numbers and for our success in colonizing this planet. But the achievements of our culture hide our incipient individual capacities.
All we think has been given to us, from other members of the species. We would have not learned it for ourselves. We would not have learned how to think in words, how to represent objects abstractly in our heads, we would not know how to make a fire, how to make clothes, or even the importance of wearing clothes. We learned all this and much more through others. In a certain way we are reincarnations (psychologically) of others, dead and alive. More precisely we reincarnate parts that are useful, that work well, or that, for some other reason, we have adopted as a way to behave.
All of this makes us look highly intelligent. We lead civilized lives, we make the right choices, we say wise things. But the reason we do that is not because we actually thought through all those things until we arrived at the right choice, but simply because we copy-cat some way of thinking that seems to work quite well for us. This applies to everything, even to the most basic things, from personal hygiene, to physics and philosophy. Obviously some people think about the fundamentals more than others, but, in the end, regarding the vast majority of things, we simply accept what someone told us, an interpretation of reality.
I understand myself in this way. I'm rather dumb, I would never have thought about almost everything that I think in my daily life if it weren't for people like Plato, my parents, many teachers and many other writers. Those writings really made sense to me and I adopted many of those ideas, but when I think them through I have to recognize, sadly, that I have no idea of what I'm talking about. That is, no founded-in-fundamentals idea, nothing really certain, that I understand from rock-bottom. This applies to everything I have written so far, and, I think, to everything I will write in the future.
So why do I, even admitting that I actually don't know what I'm talking about, don't simply shut up and be quiet?