There is the question of whether we are even able to understand reality. Just as fish in a fishbowl can never understand the world beyond.

But suppose that one could create an artificial mind, arbitrarily large and complex. It would surely have more working memory than humans, and would be able to maintain mental concepts and patterns far more complex than humans, but do we have any reason to believe that its intelligence would be qualitatively different from ours?

So maybe we _could_ understand reality, if only we could see outside the cave.

Your example of the expanding universe is very on point. We visualize that, but the reality is quite different: it is about relative scales of things, in their degrees of freedom. But why do those scales matter? That is the metaphysical question.

It is as if we are missing something at the center of all this. The ultimate source of "meaning" - and interestingly, that is a concept that itself only has meaning in the context of consciousness.