Excerpt:
I can’t see a four dimensional universe nor can I truly know what someone is experiecing. It’s frustrating. For now, I rest with equations and eloquent proses. Or at times I simply give up:
“Man, I wish you can just see it”.
Calculus and Flat Land
When I was taking calculus we learned about three dimesional space. My professor made a very cool anology. Projection or shadow of a two dimensional shape is a line, which is a single dimension object. Projection of a three dimesional shape is a two dimension object. Then by anology, a three dimensional object is the projection of a four dimesional object, and so on. I probably heard something similar in “Flat Land”. This concept of “higher dimension by anology” was essential for the characters in flat land to hypotheize that there is a three dimensional being.
One interesting fact pointed out by the creature in Flat Land was: a higher dimension being can see a lower dimension being but not the other way around. Just as the two dimensional being not able to visualize or imagine a three dimesional being, we, a three dimensional being cannot visualize a four dimensional being. Let’s look at this very confusing four dimensional cube, the Tesseract.
For the first time I was told there are places that our imagination cannot take us. Our imagination is limited at constructing the higher dimensions even though we can describe them. What comes out when I attempt to imagine a 4th dimensional being is twisted and probably wrong.
We Don’t Communicate Well
I was thinking about this the other day, and I noticed that our imagination is limited elsewhere too. Just like our inability to access a higher dimensional world, we humans cannot access another human’s mind. We can only describe, and simulate someone else’s thought but we cannot take their thoughts as is and experience them unaltered.
For instance, when we experience emotions and feelings or complex and abstract thoughts, we communicate these experiences via language, which is translated back into experiences via the listener imagination. However, such is lost in translation. Either we didn’t “package” the thoughts so well into languages (not very eloquent or articulate) or the audience simply have inadequate resources to correctly reconstruct the experiences (weak comprehension or lack of reference).
Our existing means of communication are inefficient at transferring experiences unaltered. When we attempt to communicate an abtract and complex idea to another person, often we use an significant amount of language, gesture, body language, facetual expressions, and anologies and even movements to communicate. (or a really long blog post). (Oh, since we are not that good with language, imagine how it’s like to live without language)
As language is predominately left brain, an interesting break from our typical mean of communication is the working with the right brain using the arts (painting, fiction, poetry, musics, movies, photography, etc). The arts are another avenue of communication. A subtle kind that provoke emotions. Provoking emotions is entirely different from describing it - experiencing an emotion is authentic whereas reconstructing it from a description is simulated. Movies and stories for example, are not about describing the emotion that ought to be experienced, but place the audience in a situation where the emotion arise naturally.
However, even the arts is not that great. They are sometimes intepreted differently between individuals, and may not provoke the intended emotions. Also, we can’t quantify feelings (such as pain) with neither language or artistic expressions.
And So I Rest
I can’t see a four dimensional universe nor can I truly know what someone is experiecing. It’s frustrating. For now, I rest with equations and eloquent proses. Or at times I simply give up:
“Man, I wish you can just see it”.