About perceiving in 3 dimensions
This post is a follow-up to the previous post about how dimensions constrain our perception and indeed, our thinking.
Continuing with the analogy of a chessboard, you can now see how expanding one's perceptions from one dimension to 2 dimensions enabled us to understand the game of chess. In both cases the game of chess was reality. The same moves, the same logic. What differed was our perception and that consequently changed an inexplicable and mystifying situation into something a lot more understandable.
Now imagine for a moment one of those 3 dimensional chess games in Star Trek, where there are multiple chessboards one on top of the other. Suppose in this hypothetical game of chess, the chessmen can move along the plane of one board, as well as across planes to a different board. Now imagine that you could only perceive in 2 dimensions, that you would only be able to see what's happening on one board of the many that exist in that game. You would definitely understand some things about the game (a lot more, for example, than what you would understand if you could only perceive along a single dimension). But a lot of moves involving movements between the planes would totally escape your comprehension.
Things like how some piece would suddenly disappear from view or how some piece would suddenly appear from nowhere. Things like how some peice would suddenly get captured by another piece that wasn't even there. Imagine a move where a piece moves to another plane and returns to some other place in the original plane - would seem like "teleportation" by the piece.
But taking a step back and looking at the entire game and all the chessboards involved would explain a lot. Expanding our perception to 3 dimensions (adding "depth" to length and breadth) would also expand our ability to understand the reality of the game better.
In the next post, I shall take a step back and talk a bit about some basics of dimensions and an observation about human thinking.
Continuing with the analogy of a chessboard, you can now see how expanding one's perceptions from one dimension to 2 dimensions enabled us to understand the game of chess. In both cases the game of chess was reality. The same moves, the same logic. What differed was our perception and that consequently changed an inexplicable and mystifying situation into something a lot more understandable.
Now imagine for a moment one of those 3 dimensional chess games in Star Trek, where there are multiple chessboards one on top of the other. Suppose in this hypothetical game of chess, the chessmen can move along the plane of one board, as well as across planes to a different board. Now imagine that you could only perceive in 2 dimensions, that you would only be able to see what's happening on one board of the many that exist in that game. You would definitely understand some things about the game (a lot more, for example, than what you would understand if you could only perceive along a single dimension). But a lot of moves involving movements between the planes would totally escape your comprehension.
Things like how some piece would suddenly disappear from view or how some piece would suddenly appear from nowhere. Things like how some peice would suddenly get captured by another piece that wasn't even there. Imagine a move where a piece moves to another plane and returns to some other place in the original plane - would seem like "teleportation" by the piece.
But taking a step back and looking at the entire game and all the chessboards involved would explain a lot. Expanding our perception to 3 dimensions (adding "depth" to length and breadth) would also expand our ability to understand the reality of the game better.
In the next post, I shall take a step back and talk a bit about some basics of dimensions and an observation about human thinking.
posted by the grim sleeper at 9:15 PM
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