well im a very late commer to the converstation, but still, for anyone still interested or passers by.
im a mechanical engineer and ive toyed with the concept of hyper dimensions here and there, my personal idea is that it might actually be possible to visualize 4D spatial dimensions just as we do 3. Think about the color scheme of visible light, supposedly, some people out there are tetrachromatic, meaning, that they can percieve 4 basic colors, instead of your typical trichromatic human, which only percieves 3, allowing for only a million different combinations as opposed by 100 million colors by tetrachromats.
So i assume all people here are trichromats, including myself, can you attempt to imagine what that 4th colors looks like for tetrachromats? and how about the resulting combinations? we cant even start to grasp the universe of colors these people can, but that doesnt quite mean were wholly unable to do so.
Lab rats are only bichromats and can only see yellow and blue, and genetic expirmentation as well as connecting optic sensors capable of sensing redlight waves, apparently, allwed them to develop neural paths in their occipital lobe corresponding to red light signals, though we dont yet know if “sensing” is the same as “seeing”. So how exactly these rats percieve red light waves we dont know. But this shows that the only limitation these little creatures had when in came to percieving trichromat colors, was sensory input.
So coming back to the 4D discussion, if there IS data, that is wholly accesible and can be processed and grasped by the brain, yet its only limitation is sensory input, then 4 dimensional space might be also the case. Other questions might relate to physical reality, for example, in our conception of space, if we took a human and ditched him into 4D space, it would be the same as ditching a 2D being into 3D space, it wouldnt even quite exist, as it wholly lacks 1 dimensión to be considered to occupy 3D space. Yet, this might not be a limitation at all! take for example, an alien species whose conception of reality is 4D, yet, theyre as capable if not more than us to navigate reality, we simply have very different methods of measuring it =D !
So you see, everything might be just a matter of context.
This is where I stopped reading.
You joined this board so you could post that to a thread from 12 years ago? Doesn’t really move the discussion forward, IMHO.
Carl Sagan: - YouTube
Then you missed the best part of my comment fella 
So?
now now theres no need to be such a jerk dude, if you didnt understand what i said, ill be glad to further explain it to you
Sure. Feel free to explain that, and please relate it to other information put forward in this thread.
Just drop your hostility already mate, i mean, i came… i even signed up because i wanted to give some further insight and never really expecting anyone to reply or even read what i had to say, and this is how im welcomed?
anywhore, well im not sure what you dont get, its pretty self-explanatory. The example of aliens i gave has to do with the quantum notion that we create reality, or how i interpret it is that reality doesnt have an exact and fixed form or nature.
I don’t mean to be hostile. But this forum is for questions that have factual answers and I’m not sure that I see a factual answer regarding 4D visualization in your post. Generally the culture on this forum is that if you contribute to a thread that is very old, it is because you are bringing new information that is relevant.
You may have some interesting points with your analogy of how animals see light (I think the word is dichromat), but in that case it is about different senses to detect something that it is definitely out there. Our eyes don’t see ultraviolet, infrared, microwaves, or FM radio but we know all those forms of electromagnetic radiation exist and it is just a matter of sensory evolution as to which animals can see what. We can’t really imagine what it would be like to “see” them (although people who have had cataract surgery can see some ultraviolet) because our brains just didn’t develop like that.
Dimensions are a little different. We have no particular reason to believe that we are embedded in some fourth dimension that we can’t detect, although we are pretty good at modeling it mathematically. I suspect you might be saying that this is just because of our sensory limitations, and perhaps beings exist that can fully sense this fourth dimension because they evolved that way. But there are other issues with that idea, like the laws of physics would have to be different in a 4D universe.
Chronos said above that he could visualize four dimensions (he said that back in 2003 although he’s still on the Board so maybe will show up with more to add) which was a pretty direct answer to the question. But in reading your post, I still don’t understand the point you are trying to make. I quoted the specific portion that I don’t understand because you said you would be glad to explain it; now you’re saying it’s self-explanatory. You added later “the quantum notion that we create reality” and I also have no idea what you mean by that phrase.
BTW I couldn’t find the item linked in the OP but I think this is the same paper.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m not as good at it as I used to be. The old gray matter gets less flexible with age, and I haven’t been practicing as much since I learned abstract methods for dealing with higher dimensions.
Just keep repeating the phrase: Upward, not northward. Upward, not northward. Upward, not northward.
As I was falling asleep last night, I had a moment where this exact thing happened. I find it hard to believe that I glimpsed it, but it certainly felt that way at the time. But we’re probably moving into MPSIMS territory!
ok, try to be a bit imaginative here, attempting to understand concepts that are by definition inconcievable may take a while.
I get it that you wish for people to provide really solid or at least palpable evidence or sources or materials to the discussion, believe me, thats exactly what im trying to do and if it were that simple, ill be glad to to state it in the most concrete manner posible.
I havent been able to visualize 4D as the discussion in general, proposes it. Yet, that doesnt mean that i, or i presume other people here, understand nothing or are completely in the dark.
As a mathematician, new, especially exceedingly radical frameworks, really start out as plain phylosophy, and you really must withold the frustration that comes from the resistance, such abstract concepts, muster against your efforts to concretize them. “If all efforts fail, then the problem is beyond and so you must expand your sphere of knowledge”.
My input was intended to provide a wider scope of what you guys are attempting to understand, my example that a flatlander will not even exist in 3D space is just 1 of the paradoxes or difficulties we will encounter if we wish to visualize 4D from a purely euclidean perspective. So then, i provided a more phylosophical approach to the problem, intendend to, well, think outside of the box if you will.
What i meant with the quantum notion that we create reality, is that try to think reality as no more than a formless, volumeless, weightless… etc, devoid of not only physical laws, but also, the very foundations of what we consider “real”. Long story short: reality does not exist per se, only the ways we use to measure it and what framework is built around said measurements. But maybe, you already understood that.
So to continue, you might be wondering, “ok cool, reality might be molded in ways we cant even comprehend, how does that further our knowledge?” well it doesnt per se, but i think its a good place to begin with your search and research, just think about this, if you were to become capalbe of visualizing 4D, you probably would be lightyears ahead of even the likes of Einstein, Niels Bohr, Faraday and Higgs combined.
Such a psychological state will be sort of godlike in its ability to understand physical reality, just as we move flatland in the Z axis, you will be able to move reality in the W axis. What i mean with this is that, all too much knowledge and time will be required, and the understanding provided by the likes of differentia, integral, vectorial and infinitesimal calculus as well as logrythmic and differential equations, might as well be just your very first step, if you ever wish to visualize 4D.
See, O children, it only requires that one evolve one’s mind into a higher order of thought-dimension. Sit at elchapetas’s feet and absorb the wisdom, for he has shewn us the way!
lol i take the trolling
As usual with our mind’s eyes, there’s lots of misdirection going on. Even our 3D-visualization abilities are nowhere near what we think them to be; rather, we generally make do with quick and dirty schemes that merely give us the impression that we’ve successfully completed a visualization task.
It’s a bit like the way the blind spot gets handled in the visual field: you don’t see that there’s anything missing, at all. So the most natural hypothesis would be that the ‘missing content’ somehow gets painted in—but that’s not really what happens, either. Rather, there simply is no region of the visual processing system that attends to that particular spot on the retina—and why would there be, since there’s no signals coming in from there. Any ‘painting in’ would only have to be done in order to satisfy the curiosity of any signal detectors aimed at that particular spot; since there are none, no painting in needs to be performed. There’s simply an absence of representation, not a representation of absent signals that then has to be laboriously retouched out of the finished picture.
Something like that probably goes on with visualization: we think we imagine a consistent object, but in fact, we just don’t notice the many ways it is inadequate, since there’s no detectors alerting us to that fact. Daniel Dennett illustrates this with this picture of a simple geometrical figure. The question is, can you decide whether the cross is visible through the opening?
If you are capable of even basic 3D visualization, this shouldn’t be a problem: just rotate the object in your ‘mind’s eye’, and see if you can see the cross through the opening. But most people will find that they can’t do it. Indeed, it’s already difficult to recognize 2D-shapes simply rotated 90° from their familiar orientation (such as outlines of states or nations).
Ultimately, I think much of our so-called ‘inner’ imagery is just our visual system pulling the wool over our mind’s eye; there’s no need to successfully render a 3D-image if you can just check the box ‘3D-image successfully rendered’, i.e. generate the belief of visualization success. I think things are not different for 4D-imaginations.
I’m sorry, but I find your statements confusing. I thought the utterly indescribable horror, and indeed the madness, caused by viewing your form here was caused by the extra dimensions dragged into our puny world by your mighty frame.
I think the top one-third of the square with the cross will be visible.
I’m not convinced that’s an entirely fair test. First of all, that isn’t all that simple a geometric figure, and nor is it a figure that we’re particularly familiar with like a face or a hand. Second, and more importantly, it’s not a 3D figure. It’s a 2D representation of a 3D figure, which means that before we can manipulate a 3D model, we have to construct the model. This is of course true for anything we see, but that image is missing many of the visual cues we’d ordinarily use to construct such a model, like parallax and shadows. So we have to actively construct the model, instead of relying on our (fairly strong) automated systems. I suspect that one would get much better results with an actual 3D figure constructed of blocks, even if the viewer only saw it from the same perspective as shown there.
I agree. (actually, a little less due to lateral displacement) But my first intuition was that the cross-face would be completely obscured.
Fair point, but that’s of course just as true for any 4D-shape one might try to visualize.