Please be reminded that this is a zombie thread. You responded to a post from 2003, and the person you responded to was banned some time back.
The first few posts felt like walking into a very posh rich-man’s club in the late 19th century.
Dimensions are just mathematical things to model stuff.
There are no monsters from the 5th dimension.
Example:
Make a model of a really dumbed down train: you get a point, no mass, no size.
- you have a model with 0 dimensions: there is a train or there isn’t one (this model is often used by running commuters)
Let’s complicate stuff and give the train a length of 100 meters (yards, miles) - you have a model of a train with 1 dimension, still pretty useless but you could use it to compare trains to find the longest, shortest; whatever.
Give the train a with (gage in railroads?)
- you have 2 dimensions, you can figure out how long it is and on which tracks it’ll fit.
Let’s go full 3D; add a height.
- you can model the train wel enough to almost fabricate it; you can start to figure out the capacity in volume; and maybe see if it will fit through a tunnel. Still not very useful.
Add another dimension, lets call this one “material”; a dimension where we fill in the material occupying the space we described in the first 3.
- Cool! We now have added enough information to manufacture the whole train.
Add yet another dimension: time.
- we have a 5 dimensional model of our train, good enough to make it and a timetable of its track.
Of course we could make a timetable with only a 3 dimensional model, but that would only simplify matters:)
Keep going: pressure/tension
- with this 6 dimensional model we can figure out if the boiler explodes and if the bridges will hold. Still easy within the realm of actual models of stuff that get used everyday.
We just got started: temperature.
- why else would the boiler explode? 7 dimensions.
Make it an electical train: current/flux
-Same as before: 8 dimensions needed to describe what we all know is there.
Let’s get an accountant: financial value.
- 9 dimensions just to make a train run on time and to calculate if the thing is worth robbing.
I’m sure there is plenty of low hanging fruit left, at least this shows we all have no trouble thinking in 9 dimensions.
There’s Mr. Mxyzptlk.
Or a sophomore dorm after a night of drinking.
But isn’t the OP about spatial dimensions?
3D spatial recognition is a task that simply needs clarification, though i believe its limits lie in the same realm of a computer rendering 3D objects, as its just complex maths.
Take this for example:
imagine the US capitol in a bright day, from any perspective, and see how detailed your picture is. Next, from your picture, slowly rotate de capitol 360 degrees, and finally, rotate it freely in the xyz axis.
in the first stage, i suspect the level of detail was realistic, probably almost the same as a picture taken from a camera, the gray gradients of the capitol correspond to those of light coming from the sun, the sky is about the right blue, probs with clouds, street/gardens/trees litter the foreground, everything is correctly rendered according to the vanishing point, maybe you even rendered some cars and people.
compare the level of detail of the first example to the second, the slower you rotate, the more detail youll be able to render, however rotate it in about 2 seconds and youll probably only get the main details right, maybe youll struggle to generate “missing data”. Think of this as the detail for each and all frames per second.
my estimation is that, to generate a full rotation in 2 secs, we generate about 100-200 frames, we might even throw in physics, as, if there are obstacles, you might even try to avoid them as you would in the real world.
the weight of the data processed is hard to calculate, because as i said, we even might be calculating stuff that has nothing to do with the rendering of the frames :dubious:
… well gonna continue this later, im hungry
At the risk of exposing myself to ridicule, it seems obvious that the answer is either no you can’t, or at best, you could only see a little bit of the x. I tried googling for the answer so I could be proven wrong in private, but couldn’t find it.
So?
So your answer is: either you can’t, or you can? Myself, I haven’t the foggiest. I could convince myself that one might see just the top left corner of the x (certainly not the whole top third, I think—the right half should be obscured by the block to the right of the hole), but that’s if I imagine drawing lines of sight into the figure, not by doing any kind of mental rotation; I find that what I do when I rotate doesn’t really yield any judgments I’d be willing to hold to with great confidence. One could easily figure it out with 3D modelling or even just a piece of graph paper, though. Perhaps one could do a poll, to see if there’s any consensus answer?
Dude, it isn’t sporting to post a brain teaser you don’t know the answer to! 
I can model it with toy blocks if you want. If I still have them around; my kids are all grown up.
It wasn’t meant as a brain teaser, merely to show that our ‘inner vision’ isn’t as 20/20 as we like to think—which, if you’re unsure about the correct answer, it demonstrates. But anyway, this got me curious myself, so I went ahead and posted a poll, so we can at least see if there’s any kind of consensus on the issue. If I have some time in the next couple of days, I’ll maybe do some modelling myself (though you’re very welcome to do so yourself).
hey you know, actually, string theory proposes that there are about 7 more higher spatial dimensions, but that theyre so “curled up” and are so tiny that theyre virtually imperceptible, though i have no fucking idea what they mean with that
Picture the infamous cardboard tube that a roll of paper towels is rolled on. (You’re new here, so maybe you don’t understand what’s so infamous about them here, but let that pass.) Imagine the tube is infinitely long.
If you travel along the tube in one dimension, along the length of the tube, it goes on and on forever.
But if you travel perpendicular to that (that is, along the other dimension), you just go round and round the tube. Now imagine a space of lots of dimensions, in which some dimensions are “straight” (more or less) or at least macroscopic, so you can travel in those dimensions for a long long way, or maybe even infinitely long. But some of the other dimensions of the space are curled up, so if you travel along any of those dimensions, you just go round and round.
Now, imagine further, these curled up dimensions (I think the term of art is “compact” dimensions) are super-ultra-microscopically small, like on the order of the size of those strings of string theory.
The thinking is something like: When a universe is created (however you think a universe gets created), it is somehow given a certain number of dimensions to work with, and those dimensions very quickly snap into the shapes they will have for the duration of that universe. Some dimensions will settle into an extended configuration, and some while happen to snap into a compacted configuration, and then that’s what we’re stuck with.