Well, it’s a video – anything it does show is 2D, of course. The aim is to build an intuition, similar to how you ‘see’ a 3D cube when presented with two squares with joined vertices, which isn’t any more three dimensional than a wire model of a tesseract is 4D. Still, looking at this, you know it’s ‘really’ 3D, just projected down to two dimensions, and apparently it’s possible to train yourself to know that this is really 4D projected to 3D (and then down to 2D) in the same way. Exactly the same steps are carried out in the brain to reconstruct a three dimensional picture from a two dimensional one (so effectively that we usually don’t even notice that we’re doing anything at all – the collection of lines phasing awkwardly through each other just looks naturally like a rotating cube to us) as would be necessary to reconstruct a 4D object from its 3D projection.
Of course, there’s one problem – our brains are 3D networks, so any sort of direct representation of 4D entities is of course impossible. But it’s possible to get around this, as one can encode higher-dimensional information on lower-dimensional substrates – holography is one example, the data of a first-person shooter, say, saved on your PC’s harddrive, is a more mundane one.
One interesting point is that it is impossible to imagine how to imagine four dimensional entities – since of course if you could do that, if you could imagine what it is like to ‘see’ four dimensions, you could just as readily imagine 4D objects yourself! So conversely, if you are unable to think in 4D, it must seem utterly impossible to you, whether or not it actually is. This should be a warning to anybody willing to proclaim impossibilities when it comes to conscious states. (Just to not give a false impression, I can’t ‘see’ in 4D, at all, and it does seem utterly impossible to me to do. But I’ve been in other conscious states that I can’t now imagine what they are like, so I know that this isn’t grounds to dismiss the possibility.)
That’s what I need to see evidence for. Of course I can look at the animated gif and understand exactly what it represents and how it represents it. But that’s not the same as vizualizing four dimensions. Frankly, I doubt that that is possible–but can you tell me why you say one can “apparently” train oneself to vizualize more than three dimensions?
Well, basically, there’s people claiming to be able to do it (Chronos, for instance), and there are apparently people capable of solving 4D Rubik’s cubes, which perhaps provides some more tangible evidence.
Perhaps you can try to ‘reverse-engineer’ the way you get to a 3D cube from a 2D picture. Try not to see the .gif I posted previously as a rotating cube, but rather, as a collection of adjoined lines intersecting and moving through one another, changing length and relative angle in the process. That’s essentially how you see the tesseract now, faces that move through one another, angles and lengths that change, etc. What your brain does to get the 3D cube is essentially to fill in the missing information – that those edges are actually always of constant length, the angle between them is always 90°, etc. From this information, the third dimension is constructed. What you see and what your brain adds could not be simultaneously true for a 2D figure. There’s no reason in principle that an analogous process could not work in order to get to four dimensions, other than that it seems fundamentally impossible to us that can’t do it, which it must, whether it actually is or isn’t (really, I think this point is more important than whether or not people ‘actually’ visualize four dimensions when they claim to do so).
I couldn’t quite parse the last sentence. What is it that you’re saying is more important than what?
I’ll give the approach you suggested a go–I’ll try really insisting to myself that the lines in the animated gif are all of the same length, see if doing this for some extended time for some extended period of days ever gets me anywhere. Seems like the most plausible suggestion I’ve ever seen for such a project as this.
As for Chronos’s claim… I’ve seen him say that, and I frankly just don’t believe it. Not that I think he’s lying, I just think he’s not using the word “visualize” the way I do.
How could he convince me? Honestly, I don’t know, which is of course my problem and not his.
The Rubik’s Cube thing isn’t convincing because I could probably train myself to do that in a day or so without having to do any visualizing of anything but three dimensions.
Now that’s really interesting! I’ve never heard a postulate like that before. Hmmm, when other people are watching you, you become “self-conscious.” So it kind of makes sense.
But wouldn’t that mean that people who had their hemispheres surgically separated wouldn’t be conscious anymore? As far as I know they appear to be as conscious as anyone else.
Consciousness is a field (or dimension) that is accessed by humans through their own electromagnetic activity created by brain and heart activity.
So, it is not “caused” by anyone.
In my suggested argument against Mary, it’s more important to realize that certain mental acrobatics must seem impossible to anyone not capable of performing them, whether or not they can actually be performed, than showing that some specific such gymnastics actually is possible. Because then the fact that it seems absolutely inconceivable to us that Mary might not ‘learn something new’ upon encountering colour is not indicative of whether or not she actually does.
I’d be surprised if doing this just for a couple of days will bring about any measurable success. While the brain sometimes can adapt to new modes of visual perception quite quickly, such as in those experiments with vision-inverting prismatic eyeglasses, I’d expect for such habituation to take quite a while, depending on how intensively you’re going to go about training yourself.
Well, if his brain manages to convincingly and consistently ‘trick’ him into believing he visualizes the fourth dimension, is that really any different from actually visualizing it? After all, one could argue that convincing and consistent trickery is really all there is to visualization/imagination…
That may be so. Me, I could never even get the hang of the 3D variant. Hell, I even suck at those 2D jumbled-picture puzzles…
But I’m curious – what makes you such a sceptic of fourth-dimension visualization? Is it just that it seems absolutely impossible to get an idea of how that might feel? If that’s the case, I can’t speak for you, but I’ve been in many cognitive states that were altered in one sort or another – through fever, hypnagogic states, chemistry etc. – which I can’t now properly conceive of. I can only remember that I experienced an entirely different mode of cognition – for example, things seemed logical that plainly aren’t, and while I can remember, I can’t re-experience these thought processes. Or take cases from the medical literature – I can’t imagine, for example, how it is to mistake your wife for a hat, or to be blind and not know it, or even being convinced that one doesn’t exist.
Consciousness might be something that isn’t lost once it’s acquired. Maybe a person whose hemispheres were separated from birth wouldn’t develop consciousness.
People with two surgically separated hemispheres are indeed conscious.
Go look up alien hand syndrome.
Also while your at it, look up alexia without agraphia.
Mysticism has no place in the legitimate pursuit of neurophysiology. That being said, though “consciousness” is poorly defined, arousal (the neurological function of being awake and alert) is not. In my opinion, consciousness is merely the integration of learned behaviors with an appropriate degree of arousal.
Sure, I was just saying I’d give it a go. If it works, yay, if it doesn’t, then no conclusions can be drawn.
I don’t think his brain is tricking him into believing he’s visualizing something, I think he’s just not using the word “visualize” the same way I do. (I’d have said he’s not using it “correctly” but that’d be ideolectical prejudice. )
If I had to guess (and a guess it would be) I’d think he’s doing basically what I’d do if I learned how to solve a 4-d rubiks cube, namely, I’d learn how to go through some algorithms using some purely 3-d vizualizations to aid my thinking.
See, I can imagine all that. I know fairly what it would be like to mistake my wife for a hat, because I know what it’s like to mistake my wife for something else, and I know what it’s like to mistake things for a hat–it’d be pretty much like those two things. Being blind and not knowing, imagining that is super easy–it’d be just like how they report it: I would think I see things, and I’d be wrong. No problem there–it’s just a massive hallucination. And I know what it would be like to be convinced I don’t exist because I know what it would mean for me not to exist. It’d mean I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t speak, etc etc. So being convinced I don’t exist would just be a lot like being convinced I can’t do anything. Sure, the contrary evidence would be right there in front of me (even closer) but I’ve had blazingly stupid moments before in which things were right in front of me, conceptually speaking, and I failed to grasp them. No problem. I can totally imagine this.
4-d visualization? Can’t imagine that. It’s like asking me to visualize a square circle. The words just don’t work together that way. If it’s 4-d, it’s not visualization. I can maybe “imagine” it in a sense, but in no way is it visual imagination.
I can say there’s been a single instance that I can recall where something “seemed logical” to me at the time, while later it just seemed like nonsense. Once while under anaesthesia while having a dislocated shoulder jerked back into place, I suddenly had the distinct impression that I understood. Understood what? Nothing at all–I just finally understood. That’s all I know to say about how to describe the feeling. It felt like an ultimate, cosmically significant insight, but it was utterly ineffable. (And, btw, ecstatic: my mother tells me that at the time I was exclaiming with a joyful expression that, in fact, I “understood,” but couldn’t explain what I understood–so it was ineffable both then and now.) That’s how it felt, but looking back I can’t fathom what it was I was on about.
I don’t think this is a very good example, though, since the feeling was so general and contentless–nothing at all like having an experience as concrete as “visualization” of something I can no longer experience. And unfortunately it’s the only example I have in my own history that even comes close to the kind of altered consciousness you’re talking about. So that may just be a handicap on my part.
(Hm, I now remember I once passed out and as I was coming to, had an odd experience in which I could see everything, but none of it cohered–my eyes were definitely giving me all the visual information they typically give, but my brain was not processing it into information about objects, or even into something like “color patches.” Yes, this is a more concrete “visualization”-like example, but still, it’s not like I was making a kind of sense then that I can no longer make. Rather, in this case, there was not any sense being made. That was the very character of the experience–normal visual information was simply not being interpreted, and so was AFAICR simply “senseless.” (BTW next my hearing returned and I heard laughter, and interpreted it as demonic and had the odd thought that this must be what Hell is like.))
So you’re saying that consciousness and matter are different manifestations of some underlying phenomenon, much like ice and steam are different manifestations of water.
The collective phenomena of consciousness–that is, the combination of sense perception, cognition, and self-awareness–can most easily be conceptualized as a Droste figure (a image or pattern that recursively repeats until it disappears to a level below resolution). In effect, when you observe consciousness in yourself (i.e. you say to yourself, “I am here,”) there is a second level of awareness of self (“I am physically sitting in this chair,”) and a third level (“My butt feels the pressure of the chair’s cushion,”) and so forth, down to a point that you no longer have an interior dialogue or perception about your condition or mechanorecepation, i.e. you don’t consciously observer individual nerve pulses.
A ready example of this that you can (and will, now that I’ve mentioned it) observer is breathing. You don’t normally perceive yourself to be breathing as it is a function of the autonomic nervous system. However, now that I’ve mentioned breathing you’ve just become aware that you are, in fact, inhaling and exhaling air, and in fact if you don’t make a conscious decision to continue breathing you’ll probably stop (although parts of your awareness as both a conscious and subconscious level will prompt you to continue breathing). As long as you continue to think about breathing, you also have to consciously control your breathing. However, if you relax your attention to this function, your awareness will drift to something else and the cognitive control of breathing will go from a primary conscious level to a lower level and gradually the autonomic system will take over breath control, until I mention breathing again and you return to thinking about your breathing.
Consciousness, in other words, is not a monolithic or even modular process; it is a recursive one that disappears into the granularity of neurological responses, just as an ocean isn’t just a single body of water but instead is composes of flows of water following currents and tides, which then make individual swells and waves, which are ultimately composed of water molecules.
Buddhism and similar Eastern philosophies may be conceptually useful in understanding awareness and consciousness by analogy in that they don’t try to categorize graduated phenomena into rigid boxes, but it is a mistake to understand this to mean that this is a more precise or accurate understanding to the neurological processes behind consciousness.
If I’m understanding you correctly, you’re saying consciousness is not an internal process? That all people do is tap in to some external source of consciousness?
I faintly remember a thread in which he was asked how he visualized 4D things, and he said that he imagines, for instance, a tesseract in a wireframe-kind of way, like one would imagine a cube. But of course, my shoddy recollections of what somebody might have said somewhere aren’t much to go by…
Anyway, I think that generally, our visualizations are much more shoddy things than we, uh, imagine. Even for relatively simple shapes, it’s not really the case that they are ‘present in our mind’s eye’ – Dennett has a great example in Consciousness Explained, where he asks the reader to rotate a simple object that has a hole in and a coloured patch on it in his mind, and decide whether or not you can see the patch through the hole. And it’s freaking impossible!
We tend to think that our mental images are in some way presented to us like images on a computer screen, say. But we are the computer – there’s no need for a screen at all. To have a camera point at the screen in order for the computer to be able to ‘know’ what something looks like would just be redundancy – if the computer can draw it on the screen, he gains nothing from the setup. Moreover, if the computer can draw it, he doesn’t have to! He could answer any question one might ask about some image just from the data saved on his harddrive. Including those he might ask himself! So a visualization of something is actually more something like a collection of answers to questions you have asked yourself about an object than it is an ‘image’ of the object – this isn’t in principle any more difficult to have present in consciousness for a 4D object than it is for a 3D one.
It’s the same with ordinary vision (which is, after all, just a visualization of the data our eyes provide us with). You’ll probably know that most of what we actually see is concentrated in a very small area right in the centre of our field of view – the fovea (and even if one knows that, it’s somewhat shocking to experience just how bad our peripheral vision is – take, for instance, a playing card, and hold it out at arms length, to the extreme right (or left) of your field of view, while holding your gaze transfixed on some point right in front of you. Then, slowly move the card toward your centre of vision. Take note of when you can identify colour, suit, whether it’s a picture, what exactly it shows – it’s fairly surprising…). Yet, everything in our entire field of view looks crystal clear to us. Now, part of this is of course that our eyes dart around (saccade) unconsciously all the time, ‘building up’ the picture we view. But only part of the completeness of our vision can be thus explained (for example, when you are suddenly presented with a completely new image, you have no sense of the image ‘building up’ over some small period of time; rather, it seems ‘instantly there’.)
Take scotomas: areas of the field of vision where visual acuity is significantly diminished. Everybody’s got one, the so-called blind spot. Yet, we don’t notice it – in the post-processing of the data we get from our eyes, it seems to get ‘filled in’, or papered over, at least. But that’s not actually what happens: everybody’s done the experiment with two crosses on a piece of paper, one of which suddenly disappears as it is ‘hidden’ by the blind spot. If our brain uses memories of what we have seen to fill in the blank, why does it forget about the cross? Is the processing machinery just not sophisticated enough, that it only manages to continue the paper’s white surface? But then, why do we perceive arbitrarily complex patterns without any apparent gaps where the ‘filling in’ fails?
The reason is, broadly, that an absence of representation is not the same as a representation of absence. Not seeing is not the same as seeing nothing (for instance, and while I obviously can’t check it, I think that what we imagine when we imagine how it is to be blind – much like being in a dark room, or having our eyes tightly closed – significantly differs from what being blind actually is like; instead of having a dark field of vision, one might have no field of vision at all, which is not something I can readily imagine). In a sense, there’s nobody there to complain – since the brain never received input from the blind spot, it doesn’t notice anything being amiss when it doesn’t receive input from it. Hence, we don’t notice any gap in our vision; there’s no need to do any ‘filling in’, nor is there any need to ‘build up’ our field of vision when seeing a completely unfamiliar pattern, say.
And similarly, there is no need to ‘project’ an image of something we are visualizing on some mental canvas – there’s no audience (none, at least, that is different from the projector, and the reel of film itself) for whose benefit the visualization might be. Anything you might learn from this inner projection, you must already know in order to create it. So why would the brain burden itself with the computationally difficult task of projecting in the first place? From such a viewpoint, visualizing something and knowing enough about the properties of something to uniquely identify it aren’t really all that different – and the latter can certainly be done for a 4D object as well as a 3D one.
It’s similar to how dream logic seems perfectly convincing in a dream – it’s not that some elaborate machinations are in place in order to deceive the dreamer of blatant losses of continuity or other inconsistencies, it’s just that the part of the brain that would ordinarily ask the questions that would expose these faults, doesn’t – so everything seems consistent. Similarly, something ‘seems visualized’ until a question that can’t be answered – say, ‘can you see the coloured patch through the hole?’ – is asked. If one knows enough about 4D geometry (something most people don’t), few such questions will present themselves, and a 4D object will seem visualized – and hence, be visualized.
Well, of course, if you didn’t exist, you couldn’t be convinced of anything. Really, the others, I can accept – though not imagine myself --, but even Descartes’ near-omnipotent trickster demon couldn’t deceive him about the question of his existence (granted, it may be easier to convince the existing of non-existence than the other way around). How could one possibly be wrong about that, and not notice that the mere fact of having an opinion about it means that one is wrong?
Well, I think there’s a difference in the latter simply being contradictory – there’s no consistent set of questions you could ask of such an object (that’s not to say that it’s in principle impossible – one can certainly believe in contradictory things. ‘Is it round? - Yes.’ and ‘Has it edges? - Yes.’ only yields tension if there’s something that ‘watches out’ for such mismatches. Should that part be ‘behind a blind spot’, I think it’s entirely possible for somebody to wholeheartedly believe themselves to be able to visualize a square circle.)
Anyway, that’s kind of my thinking on the matter. Of course, the part that would recognise all of it as bull may just lie in a blind spot…
Well, not quite. Rather, I think consciousness supervenes on matter – i.e. if there’s some brain configuration that corresponds to a certain state of consciousness, that same configuration will always correspond to this state of consciousness (there could not be a physically identical configuration that corresponded to a different conscious state, although a physically different configuration might correspond to the same – or at least an indistinguishable – state). Like how pictures supervene on pixels: the same collection of pixels always yields the same image, but one could probably change a few without anybody noticing (though that is an imperfect analogy).
Not in that I do think that we’re controlled by our consciousness. I just don’t think that our consciousness is a physical thing. It’s the result of the workings of physical things.
Well we live in a universe where physical law dominates. We possess consciousness, or at least we seem to. Since we possess it, it is not impossible to create under the physical constraints of your universe.
I recall that too. In fact, I do the very same thing–but that’s not a “visualization of the 4th dimension” any more than a bar graph is a “vizualization” of the change in population of the US for the past several decades. In other words, sure, you can call these “visualizations” but it’s not interesting or surprising to claim you can do this. Pretty much anyone can.
I’d count it as a vizualiztion of the fourth dimension if, as I imagined the wireframe, it seemed visually to me as though all the lines were the same length.
Regarding your comments about vizualization, I’m not sure how to argue about this, but the simple fact is I just disagree. There’s definitely a difference between me knowing every fact there is to know about a square, and on the other hand, visualizing a square. When I visualize the square, there’s a sense in which I fairly literally see it. The square is present to me under a visual mode. I don’t think this is controversial–I’m fairly certain that our best brain science indicates that when we visualize things, the visual cortex actually lights up in the same way that it does when we are presented with actual images. I’m willing to be corrected on that point, though.
There doesn’t have to be an internal “screen” on which I “draw” for this to be possible, any more than there needs to be any kind of screen on which anything is drawn in order for actual vision to be possible. Just take whatever process issues forth in visual experience, whether it involves “drawing on a screen” or not, and abstract away the direct connection to the immediate environment, and make the seemingly quite plausible suggestion that it could be stimulated in some other way, from some part of the brain rather than from the eye. There you go.
And yes–someone could believe themselves capable of visualizing a square circle. But of course they would be wrong!
Are you talking about the 3D wire mesh that seems to bend and move through itself? Because I’m not sure that’s what he meant.
And why wouldn’t that work just the same way it does in the 3D case?
To my thinking, the visual mode is just a way of asking questions about it. Not ‘are all the lines the same length?’ but ‘do all the lines look the same length?’. Again, the computer does not have to generate an actual representation of an object within itself to answer any question it could have about its appearance. How could you tell the difference between having visualized something, and knowing all about how it would appear?
It does, for very simple shapes. But if you imagine the Mona Lisa, there probably won’t be any mysterious smile shining from your neurons!
That’s certainly how visualization works – it’s what I tried to describe, using my own favourite model of the process that underlies visual experience --, but there’s nothing in there that seems to prohibit more than three dimensions.
Only by virtue of square circles being impossible. But, for a possible (and possibly four dimensional) object, what’s the difference between visualizing it, and believing to visualize it? Sure, it might be that interrogation uncovers an error or omission in the mental image somebody only believes to have. But by that token, I could claim that you only believe to visualize 3D objects! How would this belief and the actual visualization be different, to you?
