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Shower thoughts


p1t1o

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6 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Nobody even really knows what they mean when they say "rearrange the days memories"

"Defragging the hard drive..."

I believe sleep is when the short-term memory cache is dumped/flashed/shipped/encoded into long-term memory. Kind of hard to do that when new input is still happening, perhaps.

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On 7/24/2018 at 7:21 PM, qzgy said:

 

I get this. I'm trying to understand how. Is it just MAGIC or is there some mechanism, or is there a demon named Maxwell or what? Because then that mechanism must be absolutely flawless at reading states.....

It's generally used as a counter to th concept of ophalism, which is a young earth creationist idea that states that the earth was created six thousand years ago to look like it was created billions of years ago. So people say if God created the universe to look like it's been around for thirteen billion years ago what's to stop someone from saying God created it last Thursday?

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The person who checked Hitler's speeches for errors was an actual Grammar pedant.

Oh, I forgot the forum censoring words that may be offensive. I'm sure you all know what I meant.

Edited by Kernel Kraken
Pedant? That's the best Y'all could think of?
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Cats.
That's why they have domesticated the humans.

P.S.
That's really so, as in those distant times there was neither cat food in packages to be opened, nor cat toilets to be cleaned. So, otherwise humans were absolutely useless.

Edited by kerbiloid
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We can use language to describe the world around us. Most languages understandably lack ways to express things that don't exist in our experience, like non linear time or a spatial fourth dimension. However, we could conceivably create a language that could describe those things. If one were to become fluent in that language, what would their dreams (unbound by reality) be like?

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1 hour ago, MDZhB said:

We can use language to describe the world around us. Most languages understandably lack ways to express things that don't exist in our experience, like non linear time or a spatial fourth dimension. However, we could conceivably create a language that could describe those things. If one were to become fluent in that language, what would their dreams (unbound by reality) be like?

Ever read Stranger in a Strange Land? The Martian language allows people who understand it to do some cool stuff.

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2 hours ago, MDZhB said:

We can use language to describe the world around us. Most languages understandably lack ways to express things that don't exist in our experience, like non linear time or a spatial fourth dimension. However, we could conceivably create a language that could describe those things. If one were to become fluent in that language, what would their dreams (unbound by reality) be like?

Up, down, left, right, forward, backward, and a couple more words for +W and -W should do it for spatial 4D. Not sure how much more complicated it could get.

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1 hour ago, cubinator said:

Up, down, left, right, forward, backward, and a couple more words for +W and -W should do it for spatial 4D. Not sure how much more complicated it could get.

You'd also need analogs for in front of, behind, above, below, etc. You're right that it wouldn't be hard, but to my knowledge there is no natural language which incorporates these concepts. What I wonder is if one could dream in 4 dimensions. If the language exists to describe them, I think it would might possible to mentally experience them as well. Mutlidimensional time would be really interesting as well. What if, in addition to moving forward and backwards in time, one could move left, right, up, down, and even +W and -W? Of course, there are probably limits to what we can imagine in our brains, but I do wonder.

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38 minutes ago, MDZhB said:

If the language exists to describe them, I think it would might possible to mentally experience them as well.

That's an interesting idea. To have a word for +W, for instance, you need to understand what it means for something to be on the W axis. Then your mind would recall that concept when it hears the word. I don't think language helps except as a tool for understanding a concept like higher dimensional space and time. Most of what I understand about 4D space comes not from words, but from visuals like drawing pictures of 4D shapes and their 3D cross-sections, and experimenting with 4D blocks, abacuses, and twisty puzzles in computer simulations. Through that experience I now can understand certain aspects of what it would be like to see in 4D space, and I think if I think about it hard enough I can put it all together and really, actually visualize in four dimensions with my mind. But I agree that thinking about words that beings living in a 4D world would use casually which we have no need for could help to understand the nuances of that world which are harder to get with hard geometry.

P.S. If I ever do get to the point where I can really see in 4D easily, I will be sure to draw some 4D art to share! 

Edited by cubinator
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On 7/28/2018 at 8:48 PM, cubinator said:

That's an interesting idea. To have a word for +W, for instance, you need to understand what it means for something to be on the W axis. Then your mind would recall that concept when it hears the word. I don't think language helps except as a tool for understanding a concept like higher dimensional space and time. Most of what I understand about 4D space comes not from words, but from visuals like drawing pictures of 4D shapes and their 3D cross-sections, and experimenting with 4D blocks, abacuses, and twisty puzzles in computer simulations. Through that experience I now can understand certain aspects of what it would be like to see in 4D space, and I think if I think about it hard enough I can put it all together and really, actually visualize in four dimensions with my mind. But I agree that thinking about words that beings living in a 4D world would use casually which we have no need for could help to understand the nuances of that world which are harder to get with hard geometry.

P.S. If I ever do get to the point where I can really see in 4D easily, I will be sure to draw some 4D art to share! 

I like to associate the fourth dimension with time using what I call the flipbook analogy: In a 2D universe, we could picture time as the third dimension, just like in a flipbook all "frames" are stacked on top of another, giving a 2D being the illusion of time (it can also illude us, since we only see one frame at a time). If that's hard to understand, we can go one more dimension lower and associate it with a 1D particle, where the second dimension would be time. If the particle was to move from left to right, what we would see is a diagonal line, since we can see the entire plane at once, but, to the particle, it would look like it just moved along its physical dimension over time.

So if our universe were to be deterministic, we could say that the impression of time is caused by us, the observers, moving along the 4th axis (or 5th, if you were to consider relativity), passing through 3D "frames" and seeing in 2D, just like a 2D being would pass through 2D frames when moving along the 3rd axis and seeing in 1D.

From these observations, we can imagine the 4th dimension using time: if you have a point standing still, it will draw a line parallel to the 4th axis; if you have a line standing still over time you have a plane, and so on. So to make a 4D object, you need to manipulate a space's position over time. 

 

I haven't quite figured out rotation yet, though. I think it would mean that a 3D object would pass through points in time (past and future) and then return to ours (or maybe not, since we'd have moved further along the 4th axis, but you could time it so that you'd get to see it in the future) if we consider time as the 4th dimension.

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5 hours ago, Aperture Science said:

 

I haven't quite figured out rotation yet, though. I think it would mean that a 3D object would pass through points in time (past and future) and then return to ours (or maybe not, since we'd have moved further along the 4th axis, but you could time it so that you'd get to see it in the future) if we consider time as the 4th dimension.

Movement and rotation of a 4D object requires a fifth axis for time in this model. One thing you can do is imagine all the ways a 3D cube can rotate in 4D. You can do all the normal 3D rotations, but you can also make it appear flat 2D, and flip it over so that it is mirrored.

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On 7/28/2018 at 4:47 PM, cubinator said:

Up, down, left, right, forward, backward, and a couple more words for +W and -W should do it for spatial 4D. Not sure how much more complicated it could get.

How about up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, then B and A for the +W and -W?

 

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