Science Forums 2

[AnssiH]

"Anything our mind is going to be able to imagine or comprehend is going to be, at its max dimensional representation, 3 dimensional. Regardless of the geometry or math, and the scale an illustration is designed to represent. When we discuss anything visual and/or represent anything visual, when we put out imagination aside, what is left behind will be a product of our macroscopic 3D world."

"And why is it so?"

"The answer is simply that humans are not fully creative beings. They can reorganize things they have seen into new things, but they cannot create something that is not a function of things they have experienced before."

Am I totally misreading you, or is your argument really "the reason we understand things in 3D form is because that is something we have experienced before"?

It is really mystifying to me, how can people cook up such a "just is" explanations without blinking an eye. We experience reality "just by looking at it", and "seeing happens"? Is that it? Also, I have no idea what Rade means when he says "reality given by the senses". Reality just hits the surface of our eye and that's when we see it?

But you guys probably also reckon that it is data patterns (instead of "picture") that enter our cortex? If so, I'm sure you also understand that there must occur some interpretation process there in some sense for the data patterns to be "understood" as anything, yes? And you should understand that "experience" is however we understood that data, i.e. there exists an an interpretation of the data but we don't see "the data itself" so to speak, yes?

The question was, how does reality become conceived in terms of a 3D representation. Notice, that before any idea of space is sensical, there must exist some idea of "objects". And there can be no explicit statements of "objects" in the sensory data (that you'd know about a priori), but instead the data must first become interpreted that way. So, how does the data become interpreted that way?

What DD was asking about has to do with that transformation process between "data patterns" and "spatial presentation of objects".

Before you jump into another "just is" reply, like "because it is correct" or "because we are so used to looking at reality" or whatever, please note that the "unnecessary mathematics metaphors" is actually a description of that exact transformation process between unknown data batterns and spatial representation. About how the spatial representation exists due to how the data is ordered for prediction reasons, but not due to what the data actually is. It is an explanation about why and how any data patterns (where there are no "objects" as such) can be translated into a useful "spatial representation of objects".

And don't worry, mathematics is not lifted to any priviledged status, apart from being a handy tool of tracing logical relationships. Just like "speed = distance / time" is a statement of a relationship between concepts that we defined, DD's work is a statement of not-so-obvious relationship between "necessary symmetries of a world model" and "modern physics definition of reality". It is not a statement of ontological reality itself.

-Anssi