this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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Spot Draves, the dude who made Electric Sheep, once described cyberspace as “infinite dimensional”. When I asked what he meant, he meant that every connection was orthogonal to everything else, and that you could instantly connect to anything by uttering its name. It was like space where you could get anywhere by introducing a new dimension where the distance, along that dimension, from you to that place was zero.
He also told me, in that same conversation, that he thinks this universe might be a 3D simulation running in a 2D universe. It was a fun conversation.
A 3D simulation running in a 2D universe?
It's a hypothesis that our perceived ability to see things as "3D" is just a holographic effect, exactly how a 2D hologram gives rise to the illusion of a 3D object.
Not that out there, especially if you consider VR, or anything in 3d on a computer, is borne from 2D instructions.
Now I want a 5- or 6-dimensional VR game where head tracking rotates the camera in one set of dimensions while the right stick rotates it in another
My hypothesis is if you found a way to send “sensory” data about points in the 4D universe to a brain, perhaps a very young brain, that brain could develop an intuition for 4D space and motion.
Brains are incredible, I bet it might work even with an adult, it would just take some getting used to.
Another thought I had (more of a weird experiment than a game) would be to feed the view from a 3d camera into a VR headset such that you can see all of it at once. Obviously it would be weird and everyone would look funny, but I bet if you stayed in long enough your brain would get used to it and it would start to look/feel normal
Yeah. So basically physics tends to work in N dimensions, or at least that’s how he explained it. So they derived the equations of physics then added a third dimension and started a simulation. Then moved themselves into it.
In the same way, one could take a physics engine for a game, and make all those functions operate in four spatial dimensions. Then you could simulate a 4-dimensional universe.