[FRIAM] A Question For Tomorrow

[David Eric Smith]

On May 1, 2019, at 12:58 AM, Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com> wrote:

Marcus wrote: 

> < Why do people seek this (as Eric puts it) emotional comfort with their ways of knowing? >
> 
> Either spacetime works in a surprising way and commonsense intuition is just wrong -- to cling to a familiar way of knowing amounts to taking the blue pill -- settling for crude satisficing heuristics to muddle through as a bag-of-water in what appears to be a 3D space.   Or we are totally driven and our experiments are fate.  In one case humans can't engage their special-purpose DSPs (so to speak) and fast thinking is useless -- we aren't equipped to function efficiently in that alien world.  In the latter case, it just doesn't matter what we calculate.    I think the potential for cognitive dissonance here is pretty clear.

I would love to take this question into a developmental timescale, but it will he hopeless to ever get it past IRBs.  The only way we will learn is when companies that already view children’s attention as a natural resource to be consumed do it anyway, and afterward we run a post-mortem on the consequences.

I can do a great job visualizing 2-spheres when I need to reason or prove something expressed in terms of them.  I can do it with eyes closed, without going to fetch a material 2-sphere.  But probably the only reason I developed a brain that can do this, is that I spent all those developmental years with my eyes open in a world that had material 2-spheres to experience.

I can’t similarly visualize 3-spheres, or other higher n-spheres.

Is that frontier a reflection of inherent limits in what my brain an do, which evolved together with the limits of vertebrate eyes to provide its training sets?  Or would a child, immersed in a visual world with real renderings of n-spheres, learn to visualize them as I an do for n=2.  After all, I can’t “see” the 2-sphere.  I use time together with my flat visual field to do an active construction.  Are there ways to render higher-dimensional spheres that employ time, perspective, scale, shear distortion, or whatever other aspects of flow, to encode dimensions of space that are not literal in the 2-d projection?  And could my brain then learn to process them as equivalent dimensions?  (Of course not MY brain; some other brain that worked in the first place, and then did so through its infancy and childhood.). What would be the limits?  Eventually, overloading other sensory modalities to carry dimensional information must lead to confounds from their carrying information about what they literally are.  (There’s a material application for Nick’s worry about metaphor, a kind of data-compression and confound problem.). 

I like the visualization version of this question, because we can do a lot with it already and it is familiar, so not hard to imagine extrapolating.  But having said that about visualization, why not say it about quantum superposition dynamics or decoherent histories?  

Eric