new philosophical thread by jake, hated and feared scourge of the board... *sigh*

[thejakeman]

so. um... uh... TL;DR warning.

alright, I'm going to start this off by assuming that most of you have already heard of the concepts that I'm going to briefly pass over. because i have faith in most of you. as it stands, humans go through life in approximately 4 dimensions, or as some mathmatical definitions would put it, 3 spatial dimensions and one time dimension.



note, that this image is a representation of a two spatial dimensional plane plus 1 time dimension. other further dimensions have also been proven by mathematics to exist, reaching the fourth spatial dimension and beyond. the best way we can detect these higher dimensions is by the shadows that they leave behind. "what shadows?" you ask. in day to day three spatial dimensional life (heretofore referred to as 3d) objects cast shadows (or rather block light from reaching an object behind it) that are conceptually 2 spatial dimensional. though these shadows have length and width, they have absolutely no depth. 4d objects should presumably leave a 3d shadow. another way to detect or conceptualize extra dimensions is to apply the theory that each new higher dimensional object can be created by attaching all of the corners to an identical copy of an object. ergo attaching the ends of two lines to create a square, and attaching the ends of two squares to create a cube. the 4d object created by this is called a tesseract. these can also be created by folding together 6 cubes, apparently.


notice that all of these are shadows, and not the figures themselves as unfortunately, our eyes are limited to 2d vision.

i found a link to an old comic i read years ago at my grandma's book shop that illustrates the point i'm trying to get across fairly well. you can find the entire thing here

so, what the fuck is my point? why does this asshole insist on rambling on as though i cared for a physics lesson. well, I'm here to discuss the relation of the human mind (or soul or whatever) to the three dimensional world. as it is, biology can fairly clearly describe what random stuff is happening in our heads when we think, and where certain things take place, but obviously science has yet to understand what exactly causes self-awareness and "free" will. something happens somewhere along the way that converts subconscious thoughts into conscious ones, plays movies and music in our heads, lets us create our own music and movies. somewhere in there is an OS guiding it all. so as it goes, i propose the (tired and unoriginal) idea that the soul, psyche, whatever, is actually a fourth dimensional construct.


what? that makes no frickin sense. are you telling me I've got a freaky spinning thing in my head?

ok, so we're back

a fourth dimensional construct in three dimensional space would be capable of many fantastical feats, such as shapeshiftery, ignoring physical laws, and being able to perceive all of a third dimensional object at once. to think of it, think of the subject of Edward Abbot's book, Flatland, in which a sphere visits a 2d world. the sphere appears to be constantly changing shapes and sizes to the flatlanders. the sphere can do many fantastical things, such as pulling things out of locked safes, just by reaching in and grabbing the object in question and moving it in 3 dimensional space. the sphere could teleport, simply by moving to another part of flatland.

so anyway, i propose that the soul is just as capable of these feats. the soul constantly changes shape, usually just in the course of growing more experienced in the world. also, through trauma and whatnot, you may show a side of yourself that you weren't aware existed. this could also explain stuff like yogis and the odd fact of our ability to conceptualize these ideas in the first place. also, i believe that on some level our "souls" are able to communicate with each other. when you hear of people "connecting with one another, finishing each others sentences and whatnot, i think those are examples of this.