Message #2020

From: Roice Nelson <roice3@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] Re: New here
Date: Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:24:09 -0600

I know *exactly* what you mean by "clutterblind". I’d never heard the term
though, so I’m glad to have it be part of my vocabulary now :)

For myself, even having solved MC5D once many years ago, I’ve never felt I
could really make the jump to visualizing 4D. To think about things, I’m
always a slave to dimensional
analogy<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-dimensional_space#Dimensional_analogy>,
and when interacting with the puzzles, I have to do so in the most 3D way I
can (a nice part of this group’s puzzle representations is that they still
allow you to interact with things in a 3D-like way). It would be great to
be able to "see" the hypercube and hypersphere in a truly 4D way though,
and I’ve read about people who claim they have. In my case though, I think
the John von Neumann quote better applies - "In mathematics you don’t
understand things. You just get used to them."

Glad to have you as a member of 4D_Cubing!

Cheers,
Roice

On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 7:40 AM, Chris Chiesa <xet001@yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
> Thanks, Roice, for the links! Looks like I could have found some of those
> for myself (i.e. the ones at Superluminal) if I weren’t sort of
> "clutterblind" if you know what I mean. (Can’t see something right in
> front of my face, if it’s surrounded by other things. It’s not just
> Superluminal; I do the same thing in the pantry cupboard in my kitchen.)
>
> All of this is very interesting to me given that I’ve always been
> interested in the general idea of "higher dimensions," and that I
> specifically remember reading, somewhere in my misspent youth, something to
> the effect that "human beings weren’t designed / haven’t evolved to think
> in more than four dimensions." Clearly, this group is proof to the
> contrary. A seven-dimensional human solution? How can somebody even THINK
> that way? "Youse guyse oughtta be in physics, they needja."
>
> Further bulletins as events warrant.
>
> C
>
>