Post by Maddad on Jan 30, 2005 19:59:34 GMT -6
Time may be a construction of our perception as opposed to a physical reality. I do not believe this, but nonetheless I would like to explore the idea.
Ignoring time as a dimension, imagine for a moment Flatlanders imagining our three-dimension world. Flatland embeds part way through a three dimensional ball. The intersection of our world and theirs is a circle.
Flatlanders do not have the hardware to perceive the ball directly, but they could come to understand that this object in our three-dimensional worlds exists for them as a point, as this circle, as other circles of different sizes, and as nothing at all. However, at no time does their perception encompass all these different aspects of a ball together. Each different aspect of the ball would be a slice of it from our point of view depending on where Flatland cut through the ball.
Flatlanders might attempt to comprehend ballness by sequencing these slices. If they organize the slices by size, then they start with nothing. At the next slice, a point appears, and in the next slice, the point becomes a small circle. Depending on the resolution of their senses, they will have a variable number of ever-larger circles in each succeeding slice. Their perception of the ball would be a point appearing in their world, becoming a small circle, and then expanding.
This model of the Flatlanders does not fully describe a three dimensional ball, but it may be the best they can do with the limitations of their two-dimensional existence. They would have generated an illusion of time to explain the three-dimensional nature of ballness. Where for us no time-like quality of the ball exists, for Flatlanders the ball exists as a two-dimensional object changing in time.
Note that the Flatlanders might entirely miss fact that the ball does not stop at its equatorial diameter. They might not realize that it shrinks again, becomes the point, and vanishes. Because they organized their perception by the size of slices, the end of their timeline would have been the maximum diameter.
In the same way, we existing in a three-dimensional universe would generate an illusion of time to explain a four-dimensional object. It would not fully describe the nature of this object, but it might be as close as we could come to understanding it.
The implication for us would be that the past, present, and future states of this object exist all at the same moment.
Ignoring time as a dimension, imagine for a moment Flatlanders imagining our three-dimension world. Flatland embeds part way through a three dimensional ball. The intersection of our world and theirs is a circle.
Flatlanders do not have the hardware to perceive the ball directly, but they could come to understand that this object in our three-dimensional worlds exists for them as a point, as this circle, as other circles of different sizes, and as nothing at all. However, at no time does their perception encompass all these different aspects of a ball together. Each different aspect of the ball would be a slice of it from our point of view depending on where Flatland cut through the ball.
Flatlanders might attempt to comprehend ballness by sequencing these slices. If they organize the slices by size, then they start with nothing. At the next slice, a point appears, and in the next slice, the point becomes a small circle. Depending on the resolution of their senses, they will have a variable number of ever-larger circles in each succeeding slice. Their perception of the ball would be a point appearing in their world, becoming a small circle, and then expanding.
This model of the Flatlanders does not fully describe a three dimensional ball, but it may be the best they can do with the limitations of their two-dimensional existence. They would have generated an illusion of time to explain the three-dimensional nature of ballness. Where for us no time-like quality of the ball exists, for Flatlanders the ball exists as a two-dimensional object changing in time.
Note that the Flatlanders might entirely miss fact that the ball does not stop at its equatorial diameter. They might not realize that it shrinks again, becomes the point, and vanishes. Because they organized their perception by the size of slices, the end of their timeline would have been the maximum diameter.
In the same way, we existing in a three-dimensional universe would generate an illusion of time to explain a four-dimensional object. It would not fully describe the nature of this object, but it might be as close as we could come to understanding it.
The implication for us would be that the past, present, and future states of this object exist all at the same moment.
