Ah, I get what you are saying, and I agree. It’s possible the human brain architecture, as-is, can’t process 4D, but I guess we’re mismatched in what we think is interesting. The thrust of my intuition here was more “wow, someone could understand N-D intuitively in a 3D universe, this doesn’t seem prohibited”, regardless of whether it’s the same architecture of a human brain exactly. Like, the human brain as it is right now might not permit that, and neurotech might involve doing a lot of architectural changes (the same applies to emulations). I suppose it’s a lot less interesting an insight if you already buy that imagining higher dimensions from a 3D universe is in principle possible. The human brain being able to do that is a stronger claim that would have been more interesting if I actually managed to defend it well.
I suppose I was kinda sloppy saying “the human brain can do that”—I should have said “the human brain arbitrarily modified” or something like that.
I definitely think it’s interesting that it’s possible for N-D-substrate-computations to imagine / intuit N+1-D, but yeah, I feel like that’s mostly a given because we have the concept of N+1-D in the first place.
There are different levels of “imagine / intuit” though. Some people have particularly good or bad intuition for the 3D space we live in. I took your claim to be something like “the average brain could intuit 4D just as well as 3D, maybe requiring slight modification”. I think the modifications to reach true parity would be pretty extensive, because of how much 3D-specific architecture (as opposed to weights) human brains have. I do agree the modifications are theoretically possible, but the modifications to give a fruit fly human-level cognition are also theoretically possible with arbitrary modification.
Ah, I get what you are saying, and I agree. It’s possible the human brain architecture, as-is, can’t process 4D, but I guess we’re mismatched in what we think is interesting. The thrust of my intuition here was more “wow, someone could understand N-D intuitively in a 3D universe, this doesn’t seem prohibited”, regardless of whether it’s the same architecture of a human brain exactly. Like, the human brain as it is right now might not permit that, and neurotech might involve doing a lot of architectural changes (the same applies to emulations). I suppose it’s a lot less interesting an insight if you already buy that imagining higher dimensions from a 3D universe is in principle possible. The human brain being able to do that is a stronger claim that would have been more interesting if I actually managed to defend it well.
I suppose I was kinda sloppy saying “the human brain can do that”—I should have said “the human brain arbitrarily modified” or something like that.
I definitely think it’s interesting that it’s possible for N-D-substrate-computations to imagine / intuit N+1-D, but yeah, I feel like that’s mostly a given because we have the concept of N+1-D in the first place.
There are different levels of “imagine / intuit” though. Some people have particularly good or bad intuition for the 3D space we live in. I took your claim to be something like “the average brain could intuit 4D just as well as 3D, maybe requiring slight modification”. I think the modifications to reach true parity would be pretty extensive, because of how much 3D-specific architecture (as opposed to weights) human brains have. I do agree the modifications are theoretically possible, but the modifications to give a fruit fly human-level cognition are also theoretically possible with arbitrary modification.