Humans have languages. A spoken language is a sequence of sounds with a rule — a one-dimensional sound sequence created with different sound frequencies. Thus, two-dimensional. The sound sequence means the time. This sequence of sound frequencies, not the frequency itself, allows us to make complex communications possible. With languages, we have names for objects, verbs for linking and actions, and adjectives for explanations. Language allows us to share one’s past with others as narratives. A narrative story tells the sequence of events —the one-dimensional time series. This forces us to have the beginning and end. For the first time, continuous current moments are divided into a series of discrete events, each with a start and end. Without languages, there are no start and end—continuous moments. You cannot share your past with anyone, even with future you.
Our physical world consists of four dimensions. Three dimensions plus time. On the other hand, humans sense the surrounding environment in twenty-six dimensions. Yes. Twenty-six dimensions! Seven senses (lights with eyes, sounds and gravity with ears, touching and heat with skin, smell with a nose, and taste with a tongue). Light sensing (eyes), mechanical sensing (ears and skin) and chemical sensing (nose and tongue). Light sensing with eyes has six dimensions. 1. Light sensing. 2. Colour sensing with three photoreceptors. 3. Depth sensing with lens and two eyes. 4. Pattern cognition like circles and triangles. 5. Orientation cognition like X and +. 6. Sequence cognition like 123 and 231. Each higher cognition/sensing is nested on top of the lower cognition/sensing. Sound cognition with ears has three dimensions. 1. Sound sensing. 2. Sound frequency cognition. 3. Sequence cognition. Skin sensation has four dimensions: 1. Touching. 2. Strength. 3. XY dimensional size. 4. XY orientation. Taste has three dimensions. 1 Chemical sensing. 2. Texture and 3. Heat. Two types of memory: motor and cognitive. And emotion. The total is twenty-five plus time. Each moment, we are scanning our surrounding environment in twenty-five dimensions. Without language cognition, this becomes seven senses, memory and emotion, plus time. Ten dimensions. I think that most mammals live in at least ten dimensions.
Not all information in twenty-five dimensions is always cognized and extracted. But they are continuously sensed each moment. Imagine a surveillance camera with endless recording or no recording. All events in front of the camera are captured without the beginning and end. Interestingly, endless recording and no recording are not much different unless someone decides to look it back. However, without language, there is no chance to look back except for one condition. The event evokes a strong emotion. This is post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—the memory without language cognition. No beginning and no end. But the moment of the event is extracted and remembered without language.
Without language, we live from a moment to a moment. There is no way to recall anything, but we are occupied with the current surrounding environment every moment. Language allows us to extract an event, object, and action from the continuous past. This extracting process is like going from chaos to order. Multidimensional information is extracted and compressed into a one-dimensional sequence of sound frequencies or letters- a narrative story. There are infinite ways of making a story from a single event.
On the receiver side, the one-dimensional narrative story is decoded to reconstruct the original multidimensional information with imagination. At least two people must understand the same language to make this system work. In addition, they need to share a similar way of extraction and imagination. Otherwise, something-in and something-out will be completely different.
Imagination is potentially infinite but also constrained by the receiver’s physical and intellectual experience: reading and education. Without priming by physical and intellectual experience, imagination would stay primitive. Intellectual experience, including reading, hearing and watching, helps develop the imagination to go beyond one’s direct physical experience. Listening to stories and reading books is the best training for imagination—reconstruction from one-dimensional information to multidimensional events. Watching TV or movies would involve nine-dimensional information (five visuals and three audible information plus time), which could be reconstructed into a 26-dimensional event. The experience of imagination through reading a book or watching a movie sometimes further evokes deeper imagination, similar to what one’s physical experience can do. However, imagining physicality, such as pain, is often challenging and requires training and deep empathy.
Languages are a necessity for communication, but more is needed for successful communication. On the other hand, if imagination is shared, communication can be held without language. Respect and suspect. Both assume the other’s intention based on one’s imagination without language. Ultimately, we cannot come out of our brains and share our consciousness. All communication with or without language is based on individual receivers’ imagination. If you refuse to imagine, a conversation is no longer a form of communication, even when speaking the same language. Those words will be an order or statement—one-directional.
When we speak a narrative story, we weave one-dimensional information from random chaotic fragmented dots spread in the 26-dimensional space in our mind. You, as a storyteller, are the one making the selection and connection of dots. Which dots you take as a part of your story is solely your intentional or nonintentional decision. Reasoning would help make logic within a story. Whether the reasoning was actual or only retrospective does not matter. Reasoning and logic create biases in selecting the dots as related/unrelated, relevant/irrelevant and necessary/unnecessary. An order (one-dimensional sequence of information) is built from the original 26-dimensional chaotic information. Although all dots have no difference in the original chaos, after this extraction, there are the dots necessary for making sense of the story, the dots irrelevant to it, and some that confuse the audience because of disrupting its logical flow, etc.
Logic without a goal is nonsense. Logic demands a goal. A story without a goal is chit-chat. Logic sets individual values in originally equivalent dots. Logic separates the equivalent dots into two, such as correct/wrong, good/bad, in/out, self/non-self, etc. Outside of logic, it becomes irrelevant.
Retrospective reasoning can imitate an unintentional endpoint as a pre-set goal. Accidental choices will be logically justified as if they were rational decisions to achieve the goal. Retrospective consequential logic is extracted as a universal standard logic for future practice. However, this type of logic usually does not work for future planning as intended because it is just retrospective reasoning.
Scientific statements are also inevitably one-dimensional because of the use of languages. The essence of modern science is reproducibility. Simply, REPRODUCIBILITY. An event reproducible whoever, whenever, and wherever it performs in a precisely defined condition, we consider it to be the scientific truth. However, this does not mean that the scientific statements describing it are also valid. The scientific statements use logic. Logic is always constrained by the context.
Think about our historical understanding of the universe. The sun rises from the east every morning and sets to the west every evening. Before Galileo, people explained that the sun was moving around the earth. This is an intuitive interpretation. But we now know the earth is rotating and moving around the sun. Nothing was wrong in reproducible observations. However, our statements to explain the observations did not capture the whole view. Our logic was constrained by the context at that time- the earth is the centre of the universe.
All physical events on the earth are four-dimensional. Even if we try to control everything and observe all small changes, there are always limitations of biased presupposition and detection methods. In the history of science, scientists have made tremendous efforts to visualize something invisible and to measure something inconceivable. However, there is no way to capture ‘all’ because ‘all’ means infinite. When another way of making a one-dimensional path (i.e. logic) was discovered, it was recognized as a paradigm shift, such as Galileo, Einstein and Darwin. They provided a new path to interpret our world. After all, all scientific statements are tentative interpretations of reproducible observations in well-defined (in other words, highly limited) conditions. Interestingly, mathematics looks different.
Telling one’s experience is making a story. This is a process of converting chaotic information to one-dimensional verbal word order. We humans are constantly extracting order from chaos in daily conversations. Languages are an excellent tool for this. Without languages, chaos stays as chaos. Literature. Music. Arts like painting and sculptures. All of them are extracting something from chaos to order. Humans seem emotionally reacting when presented with new ways of removing order from the world.
Note – Interestingly, the number of sensing/cognitive dimensions I am thinking about is equal to the number of dimensions discussed in string theories in physics…. Superstring theory has 10 dimensions, M-theory has 11 dimensions, and bosonic string theory has 26 dimensions. Is this a coincidence?
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