Useful insight

[varshax]

I attended a Montessori school for the first few years of my schooling, and while I was always aware that this experience directly contributed to many aspects of my life, now I am beginning to think that I have no idea of the extant to which it made a difference. Yesterday the trainer at the gym rolled out a mat to do some core work and I remarked

Comments

[shortindiangirl]

Wonder if there's more to it than Montessori. I did not go to to Montessori school, but I too have this great need for visualizing and details. This is one reason that I could not continue my education in Physics and had to stop at the Bachelor of Arts level in undergrad. (3 more courses would have made this a B.Sc. Physics as opposed to a B.A. Physics). I needed to visualize dimensions - 5th dimension and onwards. And naturally, this is painful at best and impossible at worst. And the layers upon layers of assumptions that both computational and theoretical Physics is built on did not suit my needs. It seemed to me that the assumptions were self referential, and without a true visualization, I could not verify that it was not. I decided then that my right brained needs to "feel" the Physics overtook my left brained ability to "prove" the Physics.

There was only once when I could truly "feel" and visualize my Physics. That was when I was intoxicated on marijuana. I experienced infinity and a great many things started making sense to me. Even after I became sober, I remembered my experience of many concepts and was able to hold on to my deeper understandings. Sadly, I have not been intoxicated since, and have not had a chance to truly "understand" more things that I could not otherwise visualize.

I am reading a book now called the "Theory of Knowledge". This is a text book for the International Baccalaureate. My Singaporean cousin was reading this for her A levels (or is it O levels ?) a few years ago, and I find the concepts in the book about what knowledge is and how we build knowledge to be fascinating. It touches upon what you have said here, about how we take information and create knowledge out of it. It says that there are 4 main ways we build our knowledge:
1) Through language (hearing / reading things)
2) Through perception / observation (directly)
3) Through logic / deduction / reasoning
4) Through intuition / gut feeling / values

More as I get further in the book.

[varshax]

I guess this need for visualization could come from many sources .... methinks mine is less likely to be inherent as I dont have your artistic inclination or education. In those first few years, I probably learnt how to learn - and I still fall back on the tools I picked up then (pictorial cues for example).

Experiencing infinity ..... I have no idea what that is :)

Interestingly enough, I dont find it hard to visualize multiple dimensions .... and that is most likely because of my background in coding theory (Codes are visualised as vector subspaces) so for me that too is a learnt-trait.

Sounds like a very interesting book ...

Experiencing infinity

[shortindiangirl]

I think the education that I sought was probably because of my need to visualize things. Perhaps somehow I too learned how to learn by visualizing, who knows ? Or perhaps my brain is precluded to learning that way because it is unable to process un-visual lists as well ?

The best way I can describe experiencing infinity is that I repeated endless cycles of the same thoughts. Over and over and over again. And time in real time was slower than time in my head. So I could think the same thoughts many hundreds of times, coming back full circle. And of course, while I'm thinking these thoughts many times, I appear to be totally out of it to others, but truly, I was experiencing Physics.

Anyway, on some nth iteration, suddenly, my internal bulb glowed. I was experiencing infinity. Aah. And even as I thought that, the idea that I was experiencing infinity became a part of my infinite fabric, repeating itself. I would rediscover infinity, infinite times after I first had the thought. So much so that I could not identify, untill sober later, whether I had originally grasped the idea, or if it ocurred midway during one of the iterations. Some other things layered on, but to add another thought layer to a cyclical pattern of the same thoughts infinite times took a lot of effort. Each time I went through any single thought, or cycle of thoughts, I would feel as though I have just thought this so many times just recently. Indeed, just now. It's like holding up two mirrors on either side of a deja vu. It's deja vu times infinity. Each time.

A very interesting experience. But essentially, I experienced infinity through the concept of an infinite cycle of the same series of thoughts. Chemically, my nerves were probably firing the same way over and over, and I would briefly forget till I felt it again, and then I would remember. I wrote my thoughts as and when I felt it, as many words as I could manage - my thoughts were quick - and looking back at them when sober, I saw myself repeating and repeating. Sometimes a changed word here, or a new thought there, but over and over, some 12 pages of repetition.

In the midst of this writing a poem emerged about Quantum Physics (as I intoxicatedly passed out of the infinity stage and started to visualize dimensions and differentials). I should dig up that poem - I promise it makes more sense than the Karama Generatrix!

Anyway, I also experienced infinite space. The feeling of being expanded. My entire being was no more contained within my body, but spread far and wide, to the ends of infinity. But this was less satisfying an experience, because rather than feeling the ends of infinity, I was only letting it go, as though I didn't care where my being ended or began. That my consciousness just was filling it all up, whatever that "all" was.

And now back to sobriety - I saw an interesting book once about how we learn. I photocopied some excerpts from it when I was given the book during Teaching Assistant training. Must dig that up too someday and review.

Didn't know that Code theory were visualized in vector subspace. Sounds totally out of my reach and sci-fi to me. To debunk the popular American expression, I respond, "It IS rocket science!"

Re: Experiencing infinity

[varshax]

Thats a really interesting experiment .... with very interesting results. Your narrative reminds me of scenes from "That 70s show".
And coding theory is not very complicated ..... there are some involved concepts but those even I dont remember at this point :) My memory is definitely DRAM ... fundas die quickly if they are not refreshed.

[oldhen]

I needed to visualize dimensions - 5th dimension and onwards.

Hmmm, this is a hard one for most people to wrap their minds around I think (hope)- here's an attempt to paint a four-dimensional object by Dali- someone who knew a thing or two about both warped spaces and dope ;-) You can kind of theoretically extrapolate what mutiple spatial dimensions would look like, like in this Wikipedia article, but can you really see it? Theoretically I can guess what a four-dimensional cube would look like, and sort of follow how you can get from that to the Dali cross, like the article explains, but can't really "see" the tesseract. From here you can kind of theoretically extrapolate to five spatial dimensions and so on and so forth..

Technically, I didn't think it was possible for n dimensional beings to "see" n+1 dimensions - we technically only see in 2 dimensions and extrapolate the third from angular displacements, as lots of the optical illusion things at science museums will testify.. Or at least that's how I used to console myself, for my inability to actually "see" the tesseract. I guess V'mov if you can do it, then I've had my fundas are all wrong.. :-)

P.S. There's this fab. book by Aldous Huxley - The Doors of Perception (from whence by legend, the band Doors got their name), that's basically a detailed description of all his thoughts and visions after he very clinically gives himself measured doses of drugs, interesting stuff..

[varshax]

No no .... I completely agree with you that a n-dimensional observer cannot accurately "see" any more dimensions. But thats because the function "see" is defined by the medium we use to do so. When I say visualise n-dimensional space, I actually mean something to the effect of "understand and feel comfortable with". So in my view (heh heh) there is a difference between "see" and "visulaise" here .... but I agree that its wicked of me to not define my variables ;)

And Dali ..... fun guy ... interesting illusionist ... but I dont see the new dimensions. IMO, n-dimensional space is better defined by geometry.

[oldhen]

but I dont see the new dimensions.

The Wikipedia tesseract article has a little animation that sort of tries to explain it..

[varshax]

Yeah ... He's trying to explain using geometry ... the picture does not do the theory justice though. Like we talked about before, the medium is limited by its dimensions. I only saw an image on the page .... was there a link to the animation ?

[oldhen]

was there a link to the animation ?

Mea culpa, here's the right link..