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Main Boards => VGMaps Social Board => Topic started by: Revned on May 12, 2006, 04:25:51 pm

Title: What if...
Post by: Revned on May 12, 2006, 04:25:51 pm

Here's something to get you thinking: what if you were born with a brain defect such that all your vision was inverted? Black would be white, orange would be blue, etc. Would you be able to tell? Would anyone be able to tell?

I think not. Unlike colorblindness, you would not lose any of the original image. It would look normal to you, having never seen what things should really look like. You would be completely unaware for your entire life. Imagine looking at the sun and being blinded by black light....

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Inty on May 13, 2006, 02:50:06 am

Revned Said:

You said black is white. The sun is orangeish yellowish, so wouldn't you be blinded by blue light?

<_<

Anyway, i'm sure someone would discover that you have it early on in life because of simple questions like `what color do you want your room to be painted?`

You ask for Green and get Green, when in reality you wanted Purple.

---

I wonder if a girl will come over and play with my Wii.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Revned on May 13, 2006, 10:06:25 am

If you look straight into the sun you get blinded by almost white light. Sure, it's a little yellow, so you're right. You'd be blinded by very dark blue light.

The color thing is the very essence of my idea. You wouldn't know what green looks like to other people. You would grow up calling green colors green, though they look like purple to you. You would be able to identify all colors just as well as other people, but they'd be the exact opposite in your eyes.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Grizzly on May 13, 2006, 12:06:35 pm

That would be quite strange. But I am not quite sure if you really would never realize that something is wrong with you. I mean people would get up if it is quite dark outside and everyone sleeps when colours get lighter outside, although the words would be inverted in your vocabulary so that the dark colours are called light ones and light colours are called dark ones. So everything would be fine when talking about it.

It would also be very white inside caves but still you wouldn't be able to see anything more than us there because there would be no other colour than that white just like for us there is nothing else than black.

It's funny that I cannot find any situation in which someone would realize something is wrong just by your reactions as you would learn in early years to fear the brightness (called darkness then) and that dark colours are friendly.

Although here comes a difficult question, what happens if some colour related things are determined by the genes?

For example if tiredness is set by the brain when it gets dark around you - would you become night-active? And would red attract special attention for you or would it just perish in all other colours because it's just a light blue?

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Revned on May 13, 2006, 12:58:51 pm

That's an interesting thought. Maybe some nocturnal people really do have this problem? I doubt it, but it seems possible.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Thraxian on May 15, 2006, 07:34:26 am

Borrowed from "Clarifying Ostensive Definitions by Logical Possibility of Inverted Color Perceptions", I'm sure that this will add to the discussion:

Although many materialists are not satisfied with the conclusions of logical empiricism, they have no different opinion about the view of logical empiricism on ostensive definitions because they believe that a sensation reflects a property of objects and there is a one-to-one relation between the sensations and the properties. As to that ostensive definitions are made with the sensations or with the properties, this is of no importance to them. They still more have no doubt about the identity between sensations of different people. What is critical in this paper is to prove that the identity between sensations or experiences of different people cannot be logically proved. And it is possible that different people with the same language have different even inverted sensations; and hence, the view of logical empiricism on the ostensive definitions is logically wrong.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: bustin98 on May 15, 2006, 09:47:53 am

Imagine if everyone was able to "sync" their perceptions of reality with everyone else.

This brings another question: Will someone with inverted color perception be able to accurately identify how bright or shaded an object is? Probably not.

In the end, it seems it doesn't matter as perception is relative. Hopefully no one loses any sleep wondering if what they see is what the rest of the world sees.

---

Cool beans

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: bustin98 on May 15, 2006, 09:55:32 am

Here's another thought to get you thinking:

Imagine a world that lives on a sheet of paper. There is no "up" or "down", only North South East West and everything in between. Now shove a pencil through the paper. How would that look to that world? A round object that grew from nothing to a stable size, then disappeared, leaving a 'nothing' in its wake.

A 3D object in a 2D world.

Now bump it up a notch. What would a 4D object in a 3D world be like? An object untouched by time and the movement of space? Could we even acknowledge the existance of such a thing?

---

Cool beans

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Revned on May 15, 2006, 10:14:25 am

Very interesting, Thraxian. I never considered extending it to other senses. My friend also told me about some philosophy he read that says people's favorite colors can be applied to completely different objects, just whatever pleases them best.

bustin98, there's an entire book about that. It's called Flatland. It's about a flat world and how its inhabitants live, and an encounter with a 3 dimensional object. I understand the concepts and how they apply to the next level, but the fourth dimension still escapes me. I don't suppose anyone can really accurately visualize a 4 dimensional object anyway.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Dan on May 15, 2006, 11:25:35 am

I've thought about this a bit too, but in a different way.

In 2d graphs, a tangent line consists of a single line, i.e. then entirety of a 1d graph. In 3d graphs, a tangent plane consists of a single plane, i.e. the entirety of a 2d graph. Thus, 4d graphs must have tangent cubes, the entirety of 3d graphs. Simply trying to visualize this has put an end to my speculations, but I thought I'd throw this out there.

4d is crazy stuff, yo.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Revned on May 15, 2006, 03:22:55 pm

Tangent cubes? Oh goodness. My head hurts.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: JonLeung on May 15, 2006, 05:57:41 pm

Inty's wrong about the colour. I've actually had this very thought many times before, actually. If the colours were reversed, you would always believe your reds to be blue, so you would always refer to the same colours even if you perceived them differently. If you were taught that what you see as red is called "blue", you would always call it red regardless.

When you consider that our visual senses are limited to red to violet, and can't see beyond, like infrared and ultraviolet, then even if there were "true" colours, we're still missing out on a lot of light. It's possible that other beings might see different ranges of light, resulting in a different view of the world. We know that some people are colour blind, and that animals are more dependent on other senses, so we know it's not an impossibility. While bats being blind is only a myth, they navigate using reflected sounds, so depending on how you define "seeing", that creates more variations on how the world is "seen".

I don't think we can comprehend 4-D. The fourth dimension being supposedly time (or duration), what that might mean is that a four-dimensional image includes how something appears at all times all at once. "Somewhen" becomes a concept as concrete as somewhere, so a four-dimensional image of me (assuming that my body didn't change much) already (or rather, always has) include(s) a younger self and a skeletal, long-dead self. Weird. Actually, I think I'm deviating a bit from what 4-D really is...but yeah, the weird things you think of when you consider time as either malleable or extremely concrete.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Revned on May 15, 2006, 06:19:43 pm

Most of the time when people talk about the fourth dimension, they're referring to a fourth physical dimension. If you're talking about a hypercube using time as the fourth dimension, you have to imagine a cube that appears and disappears after a time identical to the length of the sides. Figure out how to measure time in feet, and you're set.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: KingKuros on May 15, 2006, 07:23:29 pm

Here's how the colors are inverted:

Red --> Green

Blue --> Orange

Yellow --> Purple

Here is a link to a page about the speculations of a 4th spatial dimension.

http://tetraspace.alkaline.org/

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Revned on May 15, 2006, 07:44:05 pm

That site looks like a modernized version of Flatland. Very interesting. I'll add it to my bookmarks.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: KingKuros on May 17, 2006, 08:34:56 pm

With this color inversion thing, here's something that may interest you. The image below shows you 4 circles of different colors and 2 black spots. Stare at the left dot with the circles for a while. Then look at the right dot. You should see an afterimage of the circles at the left in their inverted colors.

(http://img125.imageshack.us/img125/8038/incolor1pl.png)

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: TerraEsperZ on May 17, 2006, 10:27:31 pm

About that 4th spatial dimension, after reading a bunch of sites on the subject I tried to imagine a Marvel-type of mutant whose ability was being able to move through a 4th spatial dimension. In effect, there would be no point in our 3D space where he couldn't freely travel, whether it was enclosed or not. The closest equivalent would have been Grimskull from the old Skeleton Warriors who could travel through "the shadows".

I also tried to imagine how that would look from that mutant's point of view but I just don't have a good enough grasp of mathematics for that. Still, interesting stuff.

---

"With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censored, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably." [...] The first time any man's freedom is trodden on, we're all damaged. - Captain Jean-Luc Picard

B*tch, meet reality. Reality, meet b*tch. - Me

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: bustin98 on May 18, 2006, 12:48:12 am

There are a number of comic book characters that travel instantly. Whether its through a '4th' dimension could be questionable, but seeing how distance is unaffected by time, I would say the question is mute.

DC has a character named Warp.

Marvel has Nightcrawler (though he can only go where he has seen)

DC has a character who rides time (but I forget the name). They had a whole summer crossover event called Zero Hour to introdoce the character.

I've been thinking more on the 4th dimension stuff, and I remembered a Star Trek: TNG episode where thought is linked to space, and inherently time. The Traveler I think. He just touched the ship's controls and thought about moving through space and it happened.

So from there, I began thinking about how thoughts originating from our dimension and their possible effect on space might be construed by a being living above our dimension.

Perhaps every thought is layed out, from the beginning of time to the end. We see this as impossible because the only way we can imagine working would be far too cumbersome to be efficient, and the number of thoughts would number near infinite.

When you live outside of time, what is infinite?

As I type I feel perhaps I'm coming dangerously close to describing God, and I don't want to see this thread degrade to a debate on theology. But I'm happy to see it hasn't been brought up til now ... :)

Its late and I'm losing coherent thought rapidly. I'll just wait and see what else is commented on.

---

Cool beans

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: JonLeung on May 18, 2006, 07:52:16 am

bustin98's thought about how thoughts are laid out reminds me of a theory I often think about, that of fate.

Since everything is merely a continuation or reaction to the state of things a moment before, things can't happen any other way. Another universe that has the exact same starting conditions (placement of energy, matter, direction of inertia, quantum particles, mood of God, etc.) can only have the exact same history. And this also means there can only be a specific present and future for any one universe.

You can't do something without a reason. Nothing happens out of the blue. Even if you do something now, relatively unusual and unsuspected, you'd probably be doing it out of spite of this theory, which itself is a reason, and it'd be confined to your mood, the electrons and chemical makeup of your brain this very instant. You can't think a thought or do an action that has no origin.

Being a Christian, it's hard to say that God isn't immune, but in a singular universe, it sure looks like He can't escape either. He's reacting to us as much as we react (or choose not to) react to Him, so the only escape from this theory for anybody is a multiverse of probabilities, but limiting the scope to a single universe with the quantum particles and God and all other things that could possibly affect it in a closed system, there's no way to escape a particular fate.

Of course, by limiting everything to a single frame of probability, I suppose the fallacy of this theory is the limited perspective - but that's what we all have. Or if we see the entire multiverse as a whole as a closed system, even that can't escape all the possibile destinies, as each universe is confined to its own.

In short, our future is inevitable (whether it co-exists with the present or not), and free will is an illusion.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Revned on May 18, 2006, 02:33:03 pm

I've also thought about the inevitability of our universe. I thought about multiple "copies" and whether or not they'd turn out the same. Unless you bring in a higher power, events were set in stone from the moment of the Big Bang. This led me to another theory.

Given an infinitely powerful computer and a perfect comprehension of physics, could you not simulate the motions of every single particle in the universe? You could "fast forward" and take a peek at the future, or maybe even simulate backwards and see the past. I realize that the computer would have to use more matter than there is in our universe, but perhaps this machine could be in a separate universe so as not to interfere. This idea occurred to me when debating whether or not anything can truly be lost (old books, buildings, etc.) from our world forever.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: bustin98 on May 18, 2006, 07:40:44 pm

Chaos theory predicts that you cannot predict the future, even if you know all the rules.

Many subatomic particles behave randomly, and as such they are the butterfly's wings that cause a hurricane on the other side of the world.

I've wondered about the 'multi-verse' and if there's a copy for every decision to be made. But that seems a bit self-centered. When I was younger I had thoughts about the possibility that realty is just a figment of my imagination, that everything that happens as my subconscience mind creates.

I've got another thread of thought to throw out here later on.

---

Cool beans

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: JonLeung on May 24, 2006, 12:17:12 pm

bustin98 Said:

Now I don't think that's how the multiverse would work, but this is just my take on it.

The multiverse is comprised of a universe and all its possibilities. What we perceive is just a particular thread of possibilities, in a sea of all other possible outcomes of universes.

It's about possibilties, which I don't think is the same as conscious decisions. While in other universes something may compell you (in universes where you do exist, that is) to make a different decision, it's because of what happens in that universe that influences your decision, not the other way around like you were implying, where a single choice suddenly spawns a whole 'nother universe.

Sure, there are universes with other conscious decisions made. Don't forget unconscious decisions, or things like quantum particles (supposedly placed differently in different universes) slicing through strands of DNA affecting the biology of a single organism or an entire race. Or smacking into certain particles at certain times causing chemical reactions, possibly major, like causing an explosion somewhere in certain universes but not in others.

While I do personally think that "thought" and self-awareness are related to consciousness and life itself, and not just a property of matter (how does matter become self-conscious? I can't imagine how), I do believe it is still too limited to our physical surroundings and therefore not capable of spawning universes. However, if you consider dreams, or that our existence is entirely dependent on our own perception of things, thought is capable of altering subjective reality, but not objective reality.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Revned on June 07, 2006, 08:21:23 pm

I just found a visualization of a tesseract that really helps me understand it. The problem with the typical animations you see is that they show a 4-dimensional object in 2 dimensions. This one, however, presents a stereo view of it. That means you actually do see it in 3 dimensions. Try it out: http://dogfeathers.com/java/hyprcube.html.

If you don't have 3D glasses, click "Stereo" twice. Now cross your eyes until the images meet, then refocus. Speaking of which, I made several stereoscopic images years ago. Those were really cool.

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: bustin98 on June 07, 2006, 08:40:57 pm

Thats cool.

Funny that you bring up a tesseract, as the first place I heard the term was in 'A Wrinkle In Time', a book of 4 in a collection I just got. Coincidence?

---

Cool beans

Title: RE: What if...
Post by: Revned on June 07, 2006, 10:09:38 pm

I read that and A Wind in the Door in 3rd grade. I sure did like them.