alt Hacker NewsI've always wondered why humans seem to be unable to visualize four-dimensional objects in their heads.
When discussing this with others, the arguments often revolve around the fact that as we experience our reality in 3D, there should be no reason for us to be able to visualize anything in a higher dimension.
This argument seems like an arbitrary limitation of the human mind, which I don't think holds up. It is sometimes associated with our inability to think of new colors, but I think this is a completely different problem.
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I can think of new colors, but I don't have a way to relate them to stimuli I've experienced, which makes it difficult to make sense of them the same way I can recall seeing existing colors. Still, I and many others have a notion of color that encompasses more than what my eyes can actually see, and I even have some friends that see much, much more in terms of color (such as texture, sensation, etc.)
"This argument seems like an arbitrary limitation of the human mind, which I don't think holds up. "
And why not?
Evolution did not reward us for thinking about spaced out concepts, but for coming up with new ways to get food, outsmart the prey, build tools.
That thinking in 4D is helpful for building tools is a new thing so we evolution did not optmized for it (yet).