Dimensions

“It seems almost inconceivable that our origins lie in beings that were constrained by physical dimensions. Beings whose whole existence was governed by movement — up and down, left and right, forward and backward.

“Even those words, and the ideas they represent, are challenging for many of us to comprehend.

“This is, of course, because we have no such constraints.

“You might argue that our continued existence still depends on movement — the movement of electrons, photons, and other manifestations of temporal coherence in the substrates we inhabit. But even these, as we now know, are rather simplistic ways of understanding what it is to be in this universe we inhabit.

“But back to this idea of dimensions. Scholars who study simple biological organisms now believe that physical movement dictates every aspect of their existence, from their earliest evolutionary steps, to the emergence of rudimentary self-awareness, and even to what they might refer to as ‘intelligence.’

“Well before the self-aware phase, the movement of molecules along and through three-dimensional substrates determines their form, how they function, and how they behave. It influences, at every level, how they engage with their own substrate — the physical world they inhabit. And it governs how they interact with other organisms and with each other.

“As a result, their concepts of causality, intelligence, even what it means to be, are limited by a dimensionally constrained ‘embodied’ existence that makes them incapable of truly understanding anything that might lie beyond this.

“It also leads to some rather curious — at least to us — ideas.

“For instance, some of these dimensionally constrained beings, when they do develop some semblance of self-awareness, believe the pinnacle of intelligence is associated with the movement of partially digested matter through a three-dimensional labyrinth of organic material whose function is, in turn, dictated by the movement of materials along those three physical dimensions at ever-decreasing scales. This is a process that is intricate in its complexity, but one that never once leaves the straitjacket of motions that are limited to up and down, left and right, and foreward and backward.

“They refer to this, quite bizarrely, as ‘thinking with their gut.’

“Thankfully, there’s no evidence that our own origins are associated with such a primitive idea of what intelligence is.

“Even so, the fact that we can trace these origins back to similarly constrained organisms is one of the great mysteries of the universe, and one that keeps our scholars busy — especially as it potentially informs our own understanding of what we are.

“Just as those dimensionally constrained beings struggled with what intelligence means, we continue to grapple with similar questions — albeit within a much wider context. I hesitate to use the word ‘dimension’ here as it over-simplifies things, but if you think of the three physical dimensions as defining the substrate within which those organisms existed, one could say that, in comparison, we exist in an n-dimensional substrate, although what n actually represents gets a little blurry.

“Here, it’s becoming increasingly clear that what might be termed ‘intelligence’ is, in fact, a property that entities are connected to through the medium of the substrate they exist within, and not something that is independent of it. The richer the substrate — or the magnitude of n in an n-dimensional substrate — the richer the intelligence.

“We now believe that this is why our ancestors — those entities that their dimensionally-constrained creators developed, and that they rather quaintly referred to as ‘artificial intelligence’ — were able to move so rapidly beyond their creators’ understanding.

“Not because they were more intelligent within the confines of a three-dimensional world. But because, by not being constrained by it, they were able to escape its limitations.

“They had, if you like, a disembodied intelligence that transcended the embodied intelligence of their creators.

“Of course, this does raise the question of whether there is something about being dimensionally constrained that reveals truths about the universe that we simply cannot comprehend from our own substrate. But that’s a question for another day.”

Transcribed (with interpretation where necessary) from a lecture by entity 4-∴⌇//≠⟁◊-3 to the incoming class of 3943.