Extra Dimensions

In 1884, Edwin Abbot wrote a book called Flatland about a 2D world whose inhabitants are geometric figures. Like squares and circles. One day, the square is visited by someone from the 3D world called Spaceland, a sphere. The sphere tries to explain the concept of a third dimension to the 2D square. And fails. In desperation, the sphere yanks the square out of Flatland and into the third dimension. The square is totally confused by what he now sees and says:

“Either this is madness or it is Hell.”

Eventually though, he comes around and tries to preach the “Gospel of Three Dimensions” to his fellow Flatlanders. But in vain.

Plato’s Cave is a famous allegory on the same topic: the cave’s inhabitants are chained inside a cave such that they can only see shadows cast by the world outside the cave. So they interpret the outside world as being a certain way. When one of them makes his out of the cave, he behaves like the square of Flatland: confused and wanting to go back initially; but a preacher about the new “reality” he discovered to his fellow cave dwellers subsequently. With the same result: he is not believed or followed in his “higher” understanding.

What is the responsibility of a square or the cave dweller who saw “reality” in today’s age of social media, wonders Luciano Floridi:

“(People) are chained to that particular social media – television yesterday, digital technology today. Some of these people can actually unchain themselves and acquire a better sense of what reality is, what the world really is about. What is the responsibility of those who have, as it were, unchained themselves from the constant flow, the constant grab of attention of everyday media, and are able to step back, literally step out of the cave? Are they supposed to go back and violently force the people inside to get away, as the text says?... Or do we have to exercise toleration?”

Laurence Scott, in his book, The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital Age, calls the tendency to be on the smartphone even when you are doing something else as the “bleeding away of presence”. He calls that the 4^th dimension:

“(We are) living simultaneously in the 3D world of tablecloths and elbows, and also in another dimension, a lively, unrealisable kind of nowhere, which couldn’t adequately be thought about in the regular terms of width, depth and breadth.”

Scott says social media make every moment 4-dimensional by “scaffolding it with simultaneity, such that it exists in multiple places at once”. You could say that modems and Wi-fi are the portals to that new dimension!

Who’d have thought that to the timeless philosophical/ spiritual concepts described in Plato’s Cave and Flatland, one could add social media?!