Mario sees nothing

[EDIT:] this article is so dumb, please don’t waste your time.

I was thinking about an article I read, which went over multi-dimensional addressing (shoutout thatgabriel.com). I’d skimmed through it once, but I barely understood a thing. So that made me question my fundamental knowledge of dimensions. I thought I had a good grasp of 2D, I mean who doesn’t? It’s pretty easy to visualize 2 dimensions, so I’ve never bothered to question how deeply I understood it. Yet when I tried to dig into the implications of something like “Living in 2D” or asking myself “What does mario see?“. I quickly saw that my concept of reality held me back in my exploration of the topic.

I’m someone that struggles a lot with abstraction. I often ask “but what does this really mean?” whenever I discover a new topic. Only to find myself uncovering countless layers of abstraction, until I give up because “I’ve been at this for so long, yet I haven’t found the answer to my question (i.e what does this really mean) so I must give up as this would probably consume too much of my time.”

With some afterthought, I’m able to clearly see the issue in this line of thinking. It’s my definition of reality. See I think that if my idea of reality was different, I’d have an easier time internalizing information that’s purely theoretical. I’m only struggling because my goal when I ask the question, is to find what this new information means in my view of reality and how it fits into it. So that’s the real obstacle, nothing else.

I think most of us define reality as physical, something we can sense. Yet we rarely stop to think about how many purely “theoretical” ideas/logical constructs, directly impact our daily lives, in very real ways.

Going back to my idea of 2D. I came to the conclusion that I really didn’t know anything about it. To me, 2D was analogous to an x-y axis. That’s all I saw whenever 2D was mentioned. So I thought about the x-y axis for a second, and I asked myself “why?, why is it that 2D looks the way it does?” It might sound like a stupid question (might very well be) but it’s one that forces me to check my core understanding of 2D. So I came up with the answer “because all possible coordinates in this dimension are bound to that surface area.” That kind of makes sense from a visual perspective. But then I asked another question (perhaps a dumber one) I drew an x-y axis on a sheet of paper and looked at it, then I thought “from where I am, this makes total sense. But what would it look like, if I was at the edge of the x axis and looked through it?“. I must admit, this question isn’t logical at all, for me to go from where I was (Point A) to where I wanted to go (Point B) I’d have to travel through the z axis, which doesn’t exist in 2D obviously. So that logically checks out, my question mentions variables that don’t exist so it is fundamentally flawed. But it made me realize that no 2D “being” could ever see the x-y axis, because it’s something that can only be observed from the z axis. To conclude my little experiment, I still decided to go to point B by turning the envelope in a way that would allow me to “look through the x-axis” I could still see the x-y axis but not nearly as well as when I was facing it.

The x-y axis on the envelope only remained visible to me because I live in 3D, again I found myself trying to ask questions about world that doesn’t have all the variables I mention at its disposition. This goes to show how much my personal view of reality, is deeply engrained in the physical world, to the point of limiting my understanding of new concepts.

All of this made me wonder, what does mario see? Does he have vision? I tried to compare my experience trying to imagine 2D vision with the envelope experiment, and use that knowledge to hypothesize on what mario’d be seeing in his day-to-day life. Here I found myself using a non-existent dimension again, because I was only able to see the envelope and x-y axis because my eyes are outside the x-y axis, so that doesn’t count. But so what’s a two-dimensional eye? It seems impossible to me since there’d be no depth at all, so objects would be invisible.

Anyways it’s getting late, I find the idea of two-dimensional vision interesting. But it’s not something I’m ready to spend time researching so I’ll end the article lazily (this was more of a rant tbh but whatever).

My envelope experiment taught me lots about my definition of reality. And how it’s currently limiting me. It’s much more than the physical world, and that’s something that I truly realize now. I hope this newfound knowledge will serve as an aid to my continuous learning, and I plan to work on it until I’m able to have a brand new definition that suits both my thirst for an understanding of truths on reality and enough flexibility to not let that definition limit my mental capacities.

I think I’ve subconsciously been asking myself

How do you make sense of something that you can’t sense?

I really have to work on these things because I can see it’s holding me back. I always grapple with new ideas before accepting them and I have a tendency to reject them by default. Not by a lack of openness, but a misconfiguration let’s say.

I wrote this relatively quickly and never proofread it, if there are grammatical errors, typos, inconsistent structure, nonsense, forgive me. This is basically brain vomit.