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User:Hillbillyholiday/Articles/Hyperspace philosophy

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[Italicized parts need transliterating]

Linda Dalrymple Henderson coined the term Hyperspace philosophy in her 1983 thesis about the fourth dimension in early-twentieth-century art. It is used to describe those writers that use higher-dimensions for metaphysical and philosophical exploration.[1]

The concept of a fourth dimension was developed in the mid-nineteenth century.

Although the vague notion of a higher world has always been with us, the scientific concept of a geometrical fourth dimension was late to develop.[2]

By uniting space and time in a common metrical framework Minkowski shattered the prejudice, going back to the ancient Pythagoreans, that a geometry applies only to lengthlike quantities. He was the first to make such a special proposal in the context of a fully realized physical theory (special relativity) and it is entirely appropriate to consider him the father of spacetime.[3] Nevertheless there were intriguing precursors for such a union before 1908, and these may have helped to prepare the conceptual ground for the eventual acceptance of relativity theory.[3]

Kant

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The first philosopher to seriously entertain the idea of higher-dimensional spaces was the great Immanuel Kant. In one of his earliest essays he writes longingly of such spaces:
"A science of all these possible kinds of space would undoubtedly be the highest enterprise which finite understanding could undertake in the field of geometry...If it is possible that there could be regions with other dimensions, it is very likely that God has somewhere brought them in to being."[2]

In 1783, Kant wrote: "That everywhere space (which is not itself the boundary of another space) has three dimensions and that space in general cannot have more dimensions is based on the proposition that not more than three lines can intersect at right angles in one point. This proposition cannot at all be shown from concepts, but rests immediately on intuition and indeed on pure intuition a priori because it is apodictically (demonstrably) certain."[4]

  • James Van Cleve "Must Kant's Critics Presuppose That The Fourth Dimension Is Actual?"
There may be readers who are inclined to expostulate as follows: "It is no doubt true that if there were a fourth dimension, Kant's argument would break down...But what follows form this? Nothing, unless you are prepared to assert that there really is a fourth dimension, that is a genuine feature of the space in which we live and move. If the fourth dimension is only a mathematical abstraction, Kant's argument against externalism remains sound."
If partisans of the fourth dimension must indeed affirm its actuality in order to make their point, they are swinging on a thin vine.[5]

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer referred repeatedly to matter, motion and causation as the equivalent to the "union of space and time" in The World as Will and Representation (1818) He was, however, not concerned with physics, but rather with staking out a philosophical position relative to his predecessor Immanuel Kant.[3]

Grassman

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Grassman's mathematics was outside the mainstream of thought; read by few, his great work Die lineale Ausdehnungslehre (The Theory of Linear Extension, 1844) was described by Klein as "almost unreadable." Yet this book, more philosophy than mathematics, for the first time proposed a system whereby space and it's geometric components and descriptions could be extrapolated to other dimensions.[6]

Gustav Fechner

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Space has Four Dimensions, is a short story published in 1846 by German philosopher and experimental psychologist Gustav Fechner (under the pseudonym Dr. Mises). The protagonist in the tale is a shadow who is aware of, and able to communicate with, other shadows; but is trapped on a two-dimensional surface. According to Fechner, the shadow-man would conceive of the third dimension as being one of time.[7] The story bears a strong similarity to the "Allegory of the Cave", presented in Plato's The Republic written around 380 B.C.

Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner

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The person who really popularized the spiritualist notion of ghosts from the fourth dimension was Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner. Zöllner was a professor of astronomy at the University of Leipzig, [(as Mobius and Fechner..)] Zöllner got his interest in spiritualism from William Crookes, inventor of the cathode-ray tube. Crookes was very committed to spiritualism, and was the champion of the American medium Henry Slade. When Slade's stay in England ended in arrest and conviction for fraud, the medium went to visit Zöllner, who waas eagerly waiting for someone to help him prove that spirits are four-dimensional. According to Zöllner's Transcendental Physics of 1878, the experiments were an immediate success.[8]

  • Steiner on Z.[9]

Paywall "Nietzsche, Zöllner, and the Fourth Dimension"

Charles Howard Hinton

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Charles Howard Hinton was the first to use the word "tesseract" in 1888.

One one level Hinton's A New Era of Thought (1888) and The Fourth Dimension (1904) offered a practical, experimental approach to acquiring an understanding of the fourth dimension: readers were to memorize a series of multicolored cubes, whose subsequent visualization was meant to suggest the passage of successive sections of the hypercube through three-dimensional space. Far more influential, in the end, were his philosophical discussions of space and the strongly anti-materialist implications of his conviction that "the human being somehow, in some way, is not simply a three-dimensional being."[10]

Simon Newcomb

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Simon Newcomb wrote an article for the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society in 1898 entitled "The Philosophy of Hyperspace".[11]

"Religion"

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P. D. Ouspensky

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Theosophy

Russian esotericist P. D. Ouspensky in his book The Fourth Dimension published in 1909, introduced the concept of a fourth dimension that could only be perceived with a new "cosmic consciousness", of which our three-dimensional world is only a shadow.[12]

  • New Model of the Universe (1931)
"..In this way we must come to the conclusion that there may exist a cube of three dimensions and a cube of four dimensions, and that only the cube of four dimension will really, actually exist.
Examining man from this point of view we come to very interesting deductions. If the fourth dimension exists, one of two things is possible. Either we ourselves possess the fourth dimension, i.e. are beings of four dimensions, or we possess only three dimensions and in that case do not exist at all.
If the fourth dimension exists while we possess only three, it means that we have no real existence, that we exist only in somebody's imagination, and that all our thoughts, feelings and experiences take place in the mind of some other higher being, who visualises us.
We are but products of his mind and the whole of our universe is but an artificial world created by his fantasy..."[13] :/ Hmm...
  • Size of fourth dimension
Such blindness in relation to the fourth dimension may be caused by the fact that the fourth dimension of our own bodies and other objects of our world is too small and inaccessible to our organs of sense, or to the apparatus which widens the sphere of our observation, exactly in the same way as the molecules of our bodies and many other things are inaccessible to immediate observation.

Rudolf Steiner

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Rudolf Steiner

Fourth dimension in art

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Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Cubism, Surrealism, Piet Mondrian, modernism, abstract art, Salvador Dali, Max Weber (artist)


From Fourth dimension in literature:

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Proust?

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In the first volume of In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past) published in 1913, Marcel Proust envisioned the extra dimension as a temporal one. The narrator describes a church at Combray being "..for me something entirely different from the rest of the town; an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space – the name of the fourth being time."[14]

In the Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last work completed in 1880, the fourth dimension is used to signify that which is ungraspable to someone with earthly (or three-dimensional) concerns.[15] In the book, Ivan Karamazov laments to his younger brother:

"..I have a Euclidean earthly mind, and how could I solve problems that are not of this world? And I advise you never to think about it either, my dear Alyosha, especially about God, whether He exists or not. All such questions are utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions."[16]

Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford's 1901 work The Inheritors : An Extravagant Story uses the "fourth dimension" as a metaphor to explain a shift in society away from traditional values towards modern expediency and callous use of political power. The "inheritors" are a breed of materialists, who call themselves "Fourth Dimensionists", tasked with occupying the earth. The narrator tells how, "I heard the nature of the Fourth Dimension – heard that it was invisible to our eyes, but omnipresent.."[17]

References

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  1. ^ Kruger, Runette (2007). "Art in the Fourth Dimension: Giving Form to Form – The Abstract Paintings of Piet Mondrian" (PDF). Spaces of Utopia: an Electronic Journal (5): 11.
  2. ^ a b Rucker, Rudy (1985). The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes. p. 38. ISBN 0395393884.
  3. ^ a b c Petkov, Vesselin (2010). Space, Time, and Spacetime: Physical and Philosophical Implications of Minkowski's Unification of Space and Time. p. 33. ISBN 3642135382.
  4. ^ Prolegomena, § 12
  5. ^ Cleve, James Van; Frederick, Robert E (1991). The Philosophy Of Right And Left: Incongruent Counterparts and the Nature of Space. p. 217. ISBN 0792308441.
  6. ^ Robbin, Tony (2006). Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought. p. 3. ISBN 0300129629.
  7. ^ Banchoff, Thomas F. (1990). "From Flatland to Hypergraphics: Interacting with Higher Dimensions". Interdisciplinary Science Reviews. 15 (4): 364. doi:10.1179/030801890789797239.
  8. ^ Rucker, Rudy (1985). The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes. p. 53. ISBN 0395393884.
  9. ^ Steiner, Rudolf (2001). The Fourth Dimension: Sacred Geometry, Alchemy, and Mathematics. p. 166. ISBN 9780880104722.
  10. ^ Dalrymple Henderson, Linda (2013). The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Mit Press. ISBN 0262582449.
  11. ^ Newcomb, Simon (1898). "The Philosophy of Hyperspace". Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society. 4 (5): 187. doi:10.1090/S0002-9904-1898-00478-0.
  12. ^ Marvell, Leon (2007). Transfigured Light: Philosophy, Cybernetics and the Hermetic Imaginary. p. 288. ISBN 1933146273.
  13. ^ Ouspensky, P. D. (1999). New Model of the Universe: (1931). p. 90. ISBN 0766108228.
  14. ^ Proust, Marcel (2009). Swann's Way: Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff. p. 41. ISBN 1420936646.
  15. ^ Knapp, Liza (1987). "The Fourth Dimension of the Non-Euclidean Mind; Time in Brothers Karamazov or Why Ivan Karamazov's Devil Does not Carry a Watch". University of California, Los Angeles. Retrieved 25 March 2013.
  16. ^ Dostoevsky, Fyidor (1967). Brothers Karamazov. pp. 219–220. ISBN 159377348X.
  17. ^ Conrad, Joseph; Madox Ford, Ford (1901). The Inheritors. pp. 9, 10. ISBN 9783847201595. OCLC 365183.
  18. ^ Jegadeesan, J. The Fourth Dimension. p. 311. ISBN 817899092X.

Sources

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Kant

Alice in Wonderland Fechner, Abbot

Newcomb

Art

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, § 10 "Einstein and 20th Century Art"

Religion

Hud Hudson, § 5 "Hyperspace and Christianity"

Literature

Poetry

Overview

See also

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