Alright, hear me out. We all think the world is three-dimensional, right? Length, width, depth—standard stuff. But what if the world is actually two-dimensional, and our brains are just tricking us into thinking it’s 3D?
Here’s my theory: Everything we see is like a bunch of photos—flat, two-dimensional snapshots. Our eyes are like cameras, capturing these moments as still images. But when these snapshots get played back super fast, it feels like a seamless video. Basically, living life could just be our brains stitching together a nonstop slideshow.
Why do I think the world’s actually 2D?
• The images our eyes pick up hit the retina as flat, 2D pictures.
• Our brain takes those flat images and constructs depth, making it feel 3D.
• So, the “three dimensions” we experience could just be a fancy illusion created by our brain.
Some old-school philosophers kind of played with this idea, too:
• Plato’s Cave: People mistaking shadows for reality—what if we’re doing the same thing?
• Berkeley’s Perception Philosophy: Reality is only what we experience. If our brains make it 3D, does that make it real?
• Kant’s Reality Gap: What we see vs. what really exists—maybe they’re not the same thing.
So, if our brain is basically just a super powerful video editor, then are we actually experiencing a 3D world or just a crazy detailed 2D illusion?
I told this idea to a few friends and they just laughed at me. Do you guys think this approach is stupid or could it actually make sense?
Comments
What if I told you that actually all that exists is the three dimensional universe, as every atom and every sub particle is inherently three-dimensional. 1D and 2D are just theoretical constructs created to explain kids the three dimensional plane we live in. If you draw a dot, the dot has a specific mass and volume, even if it is just atoms or particles wide, tall, and long. Show me something truly two-dimensional… You can’t… But they say time is the fourth dimension. That’s a construct too, we are talking about matter occupying space here. Of the four constructs of dimensions, the “time” one is the most poor of them. Even Carl Sagan got confused and explained this “tesseract is a 3D shadow from a four-dimensional cube” theory. If you want to delve into something real and game changing, drop this dimensional nonsense and study gravity. Gravity is the game changer.
Stretch your arm out to the side, now out to the front, and now up in the air.
Congratulations you’ve moved on three axes and proved that we infact live in a three dimensional word.
On a personal level, you’d have to account for the other senses too, the biggest one probably being proprioception. If I close my eyes and move my arm, I perceive its location as varying in three dimensions, not two.
You’d also have to build new models for how physics works and why our engineering holds up. Experience is one thing, but prediction is another; I can use SolidWorks to predict the failure points for a 3D printed part under a given amount of stress, and see it play out in real life. And this isn’t just my brain showing me what I expect, because if I screw up the SolidWorks model then something unexpected will happen. I can then use that result to go back and see where I screwed up.
With regards to your deeper point, we most definitely are in a Kant’s Reality Gap situation. Our eyes and ears can perceive only very limited bandwidths of light and sound, and their resolution limits direct observation to particular length scales. The world we experience is thus, at the very least, incomplete. More fundamentally, quantum mechanics observes that the behavior of matter defies our intuition, which has evolved in a context where large, complex systems have washed out small-scale effects in favor of new emergent behaviors. It’s like comparing the behavior of an individual person to the behavior of a gigantic mob. So either science is in the ballpark and our perceptions are an illusion, or science is catastrophically wrong and the observations underlying it were illusions in some other way.
Even if we rectified our current models of physics into a single, consistent framework that perfectly predicts every observable phenomenon, we’d still only have that: a model that predicts what we will observe given particular inputs. For all we know, there could be aspects of the universe that are entirely non-reactive with any sequence of causality we’re capable of observing. We could be living in a simulation, or a subspace of a larger universe closed under the observable laws of physics. That’s why the purpose of science is to make predictions, not litigate ontology. So if you think that the world might be two-dimensional, my response would be that you should create a mathematical model to make predictions using that assumption, and see how well those predictions compare with those of our current models.
whoa… cool story.
Wait until OP finds out about the “holographic principle”:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle
OP, read flatland.
Maybe your just a disembodied brain in a tank? Maybe it’s maps that are flat and that’s where the flat Earth theory came from? Maybe M-Theory is real and there’s 11 dimensions to reality?
This theory (read fairytale) is so messed up and unfounded in reality that there is 1) no way to prove it and 2) can be so easily disproven simply by going outside and touching some grass. Speaking of grass. Lay off the psychedelics, go outside and take a walk, and touch some actual grass.
Ok, to be fair, there is a plausible argument that we don’t actually see in 3D, we see a stream of overlapping 2D images that form the illusion of 3D. The opposed view would an animal with echolocation or sonar, who would “see” in true 3D, being fully and immediately aware of the depth of everything around it like we’re aware of its height. I think this is a little pedantic, but it is at least plausible.
But no, the world itself has at least three dimensions, as evidenced by jumping in the air.
We do live in a two dimensional world. We perceive in 2 dimensions and our brain constructs a 3 dimensional reality.
We cannot see or perceive into that 3rd dimension. For instance, we may dig a hole however deep, but all we uncover will be more surface.
The world is a bubble with an infinitely thin surface of which we are a part. By “the world” I mean everything we know to exist. All surface!