I had a very interesting conversation with my colleague about projections of reality. When you take a picture of a scene, what you are doing, is to capture and preserve the light that is reflected off the three-dimensional scene and projected on a flat two-dimensional surface such as a film, or a sensor chip. Using mirrors, lenses, and all the other photonic gizmos, we are able to shrink the pictures, create effects on the projection, or to just make edits after the projection has been made.
What happened however, was that a three-dimensional reality is captured somehow in a two-dimensional world. The picture, is a projection of reality at some point of time. That is what we were referring to as projections.
We were speaking more about how we perceive the world as projections – cast not on a surface but in our minds. Each and everyone of us experiences the world differently but the richness of the world is not fully captured by the experience we have because we are limited in our ability to perceive. It is as though our ability to perceive each represents a dimension. Not just the five senses of sights, sounds, smell, taste and touch but there are psychological lenses, cultural lenses by which we perceive and experience the world, and recognise patterns formed from combinations of those senses, and our logical or irrational interpretation of reality, or even events, how they had been sequenced, how they line up in the dimension of time.
If the richness of reality contains N-dimensions, then our ability to perceive is often limited to (N-x) dimensions, where x is an unknown non-negative number and potentially really large. We don’t get to really experience reality, only what can be captured by that (N-x)-dimensional hyperplane that will never truly encapsulate the contents of the N-dimensional hyperspace that the reality consist of.
I hope to be able to explain this better some day – but for now, this hopefully suffice to help encourage me to develop further my capabilities to grow my hyperplane of perception.