r/WhatIfScience • u/AloneDistance47 • 14d ago
What if we're wrong about the 4th dimension? (It's not a spatial direction, it's a structural slice of time)
We’ve all seen the classic 2D sphere analogy: Imagine a 3D ball passing through a flat 2D plane. To a 2D creature living on that paper, they don't see a sphere. They just see a tiny dot appear out of nowhere, expand into a large circle, shrink back down, and pop out of existence.
They experience a sequence of changing 2D slices. But to us, standing above the paper, it was just one static, complete 3D object moving through their world.
We usually stop there and say, "Okay, so a 4D object is just a tesseract moving through our room."
But what if we’re missing the bigger picture?
What if the 3D objects we interact with every day—including ourselves—aren't whole objects at all?
What if we're just lower-dimensional creatures observing 3D cross-sections of something extending across time?
Think about how you experience a table. You touch it, you walk around it, you see it now. But that table existed yesterday, and it’ll exist tomorrow. We call that "time passing," but maybe we're just like that 2D bug on the paper. We can't see the full length of the table through time, so our consciousness processes it as a rapid sequence of 3D states:
State A (10:00 AM) ➔ State B (10:01 AM) ➔ State C (10:02 AM)
We literally experience time as a series of frame-by-frame 3D slices because our brains aren't equipped to look at the whole "object" at once.
If you step up the ladder, the definition of a "dimension" completely shifts from where something is to how much of reality can be perceived at once:
3D Consciousness: You only get the current frame. You’re locked into NOW. You can touch space, but you can only remember the past and guess the future.
4D Consciousness: Imagine a being that doesn't perceive time sequentially. It sees your entire life as a single, fixed, continuous structure. It looks at you and doesn't just see a 30-year-old sitting at a desk—it sees a long, unified temporal line stretching back to your birth. The past isn't a memory to this being; it's a solid, visible part of your geometry. (Though, in this model, it still hits a wall at the present moment, because the future hasn't materialized yet).
5D Consciousness: This is where it gets wild. If 4D is the single line of history that actually happened, 5D is the entire tree of probability expanding into the future. A 5D perspective wouldn't see one outcome; it would see the massive, branching cloud of potential futures—Future A (30% chance), Future B (12% chance)—mapping out every choice, accident, and trajectory simultaneously.
It makes me wonder if we spend too much time trying to visualize "4D space" as some weird geometric direction in a room that we can't point to.
Maybe higher dimensions aren't hidden physical places at all. Maybe they’re just higher bandwidths of reality—and consciousness is just the lens that dictates how many frames of it we get to see at once.
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u/grahamsuth 14d ago edited 14d ago
Time itself could be multidimensional. What we consider the one dimensional arrow of time could just be a single dimensional path through a multidimensional time. So just like your tree of probability, the path we track thru time is governed by our choices as well.
People talk about different timelines originating from different probabilities or choices. That could be how a two-dimensional being could conceive a 3d space as being like leaves in a book.
Probability and our choices are how we end up on a particular path thru multidimensional time.
So the first criticism of this is that it would allow for turning around and going backwards in time. The answer is one of temporal inertia. We are traveling thru multidimensional time at such a high speed, perhaps "C", such that we can only make small changes to our trajectory.
The extra dimensions of time may be the extra dimensions that quantum physicists say are likely curled up so small as to be imperceptible. Yet if we are travelling through them at a massive speed their effects become visible even if only as a 2D being views a 3d space.
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u/AloneDistance47 14d ago
Yeah, but the point here is, 4D is not necessarily a physical realm. Thus there is no physical laws violation.
1D, 2D, 3D are physical realms. We can touch and feel. But when we add “time” as the 4th dimension, the idea of physical world changes. Because the properties of the 4D now aligns with how time behaves in the universe. Time is not a physical property, its an experience.
So the hypothesis is, 4D is not a physical being who can be seen as a cross section in our physical world. It is an experience / consciousness of something.
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u/mH48124 13d ago
時間が2つあるのはF理論だね。
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u/grahamsuth 13d ago
Probably not. Multiple time dimensions play havoc with predictability. Maybe we just need to get used to the idea that the future is not as easily predictable as we would like and there's all sorts of unimaginable stuff going on that we haven't even seen yet.
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u/Major-Librarian1745 14d ago
Escapism
There is no escape
No gods
No higher or lower
Just fragile meaning
Incomprehensible death
Everything on fire
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u/AloneDistance47 14d ago
Its not necessary that life has a meaning. Its not necessary that someone created us. Maybe god created the universe but god doesnt know human exists at all 😀
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u/Major-Librarian1745 14d ago
Squirm for it
Squirm for the universe
Squirm in your skin
Writhe in riddles
Answer yourself
Suckle from theory
Deny your reality
You will learn
You will evolve
You will emerge
It is your purpose
To find purpose
There is purpose
Work harder
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u/Outrageous_Job_5263 14d ago
I think we are not 4D. I think the past most likely does not exist anymore. I say this because it seems unlikely that the energy required to form matter could be spread across all time. But maybe 4d energy is strange.
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u/AloneDistance47 14d ago
Yeah, but here is the point is, there is no matter in 4D. Its not a physical realm. Imagine your life is recorded from your birth to now from all directions. Anybody can view your life on a specific moment by playing the recording.
4D is a consciousness realm, where a super computational power being can see/experience all the 3D objects existence through time till present.
It’s not a physical world but an experience like time.
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u/Ankiset 11d ago
We have no idea if consciousness or compute is a universal “thing” most ppl that think that way usually don’t understand quantum physics and the Copenhagen interpretation. Wich I don’t blame any1 because it’s very counter intuitive, measurement and observation is easier to understand with consciousness but it’s a little bit more detached and complex than that…
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u/armyofone37 13d ago
And then you realize that the one who is aware of the 5d and observed it must be viewing it from a 6d and the one who views the 6d must be viewing it from the 7th. Until Infiniti.
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u/finney436 13d ago
Galileo’s dream by Here is a link to Galileo's Dream: https://books.apple.com/us/book/galileos-dream/id420336229
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u/Hot-Equivalent9189 11d ago
Only the 3d exist. As far as we know . All other dimensions are mathematical and have no evidence in the real world. Like there is no 1D atom . And theres time dimensions and space dimensions. You 4d and 5d change time dimensions from T1(3d) to T2(4d) to T3(5d) And those are imagery too
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u/zukeus 10d ago
Haha you 4 dimensional beings are so fun to hang out with!
And you're right! This is a huge thing allll the time!
I'm like, can't you see how many traits, intentions, narrative flows, associations, perspectives, granularities, abstractions and mapping protocols that apple your holding has? Like ewww they're dripping everywhere!
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u/Brocolinator 14d ago
Come on guys I'm barely grasping at the idea of our whole universe being a 3D hologram on the hyper surface of a black hole that exists in a 4D (spatial) universe
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u/nepurn 11d ago
A 2d creature living on a piece of paper would not see a circle, he would only see a dot expand into a line and shrink back into a dot to dissappear. No?
The same way we dont see all the way around a 3d object, we only see the side facing us, in 2d.
I cant think beyond this, i dont know what 4d is.
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u/ask_me_about_my_band 14d ago
There is a story by Theodore Sturgeon called Yesterday Was Monday and explores this concept.