• Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Not really, they’d just need to exist in a dimension above ours. We can readily observe the lower three dimensions of length, width and depth because we exist in the one above that - duration. We can’t observe time except by passing through it point by point. A being capable of observing actual timelines would have to do so from a vantage point above them.

    The extra eyes and wings are just them being a fucking showoff.

    • Sneezycat@sopuli.xyz
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      3 months ago

      You need one eye to see 2D. You need two eyes to see 3D. Presumably, you need 3+ eyes to see in 4D. Don’t conflate spatial dimensions with the temporal one, it’s oranges and apples.

      • prime_number_314159@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Most of the “3D” we see is made up by our brains. For evidence of this, look at a photograph, and look at how far away things are.

        Having eyes spaced apart does help us to tell the distance to things that are close to us, but that is only useful for a short distance. Our brains also track the parallax and occlusion of numerous objects, which helps over longer distances, but works just fine with 1 eye.

        I think there are two ways eyes could work in higher spacial dimensions, you could either have an n dimensional eye, which percieves an n-1 dimensional image, and then an understanding of “distance” is used to fill in the remaining information, or (which may just be my own 3D-ness showing) you could have several 3D eyes in different directions, each percieving different 2D images, with enough overlap to fully see the n-dimensional space. That would take n-1 eyes to properly see.

      • psud@aussie.zone
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        2 months ago

        You can see depth with a single eye, you just need to move your eye

        Two eyes in animals are used either to get extra view angle (in a cow, for instance) or to give instant depth information (in a human or tiger for example) or for both (in dragonflies)

        • Sneezycat@sopuli.xyz
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          3 months ago

          That’s still using a temporal dimension to your advantage :P (cause without time you can’t move).

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        You can get depth information from parallax, which can come from either capturing multiple moments or using multiple viewpoints. IDK if I would call this seeing in 3D, as you can still only see 2d surfaces, just with an additional data point of depth (Think of it like an array of data, with one eye, you get res^2 * (r+g+b) data points, with two, you get res^2 * (r+g+b+r+g+b+d) instead of actual 3D which would be res^3 * (r+g+b)). Having 3 eyes just means you can estimate depth more accurately. Of course, in real animals with many eyes the eyes serve different purposes, such as having a different fov, resolution, color perception, etc.