I have been thinking about this observation of mine for some time now. How the notations and mediums that we have made for ourselves are just embedded mediums in other mediums. So let me give you a short summary before I begin:

Creatures like us humans with two eyes have basically two sensors in their system to collect the reflected light waves. And therefore they can construct a 3D model of the world; and since this 3D model has in itself a collection of light waves; the brain interprets the waves and ‘Annotates’ the 3D world by imagining the idea of color: ‘An Annotation of light frequencies’.

Then I would argue that other things such as sounds, touch, smell… Are just the same. Touch is brain’s Annotation of pressure. Smell is the ‘visualization’ of the molecular structure of the particles in the air. Taste is the same, both taste and smell are inlined since they basically represent the same thing.

Now while this is far from how we understand it; but the mind is a neural network connected to many sensory data:

So the immensely shocking picture is that; for every data kind in our body we have a sense. If the prediction of future is good we feel satisfied. If it is bad we feel stress. This is basically a form of data visualization / Annotation.

And feeling something is far different than pure abstraction. Having a dedicated sense for something is way different than abstracting it.

So; from a Media Theory perspective; it is then strange to have a mathematical notation:

Since these mediums are sub-mediums. Mediums embedded within other mediums. Mathematical Notations are information within the information regarding the frequency of light.

While we do understand these information; and while we do get to have to work with them. What remains the challenge is that ‘We have no feelings about these notations!’

There are incredible stories about Ramanujan who felt Math and came up with all sorts of things the rest of the world could not even believe. There are stories of Einstein who said he could feel math.

And well interestingly enough, the notation is only used for communication. That is the thing with basically all programmers in the world. When we program we simulate the system in our heads. We have these tools for navigating these systems; but at the end we only go to have these simulations in our minds.

And that is exactly because these systems are not in our sensory systems. These are embeddings.

Imagine if you could connect a data point as you would have connected other sensory things to your brain. Imagine if you could have connected something like the weather data of another city to your brain — something we already have a sense for — how would have it feel? Could you feel the coldness? The warmth? How could you choose between where to feel the temperature of? Your current place or that city and then what would have been the way you sensed it? Could you sense the hot and cold of the two places at once? This is something fairly strange and impossible to imagine. And yet this is the closest to what we can imagine.

If we decide to actually go to the unknown, We will find ourselves in complete unimaginable places. Imagine for a moment we moved to a world in which real-time data was fed directly to the brain. Imagine a broker feeling a unique and special feel about the Market. Imagine how they could — in theory — sense the future of the market.

That could have been bizarre. And the strangest thing about all of this is how such a system could ever be applied to non-linear things. Imagine if we fed exponential or two-dimensional information to the brain. What would it do? Could it understand the information or did it require evolutionary steps to understand it?

What if we could have had what Ramanujan had? What if we could sense the world like he did.

Recently I was looking at the results of a computer terminal. A place where software is given the possibility to emit lines of text at a time. This has been an ancient and a very primordial way of interfacing between humans and the Machines. And as one understands in a world where everything is a character; Things are fairly different. If you wish to display something you must have the necessary characters required to display them. Out of these limitations, and the hardware limits that initially faced these systems to adopt grids of characters; came the amazing ASCII Art. In this system; By intentionally placing characters at places that could have been otherwise carelessly filled; people created two dimensional graphics.

Now, this is a hugely fascinating possibility way beyond the fun of playing with code, speculation on matters of dimensions; and the philosophical inquiries. And of the many strange manifestations of it; can be the fact this embeddings of mediums are the result of our system for tricking ourselves.

We have sophisticated ways of layering information on top of each other in different mediums. Think about the whole idea of multiple instruments in music. Or even more sophisticated technologies such as the counter-point. We hear slices of a two dimensional — three dimensional space and analyze their content as we go:

And the interesting thing about this is that it still works with brain’s linearity and its system of syncing with the time axis. But what about the two dimensional mathematics?