Dimensional Tiering

[Hat_mchat]

Why is something that extends in mire dimensions automatically more powerful than a lower dimensional entity? How can a 3D being interact with a 2D being, there's literally no 2D matter to interact with, they're physically invisible and arguably non existant Why does this correlate to power levels? It's like saying black is more powerful than white even though they're not comparable in that respect

 

[NyogSothep]

"Imagine being able to walk through walls. You wouldn't have to bother with opening doors; you could pass right through them. You wouldn't have to go around buildings; you could enter them through their walls and pillars and out through the back wall. You wouldn't have to detour around mountains; you could step right into them. When hungry, you could simply refrigerator door without opening it. You could never be accidentally locked outside your car; you could simply step through the car door. Imagine being able to disappear or reappear at will. Instead of driving to school or work, you would just vanish and rematerialize in your classroom or office. You wouldn't need an airplane to visit far-away places, you could just vanish and rematerialize where you wanted. You would never be stuck in city traffic during rush hours; you and your car would simply disappear and rematerialize at your destination. Imagine having x-ray eyes. You would be able to see accidents happening from a distance. After vanishing and rematerializing at the site of any accident, you could see exactly where the victims were, even if they were buried unde r debris. Imagine being able to reach into an object without opening it. You could extract the sections from an orange without peeling or cutting it. You would be hailed as a master surgeon, with the ability to repair the internal organs of patients without ever cutting the skin, thereby greatly reducing pain and the risk of infection. You would simply reach into the person's body, passing directly through the skin, and perform the delicate operation. Imagine what a criminal could do with these powers. He could enter the most heavily guarded bank. He could see through the massive doors of the vault for the valuables and cash and reach inside and pull them out. He could then stroll outside as the bullets from the guards passed right through him. With these powers, no prison could hold a criminal. No secrets could be kept from us. No treasures could be hidden from us. No obstructions could stop us. We would truly be miracle workers, performing feats beyond the comprehension of mortals. We would also be omnipotent. What being could possess such God-like power? The answer: a being from a higher-dimensional world. Of course, these feats are beyond the capability of any three-dimensional person. For us, walls are solid and prison bars are unbreakable. Attempting to walk through walls will only give us a painful, bloody nose. But for a four-dimensional being, these feats would be child's play. To understand how these miraculous feats can be performed, consider again Gauss's mythical two-dimensional beings, living on a twodimensional table top. To jail a criminal, the Flatlanders simply draw a circle around him. No matter which way the criminal moves, he hits the impenetrable circle. However, it is a trivial task for us to spring the prisone r from jail. We just reach down, grab the Flatlander, peel him off the two-dimensional world, and redeposit him elsewhere on his world. This feat, which is quite ordinary in three dimensions, appears fantastic in two dimensions. To his jailer, the prisoner has suddenly disappeared from an escapeproof prison, vanishing into thin air. Then just as suddenly, he reappears somewhere else. If you explain to the jailer that the prisoner was moved "up " and off Flatland, he would not understand what you were saying. The word up does not exist in the Flatlander's vocabulary, nor can he visualize the concept. The other feats can be similarly explained. For example, notice that the internal organs (like the stomach or heart) of a Flatlander are completely visible to us, in the same way that we can see the internal structure of cells on a microscope slide. It's now trivial to reach inside a Flatlander and perform surgery without cutting the skin. We can also peel the Flat- lander off his world, flip him around, and put him back down. Notice that his left and right organs are now reversed, so that his heart is on the right side"

This is an excerpt from book by Mitio Kaku "Hyperspace" . It's answer to your question.

 

[Hat_mchat]

That's all very well and good if you ignore actual physics, because the problem realistically is that a higher dimensional object literally can't touch a lower dimensional object Take our physical world for example, everything we interact with are made of particles which interact in 3 dimensions, but something that is 2 dimensional wouldn't be made out of this matter so if we tried to touch it, our hand would pass through How can you even pick a flatlander up?

 

[NyogSothep]

Now, I won't sleep for a week.

But why can I touch a 2D being? I can touch everything, if it is material, can't I?

 

[Saikou_The_Lewd_King]

Pretty sure we already acknowledge this problem. While a higher dimensional being can't directly interact with a higher dimensional one by default, fiction tends to ignore that because screw you and a higher dimensional being can still interact with the higher dimensional constructs that the lower dimensional being exists in.

So a 4-D being can smack the timeline the lower dimensional being exists in, but not the being itself.

 

[Marquis_Samigina]

For Higher D beings it's not much of a problem to simply project their avatars to Lower D realms instead of directly influencing something so insignificant and hardly noticeable.

 

[NyogSothep]

Don't be higher-dimensional. Be tier 0 and you won't have any problems. ÎÉÎÖ΃

 

[TartaChocholate]

Speaking out of ignorance here, but: we can interact with surfaces, can't we? Trying to follow Nyog's quote, from what I get, in theory the 3D dude can interact with 2D dude and his 2D setting, but what seems impossible physically is to take out 2D dude of the 2D setting into the 3D dimension.

 

[Hat_mchat]

Speaking out of ignorance here, but: we can interact with surfaces, can't we? Trying to follow Nyog's quote, from what I get, in theory the 3D dude can interact with 2D dude and his 2D setting, but what seems impossible physically is to take out 2D dude of the 2D setting into the 3D dimension.

How can you interact with a 2D setting?

 

[Hat_mchat]

Pretty sure we already acknowledge this problem. While a higher dimensional being can't directly interact with a higher dimensional one by default, fiction tends to ignore that because screw you and a higher dimensional being can still interact with the higher dimensional constructs that the lower dimensional being exists in.

So a 4-D being can smack the timeline the lower dimensional being exists in, but not the being itself.

If that's the case then this capability for interaction need be verified and it's beyond infinite power need also be verified. I mean suppose a 4D being could interact with a 3D being, then they would have certain capabilities such as circumventing 2D boundaries, but unless stated otherwise, they wouldn't automatically be more ppwerful than a 2D being and certainly won't be able to destroy an infinite number of 2D universes. Consider this, every higher dimensional interaction in a lower dimensional plane logicalky requires a lower dimensional manifestation or projection so it immediately loses its advantage of 'beyond infinite size'

 

[Antoniofer]

This is personal, but I would upgrade/downgrade someone for being a Xth dimensional creature, not without feats. Being from a higher dimension only makes them able to move in higher axis, 4-D beings move in 4 axis, 5-D in 5, and so on. Characters that works like that are the Prometean fromValiant and that alien from MIB 3.

 

[Hat_mchat]

This is personal, but I would upgrade/downgrade someone for being a Xth dimensional creature, not without feats. Being from a higher dimension only makes them able to move in higher axis, 4-D beings move in 4 axis, 5-D in 5, and so on. Characters that works like that are the Prometean fromValiant and that alien from MIB 3.

I'm unfamiliar with how characters in tier 1 are judged

 

[TartaChocholate]

Giving a crude example, I was thinking on stuff like how you can touch a picture, draw/paint on it, erase it, see the entirety of it with a glance, but even if the picture was alive it wouldn't be able to reach you back, nor see stuff hidden by your Z axis. Also, taking the limitation that you can't enter the 2D surface yourself nor really lift a 2D object, rather you'd be picking up the very slim 3D paper where it's on, to cosider what Marquis said on how 4D or higher beings usually use avatars and such in fiction to exist or interact with lower dimension realms.

It's more rambling than anything, but I too am curious to how this really works *shrugs*

 

[Hat_mchat]

I always heard the explanation of "ripping paper and thus destroying the 2D realm" but that assumes the paper and the 2D realm are connected and interact which is physically absurd

 

[TartaChocholate]

They aren't? I dunno. Where would it be located then?

EDIT: Just in case, as I mentioned in my first post, I am pretty ignorant on the issue and my questions are of genuine curiosity. Don't take it as antagonizing you or anything.

 

[Hat_mchat]

It would be fixed as it doesn't interact with 3D forces

 

[TartaChocholate]

Fixed? How so? Can you elaborate a bit?

 

[Hat_mchat]

Well how would anything move it? It can't be touched by anything 3D, it wouldn't fall as it has no mass and it can't be picked up as it has no atoms

 

[Darkmon_cns]

Well how would anything move it? It can't be touched by anything 3D, it wouldn't fall as it has no mass and it can't be picked up as it has no atoms

Your premise is wrong, you assume it can't be interacted with because it doesn't have material, it is 2D material. 3D objects do exist in 2nd dimensional spaces where they intersect.

 

[TartaChocholate]

Hmmm... I think I'm finally starting to grasp the issue a bit. So, taking again the picture example, being able to alter a picture or see the entirety of it would be a limited interaction or simply a misconception of interaction?

Still quite don't get what you mean by fixed, though. Were you referring to the location of the 2D setting?

EDIT: Man, this confusing. Doesn't help that beyond solid physics a lot of theoretical stuff is into the fray >_>

 

[Hat_mchat]

But how do they interact? All our understanding of fields and material is 3D, so it's entirely dependant on the physics of the fictional universe, unless you know more about 3D-2D interactions in our world

 

[Hat_mchat]

Hmmm... I think I'm finally starting to grasp the issue a bit. So, taking again the picture example, being able to alter a picture or see the entirety of it would be a limited interaction or simply a misconception of interaction?

Still quite don't get what you mean by fixed, though. Were you referring to the location of the 2D setting?

EDIT: Man, this confusing. Doesn't help that beyond solid physics a lot of theoretical stuff is into the fray >_>

I suppose if they could interact all i could see is a limited interaction, but i don't know of any model in the real world that explains interaction between 2D and 3D physically so the fiction would have to explain the mechanics for it to be a viable factor to consider for tier

 

[NyogSothep]

Doesn't it depend on metaphysics of specific fiction? For example, Nikita Suhov from V.V. Golovachev's "The virus of darkness - the shadow of Lucifer's wind" is a 507-dimensional being (these dimensions are spatial and temporal), but doesn't have infinite superiority over low-dimensional characters (they can fight him and vice versa, Nikita is able to fight higher-dimensional creatures). So, it depends.

 

[Antvasima]

As I think the Dimensional Tiering page explains, we do not use physics to tier higher-dimensional beings, but rather geometrical size.

Think of an infinitely flat 2D surface. No matter how great a finite number of such objects that you stack on top of each other, they will never be as large as a 3D object in terms of volume.

For practical reasons, we use this principle to extend the reach of our scaling to infinities greater than what our 3D world can contain, but also use Composite Hierarchies to allow for similar systems.

That said, we also make exceptions for when fiction clearly does not portray higher-dimensional beings as particularly powerful, in order to try to not give them exaggerated ratings.

 

[Kaltias]

I always heard the explanation of "ripping paper and thus destroying the 2D realm" but that assumes the paper and the 2D realm are connected and interact which is physically absurd

Would you be fine if someone nuked the timeline?

It's the same except that it's a 4-D attacking a 3-D instead of 3-D attacking a 2-D

 

[Hat_mchat]

As I think the Dimensional Tiering page explains, we do not use physics to tier higher-dimensional beings, but rather geometrical size.

Think of an infinitely flat 2D surface. No matter how great a finite number of such objects that you stack on top of each other, they will never be as large as a 3D object in terms of volume.

For practical reasons, we use this principle to extend the reach of our scaling to infinities greater than what our 3D world can contain, but also use Composite Hierarchies to allow for similar systems.

That said, we also make exceptions for when fiction clearly does not portray higher-dimensional beings as particularly powerful, in order to try to not give them exaggerated ratings.

I get the composite hierarchies thing, but I don't get why the power of a higher dimemsional being is predicated on size. All that size is inevitably pointless when interacting with lower dimensional beings as only the lower dinensional extensions of that being can interact with the lower dimensional beings

 

[Hat_mchat]

Would you be fine if someone nuked the timeline?

It's the same except that it's a 4-D attacking a 3-D instead of 3-D attacking a 2-D

What do you mean by 'nuked the timeline'? For one thing, the ability to 'nuke' is separate to being higher dimensional and secondly, all that higher dimensional capability allows is just bypassing lower dimensional boundaries, like time travel. Just because you can time travel doesn't mean you could beat, for example a 3D planet buster.

 

[Hat_mchat]

Personally i think tier 1 shouldn't be automatically awarded to something like a 16 dimensional being, but to beings that explicity have the power to manipulate higher dimensions.

 

[Antvasima]

@Hat mchat

It is because universes stacked on top of each other in an extra dimension take up a certain nonexistent space, and higher dimensions take up more space in comparison from a geometric viewpoint.

Also, we try to make exceptions when higher-dimensional beings are not portrayed as particularly powerful.