So I was listening to a podcast, Fundamental Truth and How to Think About It.  

It was a discussion between brothers Eric and Bret Weinstein. Eric is a mathematician, and Bret, an evolutionary biologist.

The subject came up of the mathematical discovery of 14 dimensions. Bret said he didn’t understand this, and Eric tried to explain. He mentioned that it trips people up when they think of dimensions as purely spatial. For example, when you buy a piece of audio equipment, you might have these knobs on it: treble, midrange, bass, reverb, and volume. Those are 5 different dimensions. Of course, if you are speaking in those terms, then any universe is filled with all kinds of dimensions. But I think the point was merely that when these different dimensions are spoken of, the language leads us to think purely in terms of spatial dimensions, when they are not constrained that way.

Eric mentioned that often mathematicians will speak this way on purpose, to kind of ‘blow your mind’. But he says it’s not as if non-mathematicians are mere mortals, whereas the mathematicians are superhuman ‘imaginers’, even if they might want to you to think of them that way. When you get past the linguistic constraint of a spatial dimension, you realize it’s not as mind-blowing as it may have first seemed. That said, some of the dimensions themselves are conceptually difficult to grasp, and the language itself needs to be invented. So words like ‘dimension’ get borrowed, but the intuition about what that means can mislead you.

The phrase that caught my attention was ‘your intuition misleads you’.  

I felt like this was a good concept for me to have heard, and it would be worth understanding it so that I can keep a look out for areas where I might intuit something incorrectly. I feel like some of the political theories I am trying to understand have just such conceptual shifts, but that they are also doing it on purpose. Anyway, I thought it was interesting.