Your four-dimensional body

Introduction You are a four-dimensional being.And it’s fitting, because you live in a four-dimensional world. Three spatial dimensions, plus time, the dimension we all move through at a nearly-constant rate. In Einstein’s famous relativity equations, time is treated much like the three spatial dimensions. And those are the best equations we have for modeling the physical world. So even though we experience time much differently than we experience space, that may be more a quirk of our own minds rather than “how things really are.”Consider how you can cast your consciousness around three-dimensional space: you can pay attention to what’s happening in some distant area of space that you think is important, using your eyes and ears to construct the picture as if you were right over there. In some sense “you” really are over there. Not your body, but your consciousness, your self. (And many would argue the self is an illusion, but we’d still say the illusion is presenting itself over there).Now notice that you also have the phenomenal ability to cast your consciousness in the fourth dimension: forward and backward in time. You can be conscious of the past through memory, and of the future through prediction and planning.“But memories are faulty, and prediction is often very difficult.” That’s true, especially as you go further away—but that’s really no different than with space! It’s difficult to see or hear things that are far away, and even more difficult to smell or touch them, but that doesn’t stop us from trying. And of course we use technology to extend the range of our awareness in space. So too with time! In the next two posts I’ll list all my favorite technologies for augmenting your time-traveling ability.You can become a consciousness that extends across time, dancing in and out of moments in no particular order, like the aliens in that popular 2010s movie [redacted, spoilers].The shape of a humanYou think of your body as something like this:But this is a more