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Unison Icoglyph

Continuing from the last post, how would a 6D sentience read?Let's start with Earth. We, as three-dimensional beings, got our start in communication by using two-dimensional shapes to depict events and ideas. We've had sculptures for just as long, and you could argue that those did a better job at conveying certain concepts of humanity and the natural world, but paintings and drawings seemed to do the job just fine, were much easier to produce, and weren't bound by physics in the same way as 3d art was. After that, nearly every civilization that needed to spread those ideas over longer distances developed writing. The principle was the same, but this time, it involved the placement of several 2D images (letters or glyphs) along a 1D straight line. Those individual letters were known by every individual who could speak those languages, and although they usually didn't mean much on their own, a near-infinite set of combinations meant that they could mean just as many new things, many of which couldn't be communicated as effectively with a single sculpture or image.There still was the issue of complexity, though. Many concepts are simply too complicated or abstract for most modern languages to convey. Some have entire volumes of pages dedicated to them and never get close, like an artist trying to depict the color green with only red paint. The solution that the civilization of Unison came up with flowed neatly from their discovery of how to traverse extra-euclidian dimensions. Icoglyphs like this one are composites of shapes that ebb and flow through our plane of existence. It, too, requires a fair amount of knowledge to learn how to read, but as one studies the shape, patterns, timing of the morphs, and even shadows in some cases, it can lead to a far deeper understanding of the author's intent than any two-dimensional language ever could.This particular icoglyph has an interesting place in the history of xenolinguistics, and many believe it to be humanity's introduction into the field. There is a bit of controversy, since the people who found it didn't recognize it as such, and many much more banal languages were discovered and translated before we finally found out it was ever deliberate. There definitely was something about it, though: something the people who looked at it could only ever describe as a "vibe." There isn't a direct translation to English: this is the closest any studies could get to doing it justice."You are not alone. There is hope for you to see the infinite with your own eyes, and there is beauty in it."

Published on:
Friday, December 30, 2022
Medium:
Blender