Reminds me of a scene from Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan. This is a conversation between an embodied human and a person who grew up in a completely virtual environment:
Yann, sitting beside him, caught his eye. "You okay?"
Tchicaya nodded. "In the scapes you grew up in," he asked, "was there a vertical?"
"In what sense?"
"I know you said once that you didn't feel gravity...but was everything laid out and connected like it is on land? Or was it all isotropically three-dimensional--like a zero-gee space habitat, where everything can connect in any direction?"
Yann replied affably, "My earliest memories are of CP4--that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this"--he motioned at the surrounding, more-or-less-Euclidean space--"for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate, visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single, three-dimensional space."
So much for being a seasoned traveler. Tchicaya didn't envy Yann's upbringing, but it probably rendered the world behind the border less exotic to him than the notion of a jungle had been to Tchicaya as a child. It shook his confidence to be reminded that there were measures by which his millennia of experience had been laughably narrow.
Yann, sitting beside him, caught his eye. "You okay?"
Tchicaya nodded. "In the scapes you grew up in," he asked, "was there a vertical?"
"In what sense?"
"I know you said once that you didn't feel gravity...but was everything laid out and connected like it is on land? Or was it all isotropically three-dimensional--like a zero-gee space habitat, where everything can connect in any direction?"
Yann replied affably, "My earliest memories are of CP4--that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex dimensions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this"--he motioned at the surrounding, more-or-less-Euclidean space--"for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate, visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single, three-dimensional space."
So much for being a seasoned traveler. Tchicaya didn't envy Yann's upbringing, but it probably rendered the world behind the border less exotic to him than the notion of a jungle had been to Tchicaya as a child. It shook his confidence to be reminded that there were measures by which his millennia of experience had been laughably narrow.