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"Would people consider a colour photograph as encoding four dimensional information when its pixels are represented as (x, y, brightness, colour) for example?" Actually, yes, they do. Computer vision people will envision a photograph as containing the number of dimensions equal to the number of independent numbers used to describe it, so a 1000x1000 RGB image would be considered 3,000,000-dimensional. This is perfectly routine in that world. Writing would be considered n-dimensional. link In non-math terms you'd probably be justified in saying the question is ill-defined, as what constitutes an orthogonal vector component in a piece of writing is not something that has an universally-obvious answer. But it's not that there are 0 possibilities, it is that there is very many. In a nutshell, the word "dimension" does not simply describe 3-dimensional space, and all other uses are somehow wrong. Dimension applies to any independent element of a vector, and using it to describe spacetime is a tiny, tiny subset of the valid uses of the term. Another very common example is that describing the movement of a free floating in space rigid body is a twelve dimensional value; you need to describe x, y, and z (or equivalant), you need to describe the rotation around x, y, and z, and then you need to describe the velocity of each of those components. That's 12 dimensions. In fact, it's 12 dreadfully mundane dimensions. Incidentally, not included in valid uses of the term is the sci-fi sen