Facebook and Secret Societies

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids

I've talked a number of times about the very important idea quantum mechanics teaches us: reality and information are interchangeable. By the time we are holding the biggest-picture-of-all idea of reality in our heads, we are "outside the system" in the domain of indeterminacy: this is where all potential expressions of reality reside, because this is where the information that could potentially represent all possible realities also resides. But also included in what we're imagining by then would be other ways of organizing information which are not expressed as physical reality, and the concept of "memes" is a very useful way of thinking about this.

Google has become such a part of our lives by now, it's easy to forget how much it has created new ways to link information together, and therefore how easily it allows us to map the rise and fall of memes: one of my blog entries that mentions that idea is "Seeing Eye to Eye" . Now let's talk about Facebook, a tool which is linking people together (much as Google is already doing for information), creating brand new networks and connections throughout the world. There is even a fan-created Facebook group for Imagining the Tenth Dimension (thanks, by the way, to Chris Liakos of the University of Georgia for creating this group). The exploding popularity of Facebook is such a cool development because it allows us more than ever to see how ideas and people are all connected together across time and space, which is one of the central themes of my project.

Which leads to the song posted at the start of this blog. What is the difference between a deliberate manipulation of our reality by unseen forces, and the idea that our current situation is just the result of (as Homer Simpson so aptly puts it) "just a bunch of stuff that happened"? The answer, I think, is that both interpretations can be applied on a sliding scale, and that is the nature of any large and potentially random data set: even in a completely random set of numbers, there will always be groupings and patterns that can be teased out if a certain viewpoint is applied (for a very simple example, if I toss a coin 100 times, the outcome is almost certainly not heads/tails/heads/tails/heads/tails and so on, so the list of results will contain sections with more "heads" results and sections with more "tails" results that we could zoom in on). I call this idea "conceptual framing", and I have posted a number of previous blog entries that touch upon that idea.

One of the most-discussed questions at the Tenth Dimension forum is whether God fits into this puzzle we are imagining. Here's something I posted into that particular discussion thread a couple of weeks ago:

Quantum physics says information and reality are interchangeable. The set of data that represents our universe has organized patterns within it. What's wrong with giving those patterns a name?

Since one of the central ideas of my book is that the other parts of the multiverse are just as real as the observed universe we live in, I believe the broadest application of the anthropic principle applies - the reason we live in a universe finely tuned to allow our existence is because there are other universes tuned in ways that wouldn't allow us to exist (and some of those other universes would have intelligent organizations of matter marveling at how lucky they are to be in a universe with constants so finely tuned as to allow their existence).

Are we here because of a God who wanted to create a universe that allowed us to exist? By the time we're thinking about the big picture of timelessness within which all those possible universes exist, I believe there's room for us to recognize organizing patterns within that data which we can call God if we choose to do so.

I talk a lot about the memes that connect us together and the organizing forces that those memes could represent in the higher dimensions. As I say in my book,

in the highest dimensions, the meme that says 'I prefer gravity over no gravity' would be important, while the meme that says 'I prefer the Beatles over the Rolling Stones' would be meaningless...

and also...

Memes that prefer life over no life, continuance over destruction, creativity over repression, innovation over failure, and order rather than entropy would appear to have the upper hand when we think about the version of our own universe that has survived since the big bang, and which we are living in today.

Does the universe we live in have hydrogen as the most abundant atom because of the universe's (or a Creator God's) desire for it to be so, or is this fact nothing more than the result of "lucky" throws of the quantum dice? (I've posted previous blog entries here about the amusing concept of the Great Hydrogen Conspiracy.) Whether you believe one idea or the other has a lot to do with your personal conceptual framing, and like most of this ideas I'm exploring in Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I propose that there are ways to see how both ideas can peacefully co-exist.

The video at the start of this blog was created by Jason Doucette, and the audio is a 1986 recording of me singing the song. Here are the lyrics to that song, which is about the underground connections which may (or may not!) be thought of as being part of the forces that got us to this particular position in our fifth-dimensional probability space.

SECRET SOCIETIES
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

I believe in secret societies and underground confederacies
That move in my life
I believe in sisterly sororities and brotherly fraternities
And they’re part of my life

And there are signals, and there are signs
Right before us all the time
But we stumble deaf and blind
Cause we never realize

There are wheels that turn, that we never see
There are eyes that are watchin you and me
There are tears people cry cause they’ll never be free
Trapped in the arms of a secret society

I believe the guy sittin next to me waits for a sign from me
To show him I know
What he needs, or maybe what I need from him, but he won’t ever let me in
It’s a common tableau

Yes it happens all the time
We’re all sendin out signs
Cause we all need to know
Who are friends are, who’s the foe

Cause there are deals that are struck that play with our dreams
And there are people who move in places unseen
And pinocchios who dance as if they live and breathe
Tugged from above by a secret society

Oh, I believe it’s true


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Thankful 2

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Now that over two million unique visitors have been to the Tenth Dimension website, I'd like to pause for a moment and look at where we're at.

Fans of the original flash animation will be pleased to know that we have now opened a "Digital Items Store", where a self-contained flash (versions for PC and for Mac), plus a high resolution quicktime can now be downloaded. In addition, an eBook file of the revised second edition of my book plus various versions of some of the songs attached to this project are also available there.

I'm thankful to all of the fans of this project who continue to share their ideas at the tenth dimension forum. I'm thankful to people like John Daniels Riveros who have embraced the interactive chat broadcasts we're doing with unbounded enthusiasm. I'm also thankful for all the critics: it's important that people understand that when my book is called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", subtitled "a new way of thinking about time and space", and its brief description at online bookstores like Amazon includes the phrase "not about mainstream physics", those are important bits of information. But do I think it's fair then, that online reviewers of the book are allowed to give my book a thumbs down because it's not about mainstream physics? To the extent that they feel they were misled about the content, that's fair... but buying a book without reading its description and then complaining when the content is not what you expected does seem somewhat misguided to me. Oh well... there are also many people who have posted positive reviews of the book as well, and this project certainly does seem to be one of those that elicits a strong response, whether that be negative or positive.

The online listing for my book ends with this sentence: "Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live." What does this mean? It means that the implications of what we begin exploring in the eleven minute animation are expanded in a large number of directions throughout the book's eleven chapters. Ultimately, what we are trying to find here is a way to tie together disparate schools of thought - not just from cosmology, from quantum mechanics, and from the probability space of the multiverse - but also from philosophy, spirituality and ancient mysticism. For anyone who believes in only one of those ways of looking at the world, my quest for finding the unity behind all of these ideas may indeed seem foolish.

But I am thankful for all of the encouragement I have received from people around the world (and the very positive review of my book in What Is Enlightenment? magazine comes to mind here), who believe that I just may be on to something... and that's pretty darn cool.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton


THANKFUL
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite happenstance
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

And in the multitude of paths
That could have ended before now
I am grateful for the unseen hand
Which led us here somehow

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

The universe is beautiful
More complex than we can believe
And praisable for what it holds within
A tapestry of threads
That each of us must weave
From each and every moment that we’re in

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite coincidence
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

Infinity and Impulse Control

Last blog, in an entry titled "Addictive Personality", I talked about the negative patterns that can cause people to make the same mistakes over and over. Developmental psychologists like to talk about impulse control, and how this faculty is different in a child's mind, the adolescent mind, and the adult mind.

So, the child's stolen candy bar, the adolescent's silly risk taken, or the adult who decides they can get away with an Enron scam would all be examples of an impulse control (or rather, the lack thereof!) that allowed an individual to choose a path that might best not have been taken: but in a universe of free will, bad choices have to be just as allowable as good ones. To think of this another way, the child who was sexually abused and grows up to become a sexual abuser is yet another example of negative repeating patterns across time and space, and the person who ultimately overcomes the impulse to repeat that sad tale will have finally found their way to a different part of the multiverse and its "bush-like branching structure" that represents all possible outcomes for our universe.

I'd like to quote a comment posted to my last blog entry by Tom Huston. Regular readers of this blog will recall that Tom wrote an article praising my book which appeared in the spring issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine. By the way, I'd like to invite you to check out Tom's personal blog at KosmicTom.com.

Humanity's karmic momentum is indeed strong, and I can't see why it wouldn't be dominating about 99.999% of what's happening along humanity's timelines (potential or actual), at least at our current "position" in time and cultural development... But I think there's probably at least a 0.001% interjection of free will, or true creative freedom, at play in the "system" at any given moment that can break the momentum of any trajectory and change things for the better. And it's up to us to choose if we're going to help make that percentage a little larger, through freeing our own consciousness, more and more and more...

Thanks for your insightful comments, Tom. Personally, I hope that your .001% estimate is low, but I agree with you completely about trajectories and how they can be changed or not changed. A few months ago I posted a blog entry called "Your Sixth-Dimensional Self". That entry discusses the idea of choices taken/not taken in the big picture of timelessness. This time around I'd like to run with the idea Tom presents us with of "karmic momentum", while we discuss a more linear image of what could be happening within timelessness.

There has been renewed interest this year in cosmological theories which present a cyclical scenario for our universe: rather than just the single "big bang" physicists have been imagining, perhaps there are endlessly repeating cycles of expansion and contraction that start from/end with something approaching (but never achieving) a singularity, and each time the universe expands back out into another iteration of itself (I should note here that "brane collisions" are often being advanced as a possible explanation for this repeating cycle, but this time around we're going to stay away from thinking about all this "extra dimensions" stuff).

So. What if this cycle has been/will be repeated an infinite number of times? Then we could leave everything about our universe in the fourth dimension of spacetime, and forget about all these crazy notions of needing any further dimensions to express the big picture. We could just lay every possible timeline end-to-end, one after another, in an infinite "line of time".

Here we go again with another of those mind-boggling ways of imagining our already infinite universe in an infinite number of timelines. If our universe were to repeat infinitely (with each repetition representing a different set of throws of the quantum dice, so to speak) then that would have to include the repetition where everything about the universe was the same as now, except for the differences in impulse control that in a different iteration of the universe kept me from taking that candy bar as a child, or driving recklessly as a teenager, or caused me to make an unwise business decision for which I'm now doing time!

Naturally, in an infinitely repeating universe, there would also be a great many scenarios which are completely different from the one we are currently in: you and I were never born, dinosaurs were never wiped out, life never progressed past single-celled organisms, matter never coalesced into stars, and on and on. With the luxury of infinite repetitions, we can get to every single possibility that could have arisen from chance and circumstance eventually.

But the versions of this cycle that interest us the most, obviously, would be the different scenarios that are almost the same as our current one. In terms of karmic momentum, then, we could think of this cycle as being what happens when the endlessly repeating version of ourselves is presented with a set of choices, and yet no matter how often a bad/dishonest choice is presented in this endless wheel of an infinitely repeating universe, there are choices that some of us will never take.

In some cases, this is going to be just a matter of convenience: I never stole money because a big bag of somebody else's money never appeared on my doorstep. But what if it had? Perhaps the real test for sainthood should not be how exemplary a person's life was, but how many opportunities that person was presented with to make bad choices which that person's impulse control and karmic momentum caused them, again and again, through every iteration of the universe, to do good instead.


I'd like to finish off with another of the songs from the end my book, this one presents another way of thinking about the endless iterations that might be possible from the beginning to the end of our universe. First of all, here's how I introduce the idea of this song back in chapter five:

Graham Hancock, in his book “The Mars Mystery”, tells of a system of mirrors that were left behind on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. From 1973 to 1976 researchers used a 107-inch telescope to direct more than 2,000 laser beams at these mirrors. These laser beams allowed extremely precise measurements to be made and revealed a 15-meter oscillation of the lunar surface about its polar axis, with a period of about three years. Astronomer David Levy suggested that the moon is behaving “just like a huge bell after it has been clanged”. Scientists proposed that this must be the result of a relatively recent major impact, and that this ringing will die out after 20,000 years or so. Imagine, now, that you are somehow able to slow down your awareness to the point where you are able to hear the ringing of that bell.

Admittedly this all starts to sound like a Zen koan, and in some ways the goal is the same–we are trying to free ourselves from a limited viewpoint of the universe and the nature of time.

Here's a video of me singing the song:



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygAeyQMwQJI

And here are the lyrics:


BIG BANG TO ENTROPY
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

I slowed down
Till I heard the moon
I heard the moon ringing
Ringing like a bell

I slowed down
Till I felt the earth
I felt the plates sliding:
Skaters on a pond

And I finally felt the long groove moving underneath
Births and deaths of galaxies pounding out the beat
And I finally heard the whole song at once:
Big Bang to Entropy
Big Bang to Symmetry
Big Bang to Everything

I slowed down
Till I saw the sun
I saw the sun spinning
On a pinwheel’s arm

And I saw the long chain of our DNA
Stretching back to the beginning for so long
And I saw the mighty ocean that surrounds and sustains
Connecting us together in a song

I slowed down
Till I saw the song
Was only one of many
One of many more

And I finally felt the long groove moving underneath
Births and deaths of galaxies pounding out the beat
And I finally heard the whole song at once:
Big Bang to Entropy
Big Bang to Symmetry
Big Bang to Everything

It begins as nothing, silence at the end
Every song’s the same after or before
But the parts in between, there are so very many forms
More than we could ever hope to know


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Addictive Personality

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvsd6IUoH4

Last blog I talked about the end of the world: with the idea that the multiverse contains multiple branching timelines from one instant to the many possible "next"s, perhaps within that bush-like branching structure there are other versions of our universe where the celebrated predictions of the end that have failed to materialize up to now really did come to pass?

This same concept can also be taken to the personal level: what does this all mean if there are really multiple versions of "me" out there? This is one of the important ideas I get into in my book: once people have had their minds boggled by seeing a way to imagine ten dimensions, they often ask "So what? How does all this have anything to do with me?".

In "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", there are a number of chapters that explore that question in various ways. Here's a quote from chapter five, "Memes, Music, and Memory":

Sometimes people get caught in loops of addiction and abuse that trap them into circles, causing them to go back again and again to bad relationships, alcohol, or other drugs, with a feeling that there’s no way out. This is one of the pitfalls that the fifth dimension can set for people, as it offers an easy path to fold back to the same negative repetitions over and over again. There’s not much to say about this except that the fifth dimension offers many paths for escape as well, and the hardest part of the problem is usually identifying what is triggering the negative repetition and finding a way to break the pattern. Unquestionably, this is a serious issue, and anyone who is having to deal with the negative repercussions of an addiction of any kind should seek help wherever they can find it. The good news is, there are always multiple fifth-dimensional paths available, and the one that leads back into the negative repetition is never the only option.

This idea is also touched on in chapter nine, "How Much Control Do We Have?":

Despite occasional evidence to the contrary, then, hope for the future and having an optimistic outlook on life–these take on a significant new weight when viewed in terms of each of us being a quantum observer. A defeatist mindset will become self-fulfilling as subtle choices are made in our selection of which fifth-dimensional path we end up travelling upon. Depression, stress, injury and addiction can close our minds to the possibilities of “where can we go from here”, and life can become a long dark ladder descending into no future at all. For someone trapped in those realities, this information offers very little comfort, and may even seem irritating or irrelevant, which is unfortunate because that is the situation where an appreciation of the possibilities each of us has opening out before us could be the most useful. You can call it simplistic, but sometimes the simplest things are also the most true: a person’s health, a person’s career, and a person’s life will all be massively affected by whether that person has a positive or a negative outlook. If each of us is collapsing out our own personal reality from quantum waves of indeterminacy purely through the act of observation, then it should be obvious that the choices each of us make will be determined by our own mindset.

One of the 26 songs listed at the end of the book is also related to this idea, and this blog entry started with a video of me singing that song. Here are the lyrics:


ADDICTIVE PERSONALITY
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Now it’s really only natural
It’s always been the same
That when something makes you feel good
You want that something again
But when that something starts to hurt you
And you just can’t let it go
And you wake up feelin poorly
But you wake up wantin more

Addictive personality, Addictive personality
Addictive personality
Addictive
Personality

Is it nature, is it nurture
That got you to this place
Where you’re tradin your tomorrows
For what you’re trapped into today?
Is it the constant inundation
Of the media machine
Is it the way that you were brought up
Or just something in your genes?

Addictive personality, Addictive personality
Addictive personality
Addictive
Personality

Every day is a new day
Every day you’re back to one
And today can be the new day
When you say you’re finally done
Or you can find some more excuses
That today will be the same
Cause it’s easy to continue
When you say you’re not to blame

Addictive personality, Addictive personality
Addictive personality
Addictive
Personality


Enjoy the journey,

Rob

The End of the World 2

If, as David Deutsch and his team at Oxford have proven, every branching timeline possible from this moment forward exists as potential within the probabilistic quantum wavefunction, and this is what creates the "bush-like branching structure" of potentially observed states from this moment on, then this ties in so very nicely to the concepts I've been presenting here with my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project: this means the branching fifth dimension of probability space our 4D line of time is being constructed from, as I describe in my book and my popular animation, would be that same idea presented in a simple-to-visualize metaphor. As most visitors to this blog will know, the set of potential branching timelines for our universe (and all other universes) is part of the concept known as the multiverse.

Here's one of the ideas I've had fun playing with regarding the multiverse: if every potential branch from this moment to the next exists within the currently unobserved branches ahead of us at this moment, and only one of those branches will be the one that we are about to individually witness, then this must be true no matter where in the timeline of the universe we care to think about. But if those other branches exist, does that mean there are versions of each of us who did end up observing some of the alternate branches of the multiverse which our current version believes did not happen? Here's some of what I say in my book about this idea:

It seems that no matter where you are in history, at a specific moment there will always be a certain small contingent of the population who are predicting the end of the world. Usually it’s some conveniently distant amount of time away from the present to be a cause for concern, but not so close as to immediately leave the person spreading the news with egg on their face (as I write this paragraph in 2006, the Mayan calendar’s December 21 2012 looks like a good upcoming contender for an end-of-the-world focal point some portion of the public are likely to become caught up with).
But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?

So continuing on with this bit of fun, here is a video of me singing the most "campy" of all the 26 songs I've created for this project.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

THE END OF THE WORLD
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

The end of the world
Oft predicted, never realized
The end of the world
Never here, it’s such a surprise
How could millions be so wrong?
The end of the world
The end of the world
Has already been, it’s come and gone

Looking back through history
We oft encounter prophecies
Of end times so very very near
Next year, five years, ten from now
A state of flux, some way somehow
The process of postponement never clear

The end of the world…

With space and time a continuum
Of everything that is to come
And might have been, in one infinite ball
Multiple timelines, now I see
Apocalyptic destinies
Prophets proven prophets after all

The saucers?
Already landed
Our star bodies?
Already attained
Y2K? The global pandemic?
Huge disasters
The big freakin’ asteroid?
Destroyed the world

The end of the world
Oft predicted, never realized
The end of the world
Never here, it’s such a surprise
How could millions be so wrong?
The end of the world
The end of the world
Has already been, it’s come and gone
The end of the world has come and gone