Google Suggestions Time Capsule - 2nd Quarter 08

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgvy2GvJ7OQ


Happy second anniversary! My animation and website went live the end of June 2006, and vaulted to popularity a few days later on July 3rd: first as a result of digg, then due to stumbleupon, and on out through a continually widening word of mouth from one site to another throughout the world. This project has continued its popularity for two years now, still averaging 2 million hits a month at the main website. Why? I believe it's because now, more than ever, people are becoming interested in thinking about those big picture ideas of how everything fits together.


Back at the beginning of this year, I became interested in keeping track of the top Suggestions that Google makes when you type a single letter of the alphabet into the search windows incorporated into certain browsers, and how those suggestions change over time, and how much we might be able to draw from this as a record of the memes that rise and fall in our society over time. The original post is here, and although the post was created in January I have continued to update that entry on a weekly basis since then. The graphic above is my attempt to represent those results in a single visual (hopefully you've be able to read most of this and use it as a companion to the original post), and a post that talks about the poll question that was started around the same time relating to Google is here.

I've talked before (in my entry Tens, Google and the Expanding Universe) about Google's battle with spammers and scammers trying to vault their particular site to the top of Google's search results, which is part of the feedback loop that becomes Google's awesome responsibility: because once something becomes a top search result, it is more likely to stay there for a while. Three months ago in my blog entry Googling in the Tenth Dimension I listed some of the hundreds of words and phrases you can type into Google and have pages related to my project come up as the number one search result. As I said at the time, the continually changing parameters Google uses to organize its results will no doubt have made some of the search terms I provided back then to be pushed further down in the search results by now, and some other new ones will, I presume, have risen to the top.

Take a look at my diagram above. Considering how often Google shuffles their other search results, I have to admit I'm surprised at how many of the single letter search results did not change over the six months I've been tracking this information. Still, as a time capsule, this project will be a useful reference to look back upon in years to come... but it does look like some of the single letter search results - particularly those ones shown in red in the above graphic - are not going to be changing any time soon. Oh well, this just pulls us back out to that all-important big picture thinking - how many years will it take for some of the red items above to be toppled? Only time will tell.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton
Next: What Would a Flatlander Really See?

Wormholes

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi2Nh_C8Pzk

In my book I talk about wormholes, an interesting topic to look up in wikipedia, and how the "folds" we talk about in the Imagining the Tenth Dimension visualization are really another way of thinking about the wormholes that science has been theorizing about. My project is unique, though, because it provides us with a "filing system" for how the different aspects of our reality are derived, and this logical organization gives us a way to envision how our universe is kept from wandering off into some other universe where the fine structure constant is different from ours: because it is constrained within the seventh dimension. But ultimately, we are talking about what physicists like Brian Greene are asking us to hold in our minds: a place where everything for every universe and every possible expression of matter and energy exists simultaneously. As Dr. Greene says:

"Just as we envision all of space as being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as being out there, as really existing too." - Brian Greene

If you go to the Preamble link at the main tenth dimension website you will see a list of recommended books to read which connect to the ideas in this project, which includes Brian Greene's writing.

So, the animation for this project continues to generate a steady string of comments and questions. One of the ones that came up recently was this: "would a wormhole be in the 4th dimension? or the fifth?", and my answer to that question would be "depends on the wormhole". This question is also discussed in the tenth dimension faq, but it seemed like a good topic to tackle here in more depth.

Counting to Seven

According to the line of reasoning that comes from this project's "filing system" of how our reality is derived, a wormhole in the third dimension would allow instantaneous teleportation to other locations with no passage of time, a fourth dimensional wormhole would allow time travel to one specific causal future/past, a fifth dimensional wormhole would allow travel to other possible futures and pasts that are logically consistent with our current "now", and a sixth dimensional wormhole would allow travel to other logically incompatible pasts/futures - like where it's 2008 but the attack on the twin towers never took place, or dinosaurs aren't extinct. A seventh dimensional wormhole would allow travel to other different-initial-conditions universes that have a different fine structure constant and different laws of physics from the universe in which we live (and as such most of those other universes would not be a place where our physical bodies could exist or survive).

Eight
That was a far as I took the analogy in my book: since each extra dimension becomes more and more unlike our own spacetime, this gets harder and harder to visualize with each additional dimension. But let's continue this thought experiment now: by the time you're in the 8th dimension, you may well be in the highest dimension which can express matter in any way, and this may be the dimension where you are able to fold across universes which are derived from multiple or oscillating fine structure constants, but as a speculation that's getting pretty out there. As I've said before in this blog, the fact the Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation is also based upon an eight dimensional matrix may be able to be tied into this, but that remains to be seen.

Nine
The ninth dimension could well be what physicists like Wheeler and Boltzmann were thinking about as they described the roiling, fluctuating, underlying fields of quantum indeterminacy where partial bits of order are continually appearing and disappearing ("John Wheeler and Digital Physics" and "Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains" are two blog entries related to this). The ninth dimension would be mainly fragmentary bits of order, some of which could then organize into the dimensions below, and this is where I would place things like "big picture memes" or (as quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd says) initial yes/no states for the beginnings of different possible universes. So a ninth dimensional wormhole might be what you use to jump from the "I prefer universes that start from a high degree of order" meme that our own universe is within, to the "I prefer universes that change very little over their entire existence" organizing pattern that would be elsewhere in the ninth dimension. This all relates to the idea that "information equals reality", a phrase I first learned from Anton Zeilinger, and one that other quantum physicists use as well.

Ten and Beyond
The tenth dimension is the enfolded symmetry state where everything achieves equilibrium (a concept from this project that Dr. Sean Carroll is coincidentally now also promoting) - so no wormholes are possible in the tenth dimension because anything that disturbs that equilibrium state takes us into the dimensions below and the potential expressions of mass and energy again. Likewise, since this project says time is just a direction, not a dimension, and M-Theory says there are ten spatial dimensions plus one of time, I would say you can't have an eleventh dimensional wormhole because time isn't a dimension, it's a direction.

I also say that "time" is always a subset of the dimension above the one you're examining, because time is part of the causal/probabilistic set of expressions that are directly accessible from the current dimension in its current state. As I discussed in "The Flipbook Universe", without the fourth dimension, the third dimension has no way to change from state to state. In "Time in Either Direction" I talked about physicist Sean Carroll's ideas on this - time is only one of the possible ways of navigating through the dimension above. A wormhole would be another, but wormholes (folds) would allow us to jump from one part of the possible realities to another without traveling through the causal/probabilistic relationships that we are party to as we travel down our entropy-derived line of time as a particular direction within the fourth dimension.

Here's a song about the seven dimensions that define our unique universe: it's called "Seven Levels":

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs


While we've been playing with these ideas, we should keep in mind that wormholes are not just science fiction: and folding your mind around these concepts can be a mind-expanding experience.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project, 2nd quarter report

God 2.0

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Y4xseftgQ


Last entry we talked about the "daily parrying" that would cause some people to look at a blog titled "God 2.0" and automatically assume that what is going to be talked about will be non-scientific meandering about the world of the spiritual and the metaphysical. If you're familiar with my blog or my book, you will already know that I am more interested in the middle ground - a place where philosophy and physics, spirituality and science can find ways to agree that they are really thinking about the same things.

The Skeptic
Michael Shermer is the well-known publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and Michael's goal has been to poke holes in the questionable claims of fringe science, the paranormal, and a wide range of other areas that he has targeted with his razor-sharp debunking skills. This is why I found it quite marvelous when I picked up the July issue of Scientific American, and found that Mr. Shermer's regular column this issue is entitled "Sacred Science: can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?".

Reinventing the Sacred
Mr. Shermer's article is about a fellow who comes from my neighboring province of Alberta, Canada: Stuart Kauffman, founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, who has written a book called "Reinventing the Sacred". To quote from Michael Shermer's article about the book:

Kauffman reverses the reductionist's causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says 'breaks no laws of physics' and yet cannot be explained by them. God 'is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,' Kauffman declares.

I have spent time with Stu Kauffman... he is one of the most spiritual scientists I know, a man of inestimable warmth and ecumenical tolerance, and his God 2.0 is a deity worthy of worship. But I am skeptical that it will displace God 1.0, Yahweh, whose Bronze Age program has been running for 6,000 years on the software of our brains and culture.

Creativity and the "now"
I've talked many times here about the role of creativity in our universe, and how ideas from quantum physicist John Wheeler and professor of cognitive science Douglas Hofstadter can be tied together to show us how a self-excited loop can create not just a universe but life and consciousness as well. In my book I used physicist Richard Feynman's sum over paths idea to show how the past is just as probabilistic as we know the future to be. Now that Anton Zeilinger is publishing the results of experiments he and his team in Vienna have conducted that prove that we are operating in a probabilistic cloud where the only thing that is truly real for us is the constantly moving "now" of our observed reality, the ideas I proposed are being confirmed: and as John Wheeler suggested, this means that there are some indeterminate elements of the past that can be changed by our current observation. As I've been saying here, this means we can all select new trajectories from our current "now" at any time that launch us off on a new path, and accepting the indeterminate nature of the past is key to understanding how much power we are talking about here. As I discussed in Changing Your Genes, the scientific study that shows we are able to switch off and on various genes simply through changes in lifestyle and changes in attitude gives us a glimpse of how the past is not as carved in stone as we've been led to believe: because quantum physics is proving that our currently observed reality is derived from a multiverse of possible choices that exist in both the future and the past for our universe at any particular "now".

Enfolded Symmetry
Scientists like Sean Carroll, David Deutsch, and (of course) Richard Dawkins are atheists. I reference their work regularly with this project. I believe the Dawkins concept of genes as a "River Out of Eden" and memes as ideas that can be transmitted or shared without loss across time and space are both very useful and enlightened ways of imagining the underlying timelessness of our reality. My way of imagining how our reality is constructed agrees with Dr. Carroll's ideas about an equilibrium state which is "outside the system". My project also agrees with the Deutsch team's proof that the parallel worlds resulting from chance and choice are directly equivalent to the probabilistic results of quantum mechanics. Now, here's something new: the June 14 2008 issue of New Scientist Magazine has an article about the award-winning work of mathematicians John Thompson and Jacques Tits, who have offered some mind-expanding proofs about how our amazing universe is derived from symmetries in the higher dimensions. This idea is related to Garrett Lisi's eight-dimensional E8 symmetry group, which I've referred to a number of times in this blog, and which I believe ties back into my project as well: by the time you have imagined an Omniverse which expresses all possible patterns of mass and energy, there is an equilibrium state where all of those possible patterns enfold back into a balance, where everything fits together into a perfect symmetry, which is the natural underlying state. Our universe is defined by higher dimensional patterns which give it its unique laws of physics and its breathtaking intricacy, right from the quarks and neutrinos up to the universe as a whole and all of its possible "spacetime tree" of expressions. In that sense, our cosmos is just a temporary deviation which has been set in motion by the breaking of that symmetry, and our line of time is a return to that perfectly balanced zero which existed before our universe began and which we'll return to after our universe has run its course.

God 2.0
So, while some would object to calling Stuart Kauffman's patterns of emergence that feed back on themselves to create our beautiful and complex universe "God", perhaps "God 2.0" is a useful way to reset our thinking about all this: all we are really talking about here is how higher dimensional patterns could be responsible for the universe we find ourselves in to be selected from the multiverse of all other possible universes, which ultimately, are all part of the Omniverse, where information equals reality. And that is a beautiful thing, worthy of our praise and our wonder.

Here is a song about that very idea: "Thankful".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Related Entries:
How to Make a Universe
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
The Omniverse
Is God in the Seventh Dimension?

Next: Wormholes

Daily Parrying

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5HyTz9xaBc

I'm nearing the end of the quotes I'm going to be making from Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, I hope all these references have sold a few books for David Jay Brown. But one of the interviews that I thought was particularly eloquent was with Dr. John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard Professor of psychiatry:

The word "God" has become the shortcut term for what has historically been applied to the overarching or the ultimate creative principle in the universe, that is sometimes experienced in humanlike terms--because I think that our psyche can grasp things if we anthropomorphize them--but, in its essence, is mysterious, luminous, numinous, and overwhelming in its sense of presence when one is open to it. The problem is it's all concept now, mostly, because the actual experience of the divine has been pretty well eradicated from the Western psyche by what Rilke called "daily parrying" so that, as he put it, the senses by which we can know the spirit world have atrophied. So you can only know it experientially, and people that know it experientially are not very good at describing it in a way that's going to create the experience for somebody else. Therefore, somebody who hasn't had the experience, or whose senses aren't open will say, well, you haven't convinced me, because I haven't had the experience. So that's usually where the conversation ends... God as a separate entity, a theistic notion of a being that is separate from us--no, I don't have any sense of that. I have a sense of being part of some infinite spirit wisdom, or spirit intelligence, that is sometimes present, real, and alive to me. But I'm indwelling in it, and it in me.

"Daily parrying" - what a great phrase for what happens in science and culture, where people are trained by tiny little hints every day to be suspicious of anything that hints at something greater than us, or that might plug us into a larger sense of our shared connectedness. In "Animals and Kids" I suggested this might be how kids are taught to be suspicious of the moments when they turn off their narrative voice and just "be". In "Spirituality, Connections and the Ten Dimensions" and "Is God in the Seventh Dimension" I quoted a section from my book that expresses similar sentiments to what Dr. Mack is saying above: the way of visualizing reality that we're exploring here does suggest there are organizing patterns from higher dimensions, and whether you call those patterns "God" or something more clinical doesn't change what we're talking about. However, if by "God" you believe we're talking about an entity who judges and punishes, or who makes your football team win and the other team lose because that's what you prayed for, then we need to be clear that that's not what we're talking about here. Is there something that chose our universe from out of the multiverse, a pattern that unites us, a creative process that causes life in all its complexity and diversity to spring forth from simple chemical reactions, and an enfolded whole that we can return to when we die? That's what we're talking about here.

Quoting Max Planck
This also relates to the currently running poll question, quoting good old Max Planck, whose work is central to this way of imagining how our reality is constructed. The poll question asks if you agree or disagree with the following statement from Dr. Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it". While I certainly don't want to appear to be so presumptuous as to be claiming that my intuitive way of imagining how our reality is constructed should be equated with the rigorous scientific proofs offered by experts in their field like Max Planck, I do take comfort in the possibility that my ideas are simply ahead of their time: already in the two years since my book was published, major advancements have come from physicists David Deutsch, Sean Carroll, and Anton Zeilinger which confirm key predictions about the nature of reality that I made in my own book. I've talked before about books by respected experts such as Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and Douglas Hofstadter which agree in many ways with my depiction of the shared, multi-layered nature of what is commonly called the soul, and Jill Taylor's viewpoint strongly aligns with my own ideas about the importance of finding ways to quiet that constantly nattering "narrator voice" we carry within us. Clearly, these ideas speak to philosopher Ekhart Tolle's bestselling books as well: it's all about being in the "now". How many more of the supposedly "fringe science" conclusions I've drawn about how our reality is constructed will eventually be confirmed by mainstream science?

Daily Parrying
This all takes us back to a question asked here before - how much of this "daily parrying" is the result of a deliberate effort to keep the general public from becoming aware of the possibilities that are out there (ideas that are explored in entries like "The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea", "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", and "Flatlanders on a Line"), and how much is the result of random events? One of the most popular videos from this project, "Secret Societies", takes the extreme position that everything is a conspiracy. This idea is also explored in "The Anthropic Viewpoint" which makes the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that we live in The Great Hydrogen Conspiracy, since hydrogen is the most abundant element! The point we're trying to arrive at here is that if our universe was selected from a larger multiverse, then there must be events and processes we can point to that caused that to happen. I believe that whether you call those selecting patterns randomness, conspiracy, a natural outcome, or God, has more to do with your point of view than what we're describing, and that this subtle "daily parrying" we are subjected to throughout our lives has a lot to with the point of view any one of us now has.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids
Another of the songs associated with this project that deals with the idea of subtle influences forming our worldview is Insidious Trends.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: God 2.0

Changing Your Genes

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYnmqhm7BIU

(Update: some of the ideas in this entry are continued in another entry published one month later, Changing Your Genes Part 2)

In Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, we talked about how it is surprisingly easy to modify your potential future paths by making adjustments in physical stance or mental attitude. In Local Realism Bites the Dust, we talked about the groundbreaking experiments being conducted by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna, that are now proving that the only thing that is truly real is our observed "now": amazingly, everything else in the future and the past extending out from our constantly moving "now" is a probabilistic cloud. In entries like The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea, The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic, and Being More Fifth Dimensional, we've talked about what a powerful idea this is: if everything before and after "now" is only a probabilistic wave function, then we as observers have much more control over the information that becomes reality than the traditional viewpoint has led us to believe.

Genes, memes, and spimes: these are three powerful ways of visualizing the information that becomes our reality from a more timeless vantage point. As we discussed in entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Boredom and Consciousness, and The Omniverse, physicist John Wheeler introduced us to the idea that not just the future but the past can be changed by observation, an idea that makes much more sense if we can accept the evidence of the Zeilinger experiments.

So, while we're not talking about magic here (my role as an observer can't change the force of gravity or the speed of light, or allow me to walk through walls or bring back the dead, and so on), there really are things about the past that we as quantum observers can change: and this is an idea which contradicts most of what we are taught. Most of us believe, for instance, that our genes are locked in by heredity, and as a randomized mixing of our parent's genetic material that occurred at conception, this is not something we have control over now.

Now click here to read about a new study indicating that we can turn genes on and off simply by altering our lifestyle and our mental attitude. Or read below for a few paragraphs from the article:

WASHINGTON (Reuters Life) - Comprehensive lifestyle changes including a better diet and more exercise can lead not only to a better physique, but also to swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy.

The men underwent three months of major lifestyle changes, including eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products, moderate exercise such as walking for half an hour a day, and an hour of daily stress management methods such as meditation.

As expected, they lost weight, lowered their blood pressure and saw other health improvements. But the researchers found more profound changes when they compared prostate biopsies taken before and after the lifestyle changes.

After the three months, the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes — including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off.

The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As I've said before, ideas that imply this level of control over our own reality have, up to now, often been ridiculed as quackery, so publication of the above report by the National Academy of Sciences is remarkable. My song "Positive Vibes" talks about similar ideas that the mainstream often ridicule: how much control do we really have over reality? Are we really able to affect changes in ourselves and others purely by sending out positive thoughts into the "ether"? Are we really able to affect our immune systems through positive visualization, or simply through the determined viewpoint of saying "I'm too busy to get sick"? Next blog, we'll talk about the daily parrying that, historically speaking, has indoctrinated us into thinking that such ideas are nonsense.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMWDdOkWkQU

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Daily Parrying

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - June Report

The April 08 version of this list is here.
The May 08 version of this list is here.
The July 08 version of this list is here.

As of June 21st, 2008, here are the blogs that have seen the most visits in the last 30 days. Wow! Big changes in this 30 day list from last month, the previous report did not show as dramatic a shift. Please note, for both of the following lists, the number in brackets is the position that blog held in the report for the previous month.

1. Time in Either Direction (new)
2. Seeing the Big Picture - from 40 kilometers up! (new)
3. Disorders of the Mind (new)
4. Being More Fifth-Dimensional (new)
5. You Are the Point (new)
6. Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional? (new)
7. Local Realism Bites the Dust (new)
8. Anime, Gaming and Cusps (10)
9. New Book Reviews at Amazon (new)
10. Top Ten Tenth Dimension Songs (new)

And as of June 21st, 2008, here are the ten Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time.

1. Time is a Direction (1)
2. Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 1 to 10 (3)
3. The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project (2)
4. Tenth Dimension TagCrowd (4)
5. Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains (5)
6. The Flipbook Universe (new)
7. Google, Memes and Randomness (6)
8. The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea (new)
9. The Omniverse (10)
10. Hypercubes and Plato's Cave (7)

By the way, if you are new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. And as always, a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas, and the Tenth Dimension Chat room usually has streaming video, along with video clips and live conversations twenty-four hours a day.

Are you enjoying the journey?

Rob Bryanton

Next: Changing Your Genes

Magnets and Souls

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p21KA8JL9qU



A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbTHExJzJXs


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZmEStxGgsI


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKxKVpHZe5Q

Rupert Sheldrake had some more to say in David Jay Brown's book Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse that I thought was useful to add to the ideas we've looked at in entries like Being More Fifth Dimensional, Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, and Are Animals and Kids More Fifth Dimensional?:

The reason animals are called animals is because the word "animal" comes from the Latin word, anima, meaning "soul". So, what the soul did, according to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas--who were the main authorities for the medieval view--was to act first as the form of the body, to shape the developing organism as it grew. In animals the soul also underlaid the instincts, the movements, and the organization of the sensations and behavior. In human beings the soul also included the intellect, the rational mind, the conscious mind.

So the human soul had three levels, or layers. One was the conscious mind, second to the animal soul, which was largely unconscious, and we shared with animals. And thirdly there was the vegetative soul, or the nutritive soul, which shaped our bodies and gave rise to the form of our bodies, helped maintain them in health and in healing from injury and disease... Interestingly, up until the seventeenth century, everyone thought that magnets had souls. The magnet was believed to have a soul, which was how it attracted and repelled other magnets at a distance. In fact, what's happened in science is the old idea of souls has been replaced by fields. The magnetic soul became the magnetic field.

I've used "corn starch monster" videos before (which is what we're looking at in the three short youtube clips that start this entry) to demonstrate how a simple action like a low frequency vibration can impart something to a corn starch and water mixture that reminds us of life, and how the reverse is also true: most of us have seen the astonishing difference between a living creature and what that same creature appears as when the spark of life has departed. Some of us have also seen what's it like when a person's soul has left their dying body before the body is dead: even when the physical body continues to struggle on with that most basic desire to continue, it can be clear to us that the "vibration"that made that person who they were is no longer there. Would it really be such a stretch for us to think that a magnet had "died" if one day it ceased to attract and repel other magnets?

From the most primitive beginnings of life on the planet, to human beings and beyond, all life shares the same trait - a desire to continue, an interest in "what happens next". Do corn starch monsters and magnets desire to continue? That's like asking whether my car desires to move forward after I step on the gas pedal. Animation (movement), is not the same as anima (life, soul): so, while things that are alive move, things that move are not necessarily alive. Still, it's interesting to think about a time not very many centuries ago when it was believed that magnets had souls, and to apply that idea to what I've been talking about here: how something as simple as a meme-based vibration pattern across dimensions could be what imparts, using constructive interference with physical reality, the anima to living things.

All of this also strongly relates to the current bestseller I've just finished reading, My Stroke of Insight by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. After a left hemisphere stroke removed Dr. Taylor's ability to plan and think linearly, she spent time thinking only with her right brain, where she reports that she felt an intimate connection to the one-ness that we all share within the universe. I recommend this book highly because it touches upon so many of the things I have talked about with this project - how "souls" can be thought of as coming from different energy/vibration/meme patterns, interlocking together to create what we each of us thinks of as a unique "me", and how some people create energy which other people are drawn to and inspired by, while other people seem to suck the energy out of a room. The corn starch videos, I think, are good starting points for discussion - thinking about how different patterns and waves really could be interacting to create what we know of as life and consciousness. Books like Steven Strogatz's Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life add more pieces to the puzzle as we think about how different waveforms can entrain one another, and ultimately this is all part of the path towards seeing how everything fits together to create our reality.

We'll close this entry with a video for one of the 26 songs that are part of this project. This one is about the soul, the mysterious spark of life that each of us carries within, and it's called "Burn the Candle Brightly".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ydru-VYfybU

Enjoy the journey, one planck length at a time.

Rob Bryanton

Related entries:
Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension
Boredom and Consciousness Part Two
Vibrations and Energy
Waveforms in the Ten Dimensions
Music and the Dance of Creativity

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, June Report

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 11-15

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 16 to 20.
Click here for the archive of polls 21 to 25.
Click here for the archive of polls 26 to 30.


Poll #11 - "Traditionally, each of us has one indivisible soul. While each person's individual experience is indeed unique, it's much more accurate to think of a 'soul' as being created by an interlocking system of patterns, shared across time and space. "(poll ended April 3 08)

76% said "I agree", while the remainder disagreed.

"I think there is so much more in existence besides matter, energy, and time" - Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis

I've talked in this blog a number of times about Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am A Strange Loop", which was published well after my own book came out. In my book I refer to Hofstadter's previous masterwork "Godel, Escher, Bach", as well as Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind". These ideas relate in similar ways to my current references to Hofstadter's "Strange Loop" concept: there are very good arguments for us to stop thinking of each of us as being a self-contained "soul". The above poll question is my attempt to sum up the viewpoint of experts like Hofstadter and Minsky... a viewpoint that aligns very nicely, in my opinion, with the way of visualizing reality that we're playing with in this project.

"...information is never destroyed. More and more information is constantly being created, and it's not lost, and energy and matter are incontrovertible. So somehow there must be some survival, because one being represents a huge amount of information. So I can imagine that there is survival, but I'm not sure exactly what form it takes." - neuroscientist Candace B. Pert (famed discover of the brain's opiate receptors)

Are you the same person you were twenty years ago, or are there things about your beliefs and viewpoint that have changed? Do you ever marvel at how one person can change the mood of an entire room just by entering? Have you ever had an experience that made you suspect a loved one who had passed on might be trying to get a message to you? Each of these, to varying degrees, are examples of personal experiences many people in the general public have had. Finding that there are ways that we can visualize how our reality is constructed that allow for these hidden connections to occur is what we're trying to do with this project. And despite the dismissive attitudes of some in the scientific mainstream, experts like biologist Rupert Sheldrake (who I refer to briefly in my book), Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis (quoted above), and well-known neuroscientist Candace Pert (also quoted above) tell us there are numerous scientific studies that prove we are connected together across time and space in ways that might be surprising to acknowledge.

For more about this idea:
Song 25 of 26 - What I Feel For You
Song 6 of 26 - Connections
Your Sixth-Dimensional Self
Song 14 of 26 - I Remember Flying
Song 4 of 26 - The Unseen Eye
FAQ 11 - Is this about memes, creativity, connections?
FAQ 12 - Is this about consciousness and quantum observer?

Poll question 12 - ended April 18 08. "Our universe is not random, our universe is probabilistic, which means that only certain outcomes are available at a certain moment, and those possible outcomes are based upon patterns that exist within the underlying structures of timelessness."
75% agreed, while the rest disagreed, with this statement.

In "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", we talked about the standard example put forth by theoretical physicists such as Greene and Kaku that there is a small probability that any one of us could now pop out of existence here on earth and reappear on the moon. While the likelihood, these experts tell us, of such an event is so small that it would probably take longer than the life of the universe for this event to come to pass, that must also mean that it could happen right now - like any other lottery, it's just a question of playing the odds.

In the blog entry I'm referring to, I talked about the fifth dimension as "probability space", and the sixth dimension as "state space", and how those ideas relate to the possibility of one of us now appearing on the moon. This poll question was about the same idea: is the universe completely random, allowing one of us to now re-appear on the moon, or is that possibility more properly catalogued to be within the sixth dimension's state space?

There have been articles published in magazines like New Scientist lately indicating that quantum outcomes may not be random at all, and that our reality could actually be the result of "hidden variables" or underlying patterns in the quantum fabric: these are ideas that are central to my way of visualizing reality as well. For some related discussions, go to Rupert Sheldrake's www.sheldrake.org, and read about the fascinating controlled experiments by this best-selling author and biologist on telepathy, prescience, and the collective unconscious (it is at this point that some people will now stop reading this blog entry because a lifetime of training has conditioned them to reject such claims on the foregone conclusion that no scientific evidence for such things exists, but that's a whole other story).

If there are probabilistic outcomes that already exist within the fifth dimension, and we are each merely navigating towards a particular tiny subset of those possible outcomes, then all of the above becomes quite easy to imagine. There is a particular future for each of us one second from now which is more likely than all others to occur, but there are other futures contained within our fifth-dimensional probability space which any one of us could actually end up witnessing. Understanding that this probabilistic process is an effect at both the quantum and macro levels, and that what outcome each of us ends up witnessing must also be intimately tied to the trajectory each of us is on, was one of the ideas explored in my book, and in the recent blog entry "Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory".

Other blog entries that relate to these ideas:
Time in Either Direction
The Flipbook Universe
Time is a Direction
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
Local Realism Bites the Dust

Poll #13: "0,1,2,3... keep counting, you're heading towards infinity. Take a number, divide it in half, divide the result in half, keep dividing... you're heading towards infinity Are each of those infinities the same, or is there more than one version of infinity?"
(Poll ended May 3 2008)

In the end, 53% said there is more than one version of infinity, and the remainder said all infinities are the same. This poll was nip and tuck right to the end, with each answer taking the lead over the other throughout the time the poll was running.

There has been a spirited discussion about questions related to single/multiple infinities at the tenth dimension forum: "Infinity, Eternity, Endlessness and Number System" has generated over 130 comments there so far. I believe part of the controversy here is merely language-related: when someone says "infinity", what exactly do they mean? Are they talking about a number, or a path to a number, or something else entirely?

Interestingly, doing a google search for the phrase "there can be only one infinity" (in quotes) returns mostly theological and philosophical sites. On the other hand, doing a google search for the phrase "multiple infinities" (in quotes) returns mostly math and physics sites.

Plus.maths.org and WorseleySchool.net say there's more than one infinity. PhysicsForums.com says there's different degrees of infinity. Maria Henderson's TCMTechnology blog (a teacher's blog about teaching college math) says there are countable and uncountable infinities, and this blog entry includes a great set of parody lyrics for the song "Hotel California" which explains some of the seemingly paradoxical ideas behind there being multiple infinities.

Robert Kaplan's "The Art of the Infinite: the Pleasures of Mathematics" says there can be infinite infinities. Rudy Rucker's Infinity and the Mind: the Science and Philosophy of the Infinite" is described by Martin Gardner as "a dizzying glimpse into that boundless region of blinding light where the mysteries of transcendence shatter the clarity of logic, set theory, proof theory, and contemporary physics". Click here for a site that talks about Cantor and his proposals that some infinities can be subsets of other infinities, while clicking on the following words takes you to a review of of the book "A Brief History of Infinity", which also mentions Cantor again and his idea that there are multiple infinities, and some infinities are larger than others. This blog says there can be small infinities and big infinities. And finally here is a mathematical dissertation that says there are many roads to infinity.

Infinity is not a number, it's a concept, and even though one infinite set can be a subset of another infinite set, ultimately all infinite sets are the same because they are all of indeterminate size... (just like the point we start from in the tenth dimension animation!). That's why I think "there are many roads to infinity" is a great phrase, as it shows us how different infinities can appear to be of different sizes as we travel towards them, and this is why saying that there are multiple infinities in the tenth dimension animation has strong roots in mainstream theory. In the animation, I say:

"but how can there be anything more than infinity? The answer is, there can be other completely different infinities created through initial conditions which are different from our own big bang."

So, those different infinities we're talking about all come from the same background of unobserved quantum indeterminacy, which is the place where all infinities are the same.

There are many roads to infinity.

Poll Question 14: "Every direction has its opposite: up/down, east/west. For us, 'time' is a direction in the 4th spatial dimension: but even though the opposite direction exists our bodies never travel that way because they're made from thermodynamic chemical processes. (poll ended May 18 2008)

78% agreed, while the rest disagreed.

Like Kaluza's 1919 proof that our physical reality is defined at the fifth dimension, the concept of time-reversal symmetry is well-known in the scientific community but not something generally known to the public. The laws of physics make just as much sense if time travels in the opposite direction, so why don't we ever see "time's arrow" traveling from the target back to the archer's bow?

I suggest that our experience of time traveling only in one direction is tied to our role as conscious observers living in bodies made out of thermodynamic processes, and 78% of the visitors to this site were willing to agree with that statement (this also means, presumably, that they were willing to accept that "time" is a direction in the fourth spatial dimension, which is already a somewhat contentious viewpoint according to those who believe time should always be discussed separately from the other spatial dimensions). In my book, as a mental exercise I work through some scenarios of what might have happened if other forms of life were defined by the time-reversal symmetry versions of reality that science tells us are just as real as our own. What would it be like to meet a "reverse-time alien" who was riding time's arrow in the reverse direction, because that alien was constructed from time-reversal symmetry chemical processes?

Like many of the ideas I explore in this project, "time as a part of the observer effect" relates to concepts from quantum physicist John Wheeler, and from Digital Physics. This also relates to one of our most basic questions: what is life? According to this recent blog entry by Hazel Muir over at the New Scientist Blogs, there are 280 accepted definitions of life in the scientific literature. The question of "what is life" takes on greater significance as we discover more about our own solar system, and about the other planetary systems of our universe: any attempts to search for "life" should not assume that all life uses the same chemical processes or matter/energy distributions as life on Earth.

My simple definition of life is "any process that is interested in what happens next". By the time we are are thinking of an omniverse of possible expressions of matter, energy, and other patterns of information, we can think of a great many other ways that life might be able to express itself that have nothing to do with genes, and that might even be able to transcend the narrow boundaries of a three-dimensional space being observed one planck length after another to create the arrow of time.

Other entries that relate to these discussions:
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
Time is a Direction
How to Make a Universe
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
You Can't Get There from Here

Poll Question 15: "We start with a point. We make another point. We join those points with a line. The line that passes through those points extends to infinity in either direction. Can we call those two directions positive infinity and negative infinity then?" (poll ended June 1 '08)
54% disagreed, while the rest agreed.

Poll Question 13 was another question that dealt with infinity, and that one came out pretty close to a tie. Even though the responses to this current question leaned very slightly more towards "no" throughout the polling period, it still didn't have a clear winner - which, I think (as with Poll 13) reflects the fact that there are a lot of different opinions out there as to what the word "infinity" really means.

With this current poll question, we find another way to wrestle with the mainstream science concept of there being "many roads to infinity", which I discussed in more depth in my discussion of Poll 13. These ideas also tie nicely into Gevin Giorbran's ideas of enfolded symmetry, which I've talked about so many times in this blog and at the tenth dimension forum, and in blog entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Hidden Variables and the Seventh Dimension and Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Information.

If we start with a geometric point of indeterminate size, and infinity is of indeterminate size, then can a point on a line encompass infinity? Usually, when people hear that a geometric point is of indeterminate size, they imagine this to mean that the point is infinitely small: which would make it yet another "road to infinity". With imagining the tenth dimension, we are wrapping all of those concepts together: this means that the point that we start from (at zero) and the point that we end up on (at ten) can, potentially, both be the same thing. Or, in the same way that the infinite set of all even numbers can be a subset of the infinite set of all whole numbers, the zero we start from can be a subset of the omniverse of all possible states of matter, energy, and information that we end up within. Images of Mobius strips, Klein bottles, and doughnut-shaped torus universes all have this same "wrapping back around on themselves" quality that we get to by the time we've imagined the zero and the ten being part of a Douglas-Hofstadter-style self-referential loop that creates consciousness and the world that each of us witnesses each day.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Magnets and Souls

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 15

Poll Question 15: "We start with a point. We make another point. We join those points with a line. The line that passes through those points extends to infinity in either direction. Can we call those two directions positive infinity and negative infinity then?" (poll ended June 1 '08)
54% disagreed, while the rest agreed.

Poll Question 13 was another question that dealt with infinity, and that one came out pretty close to a tie. Even though the responses to this current question leaned very slightly more towards "no" throughout the polling period, it still didn't have a clear winner - which, I think (as with Poll 13) reflects the fact that there are a lot of different opinions out there as to what the word "infinity" really means.

With this current poll question, we find another way to wrestle with the mainstream science concept of there being "many roads to infinity", which I discussed in more depth in my discussion of Poll 13. These ideas also tie nicely into Gevin Giorbran's ideas of enfolded symmetry, which I've talked about so many times in this blog and at the tenth dimension forum, and in blog entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Hidden Variables and the Seventh Dimension and Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Dark Information.

If we start with a geometric point of indeterminate size, and infinity is of indeterminate size, then can a point on a line encompass infinity? Usually, when people hear that a geometric point is of indeterminate size, they imagine this to mean that the point is infinitely small: which would make it yet another "road to infinity". With imagining the tenth dimension, we are wrapping all of those concepts together: this means that the point that we start from (at zero) and the point that we end up on (at ten) can, potentially, both be the same thing. Or, in the same way that the infinite set of all even numbers can be a subset of the infinite set of all whole numbers, the zero we start from can be a subset of the omniverse of all possible states of matter, energy, and information that we end up within. Images of Mobius strips, Klein bottles, and doughnut-shaped torus universes all have this same "wrapping back around on themselves" quality that we get to by the time we've imagined the zero and the ten being part of a Douglas-Hofstadter-style self-referential loop that creates consciousness and the world that each of us witnesses each day.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 14

Poll Question 14: "Every direction has its opposite: up/down, east/west. For us, 'time' is a direction in the 4th spatial dimension: but even though the opposite direction exists our bodies never travel that way because they're made from thermodynamic chemical processes. (poll ended May 18 2008)

78% agreed, while the rest disagreed.

Like Kaluza's 1919 proof that our physical reality is defined at the fifth dimension, the concept of time-reversal symmetry is well-known in the scientific community but not something generally known to the public. The laws of physics make just as much sense if time travels in the opposite direction, so why don't we ever see "time's arrow" traveling from the target back to the archer's bow?

I suggest that our experience of time traveling only in one direction is tied to our role as conscious observers living in bodies made out of thermodynamic processes, and 78% of the visitors to this site were willing to agree with that statement (this also means, presumably, that they were willing to accept that "time" is a direction in the fourth spatial dimension, which is already a somewhat contentious viewpoint according to those who believe time should always be discussed separately from the other spatial dimensions). In my book, as a mental exercise I work through some scenarios of what might have happened if other forms of life were defined by the time-reversal symmetry versions of reality that science tells us are just as real as our own. What would it be like to meet a "reverse-time alien" who was riding time's arrow in the reverse direction, because that alien was constructed from time-reversal symmetry chemical processes?

Like many of the ideas I explore in this project, "time as a part of the observer effect" relates to concepts from quantum physicist John Wheeler, and from Digital Physics. This also relates to one of our most basic questions: what is life? According to this recent blog entry by Hazel Muir over at the New Scientist Blogs, there are 280 accepted definitions of life in the scientific literature. The question of "what is life" takes on greater significance as we discover more about our own solar system, and about the other planetary systems of our universe: any attempts to search for "life" should not assume that all life uses the same chemical processes or matter/energy distributions as life on Earth.

My simple definition of life is "any process that is interested in what happens next". By the time we are thinking of an omniverse of possible expressions of matter, energy, and other patterns of information, we can think of a great many other ways that life might be able to express itself that have nothing to do with genes, and that might even be able to transcend the narrow boundaries of a three-dimensional space being observed one planck length after another to create the arrow of time.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Other entries that relate to these discussions:
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
Time is a Direction
How to Make a Universe
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
You Can't Get There from Here

Click here for the blog discussing polls 1 through 10.
Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.
Next - Poll 15: A line passing through two points extends to infinity in either direction. Can we call those two directions positive infinity and negative infinity?

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 13

Poll #13: "0,1,2,3... keep counting, you're heading towards infinity. Take a number, divide it in half, divide the result in half, keep dividing... you're heading towards infinity Are each of those infinities the same, or is there more than one version of infinity?"
(Poll ended May 3 2008)

In the end, 53% said there is more than one version of infinity, and the remainder said all infinities are the same. This poll was nip and tuck right to the end, with each answer taking the lead over the other throughout the time the poll was running.

There has been a spirited discussion about questions related to single/multiple infinities at the tenth dimension forum: "Infinity, Eternity, Endlessness and Number System" has generated over 130 comments there so far. I believe part of the controversy here is merely language-related: when someone says "infinity", what exactly do they mean? Are they talking about a number, or a path to a number, or something else entirely?

Interestingly, doing a google search for the phrase "there can be only one infinity" (in quotes) returns mostly theological and philosophical sites. On the other hand, doing a google search for the phrase "multiple infinities" (in quotes) returns mostly math and physics sites.

Plus.maths.org and WorseleySchool.net say there's more than one infinity. PhysicsForums.com says there's different degrees of infinity. Maria Henderson's TCMTechnology blog (a teacher's blog about teaching college math) says there are countable and uncountable infinities, and this blog entry includes a great set of parody lyrics for the song "Hotel California" which explains some of the seemingly paradoxical ideas behind there being multiple infinities. (Edit: Maria has now made her blog accessible by invitation only, too bad. Here's a different link to the lyrics to that parody.)

Robert Kaplan's "The Art of the Infinite: the Pleasures of Mathematics" says there can be infinite infinities. Rudy Rucker's Infinity and the Mind: the Science and Philosophy of the Infinite" is described by Martin Gardner as "a dizzying glimpse into that boundless region of blinding light where the mysteries of transcendence shatter the clarity of logic, set theory, proof theory, and contemporary physics". Click here for a site that talks about Cantor and his proposals that some infinities can be subsets of other infinities, while clicking on the following words takes you to a review of of the book "A Brief History of Infinity", which also mentions Cantor again and his idea that there are multiple infinities, and some infinities are larger than others. This blog says there can be small infinities and big infinities. And finally here is a mathematical dissertation that says there are many roads to infinity.

Infinity is not a number, it's a concept, and even though one infinite set can be a subset of another infinite set, ultimately all infinite sets are the same because they are all of indeterminate size... (just like the point we start from in the tenth dimension animation!). That's why I think "there are many roads to infinity" is a great phrase, as it shows us how different infinities can appear to be of different sizes as we travel towards them, and this is why saying that there are multiple infinities in the tenth dimension animation has strong roots in mainstream theory. In the animation, I say:

"but how can there be anything more than infinity? The answer is, there can be other completely different infinities created through initial conditions which are different from our own big bang."

So, those different infinities we're talking about all come from the same background of unobserved quantum indeterminacy, which is the place where all infinities are the same.

There are many roads to infinity.

Click here for the blog discussing polls 1 through 10.
Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.
Next: Poll 14 - Agree or disagree? Time is a direction, and our physical bodies can't travel in the opposite direction.

Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 12

Poll question 12 - ended April 18 08. "Our universe is not random, our universe is probabilistic, which means that only certain outcomes are available at a certain moment, and those possible outcomes are based upon patterns that exist within the underlying structures of timelessness."
75% agreed, while the rest disagreed, with this statement.

In "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", we talked about the standard example put forth by theoretical physicists such as Greene and Kaku that there is a small probability that any one of us could now pop out of existence here on earth and reappear on the moon. While the likelihood, these experts tell us, of such an event is so small that it would probably take longer than the life of the universe for this event to come to pass, that must also mean that it could happen right now - like any other lottery, it's just a question of playing the odds.

In the blog entry I'm referring to, I talked about the fifth dimension as "probability space", and the sixth dimension as "state space", and how those ideas relate to the possibility of one of us now appearing on the moon. This poll question was about the same idea: is the universe completely random, allowing one of us to now re-appear on the moon, or is that possibility more properly catalogued to be within the sixth dimension's state space?

There have been articles published in magazines like New Scientist lately indicating that quantum outcomes may not be random at all, and that our reality could actually be the result of "hidden variables" or underlying patterns in the quantum fabric: these are ideas that are central to my way of visualizing reality as well. For some related discussions, go to Rupert Sheldrake's www.sheldrake.org, and read about the fascinating controlled experiments by this best-selling author and biologist on telepathy, prescience, and the collective unconscious (it is at this point that some people will now stop reading this blog entry because a lifetime of training has conditioned them to reject such claims on the foregone conclusion that no scientific evidence for such things exists, but that's a whole other story).

If there are probabilistic outcomes that already exist within the fifth dimension, and we are each merely navigating towards a particular tiny subset of those possible outcomes, then all of the above becomes quite easy to imagine. There is a particular future for each of us one second from now which is more likely than all others to occur, but there are other futures contained within our fifth-dimensional probability space which any one of us could actually end up witnessing. Understanding that this probabilistic process is an effect at both the quantum and macro levels, and that what outcome each of us ends up witnessing must also be intimately tied to the trajectory each of us is on, was one of the ideas explored in my book, and in the recent blog entry "Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory".

Other blog entries that relate to these ideas:
Time in Either Direction
The Flipbook Universe
Time is a Direction
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
Local Realism Bites the Dust

Click here for the blog discussing polls 1 through 10.
Click here for the blog discussing polls 11 through 15.
Next: Poll 13 - There are many ways to get to infinity, but is there more than one infinity?