Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 21

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

Poll 21 - "This project uses lines, branches, and folds as a way to visualize the relationship between dimensions. A "wormhole" can be thought of as a dimensional folding." Poll ended August 22, 2008.

The image below is from the wikipedia article on "wormholes", and it appears to visually confirm what most visitors to this blog are willing to agree with - 97% agreed that a wormhole can be thought of as a dimensional folding.

It's interesting how some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century - Einstein, Wheeler, Feynman, Hawking, etc. - tried to get everyone to perceive that in the big picture the distinctions between past, present and future are meaningless, because ultimately there is an underlying fabric in which all of those states exist simultaneously. The concept of wormholes, then, which is not just from science fiction but which has been seriously explored by modern physicists such as Kip Thorne and Stephen Hawking, shows us what might happen when that fabric is "folded".

My own project also asks people to use "folding" as one of the ways to visualize the dimensions, and in fact when any dimension is folded it must be folded through the dimension above. This is easy to picture with a flat piece of paper - if that paper were two-dimensional we could fold it through the third dimension to allow instantaneous transportation from one position to another.

So, as Gevin Giorbran so ably demonstrated, "timelessness" is another way of describing that simultaneous underlying fabric that Einstein and those that came after him were trying to get us to imagine. I've been waving a large flag to point out that Einstein eventually agreed with Kaluza that the field equations for gravity and light are resolved in the fifth dimension, and if we are imagining that our 4D spacetime is being bent or folded, what is it being folded through? The fifth dimension. For some reason, that's an idea whose time has not come yet, but when it does I believe many of the mysteries of quantum entanglement, "spooky action at a distance" and other more metaphysical questions will have an answer - it's because our 4D reality comes from a fifth dimensional probability space.

In my blog entry "Wormholes", I played with this idea further - since my way of visualizing the dimensions assigns unique characteristics to each dimension, then that would mean that wormholes through one dimension or another would have different effects. To close, here's the video for that blog entry.


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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Tom Huston Interviews Rob Bryanton

Click here for the archive of polls 1 to 10.
Click here for the archive of polls 11 to 15.
Click here for the archive of polls 16 to 20.

Predicting the Future (Here Come the Aliens)

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.blip.tv/file/1396117

In entries like David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, and Crossed Wires in the Brain, we've talked about how different some people's perception of reality can be from others. One idea that extends from that which we haven't talked about much is that what some people think of as aliens or UFOs might actually be shadows of patterns from other dimensions, or other nearby parallel universes. And last entry, we talked about having 4D Glasses, and how a 4D perspective would be constantly shifting in our probabilistic universe. This time, we're going to take those two ideas together - aliens and predicting the future.

The future is not random, it's probabilistic - which means there are only certain things that can happen now based upon what has already happened. If someone makes predictions that came true, did they do so by seeing the possible futures that lay before them?

My answer would be, why not? If those possible futures already exist within the underlying timeless structures of our reality, then isn't it possible for a person with a higher-dimensional awareness to catch glimpses of those futures?

Early this month I was hearing from people convinced that we would be contacted by benevolent aliens on October 14th: here's one of the many youtube videos posted about that, and here is a blog dedicated to the subject. We've talked about ideas like this at the tenth dimension forum a number of times - and in my book as well, I discussed how there are always a certain number of people making predictions like these throughout history. This fact takes on new significance if we're thinking about the Many Worlds Interpretation: there must be parallel universe versions of our universe where some of these persons were proved right!

Likewise, here's a video that predicts another major terrorist attack on December 13 2008. Will it come true? Or will it be like this year's much promoted ideas that the Large Hadron Collider would be causing the end of the world when it came online? We won't know for sure until we get there.

We all have moments of intuition where we sense future events coming. In fact, our brains are designed to predict the future: if we weren't able to do so we would all keep stepping out in front of fast moving vehicles and dying. A recent issue of Scientific American had an interesting article about optical illusions, and how it is that the brain's constant future-predicting function causes many of the more trippy optical illusions to function (you know, the ones that can seem to pulse or spin or vibrate). Here's an example of one of those kinds of images, this is from optillusions.com:
A direct link to this image is at http://www.optillusions.com/dp/1-25.htm

Of course, predicting what's going to happen one minute from now is not the same as predicting weeks or even centuries ahead - but the basic premise is the same, I believe, it's all part of a continuum. It still comes down to this though - if there are multiple futures, then someone who predicts the future has to be wrong some of the time, or we're back to there being only one possible timeline for our universe and no free will.

Did the aliens show up this month? Not so far as I know. Could they have? If that event is part of the wave function for our universe, then some place else in the multiverse that's what happened in October 2008.

So, if I may be so bold, let me say on behalf of that part of the multiverse: welcome, benevolent aliens!

Here to close, is one of the more popular songs from my project, and this is about the mysteries of the universe and our place within that mystery. The song is called "What I Feel For You".

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w06IRgChaMY

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll Archive 21 - Can a wormhole be thought of as a dimensional folding?

Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.blip.tv/file/1387254

(In case you have trouble reading the text, the comic says "At the premiere of the new 3-D movie, Dr. Mel accidentally puts on his 4-D glasses", and Dr. Mel says "Oh great! Now I know how the movie ends!")
:D
The above comic was forwarded to me by my buddy John, from a link on photobucket: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v45/cosier/ltmrkt050918.gif. You can subscribe to this comic strip, Tim Rickard's "Brewster Rockit: Space Guy" at this link: http://www.gocomics.com/brewsterrockit/. Thanks for thinking of me, John!

One year ago, editor Tom Huston of EnlightenNext magazine (which, until recently, was known as What is Enlightenment? magazine) conducted a telephone interview with me intended for the magazine's WIE Unbound website. Unfortunately, that interview has never been released, as the WIE Unbound team feel that the discussion Tom and I got into would be too difficult to follow for persons not already familiar with my animation or my book. This is a shame, because I thought Tom did a great job of leading the interview along and pulling things back if he felt I was going too fast for persons unfamiliar with the concepts. But now, I'm thrilled to be able to tell you that the publishers of that magazine, as of just a couple of days ago, have kindly consented to release the raw recordings of that interview for me to be able to publish it here. Our plan is to have this 45-minute interview available in this blog entry, and as a downloadable mp3 for people wanting to play it on their iPods and audio players... if everything went according to plan you should be able to do that from the links below.



You can listen to this file right now using the above embedded player. The mp3 for this interview is available for download from archive.org under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike license - click here to download the file.

One of the first questions Tom asked me was about a topic I had not thought about for years: the Trafalmadorians, a fictional race from Kurt Vonnegut's writing, featured prominently in his wonderful novel "Slaughterhouse-Five". Tom wondered how the unique point of view of this alien race could be related to my way of visualizing the dimensions. Like Dr. Mel in the above cartoon, these fanciful creatures were, according to Vonnegut's tale, able to see time the way we see 3D space - with the past and future stretching out like a mountain range into the distance. It's interesting to think of that idea in the context of Dr. Mel's special "4D glasses" from the above comic - all elements of the movie Dr. Mel is about to watch are locked in and predetermined, so the ending that would be approaching within the next couple of hours would be clearly defined, with no possible ambiguity, and would therefore be easily seen by Dr. Mel's special 4D spectacles.

Likewise, in entries like Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, we've talked about visualizing four dimensional shapes. Dr. Mel's glasses would have no problem showing the additional spatial dimension of a hypercube (a four-dimensional cube, with its additional spatial dimension being at an additional "right angle" to the length, width, and depth of the third dimension), because, just like a movie's pre-determined ending, a hypercube's shape would be locked in and unchanging when viewed from the fourth dimension. Also, in my entry "The Past is an Illusion" I talked about a fun little flash game called "Z-Rox" which allows you to guess shapes from the lower dimensions, and the idea that this game can only be played because the shapes you're looking at don't change until you guess correctly.

Thinking about walking around with these 4D specs on in real life, though, would be another matter entirely: since real life is not a movie or a hypercube, there are many possible futures and pasts, so the 4D shapes would be fluid and constantly changing. With this project, I've been insisting that the probability space of those possible branches is really in the fifth dimension, and the fact that Einstein also embraced the idea that our reality is defined at the fifth dimension seems to be a confirmation which, mysteriously, few people ever talk about (except me! :D ).

Is there one "most likely outcome" that could happen one minute from now? Then that would be part of what you see with Dr. Mel's 4D glasses, or with the perspective of the Trafalmadorians. If some new random event or deliberate choice right "now" changed what was most likely to happen one minute into the future, then that would become part of the new landscape seen from this constantly evolving 4D perspective.

Which leads us back to Feynman's "sum over histories" approach to quantum mechanics (also known as the "path integral formulation", interestingly enough), and the Deutsch team's proof that our quantum and macro realities are both part of the same continuum. From the 4D perspective, we could look at the path from the beginning to the end for our universe and say that there is one path that is more likely than all the others to take place, simply by averaging all the possible paths together. Now, would that be the path actually taken? When you think about it, that's really highly unlikely. That, after all, is the nature of taking averages - there will naturally be parts of the data which fall well outside the norm, but all of those large deviations will cancel out in the biggest picture of all. And in order to the see the "ray" of all possible pasts and futures that could be taken by a subatomic particle, or a human being, or by the universe as a whole, Dr. Mel would have to put away his 4D specs and pull out the 5D ones!

For more about the ideas of the most likely paths for our universe and how that relates to the universe we are actually observing, you might want to check out "Unlikely Events and Timelessness" or "Randomness and the Missing 96%". Next blog, we're going to talk a little more about the difference between the fourth and fifth dimensions with a fun entry entitled "Predicting the Future (Here Come the Aliens)".

To close, here's one of my songs about trying to visualize the biggest picture of all, where Everything is Forever and Everything Fits Together: what if you were to somehow change your perspective so that you could see the universe simultaneously, right from its beginning to its end? The song is called "Big Bang to Entropy".



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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Next: Predicting the Future (Here Come the Aliens)

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - October Report

Click on any of the following to see previous versions of this list:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08 . September 08 .

As of October 21st, 2008, here are the blogs that have seen the most visits in the last 30 days. 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 3 Dimensions (7)
2. Crossed Wires in the Brain (new)
3. Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions (new)
4. The Placebo Effect (new)
5. The Omniverse Almanac and the Federal Reserve (new)
6. The Past is an Illusion (new)
7. The Omniverse Almanac (new)
8. I Know You, You Know Me (new)
9. Foreword to Giorbran's Acclaimed Book (new)
10. Gevin Giorbran - Everything is Forever (new)



And as of October 21st, 2008, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Entries that are new or have climbed this month are marked in bold.

1. Time is a Direction (1)
2. Video Feedback (3)
3. Twisted Dimensions (new)
4. Moving Dimensions and Synchromysticism (17)
5. Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 1 to 10 (2)
6. Daily Parrying (9)
7. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video (13)
8. The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project (4)
9. Magnets and Souls (11)
10. Wormholes (16)
11. The Flipbook Universe (5)
12. Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC (21)
13. Randomness and the Missing 96% (new)
14. The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea (6)
15. Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 16 - 20 (new)
16. The Omniverse (10)
17. Tenth Dimension TagCrowd (7)
18. Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains (8)
19. Unlikely Events and Timelessness (new)
20. Changing Your Genes - Part 2 (new)
21. Google, Memes and Randomness (12)
22. Googling in the Tenth Dimension (14)
23. Hypercubes and Plato's Cave (15)
24. David Jay Brown and Psychedelics (new)
25. The Spacetime Tree (new)
26. Jake Kotze and Mystical Numbers (new)


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. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoying the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses

Scrambled Eggs

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=CFZVd_Ez23g

I suppose you could say this is a continuation of the "Beatles" theme we started with last week's entries "I Know You, You Know Me", and "You are Me and We Are All Together"... since Paul McCartney tells us when he first came up with the melody for his classic hit "Yesterday", the phrase he would sing to himself is "scrambled eggs".

Isn't it funny how we each have our own perspective, and find it so very hard to imagine some other perspective different from our own?

With my project, I've been trying to get people to understand that "time" is just a direction, not a full dimension, and like any other direction there is an opposite direction to "time" that makes just as much sense (north has its south, up has its down, and time has its "anti-time"). This idea is central to the way of visualizing reality that my book and this project is based upon: look up "time reversal symmetry" if you'd like to know more about how this concept of time having two possible directions is an accepted idea from mainstream science. In my blog entry "Time in Either Direction", I talked about physicist Sean M. Carroll's proposition put forth in a recent article in Scientific American, that there could be other universes that operate in the opposite "direction" of time to ours, which means in those universes it would be like eggs could unscramble and go back into their unbroken shell.

For most of us, that thought is unfathomable. What would it be like to live in a universe where every choice, every random occurrence results not in a bush-like branching structure of more possible outcomes, but less?

Even the idea that there are more copies of our universe created through chance and choice takes some getting used to: but the Deutsch team's 2007 proof confirms Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which tells us there is a wave function of possible futures at both the quantum and macro level. Quantum mechanics is one of the most proven theories of reality known today, so a proof that shows there is a direct continuum from the quantum to the macro world is an important breakthrough: this is why New Scientist Magazine called the Deutsch team's proof one of the most significant science stories of 2007. But the upshot of the Many Worlds theory is that right now, if I break an egg, there are other versions of our universe where I didn't break the egg, and still others where I broke more than one egg, and others where I did lots of other things involving much more than just eggs. Each of those other universes exist, but at any particular instant I can only observe one of them.

Clearly, in our universe, eggs can be broken, eggs can become scrambled, and once that has happened they can't be unscrambled. There are an increasing number of possible paths forward, just as there are many ways to break an egg, but none of those possible paths will reduce the options back to a universe where a broken egg can once again become unbroken.

Now, let's look at this idea from the opposite perspective.

Believe it or not, we live in a universe right now where each choice taken, and every random outcome at both the quantum and macro level, results in less and less choices. As we flip our minds into this opposite viewpoint, it's quite easy to see: by observing one possible outcome, there are a huge number of other logical outcomes that are no longer available. If I get out of bed at seven this morning, I am no longer going to be able to get to the versions of our universe where I got out of bed at six. If I go out my front door this morning and turn right, I am no longer going to be able to get to the versions of our universe where I went out my front door this morning and turned left. With each branching universe observed, a huge number of other universes became inaccessible, because they are no longer part of the fifth-dimensional probability set for our universe in it current state.

In one of the more poetic paragraphs from my book, I talked about the "angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler's head"). Isn't it clear that this is why so many cultures regard their children as a sacred trust? A child has a huge set of possible paths branching out into the future before them: but with each choice taken and every random action, some of those potential futures are pared away. From this other perspective, then, it's like we're living right now in a world where eggs unscramble themselves and go back into their shells!

Ultimately, what we're talking about here is timelessness. Some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century - Einstein, Wheeler, Feynman, Hawking, etc. - have tried to get us to visualize that the distinction between past, present, and future is really immaterial. Quantum physicists like Seth Lloyd and Anton Zeilinger often use a phrase that this project also embraces: in the biggest picture of all, information equals reality. So, whether we're talking about Everett's Many Worlds, or just our own universe moving through time, we should really be thinking about how the other possible states already exist, and have always existed, within timelessness.

(diagram from "Everything Forever". Gevin Giorbrans's caption for this graphic reads:
"The order of one type is the disorder of the other.")

When we're thinking about timelessness, all branches exist simultaneously. As we move down our line of time, each new instant takes away a set of possible branches that are no longer accessible, and adds another set of branches that are now part of the spacetime tree for our universe. This double-edged sword that we're thinking about here is the magic of the two kinds of order, grouping order and symmetry order pushing against each other to create the "now" that we are currently observing: and Gevin Giorbran's wonderful and uplifting book Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness gives us a powerful and intuitive way to imagine that process. Click here if you would like to watch the last interview I did with Gevin before his untimely death.

Here, to close, is one of my personal favorites from the 26 songs I've attached to this project: it's about picturing our universe as just one of many possible universes that exist within timelessness. This video was created by Ryan Hill, and the song is called "The Anthropic Viewpoint".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, October Report

You are Me and We are All Together

A direct link for the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbGAPR70tTY

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty... We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.
- Albert Einstein

In David Jay Brown and Psychedelics, we talked about the possibility that psychedelic experiences might actually be used in the treatment of addictions and mental illness, when given in properly supervised circumstances. Though I have no personal experience with psychedelics I'm fascinated when I read about the experiences of others who have gone out to the edges of perception and brought us back some jewels for us all to admire.

Last blog was entitled "I Know You, You Know Me": a phrase from a Beatles song. This time we're using another phrase, this one which John Lennon tells us was based upon an insight that came to him while he was taking an acid trip. (The song this is taken from, "I Am the Walrus", is also quite famously known as a song John Lennon concocted after learning that schoolteachers were incorporating Beatles music into their lectures, and Lennon took great delight in creating a song which would be so deliberately obscure no one would be able to interpret it. Nonetheless, the opening phrase of the song is reported to be a serious effort by Lennon to explain an insight he perceived while under the influence of LSD:

I am he as you are he as you are me
and we are all together

Last blog we talked about the feeling of connectedness that a growing number of people are sharing right now around the world. It's so easy to be cynical about ideas like this, and yet books by serious scientists like Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, whose "My Stroke of Insight" I have talked about a number of times before, are showing us that there is more than just naive wishful thinking to such an idea: it appears that it is part of our basic human awareness, the underlying seeds of consciousness that make us who we are, that is naturally driven to find the connections of the one to the many.

I don't usually talk about my dreams in this blog, but I had a doozy a few weeks ago which, if you will indulge me, I would like to share.

Have you ever had a dream that seemed to cover an impossibly long span of time? In this dream, I started from my current life, interacted with people in ways that were sometimes wonderful, sometimes frustrating or infuriating, and eventually I died. After a brief break I started another life, this time still laden with the memories of what had ticked me off and what I had enjoyed in my previous life, and this definitely had an influence on my new life and the decisions I made. Again and again I repeated the process, and eventually I started to recognize myself in other bodies, often acting from a certain belief system which was flawed by misunderstandings and bad luck that had come before, and eventually I had lived every life that there was to have lived in the history of the world. I awoke with a feeling that if only we could all have such an experience, we would all be able to understand why so many of us can appear to act with unreasoning negativity - we are all interacting without truly understanding what makes the other person do and say the things they do.

Okay, it was just a dream, everyone has strange dreams from time to time. But since this project has me obsessed with finding connections, I saw an eerie echo of my dream a few days later when I read this passage from Michio Kaku's "The Physics of the Impossible". He is talking about Richard Feynman, whose "sum over histories" method is one of the concepts I have used many times in my book and this blog:

...Feynman revealed the true secret of antimatter: it's just ordinary matter going backward in time. This simple observation immediately explained the puzzle that all particles have antiparticle partners: it's because all particles can travel backward in time, and hence masquerade as antimatter. (This interpretation is still the explanation currently accepted today.)

With his thesis advisor, John Wheeler, Feynman then speculated that perhaps the entire universe consisted of just one electron, zigzagging back and and forth in time. Imagine that out of the chaos of the original big bang only a single electron was created. Trillions of years later, this single electron would eventually encounter the cataclysm of Doomsday, where it would make a U-turn and go backward in time, releasing a gamma ray in the process. Then it would go back to the original big bang, and then perform another U-turn. The electron would then make repeated zigzag journeys back and forth, from the big bang to Doomsday. Our universe in the twenty-first century is just a time slice of this electron's journey, in which we see trillions of electrons and antielectrons, that is, the visible universe. As strange as this theory may appear, it explains a curious fact from the quantum theory: why all electrons are the same. ...Maybe the reason is that the entire universe consists of the same electron, just bouncing back and forth in time.

Feynman's crazy notion about one single electron, and antimatter particles traveling backwards in time grew into his theory of quantum electrodynamics, which has been experimentally verified to one part in 10 billion, making it one of the most accurate theories of all time. Feynman and his colleagues were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1965 for this discovery. If you click here you can read his Nobel acceptance speech from that year, which is an entertaining and insightful exploration of the creative mind.

Could our universe really have only one electron, whizzing back and forth within timelessness to create the trillions of electrons we see at any particular "now" for our universe? Could consciousness be the same, only one consciousness traveling back and forth across time, experiencing the endless complexity of our universe from a unique perspective each time, but ultimately seeing itself complete the same journey over and over again? Perhaps John Lennon and Richard Feynman were thinking about ideas that were more similar than either of them could ever have realized.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

PS - Since we've been talking about Beatles music, let's finish this entry with what I would consider to be the most Beatles-esque of the 26 songs I've written for this project, and it even begins with a mention of Paul McCartney, who reports that the first time he smoked marijuana he had the insight that there are seven levels to our reality. A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs


Next: Scrambled Eggs

I Know You, You Know Me

(October 9th 2008 would have been John Lennon's 68th birthday. Happy birthday John, where ever/what ever you may be right now.)

A direct link to this video is at http://www.blip.tv/file/1345477

What can I say? I'm from the baby boomer generation, and I remember the intense excitement of the Beatles' influence in the 1960s. As a tribute to those times, this blog and the next ones are using Beatles lyrics for their title: today's entry "I Know You, You Know Me" is from the song "Come Together", a call to action if I've ever heard one.

Whether you're talking about the sixties, or today at this very minute, the overwhelming feeling that we are all part of something big, a wave of change sweeping the planet, is a powerful experience. Today, there are people all over the world who are coming to believe that their new-found common ground of connected experience is going to allow them to make a difference, in ways that the baby boomers could only dream about.

As I've said before: it's all about connections. I believe that each of us every day are witness to emotional and intellectual connections across time and space that reveal things about the underlying structures of reality, and all we have to do is open our eyes to see.

A New Way of Visualizing
I came up with my way of visualizing reality over twenty years ago while working on the music for a play about the end of the world. I kept drawing pictures of branching timelines and folded dimensions on napkins, some people got it and many didn't, but I remained convinced that I had stumbled upon something that revealed a basic truth about our reality. After an accident during surgery in 2004 resulted in me almost bleeding to death on the operating table, I woke up saying to myself "I have got to get this idea out into the world" and eventually that's what I've done. It's all about connections, and finding the common experience that each of us shares without even realizing it.

An Interconnected System
Marvin Minsky talks about each person's consciousness being made of an interconnected, multi-layered system. Douglas Hofstadter talks about the systems within our consciousness that we share with each other across time and space. My approach builds from their ideas, says that we are not each a self-contained soul, but rather an interconnected collection of memes across time and space. Some of us are more connected to each other than others, because our systems overlap more! I've written a lot about all that in my book and in my blog.

My song "Connections" is one of the 26 songs attached to this project that explore the cloud of ideas related to this project, and the last verse of the song takes the idea of each of us each being part of a larger system to its logical extreme:

I think I met myself today
I think I saw my eyes
Another me in another body
Livin another life

If you've ever had that experience you know exactly what I'm talking about. Sometimes you can just look into someone else's eyes and say to yourself "I Know You".

Saying "I Am You" to somebody else who has not worked through this line of reasoning will, in most cases, not be something they can accept. We each know there is something unique about our own awareness: but the idea that your or my individual consciousness is part of a much larger Observer system makes as much sense from a quantum mechanics viewpoint as it does from a spiritual/metaphysical viewpoint. In my book I said this:

Whether the observer came into existence 13.7 billion years ago or one second ago, the result will be the same: out of all the possible timelines which could have existed prior to this moment, through the act of observation we are now experiencing one of them as our own present, and our own history.

The reader may notice here that it would be very easy to substitute “God” or “The Creator” in place of “the observer” in the above paragraphs. In fact, if the reader is comfortable with the concept of each of us being an expression of God, “created in His/Her image”, each with a holy spark within, then the two viewpoints are quite compatible. On the other hand though, the image of a God who is separate from, standing in judgement of, and meting out punishment to us all is much less compatible. What we are describing here is a reality where each of us is creating an expression of a specific aspect inferred within the “white noise” of the tenth dimension through our individual roles as quantum observers. If the reader finds it easier to accept the phrase “I am an aspect of God” than they do the previous sentence, then they should feel free to use that as their jumping off point instead. As we discussed before, the tenth dimension as we are conceptualizing it here is really the boring part of our discussion, because it simultaneously contains all possibilities. If we choose to imagine a Creator-God who is manifesting Himself/Herself through each one of us, we are imagining an observer who is cutting cross-sections out of the tenth dimension to examine the much more interesting and highly detailed subsets of reality which are contained within the dimensions below.

In We're Already Dead (But That's Okay) I called it "option-itis": if there are too many choices, things become less interesting, or they become overwhelming. As I've said many times before, thinking about all options simultaneously is not something we can easily do, which is why this way of visualizing the dimensions works: because it takes all the options of one dimension, adds another new set of options with an additional dimension, and continues the process all the way up to every possible expression of the information that becomes our reality in one enfolded, simultaneous state. With this project, I'm calling that state the tenth dimension, but in doing so I always want to make sure people recognize that this "perfectly balanced state that holds everything else within it" has many other names!

Here's something I wasn't aware of: human beings are genetically extremely similar to each other, much more so than other animals on our planet. According to a recently released study, the genetic record indicates that about 100,000 years ago we as a species were almost wiped out - there were only a few thousand, perhaps even only a few hundred of us left! So, in that regard, the idea that we are all connected together has a very real physical and genetic explanation. Next blog, we'll continue with our Beatles titles and our discussion of the ways we're all connected together with an entry titled "You Are Me and We Are All Together".

To finish, here's a song about the parts of our consciousness that we share, and which exist outside of our physical bodies: "I Remember Flying". A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Soe2swgtsE


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

The Omniverse Almanac and the Federal Reserve

About ten days ago I published an entry about The Omniverse Almanac, and the website extramarbles.com where you can read an excerpt from this new trilogy. This is the vlog for that post again, this video is hosted at revver.com:

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

I got a good chuckle when I went to the above revver link and saw the comment a visitor called "Dreamworker" had posted there:

According to The Omniverse Almanac, Stephen Hawking is actually one of the few very cool people inhabiting this planet, along with Johnny Depp, Steven Splielberg, Jessica Biel, Justin Timberlake, Angelina Jolie, Harrison Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Rob Bryanton, Bruce Willis, Scarlett Johansson, Kate Moss, Ridley Scott, Tim Burton, Riccardo Mariti, Tom Cruise, Laurence Dale and the Dalai Lama....

Woh, that's quite a list, isn't it!

Here's something else I'd like you to look at now.

If there were no debts in our money system, there wouldn't be any money.
- Marriner Eccles, Governor of the Federal Reserve, 1941

Over at the tenth dimension forum last week, one of our regular contributors, "Millsley" posted a link to this new two hour movie, "Zeitgeist: Addendum". I watched the first 45 minutes, which shows a thought-provoking explanation for our world's current financial crisis, and the above quote which appears in the movie sums the situation up in a way that I've never seen it explained before. I wrote back to Millsley saying "thanks for the scary movie". What I was then surprised to discover is the second hour of the movie makes lots of suggestions for ways of getting out of the mess we find our world to be in, and some of the ideas in this movie's second half seem very connected to the Imagining the Tenth Dimension way of viewing things. While the movie does come down hard on organized religion near the end of the video, ultimately it says something I agree with: that there are truths at the core of the world's religions which have value, and that many of the problems with organized religion have arisen from greed and ego, and not from those core values. Please consider watching this movie in its entirety, and see whether you come away with the same hopeful feeling I did.



A direct link to the above video is at http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7065205277695921912

And finally, last week I told you about how I'm now responsible for Gevin Giorbran's book Everything Forever following his death, and showed you a free sample of the opening three chapters. Now, I've also posted the opening 3 chapters of my own book at the same site, Scribd.com:

Imagining Tenth Dimension Sample - Upload a Document to Scribd

To view this pdf file in its own window on your browser, click on http://www.scribd.com/doc/6335767/Imagining-Tenth-Dimension-Sample

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

P.S. - Today, October 9th 2008 would have been John Lennon's 68th birthday. The next three entries have Beatles lyrics for their titles, starting off with "I Know You, You Know Me".

The Past is an Illusion

A direct link to the above video is at http://revver.com/video/1210768/the-past-is-an-illusion/

This separation between past, present and future is only an illusion…
- Albert Einstein

Physicists and philosophers often say it: "time is an illusion". But things change, things move, and it takes “time” for those processes to occur. What are we supposed to be imagining if the distinction between past, present and future is really only a persistent illusion? What we’re talking about here is that our experience of “time” from instant to instant is really just a very narrow view of a much larger picture.

Back in a blog entry called "What Would a Flatlander Really See?", we talked about how a 2D Flatlander's vision would be even more limited than most of us can imagine. One of my sons recently sent me a link to a fun little flash game that asks you to deduce the shapes of objects and letters as they pass through a plane: click here to play that game. This challenging puzzle game is actually giving you a taste of what you would be able to see if you were an imaginary Flatlander living within a 2D plane.

Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation says that we as quantum observers don't "collapse" the wave function of our quantum reality, we merely "observe" it in a particular state at each particular instant. This time around, we're going to talk about the illusions that we fall into as we observe those waves of possibility that are represented within the "now" that is our universe at this very instant, and how this can cause us to miss the potential that those waves really represent. So... here's a question that is often asked: is it possible for a person to predict the future? If so, doesn't that mean the future already exists and our free will is an illusion?

The "hard determinist" viewpoint, which says everything from the big bang to the end of the universe was inevitable and our free will is an illusion, would seem to be supported by the idea that there has been only one path from the big bang to now, so why should there be more than one path from this moment forward?

Likewise, if I pass a 3D object like a rock through a 2D plane, it does indeed appear that what is going to pass through has already been predetermined. Imagining that rock is really 4D since it exists not just within space but within time doesn't seem to make much difference, because a rock is still most likely going to be the same rock with the same shape five minutes, five months, or even five years from now.

We need the 4th dimension for change in the 3rd dimension to occur
But what about passing through a 4D human, capable of moving, dancing around, bending over and touching their toes, and doing all the other things their free will allows them to do? As that 4D person passes through the 2D plane, their shape will be unpredictable, and every time they pass through the plane there will be different 2D cross-sections visible within the second dimension.

Again, if a 2D flatlander were to somehow record the shape changes that had happened for one particular pass through by that free will human, then the flatlander would have a recording that in their minds was a "history" which, once it happened, would not change again, so a 2D flatlander could convince themselves that what had happened was inevitable if that was their chosen mindset. The flash game we started this entry off with, then, is only able to be played because there is no free will movement in the shapes being presented, and the same 2D pattern is presented over and over until you guess correctly.

Many Worlds, Many Branches, Many Histories
The quantum physics answer, promoted by respected experts like John Wheeler and Richard Feynman, is that the past has a certain amount of flexibility just as the future does, and that there are many ways we could have gotten to our current "now". Feynman called it the "sum over paths" or "sum over histories" concept, and Wheeler called it the "self-excited circuit" of quantum observation. This was an idea I talked about in my blog "Boredom and Consciousness Part One", in which I discussed the serious proposition from quantum physicists Lawrence Krauss and James Dent that our 1998 observation of the accelerating expansion of the universe has hastened its end!

This doesn't mean, by the way, that I'm claiming that simply through the act of observing we can make impossible things happen: this was the subject we explored in my blog entry "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic". But it does mean that if there are certain things about our history that were not completely locked in, that had elements that were indeterminate, then those things are part of a cloud of possible paths that we could have traveled upon to get to our current "now". Physicists Krauss and Dent are talking about extremely large ideas from cosmology, but this idea also works at a personal level: for each of us, there are many ways that the past could have affected us, and until we irreversibly lock in one path or another, that past can effectively be changed (this idea relates strongly to the surprising scientific proof we've talked about before that we are capable of Changing Our Genes). As I've said before, for persons trapped in repeating patterns of negative behavior this idea can offer a way out: because quantum mechanics tells us there are many paths we could have traveled to get to our current "now", this means the past has a certain amount of flexibility which we can take advantage of.

The "Now" is Real, Everything Else is Probabilistic
In my blog entry "Local Realism Bites the Dust" we talked about the Anton Zeilinger team's experiments in Vienna that demonstrate these ideas as well. Is the past really an illusion? Not completely, and Feynman's sum over histories concept demonstrates the same idea: there are many paths we could have traveled to get to the absolutely real "now" that we are observing from instant to instant. I believe that it's time's arrow and the fourth dimension that convinces us that the past is less than it really is. And with my project, I believe the answer to all of this is in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth: that gives us an easily imagined explanation that allows for the straight and unwavering 4D line of time that supports the hard determinists' view, and lets us imagine within the fifth dimension the more probabilistic future (and past!) that quantum mechanics asks us to visualize for the underlying structures of our reality.

My blog entry "What Would a Linelander Really See" offers further explanations of this way of thinking about time and free will. And all of this is part of thinking about the biggest picture of timelessness where, as Gevin Giorbran so eloquently described it, "Everything is Forever".


To close, here's a video created by Ron Scott for one of the 26 songs from my project, and this is about some of those events in the past that can create irreversible changes in the "now" that each of us is currently witnessing. The song is called "Senseless Violence". A direct link to this video can be found at http://revver.com/video/384964/senseless-violence/


Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Next: According to the Omniverse Almanac

Foreword to Giorbran's Acclaimed Book

Last blog, we talked about Gevin Giorbran's "Everything Forever". Here's Gevin's Foreword to that book, which sums a lot of things up quite nicely:

Foreword

If someone picks up this book and reads only this one page I want them to be left knowing what is to come in the future. In 1998 astrophysicists discovered that the expansion of our universe is accelerating. We all know the universe is accelerating away from the dense and hot conditions of the big bang, but what are we now accelerating towards? Recently physicists are beginning to state openly that time ends in the future with our universe evolving into empty space. Of course empty space is the ultimate zero, the bottom end to all physics. If our universe reaches zero all space will be stretched perfectly flat and no matter will remain. A single unified space will then extend infinitely in all directions. So is this final space the ultimate nothingness? Actually many physicists and mathematicians think of zero as the most ordered state of all possibilities. Zero is balance. Zero is perfect symmetry. But what is this ultimate zero doing in our future? The answer is that zero is timelessness. Absolute zero is the timeless quantum superposition of all the universes that exist. Zero is the great sum of all. An ultimate zero has always existed, and will always exist. Zero is the native state of existence, or what the physicist David Bohm, Einstein’s favorite student, called Implicate order. It sounds odd at first but we are inside zero.

Today in science the second law of thermodynamics suggests our single universe is becoming increasingly disordered with time. Many scientists claim our universe is winding down and dying of disorder. It is certainly true that entropy, the measure of spent energy, is always increasing. However, half of the second law is wrong. Our universe is not becoming increasingly disordered with time. Quite the contrary, we are headed for zero, and zero is a powerful kind of order.

The timeless zero in our future is the internal complexity of everything and the outer simplicity of nothing at the same time. There cannot be the simplicity of the single whole without all the inner complexity of universes that enfold into and create zero. What zero is not, is nonexistence. As Parmenides said, nonexistence cannot be. There is no state more extreme, either less than or more than the perfect zero. Zero is the default setting of reality.

The big mystery of “why is there something rather than nothing?” is answered simply by understanding that nothing still exists. All possible moments of time and all possible universes physically exist simultaneously, because all are merely fragments of a physically real zero. In the same way all colors exist in white light, or just as all positive and negative numbers sum to zero, all the moments of time sum up to construct a greater balanced whole we call zero. Zero is like a whole pie that can be sliced up infinitely many ways, but always remains a single whole. It is a difficult mental switch to adjust to, but everything we know is less than zero, not simply more than nothing. And so our beautiful universe is not dying. The very surprising purely scientific truth, as explained in this book, is that our universe is in the process of merging with the timeless sum of all, with the infinite whole, with everything forever.

In case you missed it, the following video explains the very unusual circumstances that have led to me now being in charge of the promotion and distribution of Gevin's final masterwork.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTVyPog9-_U


Finally, I recently came across a cool service called "Scribd" that allows you to embed pdf files into your blog. So here, to conclude, is a sample of the opening few chapters of Gevin's book, "Everything Forever". If you would like to buy a copy in hard cover or soft cover, please visit www.tenthdimension.com/store, or if you would like download a non-copy-protected pdf of the full 348-page book, please go to www.tenthdimension.com/digital. Profits from the sale of Gevin's work will go to the Gevin Giorbran Memorial Fund.

Everything Forever Sample - Upload a Document to Scribd

To see this document in a full screen on your browser, click on this link: http://www.scribd.com/full/6299234?access_key=key-1vasx9tzpi40k9rspqpq


Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Past is an Illusion

Gevin Giorbran - Everything is Forever

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTVyPog9-_U

Seven months ago, my good friend Gevin Giorbran, author of "Everything Forever - Learning to See Timelessness", took his own life.

On the day he died, he had packed up his computer and shipped it to me. When it arrived here at my studio I found on the hard drive all of his research, the master files for the four books he had written during his lifetime, and hundreds of other files with various essays and other snippets of writing that he had authored. I was completely mystified. I sent Gevin multiple emails that day asking if this was a present to thank me for helping to promote his book, but received no response.

The day after the mysterious arrival of the computer, I received a letter from Gevin, asking that I take over managing his website and book because he would no longer be able to do so. Needless to say, I was devastated by the news of his passing: but in the weeks that followed, once I had accepted that he was truly gone it fell to me to begin keeping his website up and running and handling various aspects of his company and projects.

Gevin's stated wish in his letter was that I be given full rights to his work. So, in order to be able to honor the wishes of my departed friend, and with the co-operation of Gevin's family, a legal transfer of ownership has been completed and Gevin’s body of work is now my responsibility. “Everything Forever – Learning to See Timelessness” can now be bought directly through the Tenth Dimension store in hard cover, soft cover, or as a downloadable pdf. It also continues to be available through Amazon, Amazon UK, and various other online booksellers.

Why did Gevin honor me with this? His letter is very clear: "If you don't keep it going no one else will". Regular readers of this blog will know that I have been recommending this book since I first discovered it in the spring of 2007, and that I feel Gevin's work is an invaluable companion piece to my own project. When Gevin felt he could no longer carry on, he passed an important responsibility on to me, and the preservation and advancement of Gevin's ideas is a privilege that I respectfully embrace.

Prior to 1998, Gevin Giorbran authored three books in which he described in detail how our universe eventually ends, as space expands perfectly flat and time reaches absolute zero. In 1998, when astrophysicists discovered the expansion of the universe is in fact accelerating towards absolute zero, it became apparent to Gevin that he needed to refine and polish the presentation of his ideas in order to better communicate them to the scientific mainstream and the general public. Everything Forever is Gevin's masterwork, in which he finally accomplished that goal. I believe the value of his insights was only just beginning to be recognized: go to Amazon.com and you will see that "Everything Forever" has received very high praise from discerning reviewers:

A Brilliant Jewel
By P.J Young

Gevin Giorbran, in his book Everything Forever, premises much of his insight on the idea that what is "real" are not only the states the universe empirically occupies but also the states the universe can potentially occupy. These potential states are not mere abstractions or conceptual titillations; rather these implicit states are of immense ontological relevance when we consider the full landscape of the universe throughout time. Indeed, as time is concerned, Giorbran notes that it is more than temporal horizontal movement; time also has a vertical dimension where potential states of the universe are playing out within the "adjacent possible" - a term he openly borrows from Stuart Kauffman. Giorbran's universe is much like a brilliant jewel that shines in many different ways depending on one's pathway through it, but ultimately, the jewel, or the universe when considered as a whole, is unchanging and unchangeable.


Moving toward symmetry
By David J. Kreiter, author of Quantum Reality: A New Philosophical Perspective.

In this exhaustive masterpiece Gevin Giorbran gives us a unique and original "hypothesis of everything". From the big bang, or Alpha state, to the final Omega state, the universe is not winding down as the traditional explanation of the second law of thermodynamics is currently understood. Rather, the universe is going from one type of order, "grouping order" to another type, "symmetry order".

Time, energy, the forces of nature, and meaning are all a result of the universe moving toward its most probable future, a future of perfect balance.

According to Giorbran, energy is a product of imbalance, and time is simply the transformation of matter into the fullness of space symmetry.

Gravity can be understood as pockets of "time in reverse". Gravity represents our past pulling time backwards. The electromagnetic force represents the arrow of time moving toward the future. The opposite charges of the electron and proton are simply the tendency of these particles to seek balance. "Forces are simply the shapes of probability waves, and those shapes bond particles together, in groups, in lattices, in symmetries."

The past and the future are quantum potentials, and conscious beings are continually creating the most likely futures and the most likely, consistent pasts. Meaning arises as a result of the decoherence of these potential states.

"Everything Forever" is the most significant book concerning the nature of reality I've read in years. I highly recommend this book for those looking for a simple and elegant hypothesis of the infinite, meaningful universe.


The Universe is NOT winding down.
By "Jerry"

"Everything Forever" articulates Einstein better than I have ever read before. I had to read page 25 to my electrical engineering students. Gevin Giobran uses concepts of other great physicist and folds them into his own concepts of time and the Universe. Reading is laborious at times but the book demonstrates that in order to explain "what is" one must consider all possibilities of what could have been but is not. This then places a boundary, or shape on our thoughts.


GENIUS
By Dr. Lee Price

Giorbran's latest book is pure genius. Well thought out, rewarding and thought provoking. He takes the concepts of time, anti-time and timelessness and makes them easy to grasp. I particularly enjoyed the section on how the future helps arrange the present. I wish I could be around in a 100 years to see how current theories were altered by his contributions. You will read this book more than once.


Exploring Time
By J. S. Parker (Portland, OR USA)

Understanding time is key to understanding cosmology. Despite its ubiquitous presence in our daily lives, however, time is an elusive subject. Giorbran has done a marvellous job of pulling together all the various aspects and understandings of time into a readable and, more importantly, understandable framework.

His reviews of various theoreticians in the history of the subject are excellent. He has a unique ability to take complicated concepts and explain them simply, but comprehensively. It is the best summary of Boltzmann's work leading to the second law of thermodynamics that I have found. The relativistic concepts of Einstein and even Stephen Hawking's "imaginary time" are explained in a surprisingly graspable manner.

However, it is not simply another summary of past and current thought. He develops his own ideas on the nature of order (what he calls "grouping" and "symmetry" orders) that provides the basis for his conclusions on the nature of time as we experience it and timelessness as can be experienced--the subtitle of the book is "Learning to See Timelessness". And it is in these concepts of order and timelessness that he lays his foundation for re-establishing meaning and purpose in the evolution of the universe.

The book is solidly based in current scientific understanding of cosmology. But he integrates these understandings in a new and exciting framework. Whether one agrees with his ideas or not, the book will open many avenues for thought and exploration. The quotations and references that are interspersed throughout the chapters provide additional viewpoints as well as providing an attractive format. There are multiple illustrations, pictures and charts which enhance and clarify the text.

The book is clearly the result of a long and thoughtful exploration by the author. It is one that will enrich any reader.

Through our respective projects, Gevin and I had each come up with useful ways of visualizing the timeless background that our universe or any other universe springs from, and I am proud of the fact that Gevin devoted several pages of his book to an explanation of why my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project is as worthy of serious consideration as Gevin's concepts from Everything Forever have proven to be. In the year prior to his death, he and I had many fascinating and challenging discussions about the ramifications of the huge cloud of ideas surrounding our projects: we both shared a feeling that it is just a matter of time before our ideas will become integrated into mainstream science, and we shared our frustration that that time is not here yet.


If Everything is Forever, where is Gevin now? Life is full of mysteries. As Max Planck said: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” Regardless of where you think Gevin is right now, he, like all of us, is part of the information that becomes our reality--a pattern within timelessness--and that will always be true.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Foreword to Gevin Giorbran's Acclaimed Book

PS - to close, here is the last video interview I conducted with Gevin Giorbran, as it turns out this is just a few months before his death.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SI5MgGnP1g