We Start

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


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfRAF400-G0

Here's a video I put up on YouTube last week which seems to be one of those pieces that trigger a strong emotional response - some people love it, some people hate it, not a lot of middle ground here. Here's how I describe it at YouTube:

This presentation is best enjoyed with headphones, in an environment free from distractions. Think of this as a drug-free mind-altering journey through the complex patterns that can arise from simple repeating structures to create our universe or any other.

This is an 11-minute "six-dimensional" audio deconstruction/reconstruction of the five-word phrase that started it all for this project: "We start with a point".

This track draws its inspiration from a famous 1966 experimental piece by Steve Reich called "Come Out":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Out...

What do I mean when I say "six-dimensional" in quotes? It's very simple. The phrase "We start with a point" was placed on six looping audio tracks, the tracks were very gradually moved out of sync with each other as they looped, and it took over eleven minutes for this process to allow the six tracks to reach a point where they all eventually re-aligned with each other. We can say that each of those six tracks is a dimension, providing a unique degree of freedom. Is this recording really six-dimensional? Only in a broad sense of the definition of the term. The point, though, is not what we call this process, but how amazingly complex we find the audio patterns created by this process to be, and how the sound gradually moves from recognizable speech, to an incomprehensible but finely detailed soundscape, and eventually back to where we started.

Last week, in You are a Point at the Center of Spacetime, we returned to the idea that our universe starts from a point, and ends with a point, and everything else between is created by the constructive and deconstructive interference patterns of various waveforms, fractals, and repeating structures. With the idea of you as the observer interacting with these patterns, this is the simple idea being conveyed with this project, and in an artistic way with the above video. Thanks so much to all the people who have written to thank me for this particular presentation!

And PS, as I say at the end of the video, if you'd like to download your own high-quality mp3 of this piece to play on you iPod or other favorite player, it's available for 99 cents from tenthdimension.com/digital . Thank you to tenth dimension fans around the world for your continued support of this project!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Placebos and Biocentrism

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs, August Report

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
. Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09
. August 09 . September 09 . October 09 . November 09 .
. December 09 . Top 100 Blog Entries of 2009 .
. January 10 . February 10 . March 10 . April 10 . May 10 .
. June 10 . July 10 .

Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days. As always, the number in brackets is the entry's position in the previous month's report.

1. New Animation - What's Around the Corner? (10)
2. BIG BANG BIG BOOM (new)
3. Ringing in the Brain, Making Connections (new)
4. Jumping Jesus on YouTube (new)
5. Viendo el tiempo, Sintiendo los Colores, Saboreando la luz (new)
6. Gojira (new)
7. Mandelbulbs and Time (new)
8. Dios 2.0
9. Simulism (new)
10. Time is in the Mind, in FPS (new)


And as of August 26th, 2010, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Jumping Jesus (1)
2. What's Around the Corner? (2)
3. Mandelbulbs (3)
4. An Expanding 4D Sphere (5)
5. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (4)
6. Just Six Things: The I Ching (6)
7. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (7)
8. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (10)
9. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (8)
10. How to Time Travel (11)
11. Augmented Reality (9)
12. Poll 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (12)
13. Dancing on the Timeline (20)
14. Alien Mathematics (14)
15. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (18)
16. Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light (15)
17. When's a Knot Not a Knot? (17)
18. Monkeys Love Metallica (21)
19. Consciousness in Frames per Second (22)
20. The Holographic Universe (13)
21. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (19)
22. Slices of Reality (16)
23. Beer and Miracles (23)
24. Vibrations and Fractals (new)
25. Magnets and Morality (new)
26. The Big Bang is an Illusion (24)


Which means that these worthy submissions are leaving our top 26 of all time list this month:

Poll 46 - Big Bang an Illusion? (25)
Poll 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (26)

By the way, if you're 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.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: We Start

Simultaneous Inspiration

We've talked many times about how we're each navigating through a fifth-dimensional probability space. We've also talked on a regular basis about the surprisingly enlightened Richard Dawkins concept of "memes": information patterns that connect together outside of the linear limits of space-time, an idea very easily relatable to ways of thinking about the additional degrees of freedom afforded by extra dimensions.

I don't want to make too big a deal out of this because coincidences happen, and designers have new ideas, new styles, new colors, that go in and out of fashion on a regular basis. But still, I couldn't let the interesting synchronicity that happened to me this morning pass by without making note of it : the September issues of these two magazines, both of which I subscribe to, arrived in my mailbox this morning, looking surprisingly alike, not just in design and color choice, but in the chosen message. Knowing the lead time that goes into getting magazines like these to the presses, the chances of one being a ripoff of the other's idea has to be virtually nil. Which leaves us with a concept I've talked about many times with this project: simultaneous inspiration. Is this an example of how there are patterns outside of spacetime which we are navigating within, which cause similar ideas to arise with no apparent connection across geography or shared communication? It's an interesting idea to consider.

Here's a couple of paragraphs from chapter five of my book ("Memes, Music, and Memory"), which relate to this discussion.

Dawkins also advanced the idea of the “meme” (rhymes with “team”), which would be an idea that desires itself to continue in the same way that a gene does. Ideas, belief systems, and unique points of view transfer themselves through word of mouth, the media, and so on. But the idea of the meme can also be stretched a bit to include more mysterious modes of transmission, where ideas seem to pop up simultaneously at geographically unrelated points. Sometimes it seems that an idea is just “ready to be born”, and that it may actually be somehow traveling across the dimensions without any visible mode of transmission, another demonstration of our non-local universe. For instance, could this be a way to explain the coincidences of inspiration in scientific research, where unconnected people on opposite sides of the planet sometimes come up with the same groundbreaking theory or invention?

What do you think? Are these two magazine covers pure coincidence, or an example of how ideas and inspiration are connected together for us outside of the limits of spacetime?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: We Start

You are a Point at the Center of Spacetime

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


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

This newly published video accompanies a text blog entry from early this year, called You are the Point. It shows various ways of thinking about how you or I are each right at the center of our own version of the spacetime universe, smack dab in the middle of the gigantic spacetime bubble that physicists call the cosmological horizon. With this entry I show how this way of thinking can be extended up and down through the dimensions, and as we said last time in Flow and the Now, all of these different seemingly incompatible approaches make sense when we accept the conclusion that our "now" is really a constantly moving series of points within the fifth dimension. Each point is causally connected to the next, but the probability space of the fifth dimension shows us that there are always a huge number of potential "what happens next" points that we can't connect to from any particular position within our 5D spacetime tree.

One thing people can have trouble wrapping their heads around is the idea that with each new "point" it seems that the number of possible versions of our universe is increasing exponentially. This is not as daunting as it seems: because all of these points are causally connected, with each new "frame" there are always a certain number of what-happens-next points which cease to become available because of the outcome that has just been observed. This is just as true at the tiny quantum level as it is up here in the macro world, because the two are really all part of a single continuum. To use a macro-world example, if I lose my leg in a car accident, there are suddenly a huge number of next possible versions of the universe which become unavailable to me from that moment forward. Yes, there are new possibilities that now become available as well, but it's important to remember that all of these different possible but logically incompatible outcomes are not connected to our current 5D point. That additional degree of freedom, to connect the Rob-has-two-legs universes with the Rob-has-one-leg universes, is afforded by the next dimension up: the sixth dimension.

By the time we're visualizing the dimensions in this way, we can begin to see how the sixth dimension in its entirety is a landscape containing all possible outcomes for our particular universe. As a point at the very center of spacetime, each of us is not expanding our 5D spacetime tree with each action taken or each random outcome observed: rather, we are navigating through this timeless 6D landscape where everything that can happen has already happened, right from the beginning to the end of this amazing universe we find ourselves to be within.

To finish, here's a video for my song that celebrates the idea of taking this timeless whole that for our universe is the sixth dimension in its entirety and treating that as a single point in the seventh dimension, continuing a simple logical process that began with a point and ends with a point across all of the spatial dimensions.


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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Simultaneous Inspiration

Flow and the Now

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgnkjab1pP4

This past week I've been reading an amazing 1992 science fiction novel by Greg Egan called Quarantine. It relates in a very interesting way to the above new video, which accompanies a blog entry I published in January of this year called Flow. I really don't want to say too much and spoil Mr. Egan's story for you, but consider this: in "Flow", we talk about how there are many things that we do better when we stop "narrating" our actions and find a way to just "be". Driving a car, hitting a golf ball, improvising music, and so on are all activities we perform better when we stop thinking about all the individual actions, and find a way to just flow.

In my book, and in several blog entries including the above vlog, I've talked about Julian Jaynes and his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Is it really possible that human beings have developed this separation, this narrator voice, only within the last few thousand years? Could it be that prior to that time civilization was advanced by humans who only heard their narrator voice within their minds as the voice of gods or ancestors? It's a fascinating thought.

Greg Egan's wonderful book appears to tie in to all this from the quantum viewpoint. Is it possible that our "observer function" is a recent development, and that prior to that time we lived more fully within our fifth-dimensional probability space?

In my book, and in entries like Being More Fifth-Dimensional, The Fifth-Dimensional Camera Project, and The Fifth Dimension is Spooky we've suggested that the "now" of our reality is and has always been a continually evolving point within the fifth dimension. The suggestion here, then, is that when we live in the moment, when we live in the now, it is not that we should be like brain-damaged patients with no memory and no engagement with our future or past selves: rather, we should be fully engaged with the possibilities of both the past and the future, and all the fifth-dimensional connections which manifest themselves within this structure as part of one magnificent flow.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: You are a Point at the Center of Spacetime

Alexander's Time Illusion Game

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxsu8BPK-S0


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ow6VC6NjPNk

This video for my entry "Time and Schizophrenia" did generate some controversy when it went up on YouTube a couple of weeks ago. Some people simply could not get used to the "echo" laid in to demonstrate the concept we're talking about in this video. Why do I have "echo" in quotes? Because that's not quite what's happening here. In addition to my voice, there are five other copies of my voice, each one offset a different amount, and if you watch the five shadowy mouths that are around my head you will see that each is also offset in the same way: starting at the bottom left mouth and working around the semi-circle clockwise, the first one you're seeing/hearing is one second early, the second is .5 seconds early, the third is .5 seconds late, the fourth is 1 second late, and the fifth is - you guessed it - 1.5 seconds late.

As I pointed out in the comments section at YouTube, these echoes do, of course, tie directly into what I'm talking about in this particular video and that's why they're there. If you, like some of the viewers on YouTube, find them too distracting, the answer is simple - turn your speakers down a bit. Because the main voice is 20 dB louder than the echoes, you'll still be able to hear what I'm saying but the echoes will be less noticeable. Same goes for the people who wish the echoes were louder, just turn your speakers up more and the echoes become more noticeable. :)

In this blog entry (Time and Schizophrenia), we looked at studies suggesting that schizophrenic symptoms could be related to the brain not properly "time-stamping" incoming information - a schizophrenic could be watching television, thinking about certain products, then within seconds seeing those products advertised. Did the TV read this person's mind? No. Their subconscious is seeing the products being mentioned, but other parts of their mind are lagging behind, giving them the disturbing impression that the TV knows what they are thinking and is responding to their thoughts!

Another of the things discussed in this blog entry was an experiment reported in a New Scientist article on Schizophrenia written by Douglas Fox. Here's two paragraphs from that article again:

In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane's response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. After the modification, the players' performance initially worsened; but in time their brains compensated for the delay, to the extent that they actually perceived the movement of the mouse and the movement of the aircraft to take place simultaneously.

But the subjects' strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That's uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.

The next day after the above video was posted, a YouTube user named Alexander, who calls himself WASDsweden on Youtube, posted a simple but effective java game he had just created to demonstrate what it would be like to play a video game where your input is delayed by .2 second. If you have java on your computer (most computers do) then you'll be able to play it right away: just click on this link to download the game.
bit.ly/db01k6

Here's a screen shot from the game:

You are the red ship at the bottom of the screen, and you use your mouse to move back and forth across the screen trying to avoid collisions with the green aliens. A check-box at the bottom, when turned on, introduces a .2 second delay in the way the ship responds to the mouse. Try it!

I suspect you would have to play this game for quite a while in .2 second mode before the effect noted in the article above would come in to play, but this is really great that Alexander took it upon himself to create this demonstration. Bravo, WASDsweden!

To finish this entry, let's look at one more just-published video that ties into this conversation: it's based upon my text blog entry, "Time and Music". In this entry, we look at a split-screen video of the classic Canadian rock band Lighthouse, performing with different band members in different geographically-separated studios. My friend Paul Hoffert, keyboard player for the band, sent me this vintage clip and described how he had to play roughly 200 milliseconds ahead of the music he was hearing from the rest of the band (coincidentally, the same .2 seconds we're talking about here) in order to compensate for the latency introduced by the digital hookup that was available for this experimental performance. Trust me! This is not an easy thing to do, and I am fascinated every time I watch Paul playing in this video.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCKDcjBsw1Q

Enjoy the journey!

Next: Flow and the Now

El Tiempo y la Esquizofrenia

We're going to talk about the English version of this video in detail with our next entry, "Alexander's Time Illusion Game". In the meantime, here's another Spanish video translation provided to us by EmpoweredByKnowledge for my video blog entry, Time and Schizophrenia.

Enjoy!

Rob


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

Time is in the Mind, in FPS

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR3kEx53IaY

In this video blog, which is based upon my text blog of the same name (Time is in the Mind), we looked at a study conducted by neuroscientist David Eagleman into the well-known effect most of us have experienced, where time seems to slow down during a particularly intense or dangerous moment. A few entries later, in Consciousness in Frames per Second, we revealed the answer proposed by Dr. Eagleman: it's not that time slows down during these moments, but rather that our memory of the moment is so rich with deep memories being formed as we have the experience. Here's the video I posted last week for Consciousness in Frames per Second:


For a direct link to the video go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txSqMO4OrOY

Months later, in an entry called Entangled Neurons we returned to Dr. Eagleman's idea once again, and here's what I said at that point:

"But Rob," some people have said to me, "the time slowing down effect wasn't something that occurred to me afterwards. It's something that happened to me during the event". And that's absolutely right. This is an instantaneous process we're talking about. The reason time didn't slow down for me while I was eating lunch today was because nothing remarkable happened, no specific memories were formed, and a month from now I will almost certainly not be able to tell you what I ate for lunch today.

I've really come to like Dr. Eagleman's idea because it ties so nicely to the general theme of what we're exploring with this project - our reference frame as conscious observers is intimately tied to what we observe, and how we observe it. There's a constant feedback loop that is occurring as the "self-excited circuit" of the quantum observer (as John Wheeler referred to this process) actively participates in choosing one kind of reality over another.

Next time, we'll look at a simple but effective game designed to explore what happens when that observer circuit malfunctions: "Alexander's Time Illusion Game".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Simulism

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ezPlq2Z59E

Tomorrow's my birthday. Happy birthday to me, wherever/whatever I am right now!

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

A couple of weeks ago I showed you the Augmented Reality my company created to promote the Legendary Pictures re-launch of the Godzilla franchise "Gojira", which is slated for a 2012 release date. It's been really exciting to see all the positive feedback, including this nice review from Robert Silva, who writes for the New York Times' about.com , and this mention on the popular website "Ain't It Cool News".

Life is But a Dream?
With Legendary Pictures' Inception being such a big hit right now, there's a lot of renewed interest in that age-old existential question: is this all a dream? Is there a way for us wake up from the dream and return to the underlying true reality?

The moment in The Matrix when Neo wakes up in the pod raised these same questions. Likewise, these questions come up in the above video, which is based on my text blog Life is But a Dream, a blog which incorporates ideas compiled into a ten minute YouTube movie called The Quantum Apocalypse.

Simulism
Ever hear of simulism? Check out this link: http://www.simulism.org/Simulation
Simulism.org is a wiki created by the Netherlands' Ivo Jansch, and it brings together a number of interesting bits of information about (to quote from the wiki) "the possibility that our existence rests on an unimaginably complex n-dimensional k-state computer grid with rules governing the transition from one state to another". To which I would respond, my approach to visualizing how "ultimately, the ten spatial dimensions represent an information space from which our observed reality emerges as a tiny subset" is another way of approaching the same idea.

One of the pages at Ivo's thought-provoking wiki lists movies that involve people being embedded within simulations where they may or may not be aware of that fact. One film listed there was a new one to me, if you have 19 minutes check it out, I've posted the video here. Created by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman, it's called "Play".


A direct link to the above movie is at http://futurestates.tv/episodes/play

Information Equals Reality
Chapter Four of my book is called "The Binary Viewpoint". Here's a paragraph that relates to all this:

From the binary viewpoint, the tenth dimension becomes like the hugest computer memory in the world, containing every possible “0” and “1” that could be combined together to describe every possible universe. The “holodeck” of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame started out as a “simple” virtual reality simulator, but as the writers developed the series, its power appeared to grow to the point where entire universes could be created within its walls. How would a person’s life inside such a world be different from a life in the real world? The somewhat confusing Matrix Trilogy started out with the same clear and profound concept – our experience inside a system capable of simulating every aspect of reality would, to our senses, be indistinguishable from the experience of actual reality.

Are you and I really living in a vast simulation? What difference would it make if we were or we weren't? Either way, the goal should still be to find ways to enjoy the journey. And if we're not, then why not? Find the problem. Make a change. Make things better.

Rob Bryanton

Next - Time is in the Mind, in FPS

Mandelbulbs and Time

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BscaUbwVR0

One of the things some people wrestle with as they look at my approach to visualizing the dimensions is this: isn't "time as the fourth dimension" a separate concept from 4D geometries such as hypercubes and hyperspheres? The above video is a blend of two previous text blog entries: Mandelbulbs and How to Time Travel. I find it really interesting to contemplate how our observed reality might be derived from extra-dimensional shapes and patterns as we look at these wonderful "Mandelbulb" images, which can be found at http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html .

Here are some other past entries where we've looked at the idea that our experience of "time" is just a unique way of viewing the fourth spatial dimension, and that ultimately there is no disconnect between the two concepts:
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?
An Expanding 4D Sphere
A 3D Sphere on a 4D Hypersphere
Finite but Unbounded
Our Universe as a Dodecahedron
Our Universe as a Point

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Simulism

Dios 2.0

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_olHPI-0tA

I'd like to thank YouTube user "EmpoweredByKnowledge" for volunteering to translate this video to Spanish and create the subtitles. Check out their channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/EmpoweredByKnowledge

The original blog this video comes from is here:
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/06/god-20.html


I'm glad to see this one being brought to a new audience, it's one of my personal favorites. Thank you, EmpoweredByKnowledge!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Mandelbulbs and Time

Jumping Jesus on YouTube

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1drvP3Y3E8

Why do some blog entries take off? The story of my blog entry Jumping Jesus really is quite remarkable. I published this entry on October 24th last year. I've been in the habit of publishing a list of what entries received the most entries each month, along with a list of the 26 most-viewed blog entries of all time for this blog. One month after Jumping Jesus was published, when I filed my end of November report on the 26th of that month, a new entry had vaulted to the top: Jumping Jesus. Remarkably, the entry was not only the most-viewed entry of the month, but the response to that entry was so overwhelming that it in four short weeks it had become my most popularly-viewed entry of all time, a position which it continues to occupy today.

No question, the cheeky irreverence of Robert Anton Wilson's name for this accelerating information stream we're all having to deal with now was a contributing factor to the success of this entry. But a cheeky title will only get you so far: there still needs to be some entertainment value or some engaging content for an entry to succeed like this. Thank you, Tenth Dimension fans, for your vote of support for this particular entry!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Mandelbulbs and Time