Psychedelics and Surprises

Happy Hallowe'en! One of the surprises for me with this project was how many people from the psychedelics community have embraced this way of visualizing the dimensions: for instance, author and research scientist David Jay Brown, a world-renowned expert on psychedelics, said this about my book: "Imagining the Tenth Dimension is one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered." With no psychedelics experience myself, I find this particularly fascinating: in this blog, I've talked about Graham Hancock's amazing book Supernatural, which advances the idea that persons around the world and throughout human history have had experiences and visions when they are in altered states of consciousness (whether those are self-induced trance states, or through the use of psychoactive substances) that show remarkable similarities. Do such experiences "lift the veil" so to speak, and allow people to see actual aspects of the extra dimensions? It's a possibility I find very attractive. In my book and this blog I've explored many other more "out there" concepts that can tie to this: are prescience, deja vu, out of body experiences, lucid dreaming, perhaps even ghosts and spirit voices all examples of how there are patterns of awareness which exist outside of our limited space-time window into reality?

Another of the surprises for me with this project was the people who looked at my helix logo and presumed this was all about Kabbalah, because of the similarities to The Tree of Life (pictured at left). Yes, I see the connections, but I don't recall ever seeing the Tree of Life until after my book was published and comments started to come my way about this coincidence. What I find particularly interesting is that there are schools of thought within the Kabbalah which  teach that we can divide our reality into three triads, which can be summed up as the material, the moral, and the intellectual. In the last chapter of my book, I reached a similar conclusion that there are three systems interacting through constructive interference, all of which in their unobserved state can be assembled into the tenth dimension as a "point" of indeterminate size. Those three systems are 1) the physical world, 2) the quantum observer who through constructive interference is actively engaged in observing specific aspects of the other two systems, and 3) the "information equals reality" world of memes, patterns of grouping, or waveforms. Likewise, it's interesting to relate this to Popperian cosmology: philosopher Karl Popper proposed that there are three worlds: the physical, the mind which observes, and mental patterns of information (I talked about all this in greater detail in my blog entry Three Becomes One). Is this recurring idea that there is a physical world, a world created by observation/participation, and an underlying realm of information another example of how Imagining the Tenth Dimension plugs into some deeper truths about our reality? I believe it is. And constructive interference is an important phrase to keep in mind through all this, as it applies to quantum mechanics, the universe as a hologram, Wheeler's self-excited circuit, and the role of life and consciousness in creating this universe or any other.

Next: Observers and Addictions

Edit: The day after this blog was published, my friend Pete Chema pointed out a new article that really ties nicely to this discussion about whether some psychedelics visions might be glimpses into something that is real but "outside" our spacetime reality. Here's a link to the article: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20978-drug-hallucinations-look-real-in-the-brain.html

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - October 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 . August 10 . September 10 . October 10 .
. November 10 . December 10 . Top 100 Entries of 2010 .
. January 11 . February 11 . March 11 . April 11 . May 11 .
. June 11 . July 11 . August 11 . September 11 .


Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days.

1. Imagining the Second Dimension
2. New video - Poll 77 - Living in a Simulation
3. New video - Poll 78 - LHC and Extra Dimensions
4. New video - Poll 79 - Gravity from the 5th Dimension?
5. Imagining the Fifth Dimension
6. Imagining the Third Dimension
7. Imagining the Fourth Dimension
8. New video - The Pencil Visualization
9. Imagining the Sixth Dimension
10. New video - Poll 80 to 82 - Right Angles and Reality


And as of October 26th, 2011, 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 (4)
5. The 5th-Dimensional Camera Project (5) 
6. Just Six Things: The I Ching (6)
7. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (8)
8. Is Reality an Illusion? (7)
9. Vibrations and Fractals (10)
10. Light Has No Speed (9)
11. Gravity and Love (11)
12. Bees and the LHC (14)
13. How to Time Travel (12)
14. Our Universe Within the Omniverse (15) 
15. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (13)
16. 10-10-10 Look Before You Leap (17) 
17. Dancing on the Timeline (16)
18. Time Travel Paradoxes (18)
19. Magnets and Morality (19) 
20. Changing Your Brain (20)
21. Monkeys Love Metallica (21)
22. Simultaneous Inspiration (22)
23. Complexity from Simplicity (24) 
24. Consciousness in Frames per Second (23) 
25. Polls Archive 54 - Is Time Moving Faster? (25)
26. Poll 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (26)



Which means that there are no new entries to our top 26 of all time list this month.


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. Also, a lot of people are enjoying discussing these ideas with me on my facebook page: facebook.com/rob.bryanton .

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton


Next: Psychedelics and Surprises

Happy Hallowe'en!

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeDNdBl6PV4

Here's a little augmented reality gag for your iPhone or Android phone from my studio, Talking Dog. Go to www.talkingdogstudios.com/ar/halloween and use your phone to scan the QR tag there to get started. Happy Hallowe'en!

Next: Psychedelics and Surprises

Timelessness and the Ultimate Ensemble

"The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. Our universe arises from a breaking of an underlying symmetry."

- Rob Bryanton

If the universe had the least amount of entropy at its beginning, and Schrödinger described life as a unique process which creates "negative entropy", does that mean that in a sense he thought the universe was the most "alive" back at its beginning? Gevin Giorbran's remarkable insight, in his book Everything Forever, was that we're not moving from low entropy to high entropy with our arrow of time: instead we're moving from a high grouping order to a high symmetry order. I like this because it allows for a way to imagine a universal creative force which expresses itself throughout the world line of the universe, and which makes sense when we view our universe as a single data set from a timeless perspective. From our own vantage point, then, both time and anti-time represent the same thing: a naturally occurring return to balance. Ultimately our universe or any other arises from a breaking of symmetry, and "outside" of this system is a return to the underlying fabric of reality: the unobserved tenth dimension, the Ultimate Ensemble, the Teilhardian Omega Point, the Godelian "outside the system", the computational underpinnings behind digital physics or Tegmark's Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, ultimate enlightenment, or the Omniverse. And that's what we're visualizing with every single dimension in this project - how can we perceive any dimension from "outside" of itself, from the truest perspective, which is timelessness?

The video for Imagining the Ninth Dimension provides one way of thinking about this – it shows how each dimension, perceived in its entirety as a single timeless point, becomes a point on the surface of a finite but unbounded hypersphere in the next dimension. Physicist and author Frank Wilczek recently put forth two papers which add a very interesting spin on this idea of extra-dimensional patterns that reside within a timeless whole as well. Wilczek proposes that just as there are naturally emerging crystal structures in the third dimension, this same effect could be happening within what he calls “Time Crystals” as well. Does a phrase like Time Crystals sound like science fiction? You bet it does, but Frank Wilczek is a Nobel prize-winning physicist so we should take a serious look at this creative new idea.

And speaking of novel approaches to visualizing reality, next entry is going to be called Psychedelics and Surprises. Enjoy the journey! 


Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

What is Life?

If we're trying to build an image which reflects "all aspects of reality", how do life and consciousness fit into this picture? Erwin Schrödinger's definition of life is that it's "a unique process which creates pockets of negative entropy". Physicists talk about the beginning of the universe being the most highly ordered/lowest entropy version of our universe, and how the "arrow of time" represents an overall climb in the amount of entropy, despite the efforts of life within these little pockets where (as Dylan Thomas put it so beautifully) it 'rages against the dying of the light'. This theme of life and consciousness being like a fire, a spark, that somehow engages with space-time and our fifth-dimensional probability space to keep itself moving forward is the theme of a number of the 26 songs I created for this project. I talked about those songs and this way of thinking about life and creativity in a blog entry called Novelty.

The phrase "self-excited circuit" comes from a paper published in 1979 by physicist John Wheeler, you can read about it in the wikipedia article on Digital Physics. As part of his "Cognitive-Theoretic Model of the Universe (CTMU)", Christopher Langan (who some readers will know as "the smartest man in America") has published an animated version of the simple drawing Wheeler created for his paper on the self-excited circuit, showing a "U" (standing for universe), incorporating an eyeball representing the quantum observer, looking at its "tail" that represents the "information" side of the "information equals reality" concept that we talk about regularly with this project. Wheeler also coined the phrase "'it' from 'bit'"which ties nicely to these discussions.

So is the universe itself a self-excited circuit, that was most excited at the big bang and is slowly winding down from there? Or was the universe in a superposition of possible states until life first emerged somewhere, and began observing more organized versions of the universal wave function from that point on in the world line? The Biocentric Universe theory supports the latter idea. Perhaps Stuart Kauffman's God 2.0 supports the former? I think there's interesting evidence for both ideas, but ultimately I lean more towards the idea that there are organizing patterns in the extra dimensions which exist outside of time and space which have selected this (or any other) universe, and which keep the universe from dissolving into chaos. Love and Gravity is a blog entry from a year ago which takes this idea out to a more metaphysical level if you're interested. I have used similar logic to argue for dark matter and dark energy as evidence of extra dimensions.

In my follow-up book to Imagining the Tenth Dimension, which is a collaboration with visual artist Marilyn E. Robertson called O is for Omniverse, we devoted the letter "J" to John Wheeler:

j is for John Wheeler, a famous physicist
who drew a strange eyeball looking at its tail
as a way to imagine that some branches of our line
might be changed in the past as we look back from today
so the branching tree that extends from "now"
is even more surprising: it branches either way

Here's a video showing the letters "I" and "J" from that book, you can see a lot more if you go to omniverse.tv. 

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA_epL_rEW4

Next: Timelessness and the Ultimate Ensemble

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

New video - Imagining the Second Dimension

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4s1-UR3D21s

Next: What is Life?

Rob on the Peake Experience

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0kZG5pGCPk

You may recall me mentioning Anthony Peake's work a few weeks ago in my blog entry Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension. This week I had the pleasure of appearing on his show The Peake Experience: the above YouTube movie is about an hour and forty minutes of good conversation about the nature of reality and consciousness, and the interesting ways that Anthony's theories can be tied to mine.

Anthony is the author of Is There Life After Death? - The Extraordinary Science of What Happens We Die, and The Daemon - A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self. For more info on Anthony's brilliant work please check out these links:
His website is www.anthonypeake.com
His Forum is at www.anthonypeake.com/forum
His DVD is available at www.logicreality.co.uk/anthony-peake---dvd-the-peake-experience
and His Facebook page: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=596170414

Thank you Tony for the stimulating conversation, I really look forward to us doing this again some time!

Enjoying the journey,

Rob

Next - New video - Imagining the Second Dimension

Connecting Zero to Ten

A number of people who have watched my animation notice that by the time you get to ten in its unobserved state, in a way you're back to where you started - with a point of indeterminate size. As I've said before, this was the intent of the helix logo created for this project - the 0 (or nothingness) and the 10 (or the Omniverse) really are connected concepts, and that's why I represent them as being on a line inside the other dimensions as you can see in the animation we're looking at here. Would this connection allow for a repeating cycle effectively creating infinite dimensions? Though some people have suggested that idea, it doesn't feel quite right to me. The idea that there are really no dimensions, that there are just infinite vectors within one underlying fabric which is dimensionless, actually resonates more strongly for me, because that's a way of describing the tenth dimension using a different mindset.

But personally, I still believe there are good reasons to believe in the existence of extra dimensions beyond space-time, and that there are good opportunities within these paths to the infinitely large and the infinitesimally small for us to consider the continuously repeating recursion that relates conceptually to Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop, or John Wheeler's  description of the universe as a self-excited circuit. In Imagining the Ninth Dimension, we looked at Stuart Kauffman's idea that there is a force for ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, and we'll return to ideas related to all this in upcoming entries.


Next: Rob on The Peake Experience

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

Why Only Ten?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrulvxL1FzY
"Why isn't there nothingness? Nothingness would have been decidedly elegant. In the Ultimate Multiverse, a universe consisting of nothing does exist. As far as we can tell, nothingness is a perfectly logical possibility and so must be included in a multiverse that embraces all universes."

- Brian Greene, discussing a concept which with this project we have called the Omniverse, in his book The Hidden Reality

Some people suggest it's arbitrary to stop at ten dimensions. Did we run out of fingers so we decided there couldn't be any more? Indeed, if you're not assigning any meaning to the individual dimensions, then the point-line-plane postulate allows you to keep adding as many dimensions as you want. People also ask Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions? In my book and my blog I've insisted that ten is really all you need to consider all aspects of reality, and that supporters of M-Theory acknowledge that there are ways in which the 11 dimensions they are talking about are functionally equivalent to the ten dimensions string theory is talking about. The graphic at right comes from New Scientist magazine, in a recent special feature called "Instant Expert: Theory of Everything", please do follow the link to read the whole article.

Another way of showing this equivalence is to say that M-Theory proposes ten spatial dimensions plus time. With my project, I say that time isn't a dimension, it's a way of describing change from state to state within any  dimension: so the tenth dimension with no time is the Ultimate Ensemble that Max Tegmark spoke of in his discussion of the different kinds of multiverse, or the timelessness that Gevin Giorbran spoke of in Everything Forever, or the Ultimate Multiverse that Brian Greene refers to in the quote with which we started this entry. As I said in my original animation, if there were no superstrings vibrating in the tenth dimension, there would be no reality precipitated in the dimensions below: no time means no vibrations, no change. And because every one of the spatial dimensions we're looking at with this project are mutually perpendicular to the others, change in the tenth dimension automatically affects the entire system in various ways.

Next: Connecting Zero to Ten

Previously in this series:
Wrapping it Up in the Tenth Dimension
Imagining the Ninth Dimension
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

New video - Poll 83 - Is Energy Not Conserved?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz81EeBp-LY

Next: Why Only Ten?