Poll 87 - Many Worlds, Fossils, and Dinosaurs

Poll 86: "Physicist David Deutsch says that calling Everett's Many Worlds an interpretation 'is like talking about dinosaurs as an 'interpretation' of the fossil record'. Do you agree with him?" Poll ended November 5 2011. 60.8% agreed, while 39.2% did not.

As I said recently in Imagining the Fifth Dimension, I have the utmost respect for David Deutsch, who has been a strong proponent of Everett's theory for many years. The quote we're talking about here was found in Peter Byrne's excellent The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family, a book we've talked about in this blog before, including in an entry called The Quantum Observer.

Like "interpretation", words like "theory" can mistakenly fall into similar territory: in the general public, after all, theory has a fairly loose definition. I could say "I have a theory about what happened to my missing sock" but there's nothing rigorous implied by that statement. A scientific theory, on the other hand, is not just a guess for what might explain the phenomena being studied. As it says in wikipedia:

A scientific theory is a set of principles that explain and predict phenomena.Scientists create scientific theories with the scientific method, when they are originally proposed as hypotheses and tested for accuracy through observations and experiments. Once a hypothesis is verified, it becomes a theory.

Why do we refer to Everett's work as an interpretation, then? In fact, Everett himself called his work the "Theory of the Universal Wavefunction", so he wanted us to understand that what he had produced was much more than supposition. It was, after all, backed up by the equations of the Schrödinger wave function, which underlies the most successful scientific theory of all time: quantum mechanics. As I've said before in this blog, any self-respecting theory of everything has to have quantum  mechanics incorporated within it if it's to be taken seriously.

So what we're left with here is Dr. Deutsch's sly swipe at the Creationist argument that the world was created less than 10,000 years ago, and the fossils must therefore have been placed in the earth at that time. Is that an "interpretation" of the fossil record? Sure it is, whether you agree with it or not. Particularly in the US, this viewpoint does have many supporters as we see in the wikipedia article on level of support for creationism:

According to a 2007 Gallup poll, about 43% of Americans believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." 

In that same article we see that while creationism has strong support in the US, there is a sliding scale of other countries around the world where this is not as prevalent a belief (for instance, about 20% believe this in Italy, sliding down through Norway, Spain, the U.K., Denmark, Sweden, France, and Japan, to Iceland, where less than 10% hold this belief). We also see that amongst persons in the US with education in the relevant earth and life sciences, the level of support for creationism is much much lower: according to a 1987 Newsweek poll of 480,000 scientists, creationism was given support by only 700 respondents, which represents about 0.146%.

So. If one approaches the fossil record from the pre-conceived notion that the earth is only thousands of years old, then a particular interpretation becomes more likely to occur. Why am I going on about all this?

From the outset of this project, I've said that I want to show people ways in which science and spirituality, physics and philosophy, can find common ground. But all of the above appears to point out one of the places where this is not really achievable: either you believe dinosaurs walked the earth millions of years ago or you think the earth was created a much shorter length of time ago than that. Isn't it clear that there's no easy meeting place where those two viewpoints can be reconciled?

Personally, I believe the universe really can be traced back to 13.7 billion years ago. But I've also said that the big bang is an illusion, and the extraordinary initial events of inflationary cosmology are better described as being a part of the process that selects a universe such as ours, though symmetry breaking, from a timeless whole that we might call the omniverse, or which Tegmark calls the Ultimate Ensemble. Still, you may be surprised that there actually is a way to find a meeting between these two viewpoints. Here's what I said in my book back in 2006:

What we’re saying, then, is where you actually began to observe becomes irrelevant. If it tickled your fancy, you could place that first observer at, for example, 6000 years ago. To do so would mean that prior to that time all potential physical realities remained possible within the wave function, and that at that point the observer turned their attention upon our universe and collapsed the quantum wave function into the reality we see around us, complete with the impression that time had actually extended out for billions of years prior to that. But why stop there? It could also be possible then that the universe didn’t actually exist until one second ago, which is when the observer turned their attention upon our universe and collapsed the probability wave function into what we now perceive as our reality, complete with a history which each of us believes we remember. 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.

Is the above paragraph just a Rob Bryanton fantasy? No,  retro-causality is now gaining acceptance within quantum physics. In Evidence for Seeing the Future, we looked at a November 2010 New Scientist article about new papers quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd and Aephram Steinberg of the University of Toronto, expressing the same idea:

But if quantum particles can't discriminate between things that affect them forward and backward in time, that means specifying a final condition can determine what happens before it. "Mathematically, there's no reason why final conditions can't be 'givens' as well and everything has to follow logically from them," Steinberg says.

This all ties together with the multiverse of possible universes, commonly known as Everett's Many Worlds. Since Everett's "Interpretation" fully agrees with the underlying quantum nature of our reality, I would say that Everett's critics are left with finding other ways to explain what physicist Raphael Bousso called the "mother of all physics problems":

"This may seem laughable, but without the multiverse our finest theories predict that empty space should contain about 10 to the power of 123 times more energy than it actually does."

- from an article published in the October 2008 edition of Seed magazine

Is there more than one parallel universe resulting from the quantum wavefunction? Is there a multiverse of other universes, perhaps ten to the power of five hundred other universes as some string theorists have predicted? This is the interpretation that makes the most sense to me, and this is what Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation also tells us.

Where does that leave us? If you don't believe in the multiverse, then my project is not likely to find much that resonates for you, and you and I are going to have to simply agree to disagree. There is a multiverse of other universes, and there are multiple pasts and futures which connect to any particular "now" you or I are observing. While I'm all for finding common meeting grounds between different belief systems, this is where I have to draw the line.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Poll 88 - Is the Sixth Dimension our Phase Space?

Trying to Escape

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

So far we've looked at We All are Chemicals, Gimme a Beer!, and Just a Shy Guy from my 1983 concept album Alcohol and Other Drugs. By the way, this 11 song collection is available for download from tenthdimension.com/digital, thank you to everyone who have already checked out that link.

To recap: these songs were written for a live theatrical show which toured the high schools of Saskatchewan back then, and the subject of this particular song speaks to the eternal problem of being a teenager and trying to figure out where you fit in. Using alcohol or other drugs as a means to escape the pressures of life? Our hero becomes the victim in this song.

Also to recap: these songs feature my friends Cal Harle on drums and Jack Semple on guitars and bass. Since we were recording this in our basements and living rooms using a Tascam 244 and a Tascam 144 four-track cassette machine back in the pre-midi, pre-ProTools world of 1983, creating a song with this many individual parts and only four audio tracks was a time-consuming process involving lots of sub-mixing and bouncing: both Cal and Jack went above and beyond the call of duty to help me create this album, and Jack and I spent many many hours working on the overdubs for songs like this one.

As I mentioned last time, Cal continues to work as a professional drummer, and also works for my studio as a foley artist. His experience and natural feel make him one of the best in the business at both of those jobs. Jack has become a nationally known guitarist, his main focus has been on R&B, but he's proficient at a great many styles: you'll see what I mean if you check out his music for sale on his website.

With Trying to Escape, we never discover the fate of the song's central figure, a boy named Jimmy Smith. Last time, with Just a Shy Guy, we talked about how these songs relate to the idea of our fifth-dimensional probability space, which is a way of thinking about the quantum superposition of different outcomes that are pre-supposed by Everett's Many World Interpretation. Is Jimmy Smith like Schrödinger's cat, neither dead nor alive but both simultaneously, until we observe him? The truth for that famous cat is artificially simple. For Jimmy Smith and all of us, the possible outcomes from any particular moment are immense, and understanding that none of us are trapped into a single path is the power of this approach to visualizing the dimensions.

TRYING TO ESCAPE
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

He was trying to escape
Any chance he would take
To get to something new
Nothin he wouldn’t do
He was trying to escape

Jimmy Smith was a young boy
Never did so good at school
You know his momma always told him
“Jimmy boy, life is cruel
It’s push and shove and give and take but mostly it’s just give
All it takes is one mistake so careful how you live”
Folks in town started talkin when he went to the doctor
Doc said he could see what the problem was

He was trying to escape…

Jimmy Smith at a party
He was like a boy possessed
He would drink down a twelve-pack
You know his momma never guessed
All the jocks never liked him much cause sports just weren’t his thing
Didn’t fit in with the stoners cause he just liked to drink
Sometimes it felt like he was caught in the middle
Sometimes he felt there was nowhere to go

He was trying to escape…

Whadaya think he was thinking of
What was goin through his head
The night he went out on the highway
When he left the road he was goin a hundred and ten…

He was trying to escape
Any chance he would take
To get to something new
Nothin he wouldn’t do
He was trying to escape
He was trying to escape
He was trying to escape

Next: Livin on the Edge of the World

Changing Your Brain

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

I hear from people every day who say the tenth dimension animation has "blown their mind", or words to that effect. I also hear from people who say they've watched the video many times, and that it has changed the way they think about the world. Could my unique approach to visualizing the dimensions really be capable of re-wiring people's neurons?

This is not as far-fetched as you might think. In entries like Changing Your Genes and Changing Your Genes - part 2, we've looked at the startling research showing that changes in lifestyle and attitude can affect not just the way your own genes are expressed, but even what genes you pass on to your offspring. This news flies in the face of the standard twentieth century approach which taught us that the genetic hand of cards we'd been dealt was locked in at conception, putting us on a specific train track defined by whatever genes we had inherited from our parents.

In Placebos Becoming More Effective?, we looked at the difficulties the pharmaceutical industry is encountering, as the placebo effect appears to be becoming stronger over the last twenty years, to the point where even successful drugs such as Prozac (approved by the FDA in 1987), would have difficulty getting approval today. As it said in the Wired Magazine article about Placebos:

Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

I've been suggesting that there could be something about these modern times that is re-wiring people's brains in ways to give them a feeling of greater control over their observed reality (see last entry, The Quantum Observer), and hence the enhanced placebo effect. What do you think is causing this shift?

With Changing Your Brain, part of what we're talking about here is the concept of neuroplasticity: the brain is very adaptable, constantly making new connections. There was a BBC article published last year about how singing rewires damaged brains that relates nicely to this discussion. And Science Daily recently published an article about a new study with far-reaching implications. The title of the article really says it all: Mindfulness Meditation Training Changes Brain Structure in Eight Weeks.

With all that in mind, let's return to my new diagram we've been looking at lately and do a little creative meditation on it. As I've said before, if you click on this image it takes you to a higher-resolution version. If you'd like, print the image out and follow along, or just do the following exercise in your mind.

1. In Einstein's view of the universe, gravity is pictured as a bending of the "rubber sheet" of our spacetime. If our "sheet" was a 2D plane, similar to the piece of paper you've printed your image out on, we'd see this bending as being through the 3rd dimension. But since the "rubber sheet" of our spacetime is four-dimensional, my assertion is that this shows us gravity comes from the 5th dimension.

2. In Light Has No Speed, we looked at physicist Peter Russell's persuasive argument for why, from a photon's point of view, it takes no time or distance for light from a distant star to reach our eye. We can help to visualize this by folding our piece of paper horizontally, so that the upper half and lower half of the image are now touching. Now, the vertical line representing "light" in this diagram has converged, so that any point on the line is in direct contact with any other point. From light's point of view, past, present and future are one and the same.

3. Stephen Hawking has said "there's another kind of time, at right angles to real time, in which the universe has no beginning or end". If our paper image represents 4D spacetime, then when we folded it we were folding it through a space which is at "right angles to spacetime": the fifth dimension, which would be where Hawking's "another kind of time" resides. Since, as Peter Russell says, a photon experiences itself traveling no distance in no time, and its birth and death are the same moment, this also leads me to say that "light is at right angles to spacetime".

4. Spread your paper out flat again. Now, fold the paper the other way, vertically, so that all points on the horizontal line are touching. This is the quantum point of view, where any particle can have an instantaneous effect on another, no matter how far apart they are from each other in the universe. But again, because these effects defy the logic of our observed reality, they are usually portrayed as being unimaginably strange. I would say that imagining how these effects come from the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fifth dimension shows how these "spooky" quantum effects occur.

5. So which is it? Which fold represents the fifth dimension? Well, they both do. And if there was a way to fold our paper so that both folds are happening simultaneously, in the same way that Schrödinger's Cat is both alive and dead, then we would be visualizing the fifth dimension: where Kaluza proved to Einstein that the field effects for gravity and light are resolved.

WHEN Max Planck came up with the notion of the quantum at the turn of the 20th century, he couldn't justify it. Nevertheless, the idea that energy couldn't be split infinitely many times - that there was an indivisible quantum of energy - was the only way he could fit the observed spectrum of radiation from a hot body to a mathematical law. This ruse was, he later said, "an act of despair".

- editorial from January 24 2011 edition of New Scientist Magazine

The predictions of quantum theory have not been contradicted by a single experimental observation, making it the most successful model of the universe ever to have been created. With it, we move from Planck's "act of despair" to a revolutionary understanding of the granular, non-continuous nature of our observed reality. This leads me to conclude that our "Now", despite the apparently smooth and seamless reality we see around us, is really a constantly evolving series of points in the fifth dimension, one planck frame after another.

Does that understanding change our brains? It certainly has changed mine. Next time, we're going to look at how language changes our brains: the entry will be called Language and the Mind.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Three Becomes One

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amcTK7Mnu70

Image from wikipedia: "Borromean Rings".
With my approach to visualizing the ten spatial dimensions, I group three dimensions together, call that a "triad", and condense it into a single entity so that it becomes a point in the next dimension up. By the time I've done that three times, I arrive at ten, the same number which Pythagoras also defined as the ultimate number encompassing all possible expressions of our reality. Let's look at some of the ways that ancient wisdom ties into all this, starting first with this mystical insight from the current Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America:

In a binary, though, every action is balanced by an opposite reaction, so thinking in binaries is very problematic if you want to foster change. If you’re a mage, you respond to dysfunctions of this sort by shifting numbers. The traditional rule here is that numbers always change in a specific order: one becomes two, two becomes three, and three becomes one and shifts to another level. (The reasons for this rule, again, are too complex to go into here.)

- John Michael Greer, as quoted by "tao", from http://drivingsocrates.com/?p=267

When I came across the above text I was struck by how strongly it seemed to relate to the triads from my approach. Here's another quote, this one from a site dedicated to Chinese martial arts:

Then the link between the qi of the earth and the qi of the sky can be formed, causing the practitioner to shape the unity of heaven, earth and person; three becomes one.

The Dynamics of Creation
In Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, I summed up the dynamics of creation like this: "One thing pushes against another, and out pops a third thing". Is this a schoolboy description of sex? Sure, why not! Long before sex came along, there's been single-celled fission, mitosis, a dividing apart: that's one kind of creation, binary and asexual. The other is sexual reproduction, a more robust form of creation because it takes elements from two sources and combines them to create something new. Hegel's dialectic is often summed up in a similar way: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Monad, Dyad, Triad

Pythagoras taught that odd numbers are masculine and divine, and even numbers are earthly and feminine. While such a conclusion might seem misogynistic, it's worth noting that Pythagoras welcomed females into his discipline, and his wife and daughters were accomplished mathematicians. In chapter four of my book, "The Binary Viewpoint", I suggested that the desire to catalog things into yes/no, right/wrong (and so on) tends to be a more masculine approach, while the holistic "yin/yang/both together" tends to be a more feminine one. Does this mean I would disagree with Pythagoras and say that odd numbers are more feminine, because they're less dualistic, less binary? It's an interesting thought.

"One state/an opposing state/both simultaneous" is also, of course, the basis of quantum mechanics, science's most-proven description of the foundation of our reality, and something which I've insisted will eventually be shown to be just as connected to our macro reality as it is to the quantum: it's all part of the same continuum. The June issue of Scientific American has just published an article about the first demonstration of quantum superposition on an object large enough to be seen by the naked eye! This demonstration is a major leap forward: while scientists have previously demonstrated superposition with atoms and molecules, this new experiment shows quantum superposition in an object made out of roughly ten trillion atoms. Suddenly, Schrödinger's cat, usually portrayed as nothing more than a fanciful thought experiment, moves a little closer to being something connected to our actual physical reality.

The Law of Threes
So. Two is a dynamic push and pull, while three is more stable, more balanced. In jokes and in fairy tales, it seems more satisfying when something happens three times. Lots of superstitions gravitate to this number: good luck, bad luck, celebrities dying, and so on are seen to come in threes. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost - entire belief systems are built on threes. To be sure, the phrase "Law of Threes" means a number of things depending upon who you consult, but here's the most popular answer as provided by "Galeanda" at Answerbag.com:

The Law of Threes states "every whole phenomenon is composed of three separate sources, which are Active, Passive and Reconciling or Neutral. This law applies to everything in the universe and humanity, as well as all the structures and processes".

In the final chapter of my book, I reached the conclusion that three systems are interacting, 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, or waveforms.

It's interesting to relate this to Popperian cosmology. Philosopher Karl Popper made a similar proposal that there are three worlds: the physical, the mind which observes, and mental patterns of information. And imagine my surprise to be told that there are branches of Kabbalah which also teach that we can divide our reality into three triads, which can be summed up as the material, the moral, and the intellectual.

Three Threes
Here's an interesting version of my approach to visualizing the dimensions, using ideas connected to the point-line-plane postulate: which, as we've said before, can be used to visualize any number of spatial dimensions.

Start with a point. Choose a second point. Join those two points with a line, you're in the first dimension.

How far away are those two points from each other? Now find an additional point that is the exact same distance away from those first two points but not on the line. What have you created? An equilateral triangle, and you're in the second dimension. The fact that such a triangle can be created with nothing more than a compass and a straight edge is well known to students of sacred geometry and the vessica piscis, concepts we've looked at before in this blog.

Now find an additional point that, again, is the same distance away as those first three points are from each other. What have you created now? This four-sided pyramid is called a tetrahedron. As you can see, it's made from four equilateral triangles, and now you're in the third dimension.

An article published last week in New Scientist magazine suggests that the tetrahedron is the most efficient shape for packing a large number of items into a 3D space. When we're thinking about how three becomes one, imagine collapsing this tetrahedron's outlying points towards any single point. This gives us a useful mental image for seeing how the underlying structures of our 3D space could be connecting to the fourth dimension, as we enfold all of our 3D universe in its current state -- its current "now" -- into a planck-length-sized frame which then becomes a "point" on our 4D line of time.

In Our Universe as a Dodecahedron, we looked at what happens when you rotate five superimposed tetrahedrons so that all their points are equidistant from each other, which took us to the discussion of the now-proven Poincaré Conjecture, and the proposal that the slight curve of our spacetime gives rise to the fifth-dimensional Poincaré Dodecahedral Space that our universe resides within. But once again, if you look at these beautiful symmetrical shapes, can you imagine how all of those points could easily be converged to a single central point?

In that same entry we talked about fascinating fellows like Dan Winter and Nassim Haramein who are showing us ways of visualizing how everything is connected through points or point-like structures. With "Three Becomes One", what we're trying to head towards is a way of imagining an underlying symmetry, and how that symmetry can be enfolded to eventually arrive at the unobserved whole, the big beautiful zero that our universe is moving towards and springing from within timelessness. Pull those points apart symmetrically and you get beautiful shapes like the vessica piscis, the triangle, the tetrahedron, and the dodecahedron. Allow the points to converge and you end up back where we started, at a point of indeterminate size.

Since gravity is the only force that exerts itself across the extra dimensions, that pushes or pulls, it must factor in here at a fundamental level. Let's continue to explore this idea more in our next two entries, Gravity and Free Will, and Gravity and Entrainment.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

P.S.:
Pictured at left: diagram showing congruence of null lines from Twistor Theory.
Pictured at right: diagram of Marko Rodin's Rodin Coil.


According to the June issue of Scientific American, there's new excitement about Twistor Theory and String Theory being united by the highly respected theoretical physicist Ed Witten. A number of people have asked me to talk about the work of Marko Rodin, I wonder what he would have to say about this latest development?

Entangled Neurons

One of the questions that came up during my Theatre of the Mind interview with Kelly Howell last week was "how do we know when we're actually choosing different paths in the fifth dimension"? While quantum randomness means that small outcomes are being selected for us at every instant, one planck frame after another, those are virtually always going to be inconsequential to us out here at the macro world (unless you're unlucky enough to be the subject of the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment!). During the interview, I suggested that any event that we have a memory of represents an important fifth-dimensional "cusp" in the spacetime tree of our lives. Speaking of trees, the tree-like image pictured here represents a map of the brain's neurons and was found in an article published in New Scientist Magazine earlier this year: written by David Robson, the article was entitled "Brain 'entanglement' could explain memories".

I'd like to quote from that article shortly, but let's look at this idea of memory and the fifth dimension a little more first.

Our long-term memory of past events is most often really only in tiny visual snippets, although the practice of telling and re-telling the story of an important event can give us the feeling of it being more movie-like, of being more than just a few visual images or actions. One of the experiences most of us have had is of dangerous or intense moments when time seems to slow down: in Time is In the Mind, we looked at the work of neuroscientist David Eagleman, whose research indicates that the "slowing of time" experience is related to the formation of many more memories during that event - if the event had not been as intense, we wouldn't have formed as many sequential memories, so we wouldn't remember an experience of time slowing down.

"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.

Which returns us to the idea that any important choices or outcomes that stay in our memory represent fifth-dimensional branches, where our probability space shifts, and some new outcomes become possible while some other outcomes are rotated into the sixth dimensional "you can't get there from here" list. That's true for each of us individually, but it's also very true for us a population of humans sharing planet Earth: there are cusps where our world and the universe it's part of branches in important ways. Those branches are our shared experience, our consensus reality: for instance, on September 11 2001 our reality shifted, for almost all of us not through our choice but through the actions of others. But now, as people around the world find more and more ways to connect to each other, those branches are starting to be formed through shared intent, and we've talked about the acceleration that is taking place because of that a number of times now.

Last time, we looked at The Fifth-Dimensional Camera Project, which was based upon my ideas of the fifth dimension as the explanation for quantum entanglement and Everett's Many Worlds, and which used a number of professors from Oxford University as consultants. Is the fifth dimension as our probability space finally gaining mainstream acceptance from the scientific community now? That's my fond desire.

Interestingly, the cover story of the issue of New Scientist magazine that arrived in my mail yesterday is a compendium of some of the most mind-boggling quantum effects that seem to be so unfathomable when we believe there is nothing beyond the fourth dimension: the article as published online is called Seven Wonders of the Quantum World. As the magazine cover pictured here says: "Quantum theory is stranger than you can ever imagine". To which, of course, I would add "unless you're willing to accept that quantum effects occur within the additional degree of freedom afforded by the fifth dimension".

Now let's quote a bit from that New Scientist article I mentioned previously, about "entanglement" in the brain:

Subatomic particles do it. Now the observation that groups of brain cells seem to have their own version of quantum entanglement, or "spooky action at a distance", could help explain how our minds combine experiences from many different senses into one memory.

Previous experiments have shown that the electrical activity of neurons in separate parts of the brain can oscillate simultaneously at the same frequency – a process known as phase locking. The frequency seems to be a signature that marks out neurons working on the same task, allowing them to identify each other.

The article then describes the neuronal activity patterns studied by Dietmar Plenz and Tara Thiagarajan at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. They found surprisingly complex coherence patterns being formed almost instantaneously between different parts of the brain: physically separate groups of neurons would display the same pattern within a few milliseconds, and each of these uniquely complex patterns appeared to be associated with different memories. Here's one more brief quote from the article, please do go to the New Scientist website to read the full piece:

"The precision with which these new sites pick up on the activity of the initiating group is quite astounding – they are perfect clones," says Plenz.

Memory and the Fifth Dimension
Like M.C. Escher's image of the ants on the mobius strip (or the flatlander we looked at in the original animation), we are twisting and turning within an additional dimension but feeling like we are traveling in a straight line.

If these ants were 2D flatlanders, they would travel in what feels like a straight line on the 2D surface of the mobius strip, unaware that they are really rotating through the third dimension. In our reality, we feel ourselves to be riding the arrow of time, moving in a straight line forward in the fourth dimension: but actually we are each navigating through a fifth dimensional probability space. If we are forming memories only at branches in our spacetime tree, it doesn't seem so astonishing that neurons in the brain could be synced up so quickly during that activity - after all, the fifth dimension makes seemingly difficult-to-imagine functions like quantum entanglement easier to visualize, and these "entangled neurons" may be providing further evidence of our connection to the fifth dimension and the constructive interference that is happening there to create our observed reality.

Are the unique memories that each of us carry within us really nothing more than a map of the branches and cusps, the "splitting apart" moments where our journey through the fourth dimension took another branch in the spacetime tree of our fifth dimensional probability space? We'll talk more about that idea next time with Entangled Awareness and OBEs.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Quantum Suicide

One of the very first questions that was asked at the tenth dimension forum back when it started over three years ago went something like this: "If all these different branching universes exist, what does that have to do with me? My life still sucks."

Coincidentally, a very successful project called "The Secret" about how our thoughts create our reality was launched within months of the launch of my website and book Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Last time, in Ringing in the Brain, and in previous entries like The Biocentric Universe and The Biocentric Universe Part 2, we've looked at just how far science is willing to take the idea that our observation is creating the reality we see around us.

While I have tried hard not to position my own project as being "use the power of the tenth dimension to find your way to happiness and riches" (because it's not really as simple as that), such ideas still do relate to what we're talking about here - if a "best possible you" (however you choose to define that phrase) already exists within the current probability space of Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation, then how do you get there? In Now vs. the Future, I talked about how phrases such as "attitude affects outcome", "healing starts from within", "eye of the tiger", and other positive visualization techniques make even more sense in the context of the Many Worlds Interpretation. I also talked about the experience many of us have had personally with elderly family members, and which many health care providers see on a regular basis: when people lose their interest in tomorrow and their will to carry on, death is on its way.

In the last few blog entries (including Beer and Miracles, Conscious Computers?, Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light, and The Fifth Dimension is Spooky), we've been dancing around the connection between the quantum wave function and consciousness, or what some people prefer to call "the soul". What carries on after we die, and what does that have to do with quantum mechanics? Here's a link to an interesting wikipedia article on "Quantum Suicide and Immortality".

In Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, I quoted from cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:

The critique of many worlds is shifting from 'it makes no sense and I hate it' to simply 'I hate it'.

The wikipedia article we're talking about now relates to a thought experiment proposed by Max Tegmark (and a number of others according to wikipedia) which is sometimes referred to as "quantum suicide". It's basically just a re-telling of the Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment, but Tegmark makes it much more personal.

A person holds a gun to his head, which is hooked up to a quantum detector looking at a subatomic particle. The gun is designed to fire only when a certain spin is detected. The person pulls the trigger, and in half of the parallel universes resulting from the moment, the gun fires. But in many of the remaining universes, he pulls the trigger again. This process can be repeated indefinitely: each time with the person surviving in half of the remaining universes. This scenario then takes us to a realm similar to Zeno's Paradox - even though the number of universes where the gun doesn't fire are halved with each additional pull of the trigger, there should always be branching universes remaining where the gun doesn't go off, no matter how many times the trigger is pulled.

What I've been trying to get people to understand is that anyone who is alive right now and reading this blog is just as much an example of this same thought experiment - when you think about all the silly risks taken, all the near-miss accidents or malicious acts, all of the things that could have conspired to end anybody's life before now, you are thinking about Everett's Many Worlds. In a great many of those other parallel universes you are already dead, and in many more universes than that you never existed at all! The fact you are alive in the universe you're observing right now really is a statistical marvel, such an unlikely quantum outcome when you consider all the possible outcomes, that we should each be amazed at our continued existence every moment of every day.

What Tegmark would be horrified to hear, I'm sure, is that some on the internet are now saying that if you were in one of the universes from his thought experiment where you took the bullet and you died, your consciousness would leap into one of the parallel universes where the gun just clicked, hence the phrase "quantum immortality". While I'm quite willing to discuss the possibility of ghosts as manifestations of consciousness that exist past a person's death (see blog entries like Auras, Ghosts, and Pareidolia, Do You Believe in Ghosts, Happy Birthday Paul and Going to the Light), I think this quantum suicide concept can be easily misconstrued: the universes where you die and don't get to see the rest of your life are just as real as the ones where you beat the odds and get to continue on. If you die you die, and what happens to your consciousness after that is very different from what happens while you're in your physical body.


There's a blog entry I put up not long ago called Suffering in the Multiverse, it gets into this discussion in a very deep way. Some of my other blog entries about death, statistically unlikely events, and the multiverse include:
The Statistical Universe
Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)
Randomness and the Missing 96 per cent
Elvis and the Electrons
Have Each of Us Already Died?
Gevin Giorbran: Everything is Forever

What it all comes down to is this - we are all lucky to be here, and whatever processes you care to imagine to have contributed to this "now" are worthy of your sense of wonder, and deserving of your praise. That's what song 26 of my 26 songs attached to this project is about: it's called "Thankful".



A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIfN1RM9X6I

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: A Hug From Another Dimension

Logic vs. Intuition

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

Currently the most popularly viewed entry of all time here at the Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog is called Creativity and the Quantum Universe. Here's the video for that entry:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

Life, consciousness, and creativity: these are all entwined together, different aspects of the same patterns. The idea that these processes somehow engage with spatiotemporal events in a way that embraces the proven non-locality of our universe is an important key here. Last blog we talked about imagining life and consciousness as an interlocking system which is constantly changing and revising itself throughout our lives. In his insightful book "What is Life?", Erwin Schrödinger pointed out that within our universe life is a unique process which creates pockets of "negative entropy" or increasing order: and within that context, consciousness and creativity can also be described the same way.

We've talked before about Schrödinger's Cat, the thought experiment which was originally intended to show how silly it is to apply quantum thinking to the macro world, and which instead has now become a useful jumping off point for understanding Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation and the multiverse landscape. A few entries ago, in Placebos and Nocebos I mentioned that I'm listening these days to an audiobook called Spontaneous Evolution, by Bruce Lipton and Steve Bhaerman, and one of the important points they make is that our world is now starting to move away from scientific materialism (the idea that what we observe around us is all there is to reality, and that everything about our reality is logical and predictable if only we collect enough data). Instead, we're starting to move towards a more holistic paradigm, as we see more and more evidence that in order to understand how everything fits together we need to embrace that there are hidden patterns and structures that exist "outside" of space-time, and some of those patterns are fractal or chaotic rather than linear or predictable. That's true as we see the growing acceptance that our universe is only one of many, that roughly 96% of our own universe is completely invisible and undetectable, that the way our genes are expressed and even which genes are passed on to our offspring is strongly connected to our attitude and lifestyle, and that our holographic universe comes from the fifth dimension, connected together outside of fourth-dimensional space-time in ways that boggle the mind.

So. Scientific experiments are proving that life is able to use instantaneous quantum connections to function much more efficiently, and I've been insisting that seemingly "impossible" quantum effects like entanglement and tunneling are much easier to visualize when we think of them as coming from "folds" of the fourth spatial dimension through the fifth. I reached this intuitive conclusion decades ago, and we're now coming up on the three year anniversary of the launching of the tenth dimension website which has given me the opportunity to share these ideas with people from around the world. Which leads us back to the title of this entry: "Logic vs. Intuition". Which is more useful?


Recently I came across a website called "Artificial Intuition". It talks about a new approach to the quandary of how to program computers to think, and suggests that "Artificial Intelligence" (or "AI") runs into problems because it fails to understand how the human mind really functions: while logic should work for specific problem-solving within controlled parameters, intuition and inference applied to a sometimes contradictory input set better describes our day-to-day functioning. The english language is a perfect example - drawing meaning from words on a page or spoken to each other often requires us to fill in the blanks, accept contradictions, and make intuitive leaps, and this is what makes our language extremely frustrating to learn, particularly for persons not exposed to it since birth.

I would connect this back to the discussion we're having here by saying that Artificial Intelligence represents a more scientific materialist approach, while Artificial Intuition represents a more holistic paradigm: one which embraces the idea that there is more happening here than what logic alone can describe.

Artificial Intuition is the brainchild of Monica Anderson, who has a Master's degree in Computer Science from Linköping University in Sweden, but who now works in Silicon Valley and is a US citizen. Her company Syntience is working on ways to bring her innovative approach to market (check out their Facebook Fan page here). At present they are still searching for funding sources: if you'd like to help support their independent research here's a link from the Artificial Intuition website.

Let me quote a few paragraphs from their website, this is from a page in which Logic and Intuition are compared:

Intuition and Logic are two strategies for prediction and problem solving.

We hear so much about the virtues of logic that we'd be excused to believe that logic was somehow the superior method, but a quick analysis shows that most actions we perform on a daily basis mainly use intuition.

Logic is not better, just different. Both strategies have their advantages and apply in different situations. Sometimes we need to use both. Sometimes we can use either one, because the problem is so simple it doesn't much matter how we solve it. Sometimes it matters; if we happen to choose the wrong approach, it may prevent us from solving our problem.

Computer-based intuition - "Artificial Intuition" - is quite straightforward to implement, but requires computers (a recent invention) with a lot of memory (only recently available cheaply enough).

If you look at the label cloud at the top of my blog, you'll see that intuition has been a running theme with this project since it began. This connects back to my song "Automatic", which makes the assertion that there are many times when that logical "narrator voice" of our conscious minds gets in the way, and that there are many complicated activities such as golf, playing a musical instrument, driving a car, or solving a large problem which will work better when we allow the more intuitive, less analytical part of our minds to take the forefront: in other words, when we can do these things "without thinking". This idea relates to a book I've talked about before, written by Julian Jaynes, called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind": a challenging and fascinating work which suggests that the logical "narrator voice" of consciousness may only have developed in the last few thousand years, and that before that time all human beings operated in a mode where their conscious minds and the underlying "intuitive" parts of their minds were fully integrated. Although he died in 1997, the Julian Jaynes Society continues to promote his work, check it out.

And please spend some time over at the Artificial Intuition site learning more about this fascinating alternative methodology for making computers "smarter" in ways that more directly reflect our own strengths as human beings. This could hold immediate promise for tasks such as document understanding, speech recognition, OCR correction, and implementing the Semantic Web. In the long term, I suspect this could allow the creation of computers that develop the emergent traits of consciousness through using a huge web of tiny little processes that are running concurrently. In that sense, the Artificial Intuition approach would appear to have connections to the consciousness theories of Douglas Hofstadter, who I've talked about many times before in blogs such as You Have a Shape and a Trajectory, I Know You, You Know Me, and We're Already Dead (But That's Okay).

To close, here's that song: "Automatic".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBJnWADnJr4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob

Next: Do Animals Have Souls?

The Spacetime Tree

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

Last blog we looked at the annotated version of the Imagining the Tenth Dimension video, which provides a running commentary introducing ideas from the website and the book to people who are already familiar with the original animation. This time, let's continue with a discussion of some of the basic ideas that stem from this way of visualizing reality.

The "spacetime tree" is a phrase that was first introduced to me by visitors to the Imagining the Tenth Dimension forum. I like this phrase because it immediately evokes a useful image of what the Many Worlds Interpretation tells us about our reality - that from this particular "now" there is not just one line of time. Rather, there is a bush-like branching structure of possible outcomes, and this has been confirmed by Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna as being more than just thought experiment: amazingly, this means that Schrödinger's cat really is simultaneously alive and dead until one state or the other is observed. The fact that the David Deutsch team at Oxford published a proof equating this at both the quantum and macro levels does indeed seem to put Everett's idea of a wave function that exists outside of time and space, and which we are merely "observing" rather than "collapsing" on a very solid footing.

In a blog entry called Time in Either Direction, I talked about Sean Carroll's ideas of an equilibrium state that exists outside of time and space, and how the entropy-derived line of branching choices that create what we experience as "time" is only one of the possible directions for a universe to be viewed. Thinking of the trunk, limbs, branches, and twigs of a spacetime tree gives us another way to visualize this - and also shows us how the move from the highly ordered "base" of the tree trunk to the many branches is equivalent to the universe we live in, where eggs do not unscramble themselves and broken mirrors do not reassemble: once you have moved out to a branch, you are no longer on the trunk, and so on. Here is a freaky-looking video blog of "Time in Either Direction":

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0j8oYNFFbw

The spacetime tree is also a useful phrase because it immediately puts one in the mindset of thinking in a more timeless mode, where all possibilities exist simultaneously. In a blog entry called Anime, Gaming, and Cusps I used the metaphor of the branching scenarios of video games as a starting point for imagining the many branches of our spacetime tree, which we would be able to see if we could somehow move our observation out to this timeless perspective. Here is a video blog entry of that discussion:

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4b7MqbpYTM

Finally, one of the assumptions that I make in this project is that the fourth dimension has (as Sean Carroll also says) two directions, one of which is time as we know it, and the other which would be the time-reversal version of that fourth dimension. If our spacetime tree was one single trunk from beginning to end that would be the end of the story, but since we now have scientific evidence that the branches do exist, the fifth dimension is where I place the spacetime tree for our particular universe as it exists in our current "now", and the sixth dimension is where I place the other spacetime trees which are logically/probabilistically incompatible with our current "now". In both cases I am using the moral/probabilistic branches created by chance and choice as ways to describe the extra dimensions, and some will insist that because of this I'm not talking about spatial dimensions, I'm talking about temporal dimensions. In Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, I made what I believe to be a convincing argument for why our experience of the extra spatial dimensions can be incorporated into a temporal model, because ultimately we are 3D creatures moving on a 4D line, and because of that our ability to perceive any of the extra dimensions requires us to acknowledge the spatial nature of time: without time, we 3D creatures are stuck in one single frame of our universe with no way to witness or experience the fourth dimension and above. Here is a video blog of that discussion:

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uP_d14zi8jk

The spacetime tree for our particular universe, then, at this particular moment, is in the fifth dimension. The spacetime tree for some other version of our universe, then, like the one where it's 2008 and gas is free, is inaccessible to our spacetime tree unless we move through the sixth dimension to get there. The logic of such reasoning is consistent with the general idea of dimensions - each dimension that we add gives us a way to get to states that were unavailable from the dimension we were in, and that is consistent with the most basic definition of the word "dimensions" that is commonly used.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Related Links:
The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video
What Would a Linelander Really See?
Wormholes
How to Make a Universe
The Omniverse

Next: Dark Energy, Linelanders, and the LHC

Visualizations

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdcsuI_uH-4





In the last few months I've talked a lot about the David Deutsch team at Oxford, who in September 2007 published a proof equating the probabilistic outcomes that occur at the quantum level with the branching timelines that occur as a result of choice and chance at the macro level. I've talked about how we can imagine our 4D line of time as having branches that occur from time to time when important "cusps" occur, and that the image we could hold in our minds is like a dandelion gone to seed, with the observed line of time proceeding from moment to moment being the stalk, and the blossom at the head being where the upcoming branching set of choices are presented to us.

At the quantum level, then, that "dandelion head" of available choices is really occurring every unit of planck time, and we are traveling down our line of time with those choices being selected for us without our conscious participation. We've talked in this blog before about Dr. Schrödinger’s poor old cat, simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the box and finds out whether an atomic particle has decayed or not: and most people would agree that the probabilistic outcome that happens in this thought experiment is not influenced by the hopes or free will of the person opening the box. In other words, the particle decays or doesn't decay, and it appears that we witness one or the other quantum outcome regardless of the good wishes or animosity we bear towards that darn cat.

At the macro level, most of our day is the same way: out of the unimaginably large number of outcomes that are taking place down at the quantum level, there are some that are more likely because of what has come before, and some occasional much more significant outcomes that take reality off into some new tangent. Likewise, we don't actively involve ourselves in deciding for the most part about the reality around us, because it is happening automatically without any conscious decision-making on our part: walls remain solid, gravity remains constant, objects at rest tend to stay where they are, and so on.

But even in a universe where no active choices are made by anyone or anything, we will still end up with worldlines that resemble the images in this blog: there will be uneventful long straight lines of no surprising change, there will be sections of noisy chaotic turbulence, there will be occasional bifurcations, there will be important cusps where a lot of new possible outcomes suddenly become available. Tracing along any one line in these images, following the twists and turns that our perceived worldline happens to take, then, is like the one particular reality we end up experiencing out of all the possible realities that could have existed.

Taking any one of those paths, then, is what moves us along the line of time, and this process is happening at both the quantum and macro levels one planck length at a time after another.

Here's an important key: because the quantum and macro level are really going through the same processes of probabilistic outcome (as per the Oxford team's proof described above), branches to new states at the quantum level affect the macro level, and changes at the macro level affect the quantum level. Can we, as macro physical creatures, consciously choose outcomes at the quantum level? No, because that's not the scale we operate at. But choices deliberately made at the macro level change things at the quantum level, because it's really all the same continuum, just being viewed at different scales.

This is why it makes sense to talk about our physical reality in the same terms as our quantum reality, and this is where we find how free will fits into this picture: because at both levels there are choices that are happening whether we choose, or whether someone else chooses for us, or even if we make no choice and random chance and probability chooses for us.

With this project, I have portrayed those branches as being in our "probability space" in the fifth dimension. The pictures in this blog show us a visualization that gives us a hint of how beautiful and intricate those bush-like branching patterns of choice and chance could be: imagine, for instance, that each of these pictures represents someone's life. "Here's the time I almost got hit by a drunk driver, here's the time I almost went to med school but changed my mind, here's where I got married, here's where the planes hit the towers", and so on. A person's life, when viewed from down here in the fourth dimension, ends up travelling down only one of those available lines at each junction, but it's always fun to play the "what if" game and imagine the other outcomes that choice and chance might have presented.

What we're looking at in these images is a visualization tool, and of course Imagining the Tenth Dimension owes much of its popularity to its eleven minute animation, a visualization tool that gives people a way to imagine ten dimensions. But here's something interesting: the three images we are looking at here are really all pictures of the same thing. They are the map of the connections within this very blog.

They were generated by a website which has been around for a while, called "Websites as graphs". Even more interesting, I think, is what you will see if you click on this link:
generate tenthdimension blog as graph
as you will then be able to watch an animated image somewhat similar to the ones in this entry being generated in real time, tracking all of the connections to this blog and its nearly one hundred other entries that have been created over the past year since its launch. You can also click on Create the Graph of Any Other Website on that page, and it will ask you for a URL. If you have a couple of minutes, give it one of the big sites like Amazon or AOL and watch all of the connections being drawn.

This all connects to the higher dimensional thinking we've been playing with here, exploring how ideas are connected together across space and time, and how higher-dimensional patterns are what created the universe we live in and the preference for one reality over another from within the multiverse of all possible universes. What we're playing with are creative visualizations of the nature of reality, and whether you believe there is nothing above the fourth dimension of spacetime, or whether you believe the fifth dimension and above are part of a Calabi-Yau manifold, or that all of the particles in our 4D universe are derived from an E8 rotation, there are ways that visualization tools can help us to imagine what would otherwise be unimaginable.

And my way of visualizing the dimensions is just another way of doing that very thing.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS: If you go to my blog entry The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project you will see that I am continuing to update the list of Google Suggestions that I am keeping track of there.

Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLXhj7TK520


Last week, in an entry called "Google, Memes, and Randomness" we talked about how something as complex as our universe and the multiverse of other universes really could spring from randomness. Now, here's a link to a fascinating article in yesterday's New York Times:
www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/science/15brain.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

This article includes a reference to the Boltzmann Brains conundrum: an idea that ties very nicely to some of the ideas we explore regularly in this blog. Let me try to sum up Boltzmann's idea: by the time we're imagining a fabric that includes every possible expression of matter and energy, that must mean there are many expressions which are not complete universes, but rather just fragmentary bits of order, and those fragmentary bits could be observed by something approximating a mind within each fragmentary universe. The disturbing idea this leads to is that within the multiverse of all possible universes there could be all these "brains" floating around (not physical brains of course, but this startling image helps to make the idea stick in our minds). This is all discussed in the above article, which also touches on some of the more metaphysical ramifications of all this.

To be clear, the Boltzmann Brain scenario is similar to the tale of Schrödinger’s Cat: it was originally offered as an extreme example of the absurd conclusions that might be drawn from applying quantum thinking to the macro world. The idea does have more power, though, when we accept the proof offered by a team of scientists at Oxford equating quantum probability states with our macro-world's probability states. Is it really such a great leap to imagine there could be organized systems representing an "observer" in many of those other universes within the infinite set of all possible universes?

Infinity or Infinities?
We keep returning to the concept of infinity with this project: some people like to think of infinity as being only one thing, and therefore they jump to the conclusion that I'm talking nonsense when my way of visualizing the dimensions uses phrases like "draw a line to yet another infinity". Here's a simple example of the same concept: the numbers following the sequence 1,2,3,4,5... extend out to infinity. But let's take any two of those numbers, 1 and 2 for instance: how many numbers are there between 1 and 2? There's 1.1, there's 1.2, there's 1.75689425... there are an infinite set of numbers between 1 and 2. Finding different ways to get to infinity is what this is all about: and as Michel from Norway recently reminded me in the tenth dimension forum, "two parallel lines meet at infinity".

Thinking of infinity as being the unobserved fabric of quantum indeterminacy shows a way to imagine how all those infinities connect together, and the parallel universes resulting from choice, chance and circumstance for our universe (as infinite as those branches appear to be) is still just one more subset of all the possible expressions of matter and energy, memes and spimes that we're playing with here.

Here's another way to describe the dimensions, which acknowledges that every single dimension extends out to its own version of infinity:

0 - a point of indeterminate size
In this way of imagining, 0 and 10 are very similar concepts - both are of indeterminate size. The common practice of referring to "0" as infinitely small isn't really correct then: a point on a graph can be any size we care to imagine it being because its size is not relevant, just its location. And to be clear, 0 is not a dimension, it's just where we start our description.

1 - a line created by a certain set of "points", extending to infinity
Start with a point, add a second point, join them together with a line. The line you have drawn is a line segment with those two points as its endpoints, but that line can be extended out in either direction to infinity

2 - a plane created by a certain set of 1D lines, extending to infinity
Draw a second line. As long as the second line is not directly on top of the first, those two lines are now part of an infinite plane that passes through those two lines.

3 - a space created by a certain set of 2D planes, extending to infinity
Any two planes that are not directly on top of each other become part of an infinite 3D space that passes through those two planes.

4 - a line created be a certain set of "3D points", extending to infinity
So 3 is our 3-dimensional space. What would "not directly on top of each other" be for 3D space? It would be 3D space in a different state. Look at your watch: let's call whatever time you see at the instant you looked "now", or the universe in one state, and we'll call that a point. Three o'clock tomorrow afternoon is another state, and we'll call that our second point. Joining those two points creates a line segment, and the ends of that line can be extended back to the Big Bang and forward to the end of the universe.

But as I've said many times here, the big bang is an illusion, it's better to think of it the way physicist Seth Lloyd describes it - the first binary yes/no that separates a particular universe out from the indeterminate background. So the fourth dimension can be thought of as a line that extends to infinity in either direction, and the big bang is just a point on that line, same with the "end" of the universe.

5 - a plane created by a certain set of 4D timelines, extending to infinity
5 is our "probability space", or "spacetime tree" as some have described it in the tenth dimension forum. The "bush-like branching structure" of the David Deutsch team's recent proof is equivalent to this, which means this occurs at both the quantum and the macro level. So: take one timeline that could extend forward or back from this moment (this "now", as we called it), then think of another alternate version that could also occur from that same "now", and those two lines define an infinite plane that passes through any versions of our spacetime that are logically consistent with our current "now".

6 - a space created by a certain set of 5D planes, extending to infinity
Stay with me now: the spacetime tree for our particular "now" doesn't include a version of the universe where it's 2008 and Kurt Cobain is still alive. That would be a different fifth-dimensional "plane". Imagining that other "Kurt alive" plane along with the "Kurt dead" plane that we find ourselves to be in, then, is the same conceptual leap as imagining one 2D plane and another different 2D plane, and extrapolating how 3D space is derived from that.

Why do we say "certain set of timeline branches", then? Here's why: the version of the 6th dimension that our current timeline is/must be part of is still constrained by the basic physical laws that are unique to our universe. No amount of choice, chance, and circumstance, at either the quantum or the macro level, moves us to a universe where the laws are different, and that is what we mean by a "certain set" of timelines in this context.

Could there be more than one version of the big bang that this infinite observed/unobserved sixth-dimensional structure passes through on its way out to infinity? Certainly, but only to the extent that there are always random fluctuations, quantum outcomes, small decisions made that in the big picture do not affect things for our overall universe to the point that its existence is no longer possible. But the 6th dimension, like the other dimensions, is an infinity. That infinity encompasses all the possible "beginnings" and "endings" for our particular universe, and it includes all of the possible paths that are not available to us from our current position in spacetime but which are still constrained by our basic physical laws. The idea proposed by physicists like John Wheeler of "reverse fine tuning" of our universe through quantum observation was discussed in my blog entry "Boredom and Consciousness", and this gives us a way to imagine how our current universe really could have multiple slightly-different-versions of the Big Bang within its 6D space.

7 - a line created be a certain set of "6D points", extending to infinity
Take the 6th dimensional structure we've just imagined, that is a point in the seventh dimension. Take the structure representing all possible outcomes for some other universe that has different basic physical laws, that is a different point in the seventh dimension. The line that passes through those two points extends to infinity in either direction.

8 - a plane created by a certain set of 7D lines, extending to infinity
Now think of the seventh dimensional line that passes through the point representing our universe, and the point representing another universe where the value for gravity is different. That line extends out to infinity in either direction, but it doesn't pass through universes where some other constant varies. To get to the infinite plane that passes through those two different lines takes us to the 8th dimension.

9 - a space created by a certain set of 8D planes, extending to infinity
The 9th dimension is the way you get from one of those planes we've just imagined to another, and the space that passes through those planes may not, as I've said many time before, be able to actually express any physical realities itself - at that point we are dealing only with the "information" side of the "information equals reality" concept. But once again, there is a timeless unobserved infinity that this 9th dimension stretches out to. Imagining the 9th dimension, then, as being filled with "Boltzmann Brains", each being an observer of some fragmentary organized bit of information/reality, is what the above New York Times article is referring to. In my book and this project, I have preferred to imagine the 9th dimension as being the place where "big picture memes" are found: organized patterns that have the potential to generate one kind of reality over another in the dimensions below.

10 - 9D as a point of indeterminate size, everything as potential only
Ten, then is the infinite unobserved quantum fabric. Attempting to observe any aspect of this collapses us into some or all of the dimensions below.

Our poll question ending soon is about Google and the way it has changed the way we interact wth information. If Information Equals Reality, then that is a very big question indeed for all of us as Boltzmann Brains floating in our perceived reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS Two other blog entries that work through a way to imagine our hierarchy of dimensions are "You Can't Get There From Here" and "How to Make a Universe". Now, for fun, here's a new video created by Ryan Hill, for my song "Big Bang to Entropy".


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