Polls Archive 55 - Lying to Children

Poll 55 - " 'Lying to Children' is a phrase used to describe the way we sometimes tell overly simplified versions of the truth to children because they're not ready to deal with such complexity. Is Imagining the Tenth Dimension like that?" Poll ended December 31 2009. 55.5% said "Yes", 36.5% said "No, because it's the truth", and 8.0% said "No, because it's wrong".

I had not heard of the phrase "lying to children" before until the original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation was posted to Boing Boing last August. A commenter named Takuan said "I must accept this charming lie-to-children graciously since I likely won't have the time or opportunity to be taught better".

Here's a link to a blog entry from a few months back written by Bruce Conrad which came up when I googled the phrase "Lying to Children". Bruce describes a high school class who were asked what the sun is made of:

...One classmate raised his hand and proudly proclaimed, "The sun is a big ball of burning gases." He looked around, and we all nodded our sage heads in confirmation.

The teacher went on to explain to us that the sun was not burning gases, but rather a thermonuclear reaction. Fusion to be exact, and as Einstein's famous equation helps us understand, a little bit of gas goes a long way in creating the energy that we receive here on the Earth as heat and light.

That was very interesting, from a scientific point of view. Something even more interesting happened during that class, from a social point of view. Many students were upset that this hadn't been explained to us much earlier. Upset that we had been told the burning gases theory. As one student put it, "They lied to us!" And, we were upset that we had believed it so easily.

But was it a lie? Or was it just a simplification?

Bruce does a good job of explaining the "lying to children" concept: sometimes it's more productive to give students a simplified version of the truth, and as their understanding of the world increases, give them a more accurate version later on.

So is Imagining the Tenth Dimension like that? Looking at the poll results, I'm flattered that over 36% said "No, because it's the truth", because that's what I personally believe as well. I'm also pleased to see over 55% saying "Yes", since I've encouraged people to approach these ideas that way: this is a way to open the door, to awaken people's curiosity, but there's years of hard lifting (intellectually speaking) if you want to really became a physicist, or a string theorist. As I'm always careful to point out, I'm not a physicist, I'm a composer, and therefore the only claim I can legitimately make is that I've come up with a useful visualization tool, one which a lot of other people have found to have interesting connections to their own ways of understanding reality.

In Holograms and Quanta, I remarked that around 2,000,000 page results come up if you type the name of my book in quotes into google. When I made that remark the number was usually just under two million... but coincidentally, I typed that phrase in right now and here's what I just saw:
Two million results! Wow. Are some of those results people who are agreeing with the 8% noted above, saying that my approach to visualizing is just plain wrong? No question. But the large majority, I'm sure you'll find, are people telling each other about how much they liked my original animation, or recommending my project to each other. A few days ago a Youtube user wrote to me to say that my way of visualizing the dimensions is absolutely wrong, and asking why I want to spread such lies. Here's how I replied :

My video shows a way of visualizing spatial dimensions. Some physicists prefer to call the extra dimensions "space-like" but we are still talking about dimensions that are each at a new "right angle" to the one before. I am using a version of the point-line-plane postulate, an accepted way of defining any number of spatial dimensions for the reasoning in my video. Which part do you disagree with? The contention from Kaluza, endorsed by Einstein, that our 4D spacetime is defined at the fifth dimension? The idea that the fifth dimension appears from our perspective to be "curled up at the planck length" but that is because of the granular nature of 4D spacetime? The string theory idea that our universe is constrained by a seven-dimensional brane? The idea that there is an underlying state of indeterminacy from which our universe or any other springs? Please be more specific in your objection.

Every day I hear from students thanking me for making them interested in learning more about physics and cosmology, and that is the intent of the original video: to get people thinking.

This is my 394th published entry into this blog. How do I keep coming up with subjects? Because I keep seeing new connections between other schools of thought and my approach to visualizing the dimensions. Let's go back to Bruce Conrad, who goes on to explain how fables and fairy tales might also be thought of as useful "lies to children". He then ties that into Popperian Cosmology, another term I'd never run across before.

Just last week, in Strength of Gravity, Speed of Light, I returned to the conclusion I reach in my book: there are three systems interacting to create our reality. The first two are just "there" once you move out beyond the entropy-driven limits of our arrow of time:

1. the physical system.
2. the system of ideas and patterns, the meme-system.
3. is consciousness, which interacts through constructive interference to select which parts of the other two systems any of us are witness to at any particular "now"

Popper's 3 worlds
Twentieth century philosopher Karl Popper, it appears, had a similar insight. His system of cosmology proposes that there are 3 worlds interacting:

World 1: the world of physical objects and events, including biological entities
World 2: the world of mental objects and events
World 3: the world of the products of the human mind

For me, this appears to be another great example of the synchronicities of ideas that are just floating out there in the ether, as a great many people seem to be reaching similar conclusions about the underlying processes and structures of our reality. With two million references to my project out there on the internet, I'm excited and grateful to be a part of this new groundswell of understanding.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 56 - What's Augmented Reality's Future?

Polls Archive 34 - God? Or the Multiverse?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1fwxqqLQI

Poll Question 34 - "Do you believe in God? Or the Multiverse?" Poll ended February 25 09. Interestingly, this poll saw the most participants so far of any of the polls we've had here: it seems people have strong opinions whenever the word "God" comes up in a question. 13% picked "God" as their answer, 32% for "Multiverse", 14% for "Neither", and 39% picked the most popular answer, "Both".

In Polls Archive 27, in which we discussed the question of whether there is really only one electron since they are all completely identical, we talked a bit about recent news items like the following, which suggest we may have to choose between "God or the Multiverse". Here's the opening two paragraphs of Mark Vernon's article, which appeared in the December 8 '08 issue of guardian.co.uk:

Is there a God or a multiverse? Does modern cosmology force us to choose? Is it the case that the apparent fine-tuning of constants and forces to make the universe just right for life means there is either a need for a "tuner" or else a cosmos in which every possible variation of these constants and forces exists somewhere?

This choice has provoked anxious comment in the pages of this week's New Scientist. It follows an article in Discover magazine, in which science writer Tim Folger quoted cosmologist Bernard Carr: "If you don't want God, you'd better have a multiverse."

Just ten days ago, the same conversation was brought up again in a New York Times opinion piece called "God and the Multiverse".

This is a good question, but a complicated one. There's a 45 minute interview on YouTube where Tom Huston, one of the editors of What is Enlightenment magazine, discusses similar questions with me:
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MteowQVkEHs

In the above interview I explain how I believe that there are selection patterns that created our universe, which depending upon your point of view are God, or just naturally occurring patterns that exist within timelessness, and in that sense I am thinking of a God that fits in with "deism". Our universe is so amazing, huge, complex, detailed, unlikely, that even if we don't ascribe consciousness to those selection patterns they are still something so humbling and intricate that they're worthy of our gratitude and praise.

Unlikely Events and Timelessness:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=Hpf3y_EdHco

I also believe that consciousness is connected together in ways we can't directly see from down here in spacetime, and that connectedness is something that some people think of as God. So phrases like "I am an aspect of God" or "God is in me" make sense within that context. Douglas Hofstadter's book "I am a Strange Loop" and Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book "My Stroke of Insight" both tie very easily to that concept as well.

Daily Parrying:

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

I Know You, You Know Me:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfq5kKkA6pw

You are Me and We are All Together:

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

As I say in my entry "Daily Parrying", though, this doesn't really support the idea of a God who you can pray to and He will make the other football team lose and your team win just because that's what you asked Him for. I talk about this in my book:

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

God 2.0:

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

With this project, I've been trying to show people that there are ways of aligning a spiritual viewpoint with the traditionally atheistic scientific viewpoint. If I say "I believe in God" that immediately creates an image in someone else's mind which may be completely different from what I'm trying to convey, so I tend to not want to say things as simply as that. To finish, here's a song that says whether you believe we come from God or the multiverse, there is still something amazing, complex, and wonderful about the universe in which we live: "Thankful".

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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 35 - Do We Come From a 5D Hologram?

Thankful 2

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Now that over two million unique visitors have been to the Tenth Dimension website, I'd like to pause for a moment and look at where we're at.

Fans of the original flash animation will be pleased to know that we have now opened a "Digital Items Store", where a self-contained flash (versions for PC and for Mac), plus a high resolution quicktime can now be downloaded. In addition, an eBook file of the revised second edition of my book plus various versions of some of the songs attached to this project are also available there.

I'm thankful to all of the fans of this project who continue to share their ideas at the tenth dimension forum. I'm thankful to people like John Daniels Riveros who have embraced the interactive chat broadcasts we're doing with unbounded enthusiasm. I'm also thankful for all the critics: it's important that people understand that when my book is called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", subtitled "a new way of thinking about time and space", and its brief description at online bookstores like Amazon includes the phrase "not about mainstream physics", those are important bits of information. But do I think it's fair then, that online reviewers of the book are allowed to give my book a thumbs down because it's not about mainstream physics? To the extent that they feel they were misled about the content, that's fair... but buying a book without reading its description and then complaining when the content is not what you expected does seem somewhat misguided to me. Oh well... there are also many people who have posted positive reviews of the book as well, and this project certainly does seem to be one of those that elicits a strong response, whether that be negative or positive.

The online listing for my book ends with this sentence: "Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live." What does this mean? It means that the implications of what we begin exploring in the eleven minute animation are expanded in a large number of directions throughout the book's eleven chapters. Ultimately, what we are trying to find here is a way to tie together disparate schools of thought - not just from cosmology, from quantum mechanics, and from the probability space of the multiverse - but also from philosophy, spirituality and ancient mysticism. For anyone who believes in only one of those ways of looking at the world, my quest for finding the unity behind all of these ideas may indeed seem foolish.

But I am thankful for all of the encouragement I have received from people around the world (and the very positive review of my book in What Is Enlightenment? magazine comes to mind here), who believe that I just may be on to something... and that's pretty darn cool.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton


THANKFUL
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite happenstance
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

And in the multitude of paths
That could have ended before now
I am grateful for the unseen hand
Which led us here somehow

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

The universe is beautiful
More complex than we can believe
And praisable for what it holds within
A tapestry of threads
That each of us must weave
From each and every moment that we’re in

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite coincidence
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

Infinity and Impulse Control

Last blog, in an entry titled "Addictive Personality", I talked about the negative patterns that can cause people to make the same mistakes over and over. Developmental psychologists like to talk about impulse control, and how this faculty is different in a child's mind, the adolescent mind, and the adult mind.

So, the child's stolen candy bar, the adolescent's silly risk taken, or the adult who decides they can get away with an Enron scam would all be examples of an impulse control (or rather, the lack thereof!) that allowed an individual to choose a path that might best not have been taken: but in a universe of free will, bad choices have to be just as allowable as good ones. To think of this another way, the child who was sexually abused and grows up to become a sexual abuser is yet another example of negative repeating patterns across time and space, and the person who ultimately overcomes the impulse to repeat that sad tale will have finally found their way to a different part of the multiverse and its "bush-like branching structure" that represents all possible outcomes for our universe.

I'd like to quote a comment posted to my last blog entry by Tom Huston. Regular readers of this blog will recall that Tom wrote an article praising my book which appeared in the spring issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine. By the way, I'd like to invite you to check out Tom's personal blog at KosmicTom.com.

Humanity's karmic momentum is indeed strong, and I can't see why it wouldn't be dominating about 99.999% of what's happening along humanity's timelines (potential or actual), at least at our current "position" in time and cultural development... But I think there's probably at least a 0.001% interjection of free will, or true creative freedom, at play in the "system" at any given moment that can break the momentum of any trajectory and change things for the better. And it's up to us to choose if we're going to help make that percentage a little larger, through freeing our own consciousness, more and more and more...

Thanks for your insightful comments, Tom. Personally, I hope that your .001% estimate is low, but I agree with you completely about trajectories and how they can be changed or not changed. A few months ago I posted a blog entry called "Your Sixth-Dimensional Self". That entry discusses the idea of choices taken/not taken in the big picture of timelessness. This time around I'd like to run with the idea Tom presents us with of "karmic momentum", while we discuss a more linear image of what could be happening within timelessness.

There has been renewed interest this year in cosmological theories which present a cyclical scenario for our universe: rather than just the single "big bang" physicists have been imagining, perhaps there are endlessly repeating cycles of expansion and contraction that start from/end with something approaching (but never achieving) a singularity, and each time the universe expands back out into another iteration of itself (I should note here that "brane collisions" are often being advanced as a possible explanation for this repeating cycle, but this time around we're going to stay away from thinking about all this "extra dimensions" stuff).

So. What if this cycle has been/will be repeated an infinite number of times? Then we could leave everything about our universe in the fourth dimension of spacetime, and forget about all these crazy notions of needing any further dimensions to express the big picture. We could just lay every possible timeline end-to-end, one after another, in an infinite "line of time".

Here we go again with another of those mind-boggling ways of imagining our already infinite universe in an infinite number of timelines. If our universe were to repeat infinitely (with each repetition representing a different set of throws of the quantum dice, so to speak) then that would have to include the repetition where everything about the universe was the same as now, except for the differences in impulse control that in a different iteration of the universe kept me from taking that candy bar as a child, or driving recklessly as a teenager, or caused me to make an unwise business decision for which I'm now doing time!

Naturally, in an infinitely repeating universe, there would also be a great many scenarios which are completely different from the one we are currently in: you and I were never born, dinosaurs were never wiped out, life never progressed past single-celled organisms, matter never coalesced into stars, and on and on. With the luxury of infinite repetitions, we can get to every single possibility that could have arisen from chance and circumstance eventually.

But the versions of this cycle that interest us the most, obviously, would be the different scenarios that are almost the same as our current one. In terms of karmic momentum, then, we could think of this cycle as being what happens when the endlessly repeating version of ourselves is presented with a set of choices, and yet no matter how often a bad/dishonest choice is presented in this endless wheel of an infinitely repeating universe, there are choices that some of us will never take.

In some cases, this is going to be just a matter of convenience: I never stole money because a big bag of somebody else's money never appeared on my doorstep. But what if it had? Perhaps the real test for sainthood should not be how exemplary a person's life was, but how many opportunities that person was presented with to make bad choices which that person's impulse control and karmic momentum caused them, again and again, through every iteration of the universe, to do good instead.


I'd like to finish off with another of the songs from the end my book, this one presents another way of thinking about the endless iterations that might be possible from the beginning to the end of our universe. First of all, here's how I introduce the idea of this song back in chapter five:

Graham Hancock, in his book “The Mars Mystery”, tells of a system of mirrors that were left behind on the moon by the Apollo astronauts. From 1973 to 1976 researchers used a 107-inch telescope to direct more than 2,000 laser beams at these mirrors. These laser beams allowed extremely precise measurements to be made and revealed a 15-meter oscillation of the lunar surface about its polar axis, with a period of about three years. Astronomer David Levy suggested that the moon is behaving “just like a huge bell after it has been clanged”. Scientists proposed that this must be the result of a relatively recent major impact, and that this ringing will die out after 20,000 years or so. Imagine, now, that you are somehow able to slow down your awareness to the point where you are able to hear the ringing of that bell.

Admittedly this all starts to sound like a Zen koan, and in some ways the goal is the same–we are trying to free ourselves from a limited viewpoint of the universe and the nature of time.

Here's a video of me singing the song:



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

And here are the lyrics:


BIG BANG TO ENTROPY
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

I slowed down
Till I heard the moon
I heard the moon ringing
Ringing like a bell

I slowed down
Till I felt the earth
I felt the plates sliding:
Skaters on a pond

And I finally felt the long groove moving underneath
Births and deaths of galaxies pounding out the beat
And I finally heard the whole song at once:
Big Bang to Entropy
Big Bang to Symmetry
Big Bang to Everything

I slowed down
Till I saw the sun
I saw the sun spinning
On a pinwheel’s arm

And I saw the long chain of our DNA
Stretching back to the beginning for so long
And I saw the mighty ocean that surrounds and sustains
Connecting us together in a song

I slowed down
Till I saw the song
Was only one of many
One of many more

And I finally felt the long groove moving underneath
Births and deaths of galaxies pounding out the beat
And I finally heard the whole song at once:
Big Bang to Entropy
Big Bang to Symmetry
Big Bang to Everything

It begins as nothing, silence at the end
Every song’s the same after or before
But the parts in between, there are so very many forms
More than we could ever hope to know


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeClGTuhCy4

My mom passed away this past week, thank you all for your prayers and best wishes. I'm so very happy to be able to say that she slipped away peacefully and I was holding her hand as she passed. A permanent memorial to mom can be found at nora-bryanton.last-memories.com .

What happens to us when we die? Does it all just end, or does some part carry on? I have my own firm beliefs on this, which I discuss in my book, and at the tenthdimension forum on a regular basis.

My song "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" is one of the 26 songs found at the end of my book. It was originally written as I contemplated my own death, but it has been on my mind as family and friends gathered to pay their last respects to mom. Here are the lyrics:

NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP
music and lyrics (c) Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Now I lay me down to sleep
To rest my weary head
If I should die in slumber deep
Remember what I said

It’s not the end of the world
It’s not the end of the dream
It’s just the end of a body
Not the end of a soul

So what am I so afraid of?
A little bit of sorrow?
It all continues flowing on
The past into tomorrow

Now I lay me down to sleep
My journey finally through
A list of things undone, unsaid
So much left to do

So what am I so afraid of?
The thought that this has ended?
Did I try my best to be
The person I intended?

It’s not the end of the world
It’s not the end of the dream
It’s just the end of a chapter
Turn the page and move on

Now I lay me down to sleep
To rest my weary head
If I should die in slumber deep
Remember what I said


Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Thankful 1

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Another video of me in my living room pounding away at my old piano, singing one of the 26 songs from my book.

We live in a seemingly impossible universe - the fine structure constants are tuned to within surprisingly narrow margins - just a little less gravity and it all would have flown apart into nothingness from the big bang, a little too much gravity and it would all have collapsed back in upon itself by now. How did we get so lucky? That's the conundrum. Some people point to a simple version of the Anthropic Principle which says the reason we're asking how we ended up in this unique universe that supports life as we know it is because if the universe didn't support life as we know it, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

For me, the version of the Anthropic Priniciple which says all those other universes do actually exist rings much truer. As the current issue of Scientific American discusses, modern science is starting to explore some of the other forms and chemical processes that "life as we don't know it" could be able to exist in other parts of our own universe... and some even more fantastical constructions of energy and matter that become interested in "what happens next" might well flourish in other completely separate different-initial-conditions-universes from our own, out there in other parts of the multiverse.

Whether you believe in a Creator-God that put together this intricate puzzle, or whether you believe in a Dawkins-style "blind watchmaker" of chance and selection which got us to where we are now, there's nothing wrong with feeling some wonder and some humility at how extraordinary it all really is. And saying "thank you" for something as wonderful as all this, regardless of your belief system, is just good manners!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


THANKFUL
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite happenstance
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

And in the multitude of paths
That could have ended before now
I am grateful for the unseen hand
Which led us here somehow

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

The universe is beautiful
More complex than we can believe
And praisable for what it holds within
A tapestry of threads
That each of us must weave
From each and every moment that we’re in

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite coincidence
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

See No Future

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69pUzwSONBc

Here I am singing one of the 26 songs that are found in the back pages of my book, all of which are related to the concepts from Imagining the Tenth Dimension in various ways. As I've discussed before in this blog, I think it's easy to define "life" as being any process that appears to be interested in what happens next. This song is about the negative patterns any of us can find ourselves trapped within. But this is also the message of hope from the timeless multiverse that we're imagining here: if all possible timelines do really exist, that information may not be so useful to someone who is happy with how their life is going. For a person who is trapped in repetitive loops of depression or addiction, some might find some strength in the knowledge that modern physics suggests the version of our universe actually exists where that person finds their way out. And that would be a good thing: when you see no future, that is a very dark place to be.

SEE NO FUTURE
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

You see no future on the road that you’ve been travelin
You see no reason to continue any more
Still you keep on keepin on
Cause it’s the way you’ve always gone
Won’t you tell me what the hell you do it for

Now if there’s one thing I can say – it’s you’re consistent
And you’re persistent to a fault, sure, some’d say
Are you stubborn or just dumb?
Why don’t you try to find someone
Who will help to turn you round the other way
When you see no future

No tomorrows
Just todays
Is that the way you wanna stay?
No wishes
No dreams
Can’t you find another way?

I wish some happiness could join you on your journey
I hope that fortune finally finds you on your way
But tell me how will you ever win
When that big wheel that you’re in
Has you runnin the same circle every day
You see no future

No tomorrows....

You see no future on the road that you’ve been travelin
You see no reason to continue any more
Still you keep on keepin on
Cause it’s the way you’ve always gone
Won’t you tell me what the hell you do it for
When you see no future
When you see no future
When you see no future
When you see no

Just Ten Things

Here's the current results from the previous poll, gang: 35% say I'm talking about physics stuff, 21% say this is about spirituality, and at almost half, 42% say it's both. Fantastic! This is the important thing to keep in mind: even though we're all talking about the same thing, each of us has their unique point of view, and in some cases that point of view has been designed to disallow the existence of other conflicting points of view. So what? We've known that all along, that's the way life is.

So here we are in the fifth dimension (this is a fact physicists have known about since Kaluza proved it in 1919, but for some reason the established media have not been inclined to promote this information: more about the "conspiracy theories" meme in a bit). We are being drawn forward by the future towards absolute zero: not the sad place where everything becomes meaningless, but rather the place where all the positive and negative spins of our probability-space world reassemble back into one, and everything fits together.

Why is the fifth dimension such a dangerous idea? Because there are moral questions that have to be answered. If you are going to admit that all we really are is a sea of information (which many people on this planet like to think of as the Mind of God), chosen from the unobserved reality that quantum mechanics calls indeterminacy, then there are moral questions that have to be answered. Selfish memes and selfish genes point the way for us to see how the patterns that connect us from the beginning to the end of our universe have to include each of us taking some personal responsibility for the creation of good within the world in which we live.

Which leads to the question of whether science preferring to suppress anything to do with spirituality might have more to do with the funding that comes from an old boys network who remain right where they are as long as the rest of the planet doesn't find out what they've been up to and how easy it would have been to stop them if we had only known. As the global village becomes aware of itself, we become a more enlightened and caring world, and that's what the web is starting to do for us all right this very moment in spacetime.

Is it a good thing that the Divas currently in trouble (Lohan, Spears, Hilton etc.) are being monitored so closely that we could actually save their lives instead of letting them self-destruct as some of their predecessors before them did? This is one of the ways that we can see the more enlightened viewpoint is steadily gaining ground. By the time we realize that we are all just different aspects of the same quantum observer, we see how we could be part of the same recurring patterns, created by the opposing organizing forces of symmetry and order, as explained so well by Gevin Giorbran, over at EverythingForever.com.

Still, let's not be mistaken here. There are a growing number of scientists who are seeing parts of the same image I portray at Imagining the Tenth Dimension: everything fits together at zero. Zero is the mind of God viewed in its entirety: no wonder zero has had such a rough ride down through the millenia! The idea that everything ends at an Omega point that is "outside the system" relates to what Gödel was talking about with his incompleteness theorems. Within that omega, gravity determines the amount of grouping, and the speed of light's planck length defines the framing chosen from probability space that defines our particular universe, with its unchanging gravity and its restrictions against faster-than-light travel.

Gravity, then, can easily be thought of as the probability of something continuing to be here an instant from now, based upon the sum over histories paths that got that object to where it is right now. Gevin suggests that at the quantum realm this is also a form of inertia: the more locked in by the overall consensual reality a particular pattern is, the harder it is for free will to make a difference to it. That's why no amount of free will can change the force of gravity, and the multiverse of possibilities that surround us in the fifth dimension is an easy way for us to imagine not just the "bent 4D spacetime" of gravity, but the hidden forces of dark matter as well.

Popular culture and philosophy/spirituality show us the ways that a "big picture" enlightened view is completely compatible with cosmology and quantum mechanics: but that has more to do with the Joseph-Campbell-sized simple truths that everyone knows, which leads some people to belittle the worth of those ideas. Once we understand that ideas are just a part of meme-space, which is just as real as the physical space we see around us right now, we see how easy it is to make a change to some things that up to now may have seemed insurmountable. And you see the ways in which we're all connected together and are co-operating with each other, and the ways that some of us think they disagree with the consensual reality they're in when in the really big picture they couldn't possibly disagree. After all, according to my framework for discussion, we're all just a point in the seventh dimension.

Here's a link to an upcoming article from next week's issue of Newsweek about exciting new experiments showing how the future really can influence the present. The secret of life is about being interested in what happens next. Once you understand that reality and information are interchangeable, you understand what the ancient mystics have known all along: time is an illusion, and everything fits together at zero. Terence McKenna definitely got it right.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Gravity and Light

In an ideal world, every interface should be able to be boiled down to a simple interplay between only two currently available choices, so that even a very limited input device (one operated by a physically challenged person, for instance) can navigate, right from the very first yes or no. Finding what the most basic choice is can be the hardest part of designing an interface!

Some people are not comfortable with the idea of "Thoughts Become Things", because it feels so counter-intuitive to the observed physicality we see around us. Is everything just vibrations and constructive interference patterns? Is a person's consciousness and our physical reality all just a reflection of a complex vibration across the dimensions? In the model proposed in "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", we begin by talking about the geometric concept of a point. Later in the book, it becomes clear that this "starting point" can be in any dimension we choose to imagine it (if it's in the third dimension it could be at position x,y,z; in the seventh dimension it could be at position t,u,v,w,x,y,z; and so on). If the tenth dimension encompasses all aspects of indeterminacy, then no matter which of the nine dimensions you choose to place that first "point", its position collapses out a particular reality from the multiverse... in other words, it becomes the first yes/no, and by its selection it is already reducing the available options to a certain subset of the indeterminate whole.

I would argue that no matter what dimension you place that first point, the first thing that point defines is the value (or range of values) for gravity in the universe (or universes) that you are selecting. Physicists tell us that gravity is the only force that travels across all dimensions. Therefore, even if the information is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, any reality (ours included) can't have an indeterminate value for gravity. What do I mean when I say this information could be irrelevant? Well, for instance, if I define a set of co-ordinates in the third dimension to create a cube, I can determine the volume of that cube. Whether that cube exists in our universe or in some other universe with a different value for gravity, I can still determine its volume. But as soon as I am imagining a cube that physically exists, I am defining it as being in a real three-dimensional universe, which means that even though I am only assigning the x,y,z co-ordinates and values for this cube, its existence as a real object necessitates that it also be part of an implied subset drawn from the wave of quantum indeterminacy: a reality defined from the ninth down to the first dimensions. If gravity is everywhere, then any subset of reality must be limiting the available choices for gravity.

What if the point I'm thinking about is in the seventh through ninth dimensions? Then we can imagine our point, because it is of indeterminate size, as encompassing multiple values for gravity. Whether it would actually be possible to create a three-dimensional reality from a seventh-dimensional point encompassing a range of values for gravity is a science fiction question, a challenge for the imagination.

The second thing that can be locked in is the value for how close one point can be to the next in the reality we are choosing to examine. For our universe, this value is known as the planck length, and its value tells us why nothing in our universe can travel faster than the speed of light, and why our reality breaks down into quantum indeterminacy when we try to examine things that are closer to each other than the planck length - it's because "time" is not continuous, it is granular. Time gives us this illusion of being a continuous fourth-dimensional line, but it's actually being created by a series of three-dimensional points each representing our universe in a particular state-space, and each of those points is one planck length away from the next. While it's entirely possible to imagine a universe constructed from points that are closer together or further apart than the one we live in, they would be part of some other subset of the multiverse.

But how can something as complex as physical reality be boiled down to just a vibration across the dimensions? Here's an analogy: think about a sound wave. Using the interplay of only two factors, amplitude and frequency, we can create something as simple as a sine wave, or as harmonically complex as the human voice, or as dynamic as a thunderstorm. In the digital realm, the degree of accuracy with which a sound can be represented is reflected by the number of bits used to represent the amplitude, and the sampling rate used to represent the frequency. Once the bits and sampling rate are high enough (and any audio geek will tell you these numbers should therefore be much higher than the 16 bits and 44.1K sample rate of a CD), any sound imaginable can be properly represented.

The speed of light, then, shows us the "sample rate" for our universe, which determines what frequencies can be properly represented in the waveform of our physical reality. As we approach the speed of light or the planck length, reality breaks down, it can no longer be properly represented.

Consciousness, in its own way, can be boiled down to an interplay between gravity and light, but consciousness is not confined to the physical world, so those words can easily be used metaphorically. Still, an idea can have a certain gravity (or lack thereof), and a frequency (or mix of multiple frequencies) which, like the amplitude and frequency of any other waveform, allows us to create any idea imaginable. In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I argue that the clouds of memes and spirit that exist across time are part of what we take on to become a unique personality, and because those factors are not rooted in the limited physical realm, they can be transmitted across generations, and also be responsible for simultaneous inspiration or the sudden ascendency of new memes. The biggest-picture-of-all memes which have existed since the beginning of our universe have such a long waveform that they could easily be represented by a much lower sample rate - but since time is really an illusion, what we are really talking about here is just another way of viewing our slice of the multiverse.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

P.S. - the new "Utopia" issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine is now hitting the newsstands. Please flip to page 26 and read the fantastic article by Senior Associate Editor Tom Huston about the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project.



The link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK29fTLXEf0



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

The Anthropic Viewpoint

Poor Ol' Anthropic Principle - it sure gets kicked around a lot. The first time I read about it in Stephen Hawking's writing it immediately clicked for me: for most of my life I had held the intuition that there are a multitude of other universes out there with different basic physical laws and different timelines than our own. Now that intuition had a name.

If you're not familiar with the term, you can read about the different variations of the Anthropic Principle at wikipedia. There are some variants listed in the article which I had not heard of before - I was familiar with the Weak Anthropic Principle ("WAP"), and the Strong Anthropic Principle ("SAP"), but I was amused to learn that there is also the "FAP" (Final) and the "CRAP" (Completely Ridiculous) versions of this concept as well.

If our universe really is only one of many in a multiverse of universes, then the anthropic principle is a no-brainer: it would be like asking how humans came to be so lucky as to live on land, because if we lived on the bottom of the ocean we would all have drowned. But the anthropic principle certainly has some passionate opposition - some people believe it is an argument in support of Intelligent Design, some dismiss it as unsupportable conjecture (and therefore not a scientific viewpoint), some people believe it proves there is no need for a Creator because every possible arrangement of matter and energy exists out there in the multiverse.

In my song "The Anthropic Viewpoint" I examine the ideas behind the anthropic principle - how did we end up in a universe whose basic laws have been uniquely tuned to support life as we know it? This song blends a number of ideas: determinism, free will, the voices of intuition, the multiverse as it relates to the Anthropic Principle, and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems (which I also sometimes use to describe how my version of "dimension ten" is different from the other nine in my model). And it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.

THE ANTHROPIC VIEWPOINT
Music and lyrics by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
The only thing that I know for certain
In everything that you say and do
The only thing you know for sure is you
Believe in that and you will be okay
You could live to fight another day, some day

Pay no mind to those tiny little voices
Every day you gotta make some choices
Make ‘em right and you can carry on
Make ‘em wrong and you will soon be gone
And if it seems just a little unfair
Get used to it, cause the stars don’t care, don’t care

In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be

If there’s other worlds then we’ve just missed ‘em
No way to know what’s outside our system
We’re like goldfish livin in a bowl
What’s beyond it we can never know
All we can do is theorize
Cause we can never… get outside, outside

In the anthropic viewpoint…

So here we are in the Hydrogen Conspiracy
That’s the way that it certainly appears to be
What’s the reason, where’s the rhyme
How’d we end up on this line
All those other possibilities
They’re just as real, but they don’t have me
It’s no big deal, not worth a fuss
They’re just as real, but they don’t have us, have us

In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be

And here is a cool video created by Ryan Hill, using as its starting point an extreme closeup of my ugly mug singing the song. Crank it up!



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Hard Determinism

There are a lot of philosophical discussions that arise from this way of imagining the ten dimensions. One thing that has surprised me about the tenth dimension forum is that there are more people out there than I realized who support the idea that our free will is an illusion, and that every action each of us is carrying out is part of an inevitable, inexorable march from the big bang to entropy: this position is called Hard Determinism.

Some have even suggested I should be completely comfortable with this fatalistic view of life: since I am insisting that time is an illusion, and that the events which are about to occur for each of us already exist in the higher dimensions, then aren’t I really arguing the same viewpoint?

This, I believe, is another one of those conceptual framing questions: there are levels at which each viewpoint is correct. Chapter seven of my book is called “The Paradoxes of Time Travel”: here are a couple of paragraphs:

“Discussions of free will crop up again and again as we imagine travelling in time. One theory that attempts to deal with this issue is known as the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, which was developed by Igor Novikov of the University of Copenhagen. This theory starts with the commonly held assumption that there is only one reality, and only one real time-line for the universe. Assuming that time travel becomes a possibility for us at some point, persons travelling in time to their own past would find it impossible to do anything that would create a paradox: in other words, even if they were to point a gun at their own grandfather, something would always happen to prevent the gun from firing, or the bullet would always miss. The most one could do would be to wound their own grandfather, so long as the wound did not prevent good ol’ grampa from then having the child that becomes the time traveler’s mother or father.

“The mysterious force that would prevent the paradox of killing your grandfather from occurring would appear to be removing free will from the equation. Proponents of this theory point out that this is not that unusual: for instance, no matter how much we attempt to exercise our free will there are certain natural forces in our world, like gravity or the apparent solidity of a wall, that we are simply not able to overcome. In the scenario we’re examining then, attempting to kill your grandfather would be like attempting to levitate or to walk through a wall: no matter how much you try, you are simply unable to do so.”

Likewise, if we are imagining a set of time lines that were selected at the initial conditions of our big bang, then there are basic laws and forces that were chosen at that time which will remain consistent from the beginning to the end of our universe, and no amount of free will be able to change them. If you are thinking of this beginning-to-the-end as a fourth dimensional joining of two points (analogous to a one dimensional line), then, you should also be able to imagine that line as having a “thickness” in the sixth dimension, and that thickness would encompass every possible timeline from the defined beginning and targeted ending of our universe. Fifth-dimensional cross sections of that rope would represent the different “planes” that make up the sixth dimension, just as we can imagine different two-dimensional planes that could occupy parts of third-dimensional space. Ultimately, that sixth-dimensional “rope” that we have imagined would be thinnest at either end, and thickest at the points where the most possible diversity of possible timelines could occur.

Suppose I do figure out a way to go back in time and kill good ol’ grampa. Is that going to change the end of the universe? Suppose I do something that causes planet Earth to disintegrate into atoms. Is that going to change the end of the universe? While it's possible to imagine some chain reaction science fiction experiment gone awry that destroys the entire universe one minute from now, that would only be one thread out of the rope we have just imagined – the other threads where that event didn’t occur would still continue to weave together on their path to one of the possible ends for our universe.

Like the conceptual framing that allows us to imagine ten dimensions by taking it one layer at a time, this is another frame – there are the possibilities and potentials for future timelines that free will, chance, and the actions of others are moving us through from instant to instant. On some of those threads Elvis is still alive (and this would be part of a fifth-dimensional plane defined by all the possible “Elvis is still alive” spacetimes): but on the threads we happen to be on he didn’t make it.

To the extent that any of us can change our position in that rope of consensual reality, created from the threads that exist from the past to the future, I would say that our free will is absolutely part of that equation. My free will can’t allow me to walk through a wall, but there are still a great many things that I do have control over. Still, in the biggest picture of all the hard determinists may also have it right: and that is because all of those possible timelines my free will is allowed to select from are already defined by the point in the seventh dimension that our particular universe is confined within.

Now, what if our universe were to move slightly in the seventh dimension? That may have already happened, but that is a discussion for a future blog entry.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Everything Fits Together 1,2,3

Today we have posted three new videos for one of the songs from my book. All three are for the same song, but each is a very different visual take. You can find them at youtube.com. The videos are titled "Everthing Fits Together 1", Everything Fits Together 2", and Everything Fits Together 3". Individual links for these videos can also be found in the "Tenth Dimension Links" box over to the right.


In a previous blog entry titled "Everything Fits Together", I discussed some of the thoughts that went into the creation of this song. Here now are the lyrics:

EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER
music and lyrics (c) 2006 by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

It’s the age old question, it always stays the same
People turnin their eyes up to heaven and callin out names
Some may get an answer, some may turn away
When they don’t want to know too much, cause it’s easier that way
Hidden back between the pages, written in between the lines
There’s a spider’s web of connections there for you to find

Cause everything fits together, you may not see that now
But there’ll come a day, when you’ll see the way
There’s always a why and a how
Everything fits together, it’s all part of the show
Soon there’ll come a day when you’ll see the way
And you’ll know (there’s a reason why, there’s a reason why)
And you’ll know (there’s a reason why, there’s a reason why)
There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why
There’s a reason why you feel the way you do
There’s a reason why you do the deeds you do
There’s a reason why you feel the needs you do
There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why
(There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why)

In this world of wonder, in this world of pain
In this world of mysteries that still remain
There’s a hunger growing, we all would love the chance
To see the hidden strings that sing to make it all dance
Just when you thought the universe couldn’t be any more complex
You started climbing up through the levels, one to the next

Where everything fits together, you may not see that now
But there’ll come a day, when you’ll see the way
There’s always a why and a how
Everything fits together, it’s all part of the show
Soon there’ll come a day when you’ll see the way
And you’ll know
Everything fits together (everything fits together)
Everything fits together
Everything fits together (everything fits together)
Everything fits together




A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdjX72VcKI






A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

Enjoy the Journey,

Rob Bryanton

Welcome to Rob's Tenth Dimension Blog

This week, www.tenthdimension.com saw its one millionth unique visitor. What has drawn people to this site? Clearly, the 11 minute animation showing people how to imagine ten dimensions has been the biggest draw... here is a site that with virtually no promotion, has found a worldwide audience. The book that is associated with the website is selling well, first from this site only, and now from Amazon.com and trafford.com.

Book sales are gratifying, but this is not the reason I created this website:

I am interested in the discussion of ideas about the nature of reality. The Forum on this website has been a popular place for people to discuss the huge cloud of ideas that surround that central thought, and I see that a lot of new visitors to the site are just spending their time reading old posts, not bothering to even log in... which is fine, there is a huge amount of discussion that has already taken place and it is good that the ideas that have been posted by this site's forum community can continue to be enjoyed.

Now that I have posted the first six of my twenty-six songs about the nature of reality on the site, I am hoping that visitors will be able to use these songs as another way in to understanding my unique way of imagining the ten dimensions. Please stay tuned, as we are now working on ways for more people to participate in this creative process.

Thank you to the many students, profs, and deep thinkers who have written to me about my "way of imagining", and for those who are new to this site, let me end my first blog entry with a version of my standard disclaimer. Other versions of this disclaimer can be found in the front of the book, the Preamble link from this website, and beside my picture at the top of the tenth dimension forum:

Although I am 100 per cent committed to the ideas I have created for this project, and the way that it uses current mainstream thinking about the nature of our reality as its jumping off point, I feel it is important to note that the "framework for discussion" that I advance on this website and in the book "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" is not what you would currently be taught in a university physics class. Anyone wanting to know more about the currently established thinking behind physics and cosmology should refer to such excellent books as "Programming the Universe" by Seth Lloyd, "Parallel Worlds" by Michio Kaku, "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene, or "Warped Passages" by Lisa Randall. Other books that strongly connect to the ideas around this project are "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter, "This is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel J. Levitin, "Linked" by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, "Quantum Enigma" by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, and "Everything Forever" by Gevin Giorbran.

I invite you to think of this as a creative exploration that for some people will have a strong and thought-provoking connection to their impression of how the world, the universe, and our conscious perception of reality really works. If you go to tenthdimension.com/forum, you will have an opportunity to discuss and debate the cloud of concepts that surround this project. A list of frequently asked questions about this project can be found at tenthdimension.com/faq . The FAQ is part of my blog (tenthdimension.com/blog ) where you will find new ideas being posted regularly. Plus, we have an interactive chat room featuring video blog entries streaming 24 hours a day which can be viewed at tenthdimension.tv , or if you want to participate in the live discussions go to tenthdimension.com/chat . There is much to see and do here, please explore and enjoy. And thank you to the millions of fans of this project from around the world!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

tenth dimension