Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4wvShQBi-I

First, go read Roger Ebert's blog entry published a couple of weeks ago, called "The Quantum Theory of Reincarnation":
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/07/everymans_guide_to_quantum_the.html

Mr. Ebert gets an awful lot of things right here, and in ways very similar to what I've been saying with my project since it launched over three years ago. I wonder how he would react to my original animation about how to imagine ten spatial dimensions? Or to the amusing College Humor satire published last month blending my way of visualizing the spatial dimensions with a movie trailer?

Over at YouTube, my most popular video blog entry is currently "Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?", which helps to solidify some of what Mr. Ebert is talking about: if, in the underlying structures of reality, time has no meaning and everything happens simultaneously, then the additional dimensions all have to be spatial rather than temporal for extra dimensions to make sense.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfhOBevrN2U

As Mr. Ebert mentions, our reality is not continuous, despite what our senses tell us. Rather, it's sliced up into planck-unit-sized pieces of not just space, but spacetime. In The Holographic Universe, I expanded upon this idea further with an exploration of the growing mountain of scientific evidence that our particular reality comes from the fifth dimension rather than the fourth:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMLVjFrtq6Q

Coincidentally, a week or so before Mr. Ebert's blog entry went up I published a video blog at YouTube called "Could I Meet My Incarnation?", which explores very similar territory: what is it that makes each of us unique, and what is it that connects us all together?

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

My most popular blog entry of all time was published earlier this year, and it also relates to Mr. Ebert's exploration of how the quantum world relates to the reality we see around us: "Creativity and the Quantum Universe". Here's the video for that entry:


Roger Ebert is one of the most widely read columnists on the planet. With his blog entry we looked at here today, he shows us he is part of a growing surge of interest in these ideas, and as I approach five million unique visitors who have been to my tenth dimension website, I'm so very pleased to have played my own small part in helping to move people towards this new understanding. Bravo, Roger Ebert!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Norway's "Reverse Deja Vu"

Polls Archive 33 - Could I Meet My Incarnation?

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

Poll 33 - "If, as Einstein said, the distinction between past present and future is only an illusion, then I could meet another incarnation of myself right now." Poll ended February 12, 2009 - 54% agreed while the remainder disagreed.

Last poll, I remarked upon how instructive these polls can be for me - for instance, I would have thought the idea that "time is a direction, not a dimension" would have gotten a lot of people to agree, since it's central to this way of visualizing reality, but that poll came in with very similar results to this current one. On the other hand, I would have thought that the idea that one could meet an incarnation of themselves right now would have seen more disagreement, since this is one of the more unusual ideas from my project. 54% of the visitors to this forum are willing to agree with that notion? I'm pleasantly surprised.

This is one of those ideas that occurred to me many years ago as an extension to my way of visualizing the dimensions of reality stacked one upon another, a concept that I had been showing to anyone who would listen for the last twenty-five years or so. Back in 2002, I wrote about 50 songs that explored the tangents that come from this way of visualizing reality, with the plan that I would pick my favorites and record a CD. I was also thinking that I would write a little booklet to accompany the CD in which I would explain how this "new way of thinking about time and space" tied all of the songs together.

When I actually got around to writing the CD booklet in 2005, it grew to 220 pages, and that "new way of thinking" eventually became my popular 11-minute animation which has been seen by millions of people around the world. Since the book's publication in 2006 my songs have become somewhat secondary to the project, which is fine, but I believe there are still ways that song lyrics can make these ideas more accessible. One of the 26 songs I attached to this project is called "Connections". The last verse of that song went like this:

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

Likewise, with my song "Burn the Candle Brightly", I was thinking about the patterns representing us that carry on after death:

So when this journey is over
And that beautiful spark is finally gone
We can see that the vessel is empty
But we know that the light carries on

... and my song "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" also talks about this idea from the first person perspective:

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

One of the books I've referred to a number of times in this blog is Douglas Hofstadter's "I Am a Strange Loop". Let me quote a few paragraphs from this enlightening and inspiring book, much of which is about the structures and forms that create the mysterious "I" of consciousness. In the latter part of the book, though, he expands these ideas into what it means to have a representation of other people - your spouse, your children, your parents, a very close friend - held within those same structures. Specifically, how much of that can be thought of as being an actual part of what it is that makes that person uniquely who they are? And if any part can be thought of in that way to any degree, then what happens when the real person dies? Hofstadter writes:

The bond created between two people who are married for a long time is often so tight and powerful that upon the death of either one of them, the other one very soon dies as well. And if the other survives, it is often with the horrible feeling that half of their soul has been ripped out. In happier days, during the marriage, the two partners of course have individual interests and styles, but at the same time a set of common interests and styles starts to build up, and over time a new entity starts to take shape.

And later on...

The following should be a much easier question (although I think it is not actually easier). What was the nature of the "Holden Caulfield symbol" in J. D. Salinger's brain during the period when he was writing Catcher in the Rye? That structure was all there ever was to Holden Caulfield -- but it was so, so rich. Perhaps that symbol wasn't as rich as a full human soul, but Holden Caulfield seems like so much of a person, with a true core, a true soul, a true personal gemma, even if only a "miniature" one. You couldn't ask for a richer representation, a richer mirroring, of one person inside another person, than whatever constitutued the Holden Caulfield symbol inside Salinger's brain.

In my own book, I suggest that what each of us think of as our unique "soul" is actually a large and interconnected set of memes, some of which rise and fall in prominence over a lifetime, and memes by their very definition are patterns of information that exist across space and time, connecting together in ways that are beyond the physical limitations of the world we see around us. This leads me to some conclusions that are related to what Mr. Hofstadter is talking about, but I go a little further out on the same conceptual limb:

Here’s another way to look at this idea: if each of us has a unique soul, where are all the new souls coming from? Our planet’s population has exploded in numbers, so there must be new “soul material” being created from somewhere (if there really are only a certain number of souls allocated to this planet, then the chances of any one of us being the reincarnate soul of a person who lived here in the last few thousand years are approaching the chances of winning a lottery!).
In the New Age community, theories abound regarding what that source of all those new souls might be. All of those theories may be held within the version of reality that we are advancing here: if our soul is a conglomeration of memes that exist outside of time, then other versions of that soul could exist in other universes, in other locations within our universe, in other parts of the history and future of our universe, and even right now in other parts of our own world. The idea that it’s possible to meet another incarnation of yourself right now may take some getting used to, but it is an important aspect of the version of reality we are exploring.

And later on:

It may appear, then, that if we imagine a particular meme that has existed since the perceived beginning of our universe, collapsing a specific version of reality out of the wave of potential universes through the act of its observation, that we are imagining an aspect of the Creator-God. But there is a second way to view this puzzle. Could the feeling of “self” that each of us holds within us also be “just geometry”? In other words, what if this interlocking web of memes were exactly like the interlocking web of physical realities implied by the Many Worlds theory? This would mean that the potential for all ways of viewing the world, and the potential for all the different systems that we think of as being our own soul, are also held within an indeterminate wave of potential at the tenth dimension that has always existed, and will always exist.

In entries like Everyone Has a Story, Being More Fifth-Dimensional, You are Me and We are All Together, The Big Bang and the Big O, and Going to the Light I've continued my exploration of how ideas from cosmology and philosophy, from science and spirituality, can be blended together into an understanding of our reality which embraces a timeless perspective. Once we've arrived at an appreciation of the timelessness that exists outside of our spacetime, an enfolded symmetry state from which our universe or any other arises, it becomes easier to think about how it really could be possible to meet another person right now who is basically you, living another life, in another body, experiencing the world with their own unique perspective but intimately connected through those underlying information patterns which exist outside of spacetime.

Other recent blogs about enfolded symmetry:
Dreaming of Electric Sheep
Imagining the Omniverse
We Start with a Point
A Point within the Omniverse
"t" Equals Zero
Going to the Light
The Invariant Set
Illusions and Reality

To finish, here's one of the songs we quoted from above: "Burn the Candle Brightly".

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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next - Polls Archive 34 - God? Or the Multiverse?

Connections

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J25WhT8WZQ4

I've just started reading a fascinating book by Daniel J. Levitin: "This Is Your Brain on Music". Written by a well-known musician/engineer/producer who has now become a neuroscientist, it finds ways to describe from a neurophysical viewpoint the fascinating connections that happen when we hear different kinds of music. Dr. Levitin suggests that music may be even more fundamental to our species than language.

This is one of the central ideas from my book: what connects us all across time and space? It's the memes that represent our consciousness, and each of us is part of our own unique meme-system that exists outside of the illusion of time. Whenever I listen to a particular piece of music, there are physical, cultural, and emotional patterns that trigger responses in my mind, and in my body. And in much the same way that body language can transmit anger or fear, or contentment or joy, not just from one human being to another but even across species, the multiple layers of information that are encoded into any piece of music are a powerful example of what is really happening behind the curtain of our observed physical reality.

This song also gets into an idea I explore in my book: creative people who touch so many people's lives may be able to do so because they are more aligned with the central memes that make up larger portions of the general public. What makes pop music so popular? Where does the longevity of the Beatles or Bach come from? All creative artistic endeavors have resonant ties to specific "big picture memes" within their underlying structures. For instance: when I read a Stephen King novel, even when the situation is preposterous, I feel a connection to the underlying ideas and motivations of his characters. As Mr. King himself has acknowledged, some critics say he has been so successful because he is a hack who writes for the lowest common denominator, but I believe that is just a negative way of expressing the idea I'm talking about here: Stephen King has become one of the best selling authors of all time based upon his ability to place us in the heads of his characters. His ability to plug his audience into strongly resonant meme-systems that speak to so many is what makes him or any other successful creator so fascinating, and their work so powerful.

Quantum mechanics tells us reality and information are interchangeable. I propose that the shapes and patterns that make up that information out here at the macro level of reality are tracked within the meme-systems that we move through as ideas rise and fall in popularity, and which makes great art transcend time to communicate across the centuries.

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

Connections in time
Connections in space
Connections we share with the whole human race
Back to the very first chemical chain
That started it all, one thing remains
It’s all about connections

Just another sappy love song
Climbin to the top of all the charts
Go ahead and ridicule it
You can say that it’s not art
But what’s inside that formula
That lets it touch so many hearts?
How could those recycled cliches
Grab so many from the start?

Connections in time…

Shared beliefs, and strong emotions
Connections of common family bonds
Draw us all together
They help to make us strong
This system of thoughts and memories
The “I” inside that I call me
There are parts I share with others here
Now and back through history

Connections in time…

Past life regression
Trips to the psychic fair
If time is an illusion
Then those other lives you share
Parts of them could be right here
Writing the books you love so well
Singing the songs that touch you deeply
Your reincarnate self

Connections in time…

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


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Your Sixth-Dimensional Self

One of the more extraordinary claims I make in my book is that what we think of as the "soul" is more akin to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" concept, and that we spend our lives integrating and rejecting various meme-systems floating out there in the dimensions, and the particular subset we have taken on at any one moment defines who we are... but this is a system that changes somewhat over our lives. This gives us an easy way to answer the old conundrum, where do all the new souls come from? There were less than ten million of us on the planet in 10,000 BC, 2.5 billion of us in 1950, now we're around 6.5 billion! Statistically, the chances of any one of us here today being the reincarnated soul of a person who lived on this planet in the last two thousand years are becoming vanishingly small, down into lottery ticket territory. Unless...

By the time we have imagined that timelessness is a real description of our place in the cosmos, and that what we think of as a soul is a specific collection of memes, then there is no reason to assume that there is a limit to the perceived number of souls, or the locations in time of those souls. In fact, there is no reason to assume that you couldn't walk up to someone on the street right now and realize that you have met another incarnation of yourself! But it gets even stranger than that.

Living on a Mobius Strip
According to my way of imagining the dimensions, in our physical bodies we are each on the equivalent of a mobius strip, travelling down a specific "line of time" in the fourth dimension, unaware of the twists and turns that we are making in the dimensions above. I have written much about what this means in the fifth dimension, including the fact that Theodor Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed that the field equations of gravity and light can be combined if they are defined in the fifth dimension, not the fourth-dimensional space-time that seems to have become stuck in the general public's mind more easily. Most people are unaware that the basic aspects of our physical reality are being defined in the fifth dimension.

Imagining my fourth dimensional body as an undulating snake, with my conceived self at one end and my deceased self at the other, is one of the starting points of my visual way of imagining the dimensions. Imagining the fifth dimensional branches of choice and possibility that extend out from this moment shows how a hard determinist could look back in time and see the proof that there is only one reality, because after the fact that is all we can see; while a person believing in free will can look forward into the fifth dimension and see that their future is not written in stone after all. However: going through that exercise artificially diminishes the size and import of what has come before, since the undulating snake leading back to the beginning of my physical body seems to be much smaller than the exploding dandelion seed of the possible branches set before me from this moment forward.

"Angels of Possibility"
So now, let's think of our bodies in the sixth dimension, which contains all possible timelines for our particular universe. Where is my sixth dimensional self the largest? If you think about it for a moment, you will see it is at the moment of conception. From there, the branching possibilities that will get me to some version of my adult self are exponentially larger than any time thereafter. This seems to relate to Terence McKenna's "timewave zero" concept, which suggests that novelty increases as the end of the universe approaches, but it is the mirror image at "right angles" to his idea: the possible cusps of change that an embryo or even a small child have before them are absolutely immense compared to the more limited subset that we have left to choose from by the time we are adults. Here is one of the more often-quoted paragraphs from my book:

"The beautiful blossoming potential we see in a newborn child is an immensely attractive thing. The angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler’s head can be breathtaking if we catch even a fleeting glimpse. And there is nothing as sad as the tragedy of a child who has been mistreated or abused, and whose life may never be the same because of it. Even from our limited window in the lower dimensions, it is easy for us to intuitively understand what is magical and wonderful about the promise of a child, a promise that is held within the sixth dimension."

Religious teachings which say we should approach the Lord as a little child resonate with this idea as well. That reverence, that sense of wonder, that appreciation of the novelty and the vast potential that are held in every instant of time, in every quark and neutrino, and in the spirit energy all around us is part of an awakening that all of us as adults yearn for. On the other hand, whether we are talking about the death of a spirit or the death of a physical body, what we are really talking about is what happens when those processes cease to be interested in "what happens next".

"And in The End..."
What does timelessness mean for me? Because time is an illusion, it means that once any of us breaks out of our physical reality, there we will find all the other branches of our sixth dimensional selves, waiting to greet us and compare notes on the journey, and see how everything fits together.

And that is what enjoying the journey should always be about.

Rob



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