I Know You, You Know Me

(October 9th 2008 would have been John Lennon's 68th birthday. Happy birthday John, where ever/what ever you may be right now.)

A direct link to this video is at http://www.blip.tv/file/1345477

What can I say? I'm from the baby boomer generation, and I remember the intense excitement of the Beatles' influence in the 1960s. As a tribute to those times, this blog and the next ones are using Beatles lyrics for their title: today's entry "I Know You, You Know Me" is from the song "Come Together", a call to action if I've ever heard one.

Whether you're talking about the sixties, or today at this very minute, the overwhelming feeling that we are all part of something big, a wave of change sweeping the planet, is a powerful experience. Today, there are people all over the world who are coming to believe that their new-found common ground of connected experience is going to allow them to make a difference, in ways that the baby boomers could only dream about.

As I've said before: it's all about connections. I believe that each of us every day are witness to emotional and intellectual connections across time and space that reveal things about the underlying structures of reality, and all we have to do is open our eyes to see.

A New Way of Visualizing
I came up with my way of visualizing reality over twenty years ago while working on the music for a play about the end of the world. I kept drawing pictures of branching timelines and folded dimensions on napkins, some people got it and many didn't, but I remained convinced that I had stumbled upon something that revealed a basic truth about our reality. After an accident during surgery in 2004 resulted in me almost bleeding to death on the operating table, I woke up saying to myself "I have got to get this idea out into the world" and eventually that's what I've done. It's all about connections, and finding the common experience that each of us shares without even realizing it.

An Interconnected System
Marvin Minsky talks about each person's consciousness being made of an interconnected, multi-layered system. Douglas Hofstadter talks about the systems within our consciousness that we share with each other across time and space. My approach builds from their ideas, says that we are not each a self-contained soul, but rather an interconnected collection of memes across time and space. Some of us are more connected to each other than others, because our systems overlap more! I've written a lot about all that in my book and in my blog.

My song "Connections" is one of the 26 songs attached to this project that explore the cloud of ideas related to this project, and the last verse of the song takes the idea of each of us each being part of a larger system to its logical extreme:

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

If you've ever had that experience you know exactly what I'm talking about. Sometimes you can just look into someone else's eyes and say to yourself "I Know You".

Saying "I Am You" to somebody else who has not worked through this line of reasoning will, in most cases, not be something they can accept. We each know there is something unique about our own awareness: but the idea that your or my individual consciousness is part of a much larger Observer system makes as much sense from a quantum mechanics viewpoint as it does from a spiritual/metaphysical viewpoint. In my book I said this:

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.

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 judgement 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.

In We're Already Dead (But That's Okay) I called it "option-itis": if there are too many choices, things become less interesting, or they become overwhelming. As I've said many times before, thinking about all options simultaneously is not something we can easily do, which is why this way of visualizing the dimensions works: because it takes all the options of one dimension, adds another new set of options with an additional dimension, and continues the process all the way up to every possible expression of the information that becomes our reality in one enfolded, simultaneous state. With this project, I'm calling that state the tenth dimension, but in doing so I always want to make sure people recognize that this "perfectly balanced state that holds everything else within it" has many other names!

Here's something I wasn't aware of: human beings are genetically extremely similar to each other, much more so than other animals on our planet. According to a recently released study, the genetic record indicates that about 100,000 years ago we as a species were almost wiped out - there were only a few thousand, perhaps even only a few hundred of us left! So, in that regard, the idea that we are all connected together has a very real physical and genetic explanation. Next blog, we'll continue with our Beatles titles and our discussion of the ways we're all connected together with an entry titled "You Are Me and We Are All Together".

To finish, here's a song about the parts of our consciousness that we share, and which exist outside of our physical bodies: "I Remember Flying". A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Soe2swgtsE


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

We're Already Dead (But That's Okay)

A direct link to this video can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQMO1eyMRuM

"Option-itis"
Here's something I've said before: things become less interesting to us as the number of choices multiply. If, as I've proposed with this project, the sixth dimension includes every possible expression of the wave function for our universe, then it includes the version where I went crazy, shot up my town, died in a hail of bullets. Do I ever want to even witness that particular version of reality? No thank you!

Nine dimensions, three triads, enfolded into the tenth dimension
Last blog, we talked about how dimensions four through six can be called the "moral" triad. It's that narrowing down of possibilities, through the moral decisions I've made so far, that have created the fifth dimensional subset that I have access to from this "now" forward--and that will continue to be true for the rest of my life. If you are fully engaged with that process, what could be more exciting? Every instant we are observing new possibilities from a fantastically complex wave function that exists across the dimensions, but which are also uniquely defined by our own personal set of experiences.

Some people like to make fun of this idea, but this is essentially true: we are each creating a version of the universe through our role as quantum observers, and the path that each of us takes is unique. But we're each also participating in a consensual reality that has been created by the other people we share this reality with, which means their moral decisions are also part of my probability set. This is the hard part, because it means someone else can still choose to kill me, or they can do things that limit my access to possible futures I'd like to get to.

Thinking about Parallel Universes
Which takes us to the craziest part of this idea: each of us have already died through bad luck or bad choices made, that's just not the part of the multiverse that we're currently witnessing. Believe it or not, that's the idea that started this all for me back when I was seven, but it has taken me many years of thinking and reading to arrive at the conclusion that this crazy idea is supported by science!

I've written many times about the proof published by the Oxford University team under the direction of physicist David Deutsch, a proof which New Scientist magazine listed as one of the most important scientific stories of 2007: the bush-like branching structure of our quantum wave function, and the parallel universes that result from chance and choice for each of us are provably equivalent. This means the universe where I took five minutes longer to get out of bed this morning is part a different parallel universe, which is just as real as the one I'm currently witnessing, it just happens to not be the version I'm traveling within. Mind-boggling? You bet. But also, as it turns out, completely compatible with what I've been claiming since I first came up with this way of visualizing reality over twenty years ago.

I'm a Spime and So Are You
In the original tenth dimension animation, we imagined a person's body as if it were a spime: a four-dimensional object. In the animation, we said this:

If you were to see your body in the fourth dimension, you would be like a long undulating snake, with your embryonic self at one end and your deceased self at the other.

If there were only one possible timeline from the beginning to the end of a person's life, that would be the end of the discussion. But as we explored in my book and blog entries like The Spacetime Tree, I'm proposing that our reality actually comes from the probability space of the fifth dimension, and it's easy to envision the branching structures that result from chance and choice as being part of a tree-like structure in the fifth dimension.

Souls as Systems
With this project, we're imagining a person's "soul" not as a single self-contained unit, but rather as being a multi-layered system of memes, a "society of mind" across the dimensions. Now we're talking about a set of parallel universes where, in many of them, bad things have happened that resulted in our deaths: but since everyone reading this blog is alive and not dead (I presume), we know that those branching timelines are not part of the parallel universe we're each currently witnessing. Yikes! What does this all mean?

How unlikely is the "Now" we're each currently in?
In Randomness and the Missing 96%, we talked about the idea that dark matter and junk DNA might be telling us more than we realize about how unlikely our current reality really is. And if we add up all of the bad luck and deliberate actions of others that could have resulted in each of us being dead by now, don't we arrive at the same conclusion? When you consider how many situations exist within all of the possible parallel universes for our universe where events conspired to result in each of us dying, it really does seem like a marvelous thing that we get to experience this reality which must be way out on the edge of the bell curve, a highly unlikely universe where each of us have managed to survive... for now.

So now, let's think about that "long undulating snake" that is our body not just in the fourth, but in the fifth dimension. From conception to death, there is the actual 4D "line of time" we have followed, and (as the Deutsch team have proved) there is the bush-like branching structure of possible outcomes extending out from our current "now". So we have something like a dandelion gone to seed held in our minds, with a single stalk representing the past and a "ray" of possible futures at the head.

But what about that missing 96%? Does it factor into the equation here as well? If we're thinking about all of the many possible paths that we have traveled upon up until now which, in a multiverse of possible timelines must include those times when we've already died, we can see in the past a great many other branches which extended off from the main stalk and ended. In my book I said this:

For each of us, we will be able to remember moments of malicious, random, or foolish action that could have done us in. It’s hard to forget that moment where a large object falling or a silly risk taken might have resulted in our death if we had only been in a slightly different place and time. According to the worldview we’re exploring, all of those things did actually happen: that drunk driver you saw last year came over the hill and smashed into you head on, and now you’re dead.

Asking the Big Questions
This is a question people ask themselves all time: what happens to us when we die? One interesting proposal I saw recently suggested maybe whatever we expect to happen is exactly what does happen! If you believe there will be nothing, that's what you get. If you believe that you will be able to continue to watch this particular version of the universe and see what happens to your loved ones, that's what happens. If you believe you will be enfolded back into a white light of all patterns and frequencies, that's where you'll go. And so on! By the time we're "outside" of the arrow of time, there's no reason to assume that these options are mutually exclusive, either: free from the limitations of a physical body riding along an entropy-driven timeline, a person's awareness could explore every parallel universe simultaneously if that was what they wanted to do!

I've quoted from Douglas Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop before with his well-considered musings on what parts of the pattern that represents a person might continue on. Now here's a different way of thinking about this idea: if there is a fifth-dimensional spacetime tree of other possible timelines for our universe, and each of us has timelines where we've already died, then could it be that there are parts of our consciousness, the interlocking patterns that make up our "society of mind" that chose to jump on to our current timeline because they wanted to see what would have happened if they hadn't died? The old adage "once bitten, twice shy" takes on a whole new meaning - if there are tiny voices in my head saying "remember how I died last time I tried that!" then perhaps next time I will be less likely to take a silly risk.

My song "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" is a meditation on the question of what happens to us when we die. To finish, here's a video of me sitting at my old piano singing that song.


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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

For related discussion of these ideas:
Unlikely Events and Timelessness
The Spacetime Tree
The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic
John August and The Nines

PS: Have each of us already died in other parts of the multiverse? That's one of our poll questions right now. And a few blog entries ago I mentioned a project called The Omniverse Almanac, some interesting fiction writing which explores a similar world of ideas, check it out!

Next: Time in 3 Dimensions

Song 24 of 26 - See No Future

The twenty-fourth of the 26 songs is called "See No Future". Scroll down below the following video for the lyrics and a brief discussion of how this song ties into the project. A blog post which lists all 26 songs, including 1 video for each song can be found by clicking here.



A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69pUzwSONBc

I've proposed here that life can be defined as any process that becomes interested in "what happens next" - that would be true for the very first chemical processes on our planet that developed strategies for their own continuance and propagation, and could easily apply to other organized patterns of energy and matter elsewhere within the multiverse. With this project, we have also expanded that idea to include systems of memes that follow the sequential frames of a fourth-dimensional line being selected from a fifth-dimensional probability space: all that is required is a "chain of attention", a quantum observer in (as physicist John Wheeler liked to call it) a "self-excited circuit", observing one timeline or another out of Everett's Many Worlds. By allowing for this possibility, we have opened the door to there being voices of "god and conscience, ghosts and ancestors" which could also possibly be part of the nature of reality: and we have suggested that this fits nicely with the Julian Jaynes concept of an integrated state of mind being until relatively recently the normal mode of operation for humans, which may be the way in which those voices were once a part of the day-to-day human experience.

Thinking in terms of these really-big-picture ways of imagining reality, and the information that is our reality, shows us how within the timeless multiverse that our universe springs from there are shapes and patterns that reveal how our reality is constructed, and places within that multiverse of all possibilities where certain shapes and patterns start and end. There is a very large pattern representing our universe from its possible beginnings to its possible endings, but that pattern is still a tiny subset of the multiverse. There is a pattern that is a subset of our universe that represents the genes flowing from a "river out of Eden" that create all human beings, just as there is a connected web of ideas and ways of looking at the world that can be thought of as the memes that contribute to human consciousness.

And within that pattern there is another tiny subset, representing the set of genes and memes that make a particular person. Those patterns are connected together across time and geography, back to the first spark of life and out to the end of the human race. With ideas like Kurzweil's approaching Singularity, or the Mayan Calendar's predicted acceleration of time and consciousness, we can entertain the hope that the memes that make up a human being (or all human beings) may find a way to continue, and this idea relates very nicely to the discussions about the nature of consciousness and what carries on when a person dies that Douglas Hofstadter eloquently explores in "I Am a Strange Loop".

So even though the genes and memes that make a human being's body and consciousness are part of patterns that extend across eons and around the world, and the memes can be thought of as extending out to basic patterns for preferring one outcome over another that extend right out to the multiverse of possible universes, at the other end of the scale there is a particular human body, which is yet another even smaller subset of all these patterns and shapes in the information that is reality.

In the animation, I suggest we think of our bodies in the four-dimension as a long undulating snake, connecting our conceived self at one end to our deceased self at the other. In my book, I blend Marvin Minsky's idea of "Society of Mind" with the Richard Dawkins idea of memes to suggest that what we think of as a "soul" is a complex interaction of different memes that rise and fall over time, and in that sense your (or my) soul is not the same as it was twenty years ago, because we are always taking on new memes and discarding old ones.

But this is not to say that the body is unimportant: there is still something unique about the experiences and meme-set/gene-set of any one of us that are carried along in a physical body, and as an organized pattern within the timeless multiverse each of us really are a unique subset of all that could be. Unfortunately though, there can come a time in people's lives where, because of old age, depression, disease, bad choices, or bad circumstance, they give up. That's what this song is about: if life is about "what happens next", then death is what happens when we "see no future".


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

EDIT - here are those lyrics written out again with chords
SEE NO FUTURE
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

B (open, no third)
B (open)
You see no
E (add 9)
future on the road that you’ve been
B/D#
travelin --- You see no
E (add 9)
reason to continue any
F#sus F#
more --- Still you
B -- B/D# -- E
keep on keepin on Cause it’s the
B -- B/D# -- E
way you’ve always gone Won’t you
B -- B/D# -- E
tell me what the hell you do it
F#sus F#
for ---- Now if there’s

A (add 9)
one thing I can say – it’s you’re con
E/G#
sistent --- And you’re per
A (add 9)
sistent to a fault, sure, some’d
Bsus B
say --- Are you
E -- E/G# -- A
stubborn or just dumb? Why don’t you
E -- A/G# -- A
try to find someone --- Who will
E -- E/G# -- A
help to turn you round the other
Bsus B
way --- When you see no
A (open 9)
future


A (open 9)
--- No tomorrows
G
--- Just todays
G/F
--- Is that the way you wanna
C#m7
stay?
A(open 9)
--- No wishes
G
--- No dreams
F/G
---- Can’t you find another
Asus A
way? --- I wish some

E
happiness could join you on your
B/D#
journey --- I hope that
E
fortune finally finds you on your
F#sus F#
way --- But tell me
B -- B/D# -- E
how will you ever win --- When that
B -- B/D# -- E
big wheel that you’re in --- Has you
B -- B/D# -- E
runnin the same circle every
F#sus F#
day --- You see no
B
future

No tomorrows....

You see no future...


....When you see no
A
future --- When you see no
E
future --- When you see no
A
future --- When you see no

(silent pause, then: B)

Next song: 25 of 26 - What I Feel For You

Boredom and Consciousness Part Three

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txe4psJ6pVw


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99oMQvccar0

In Boredom and Consciousness Part Two we talked about how boredom is very much a "conscious" part of our minds. If you are driving a car properly, you are performing a constant series of checks completely automatically: your conscious and subconscious minds are working as one. The brain is entirely capable of taking you from one side of the city to the other without your "narrator voice" interfering with what you're doing. But what if that narrator voice, instead, had been telling you how boring the drive was? You would be much more likely to have had an accident through being inattentive to all of the possible danger signs that our subconscious minds deal with constantly as we drive. Even something as simple and uncomplicated as falling asleep is almost impossible to do if you can't find a way to quiet that darn narrator voice of consciousness, as anyone who has tried to find sleep when they are upset or excited knows only too well.

Do you like to garden? Some people can't stand it because it's so boring. Other people love simple repetitive activities like these because it gives them peace... in other words, gardening can be a form of meditation. And meditation, of course, is actually not that far away from boredom: because meditation is an activity that encourages us to move through and beyond our line of time with an integrated mind, quieting that nagging narrator voice that says "this is boring" and moving into the state that Julian Jaynes tells us we used to always exist within.

Here's what I say in my book about meditation:

Meditation is a particularly interesting example of how people can use the power of the mind to change their health and circumstances. Researchers analyzing the EEGs of persons in a meditative state have seen that the parietal lobe, which processes incoming data to give a person the sense of their location in time and space, becomes much less active during meditation. If the parietal lobe would be what anchors us in the first-through-fourth dimension (time and space), then, could suppressing that part of the brain be what opens the person who is meditating up to the healing paths available to them in higher dimensions?

This same Scientific American "Mind" article on boredom we were discussing in part two also talks about the rising popularity of "mindfulness" training in education, medical, and office settings, which is a form of meditation that helps people to become more in tune with the wonder of their day-to-day lives. Elsewhere in the issue is a review of a book by Jeff Warren called "The Head Trip": Jeff describes consciousness as a wheel that can be broken into twelve states from highly alert to deeply asleep. I was interested to see that what started him down the path of writing this book was exactly what we're talking about here: he was working a potentially boring job as a tree planter, and became fascinated with how his perception of time seemed completely different while doing this job. While some people would look at a menial and repetitive job such as this and find their day agonizingly slow, he found that time passed by almost without him noticing. In other words, one person's boring is another person's meditative state, or even another person's novelty.

When people who have watched my 11 minute animation or read my book say that it's "mind-blowing", my fervent wish is that I have helped to renew and expand their sense of wonder about this amazing universe we live in. There are a great many self-help books and breathing exercises and visualization techniques out there that people can use to change their way of perceiving the world. Imagining the timeless fabric that our universe and all other universes spring from is another: that's why I describe this project on the back of the book as a "mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live".

In part one of this entry we talked about the quantum physics idea that it's actually possible for consciousness to change the past: an idea that hadn't occurred to me, perhaps not surprisingly since I have spent so much time thinking instead about how this way of imagining reality expands out what our possibilities from this moment forward might be. But even if the idea had occurred to me first, I suspect I would have just dismissed it as being too "out there" even for me. However, with esteemed physicists like John Wheeler pointing the way, and the research of physicists such as Rosenblum, Kuttner, Krauss and Dent (all of whom are mentioned in that previous blog entry), this idea takes on interesting resonances when we think about meditation and the integrated bicameral mind as being the mental processes where we stop being bored, and start freeing our conscious minds from our linear 4D succession of frames we call "time".

This week's poll question is about 2012, where do you stand? Could those predictions of a coming global transition be tied to McKenna's Novelty Theory (also known as Timewave Zero), or Kurzweil's approaching Singularity, or the many other impending predictions being pointed to by prophecy and ancient wisdom? Our minds, as pattern recognizing machines, have ways of connecting across the information of time and space. Our bodies, built from chemical processes that obey the laws of entropy, can only move in one direction in time, but if it really is possible for consciousness to "tune" the universe, as John Wheeler suggested, then we would have proof that our consciousness can freely move in any direction, and at any "angle" we choose. Thinking of an accelerating shift, where everyone's consciousness tilts at an ever more extreme angle to our 3D space to eventually encompass all of time, allows us to imagine the potential for our world to enter a timeless mindset. The idea that this possibility appears to be approaching at an increasingly accelerated pace is also one of the ramifications of this that is getting more and more people excited around the world. Are you interested in what happens next? I know I am!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Boredom and Consciousness Part Two

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF8bDBmPlVg


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

Are you bored with your life? One of the ideas I've been promoting with this project is an all-encompassing definition of life as being "any process that is interested in what happens next".

As regular visitors to this blog will know, I have come to believe that there were certain organizing patterns and forces that can be seen to have influenced the creation of our universe right from its beginning, and that each of us is a participant in the ongoing act of creation that was set in motion back then and which continues to this day. In Boredom and Consciousness Part One, we talked about the respected physicists like John Wheeler have even suggested that the quantum observer could change not just the present or the future, but the past right back to the big bang! Still, no matter what perspective you approach this idea from, we have to recognize the name that is given to those organizing patterns and forces is contentious: and since some people are uncomfortable with words like "God", I have tended to call these the "big picture memes" that we can see were a part of the narrowing-down processes that caused our particular universe to be the one selected out of all possible universes within the multiverse.

Most of us (but not all of us!) believe that we have free will, which implies that we have some degree of control over "what happens next" as we travel down our 4D line of time, twisting and turning in the fifth dimension down at the planck length. What this means, then, is that very simple truths like "attitude affects outcome" have profound implications if in fact the parallel universes that are created by the branching choices of our actions really do exist, and we have talked in previous blogs about some of the modern cosmologists who say that this is indeed the case. Are you bored? Depressed? Ill? Then of course you will tend to make different choices than if you were excited/happy/healthy. There's nothing unscientific about simple statements like these.

In my book I talk several times about what happens when we stop being interested in what happens next:

...many of us are painfully familiar with the experience of watching a loved one who, due to illness, extreme depression, or simple old age, have had their soul material gradually dissipate or be ground away. This can reach the point where we can see that the person that used to occupy that body is no longer there, even though the body continues to function. Where did they go? Perhaps they really did lose coherence and drift away. Or, more likely, most of the meme-set that made up that person lost interest in the diseased and tired body they were in and has already freed itself from its confines.
Witnessing the death of any living creature shows us one of the great mysteries of the universe: what leaves the body?

For our planet, every living thing is based on water. To quote from Paul Davies' article on alternate lifeforms on earth in the December issue of Scientific American:

...even the hardiest microorganisms have their limits. Life as we know it depends crucially on the availability of liquid water.

A couple of blog entries ago we looked at the relationship between music and creativity, and not long before that we looked at a song of mine ("Change and Renewal") which proposes that creativity and water may be more closely tied to each other than any of us realize. In a sense, this is because the opposite of creativity is death: with no water, there's no life, and therefore no creativity. So, as I say in the song: "take a drink of water and find a new idea". :-)

We could also say that the opposite of boredom is novelty. But boredom and novelty are much more subjective terms, because they are based upon the way that our conscious minds perceive reality: in other words, one person's boring is another person's novelty. In part one I talked about synchronicity: the joyous connections our brains can make from seemingly unconnected bits of information, and how that can make it feel like the universe is trying to tell you something. I had been planning last week to write about Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind, but then two magazines arrived in my mailbox the same day and I saw so many connections to what I was thinking about that I felt it was important to explore them.

The first of the two magazines is the new special issue of Scientific American "Mind": the cover story is dedicated to the study of boredom, and there are quite a few articles within that issue that relate very nicely to what we're talking about here. The other magazine was the latest issue of New Scientist magazine, which has as its cover story "The Smart, Strange World of the Subconscious".

The article in New Scientist makes the point that neurobiologists sometimes prefer to use terms like "non-conscious", "pre-conscious", or "unconscious" in these discussions about the subconscious. This is because it's much easier to define what is a conscious activity for our minds, than it is define all of those other processes which are bubbling beneath the surface, some of which are operating at much higher operations per second, and some of which are stretched out into much slower processes. We have already talked in this blog about how consciousness is thought by modern science to be a process that, for most people, operates at between thirty and ninety "bings" per second.

One of the studies discussed in the Scientific American "Mind" issue concerns persons with long-term substance abuse problems: an ongoing study of 156 addicts at a New York methadone clinic revealed that the only reliable indicator of whether an addict is about to relapse was their reported level of boredom. My song "Addictive Personality" talks about the pitfalls that can happen when people are trapped in repetitive loops that lead them to believe that "what happens next" will always be the same as "what happened before", a sure-fire recipe for boredom:


Julian Jaynes, in his epic masterwork "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", proposed that our current mode of operation, with a conscious part of the brain that is "narrating" our activities from moment to moment, and a subconscious (or non-conscious/pre-conscious/unconscious) part of the brain that is processing data "behind the scenes", is a fairly recent development. He proposed that only a couple of thousand years ago humans lived in a more integrated form of consciousness, where conscious and subconscious processes were not divided. This seems to imply that everyone existed in a semi-dreamlike state, a state which modern society has taught us to be suspicious of: which is strange, because there are still many activities that we perform much better when we are not "Thinking" about what we're doing. Athletes talk about being "in the zone": the place where they become one with their activity, rather than thinking about all of the component parts, is how they achieve success. Be it musicians, public speakers, or a teenager on their first date: the times that we become self-conscious about what we're doing or saying, we are much more likely to not be at our best. Here is another video with me in discussion with master musician Jack Semple where we touch upon some of these ideas:




Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - We wrap up this exceedingly long entry in part three. Click here to read part three now.

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

The Wii World

Our world is getting smaller: in other words, new technology like the Wii is making our world more wee (sorry for making the obvious pun). Does getting everybody in the world connected together through technology smack of socialism? Like most things, that depends upon your point of view.

I live in the province of Saskatchewan, Canada. Saskatchewan is a strange place: first left-wing socialist government in North America, birthplace of medicare, pioneers in fibreoptics, first adopters of on-demand hi-def TV over phone lines. Here in Saskatchewan, our province has now launched government-sponsored free wireless internet access in the four largest cities.

A few months ago in this blog, I mentioned the ideal interface for anything should be able to be boiled down to just two choices: a concept I deal with in my book in the chapter "The Binary Viewpoint". In Gevin Giorbran's Learning to See Timelessness, we see a way to imagine that everything is the result of two opposing forces of order, grouping and symmetry. And in my book, we talk about the biggest-picture-of-all multiverse, and how our own universe could be summed up as being a slice from that multiverse. If reality and information are two sides of the same coin (as quantum mechanics tells us), then any instant in spacetime should be able to summed up by that binary point of view: these are things it is, these are the things it isn't.

The July 07 issue of Scientific American has a great article by neurobiologist Joe Z. Tsien about new research showing how the brain encodes memory. By tracking the firing of hundreds of neurons simultaneously, his team has reached the conclusion that we use a hierchical pyramid of associations spread across "cliques" of neurons to encode specific memories. That pyramid, they say, has a binary element to it: so all memories about moments we almost died would be part of a certain neuron clique, and then memories where we almost died while swimming would be in a subset of that clique, while memories where we almost died in a car accident would be part of a different subset of that same clique, and so on.

To quote Mr. Tsien from the article:

"This combinatorial, hierchical approach to memory formation provides a way for the brain to generate an almost unlimited number of unique network-level patterns for representing the infinite number of experiences that an organism might encounter during life--similar to the way that the four 'letter'or nucleotides that up DNA moecules can be comined in a virtually unlimited number of patterns..."

Mr. Tsien ends the article on a speculative note:

"For me, our discoveries raise many interesting--and unnerving--philosophical possibilities. If all our memories, emotions, knowledge and imagination can be translated into 1s and 0s, who knows what that would mean for who we are and how we will operate in the future. Could it be the 5,000 years from now, we will be able to download our minds onto computers, travel to distant worlds and live forever in the network?"

Once again, I am struck by the idea that science and philosophy are moving to a central meeting point: the above paragraph sounds very similar to the ideas I have been promoting, but the fact that it comes from a respected member of the scientific community adds a different kind of weight to the discussion. As I explain in my book, what we think of as a soul or an individual's unique consciousness can also be thought of as a hierarchy of patterns, moving across space and time.

Coincidentally, that same issue of Scientific American has an article on new technologies that will make high speed wireless communication more and more ubiquitous, allowing high data-rate communication to be achieved through the lights in a room or the power lines into a building. This is part of an inexorable process we have been moving towards for decades now. Some day soon, no matter where you are in the world, there will be a "universal dial tone" at your disposal. In the most remote and uninhabited parts of the world, the connection might be to only a simple speech-to-text or voice-to-voice interface, but the idea of anybody in the planet having cheap and easy access to electronic communcation, whether that just be a chance to talk to a friend, or when needed, an emergency 911 operator, will help to show us how connected we are in other ways that have nothing to do with electronics or technology.

For me, one of the most exciting things about Nintendo's Wii console is not just its implications as a virtual reality tool for the home, but the way it has the potential to draw people together, allowing them to see how their own consensual reality differs from and is the same as others on the planet, and how much/how little that matters. What do I mean by that? This inexpensive box includes a service called the "Everybody Votes Channel". Anyone with an internet-connected Wii can vote on a question, and predict what they think the most common answer is going to be. So, for instance, a recent worldwide poll asked this simple question: "Do you have dreams for the future?" (a topic near and dear to my heart as readers of this blog and my book will know). Brazil, Mexico, and Peru came in with the highest percentage of "Yes" answers to this question (up around the 95% mark), the US, Denmark, and Canada came in some place near the middle of the pack (still with a fairly high percentage of yes answers). Interestingly, Gemany, Japan, and Austria came in with the lowest number of Yes answers, some place around 66%. The worldwide average for this poll came in at 80.3% yes answers, 19.7% for no.

In the connected world of blogging, commenting, and tagging, there is an astonishing clamor of people furiously typing away, wanting to be heard, wanting to feel connected. Finding ways to automatically sort out what the consensus points are that can be boiled down from that tidal wave is one of our most important goals. The Wii's Everybody Votes system shows us a glimpse of where we want to end up: inexpensive access to a worldwide system, where people can express their innermost beliefs, and see how much we all really have in common with each other, and whether the parts that any one of us don't have in common with others really matters that much in the big picture.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

PS: As a new experiment, we have a live chat window at tenth dimension: the link is at www.tenthdimension.com/chat . Schedule permitting, I will be logged in to the live chat window some time every day for anyone interested in talking about the project. Of course, everyone is welcome to go to this chat window any time and share video or URL links with each other, as part of the ongoing discussion about the nature of reality.

Seeing Eye to Eye

Each living creature has a grid of awareness that represents their point of view, their interface with reality, their way of looking at the world. That interface is comparatively simple for an amoeba or a fruit fly, but just as unique as our own. Each of us has a personal matrix that represents our beliefs, our history, the set of memes or the society of mind that drives us forward and keep us interested in "what happens next". It is that desire to continue that sums up the difference between things that are living and things that are not, and this is true at both the physical and the spiritual levels of our reality.

But there I go getting all metaphysical again. There are the hard determinists who have a great deal of problem with any framework for discussion that involves there being more than one reality, more than one timeline for the universe. This point of view is easy to understand: we look back in time and see a predictable, provable universe which obeys the second law of thermodynamics. We see the evidence of only one timeline stretching back to the big bang, so why should there be more than one stretching into the future? The timeless multiverse and determinism would seem to be drawn from two separate and incompatible belief systems, two mutually exclusive grids of awareness.

I've been told that there are oriental languages where the colloquial phrases for time involve "looking forward into the past", and alternatively "looking behind us to see the future": these phrases imply that the past is easy to see, just as if we were looking straight ahead of ourselves, while the future is something that we can only catch hints of, because it is behind us. I would argue that the future is hard to see because it is being drawn from the indeterminate wave of possible branches available to us from the fifth dimension, and some people (including those who have viewed the tenth dimension animation) would agree, while there are others who will never see eye to eye with me on this idea.

Everybody's heard the corny old saying, "the eyes are the window to the soul". Isn't it interesting, though, how eye contact is such an important part of human interaction? Even in the animal kingdom, eye contact is an important part of interplay, with modes of making/avoiding eye contact quickly establishing social order or provoking/avoiding conflict. What is it about eye contact with another person or another animal that tells us so much so quickly about their attitude, their tension, the speed of their internal clock, their health and vitality, their way of looking at the world? What does trying to see eye to eye with with a snake tell us about how close their point of view relates to our own, and why is that so different from looking into the eyes of our more nearby mammal cousins? Eye to eye contact, as simple as it appears, is surprisingly complex.

It's also intensely personal, in that it is impossible to look more than one person or creature in the eye at the same time. In psychology and philosophy, the concept of the "Other" relates to this idea - and an important part of the development of consciousness is when we become aware that there is a difference between our internal world of thought and the external world of physical reality and other people. This is not to say that the two worlds are in conflict - but rather, to say that eye contact appears to be a way for two creatures to see within each other, and to see how much their points of view agree and disagree with each other at some basic primal level.

In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we start from the traditional binary viewpoint, that there is a way to describe every particular thing about the Universe as being the result of saying "these are the things that something is" and "these are the things that something isn't". To quote from the book:

Cosomologist Jacob Bekenstein estimates that if you were to digitize all aspects of the universe as we know it, it would take approximately 10 to the hundredth power bits of data. That’s the number one followed by one hundred zeroes! So, if you were to have data storage in your computer equal to that amount, it might appear that you should be able to re-create and search through all aspects of the universe. It’s amusing to note that particular number, one followed by one hundred zeroes, has a name that was coined by Milton Sirotta in 1937: he called it a “googol”. That word is commonly spelled “google” today. Is this a coincidence? It would seem we have revealed the ultimate goal of the world’s most popular search engine–that all aspects of the universe will be catalogued and searchable within its google-sized confines.

The concept of the Other gives us a simple description of the interplay between our internal "observer" and the external physical world, which occurs at any conscious moment. As physical creatures, we are all participating in a consensual reality where the basic laws of physics are locked in, and the laws of thermodynamics seem to be moving us from the big bang to entropy. Gevin Giorbran's "Learning to See Timelessness" shows us how the interplay between grouping order and symmetry order provide a dynamic tension to create the world we see around us. With the concept of the multiverse as presented in its extreme form here, we are supposing that each of us are in our own unique reality, while we also share a consensual reality constrained by the laws of physics and the fact that there are only a certain number of possible branches available to us within the fifth dimension at any single instant. The extent to which those two realities (our internal world of conscious awareness and our external world of observed reality) are at odds with each other tells us much about the uniqueness of our own point of view, or how unusual our own sets of circumstances might be, and can be used as a way to imagine how the dynamic tension between grouping and symmetry could be what is locating each of us in our own particular realm of time, space, and shared history within the multiverse. Each of us are in our current position on a point in the third dimension, with a trajectory in the fourth dimension which can be changed at any moment by accessing the fifth dimension paths available to us. Those changes happen for the world (and the universe) at important "cusp" moments, and personal cusp moments can happen whether we choose them or whether chance and the actions of others choose them for us.

Dan Winter's Implosion Group (always good for a densely packed and potentially overwhelming collection of thought-provoking tangents) has a page about the twinkle in the eye which appears to relate to these ideas as well. My song "The Unseen Eye" is also related, as it talks about the nature of reality as being the result of a certain state-space being observed by our consensual reality, out of all of the other possible state-spaces which potentially exist out there in the timeless multiverse. When two creatures look in each other's eyes, they are seeing a summation of where they are in the ten dimensions, and the Unseen Eye is the combination of the internal and external points of view that combine to create the reality those two creatures share. Is The Unseen Eye God? If you like. It really depends upon your own unique "point" of view, doesn't it?



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

Here is a previous blog which prints out the lyrics for this song.


Enjoy the journey,

Rob