a new way of thinking about time and space ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ by Rob Bryanton
--author and research scientist David Jay Brown says: "one of the most brilliantly-conceived and mind-stretching books that I've ever encountered".
--science fiction author Greg Bear says: "a fascinating excursion into the multiverse - clear, elegant, personal and provocative"
Poll 42: "With which statement do you more agree? 1: Twitter connects people together more and helps new ideas spread more quickly. 2: Twitter distracts people from being productive and is mostly a waste of their time." Poll Ended June 24 09. This one was close throughout the poll, ended up with 53.8% saying Twitter distracts from productivity, and 46.2% saying it helps to spread ideas more quickly.
Love it or hate it, twitter has established itself as another tool for connecting people together which can't be ignored. Here's a link to a popular presentation created a while back by Marta Kagan, and here below is her followup to that presentation, "one year later". This is the first time I've embedded a "slideshare" presentation in my blog, just wanted to make sure you notice that this is not a movie, it's more like a powerpoint presentation: so you can click through the slides at your own reading speed or just sit back and watch the presentation at the more languid pace that has been programmed in.
As we deal with the rising flow of information coming at us from all directions, presentations like this one can help to remind us that it's all about connections, and seeing how Everything Fits Together is the basic goal of my project. Are we all swimming in an increasingly broad and deep "stream" of richly linked data? That's what web 3.0 pioneer Nova Spivack has proposed. Here's the video for my previous entry about that idea, "The Stream".
Two days ago, I was awakened by a vivid dream. The content was unusual enough that I immediately sat down at my computer and published it as my last blog entry, which was called News From the Future.
If you read that entry, you will have noticed that I omitted the fact that this story had come to me in a dream. Why did I do that? Because I know that there are many out there who have been trained to reject dreams as nothing more than random bits of junk, just the brain sorting through its data. On the other hand, I know that there are regular readers of this blog who completely accept the idea that dream states are plugged into extra-dimensional patterns, alternate realities not part of our own, and in that sense are not that different from the visions a Shaman might witness while in an altered state of consciousness.
It's possible, too, that both might be equally true: that the brain, in the process of sorting through recently acquired memories, is plugging into memes that exist in the sense that Richard Dawkins meant when he originally coined the term: memes are information patterns, ideas, or beliefs, that exist outside the restrictions of linear time.
At the end of that previous entry, I listed some of the recent news articles I had read in New Scientist and Scientific American which seemed to connect to my dream, and I also listed some of my blog entries which have played with similar ideas in the past. Clearly, the idea that some unconscious/subconscious part of my mind was fitting all those ideas together is easy to see, regardless of whether you believe in ideas advanced in blog entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe and Our Non-Local Universe which say that there is now scientific proof that our universe is connected together in ways that transcend the limitations of the fourth dimension. Could there really be a "stream" of connectedness that our minds are sharing, as Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor proposed in her marvelous My Stroke of Insight?
I've talked a few times before about twine.com, the brainchild of web 3.0 pioneer Nova Spivack. Here's a link to a recently published essay of his called Welcome to the Stream: The Next Phase of the Web. In it, he discusses the quandary I presented in News From the Future: as tools like twitter make the web increasingly fluid, how does an end user make sense of the deluge? How do we filter the sludge out from what we really need? Nova concludes his essay like this:
The emergence of the Stream is an interesting paradigm shift that may turn out to characterize the next evolution of the Web, this coming third-decade of the Web's development. Even though the underlying data model may be increasingly like a graph, or even a semantic graph, the user experience will be increasingly stream oriented.
Whether Twitter, or some other app, the Web is becoming increasingly streamlike. How will we filter this stream? How will we cope? Whoever can solve these problems first and best is probably going to get rich.
Finally, I wanted to mention a new scientific study just published by researchers from UCLA, who used high-resolution MRIs to discover that people who meditate regularly had "significantly larger volumes" in certain key parts of their brains. Isn't that amazing?
Boléro: 'Beautiful symptom of a terrible disease' by Peter Aldhous
Some paintings are meant to be appreciated in silence – but not this one. It is called Unravelling Boléro, by Canadian artist Anne Adams, and is a bar-by-bar representation of the popular classical piece Boléro by Maurice Ravel. The painting also provides a scientific window into the creative mind.
When Adams completed Unravelling Boléro in 1994, her brain was starting to be affected by a neurodegenerative condition called primary progressive aphasia. It later robbed Adams of speech, and eventually took her life.
In its early stages, however, the condition seemed to unleash a flowering of neural development in a brain area that integrated information from different senses. In part, Unravelling Boléro may be a beautiful symptom of a terrible disease.
Repetitive patterns This is the view of a group of neurologists led by William Seeley and Bruce Miller of the University of California, San Francisco.
And here's the jaw-dropper: Ravel is thought to have suffered from the same condition, which may have drawn him towards repetitive patterns such as the themes that cycle through Boléro. Adams was unaware of this, and of her own condition, while working on her painting.
Music in the detail In Unravelling Boléro, each of the vertical figures represents a bar of music, with its height corresponding to volume, and the colour representing the pitch of Adams' favourite note within the bar.
Like the music, the theme repeats and builds until a change of colour to orange and pink, representing the key change that precedes Boléro's dramatic conclusion. "Every last detail has some meaning," says Seeley.
With Imagining the Tenth Dimension, one of the questions I've asked is whether other "unusual" brain states, induced by music, trance, hallucinogens or other disruptions to what we think of as "normal" function might be giving us glimpses into the behind-the-scenes processing that our brains could be doing as we navigate through our fifth-dimensional probability space, unaware of the gyrations and connections that are happening from the dimensions above while we travel down what feels like a straight "line of time". Blog entries like Flatlanders On a Line and Time is a Direction are related to this.
Lately I've been reading a book by David Jay Brown called "Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse", a collection of interviews with deep thinkers and big dreamers like Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, Edgar Mitchell, Robert Anton Wilson, and many more. I'm sure I'll be continuing to quote from this book other times in upcoming entries. Since so many of these experts in their fields are promoting ideas that can so easily be integrated into my way of visualizing how our reality is constructed from the background state of the omniverse, I believe David Jay Brown's book works as a great companion piece to my own project .
Dr. Clifford Pickover, for instance, has some interesting comments in Conversations about DMT and a brain condition known as "temporal lobe epilepsy":
Temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) can produce profound religious experiences. Some researchers have gone so far as to suggest that the mystical religious experiences of many of the great prophets were induced by TLE. This is not to demean religious experiences, because all experiences are mediated by our brain states. Perhaps TLE is a doorway to valid dimensions of reality. In my books Strange Brains and Genius and The Paradox of God, I discuss several nuns with TLE who "apprehended" God in TLE seizures and who described the experiences in glowing words.
More recently at my weblog RealityCarnival.com, I published an article going much further... My controversial premise is that DMT in the pineal glands of biblical prophets gave God to humanity and let ordinary humans perceive parallel universes. As we discussed, the molecule DMT is a psychoactive chemical that causes intense visions and can induce its users to quickly enter a completely different "environment" that some have likened to an alien or parallel universe. DMT is also naturally produced in small quantities in the pineal gland in the human brain.
In my song, "From the Corner of My Eye", I explored some of these same themes. The second verse and chorus tie in nicely to what we're talking about here:
In a corner of my mind, I questioned How could there be more than this world of ours Just a trick of vision Disorder of the mind? A pattern of tiny twirling stars At the corner of my eye
From the corner of my eye I saw the dance and spin Of other worlds within Such a mystery From the corner of my eye Hidden in the folds Those other worlds untold How can it be
Here, to close this entry then, is a video of Ron Scott singing that song.
Update: here's a youtube video of a TedTalks presentation by Vilayanur Ramachandran about situations of damage to the brain which might be showing us how things are connected together within our minds. I was introduced to this by a twine.com bookmark created by Ishan Shapiro. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl2LwnaUA-k
A couple of weeks ago I started a series of blogs about the Fifth Dimension, in celebration of my easy-going article published in the current issue of Urban Garden Magazine: the article is entitled "The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea". Now, here are a couple of blog entries I'd like us to take a serious look at:
I recently came across the above two wonderful blog entries by Henry Story, the first of which I know I saw briefly back when they were published but at that time I was so immersed in launching my project that I didn't really do justice to his thoughtful presentations, which he wrote partly in response to my eleven minute animation. Now that I have spent some time at Henry's blog I am in awe of the leading-edge work he is doing with the Semantic Web (a concept I touched on last fall in a blog entry called E8 and the Semantic Web), meme-tracking, and other "Web 3.0" developments. Henry works at Sun, and he writes The Sun Babelfish Blog, check it out.
As it turns out, Henry found my animation through a blog posted by Nova Spivack. Nova's blog, Minding the Planet is equally awe-inspiring: and I am linking to Nova's blog entry about a chapter he wrote for a new book on the subject of Collective Intelligence. Again, rather than fill this entry with quotes from these people's writing, I invite you to read his chapter, which is an eye-opening exploration of just how fast our world is changing right now, how useful the Semantic Web is going to be in helping this change along, and how services like Twine.com (which comes from Nova's company Radar Networks) will be part of our toolset as these advances occur.
Another related idea is being promoted by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody. Yes, "Cognitive Surplus" is one of those buzzword-memes making the rounds right now, but Clay explains the idea well. Take a look at a couple of recently-posted videos of him discussing these ideas:
Clay makes the point part way through his presentation that it's very hard to predict the outcome of the changes that are happening now, because it's more like the complexity of predicting the weather rather than predicting (for example) gravity. I found this particularly interesting as an idea because of an upcoming blog I was working on about how the regions of chaos and sudden bifurcations to new states can be very similar to what we just tried to imagine in "Anime, Gaming, and Cusps": what comes to mind as we try to visualize a five dimensional labyrinth made of 10 directions all at right angles to each other? How could we create a map showing the cusps and tipping points, the interactions of memes, genes, and spimes that work (in concert with randomness and the patterns that spring from randomness) to create our reality? For me, this brings to mind those diagrams I was first introduced to in James Gleick's "Chaos: Making a New Science": regions of seemingly random noise that are actually complex interactions of tiny systems, interspersed with sudden jumps to new coherent states, as a map of our fifth-dimensional probability space from moment to moment. How's that for a visualization of the background layer creating our beautiful and intricate reality one planck length at a time from the fifth dimension?
Last blog we imagined the "googleverse": ideas that have shapes and patterns across spacetime, and how this is another way of describing the concept of memes.
Some ideas seem to spring from nowhere, spread instantaneously, then eventually be overtaken by other ideas. The way of imagining reality that we've been playing with here says there is a universe of spimes (things that have a shape in spacetime, which is made of energy and matter), memes (ideas and patterns that have a shape in spacetime), and life (the interference pattern that happens when memes and spimes interact).
The imagining-the-tenth-dimension meme, then, has survived and flourished not because it's the scientifically approved Theory of Everything, but because it's a mind-expanding way of holding in your mind what most people would have thought is unimaginable - the underlying fabric of reality. Like other visualization tools, it has its strengths and weaknesses, but it's still a fun way of getting people started thinking about those "really big picture" ideas.
As I've described it, the tenth dimension is equivalent to the unobserved fields of quantum mechanics, and the ninth dimension can contain the ways of beginning to organize those fields that can't be expressed as physical matter: the "really big picture memes" that express a preference for one way of organizing reality over another, but which are too broad or too contradictory to create a physical expression. This means that according to my way of visualizing reality, the 8th dimension would be the highest dimension for a reality to spring from.
Now we have Garrett Lisi, who is creating a huge stir in the physics world with a new proposal for a Theory of Everything that uses "E8" - a complex, eight-dimensional pattern with 248 points. Here's a youtube animation demonstrating some of the rotations that can happen within an E8 construct:
As visually appealing as this animation is, its implications are startling: Lisi has demonstrated that there is a way to place the various forces and elementary particles (including their possible quantum spin values)on E8's 248 points. Rotating Lisi's model in various ways reveals the explanation for a variety of interactions, some of which (like the clustering of quarks into families of three) are natural outcomes from this structure. Some points in his model are currently occupied by particles which have been theorized but which have yet to be seen, and there is some hope that the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland may reveal some of those particles when it goes online next year.
Whether this theory proves the existence of higher dimensions or not is open to interpretation - Lisi himself says this geometric pattern, although it is based upon an 8 dimensional construct, could be fully realized within our 4D spacetime without requiring additional dimensions. In an article in this week's New Scientist magazine, string theorist Sabine Hossenfelder (of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics) points out that this could be complimentary to string theory, which she says also uses E8 to describe the Calabi-Yau manifold, the higher-dimensional shape that string theory says our universe is derived from.
As Einstein liked to say, our description of the universe should be "as simple as possible, but no simpler". That's why the idea that our entire 4D universe can be defined from a geometric projection like the one seen in the above video is so appealing. But whether our 4D universe is a lower-dimensional shadow cast by higher-dimensional patterns, or whether those higher dimensions are imaginary because we can't ever see them may really be nothing more than two different ways of thinking about the same idea.
Last blog we also looked at the idea that there is an acceleration happening in our world, as ideas seem to spread faster and faster. Tim Berners-Lee's Semantic Web project is a great example of the tools that are arising now to help keep us all from being buried under a sea of rapidly rising and falling memes, which threaten to become an incomprehensible and overwhelming white noise. Perhaps E8 and the Semantic Web will become useful as ways to organize and rotate through the information of the world?
As simple as E8 may be, I've been trying to visualize something even simpler here. Personally, I have long been a fan of the idea of helix shapes derived from stacked dodecahedrons, and the implied six degrees of separation concept within that idea. I was surprised to learn from the article I'm referring to in New Scientist magazine, then, that Garrett Lisi has also been using G2 rotations, a hexagon-based system which is a subset of E8. Apparently G2 can be used, for instance, to describe the relationship between quarks, antiquarks, and gluons.
If the Semantic Web eventually allows us to understand the googleverse of ideas as being derived from the interrelationship of Just Six Things, will we have passed the threshold of "simple as possible but not simpler"? It's an interesting exercise: try to come up with the six categories under which you should be able to put everything about your life and everything you know. If the Semantic Web could ultimately be used to connect together our knowledge into something as simple as that, we would really have reached a seemingly impossible goal. But even E8 as an overlay might be a very useful tool in our desire to keep the accelerating meme-space we are swimming through from becoming too much to fathom.
Enjoy the journey,
Rob Bryanton
PS - for a more hands-on experience of where the Semantic Web could take us, sign up for an account at Twine.com.
Poll 42: "With which statement do you more agree?
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