What Would a Flatlander Really See?

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73IGTygl_Q4

One of the questions that sometimes comes up about the original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation is that it doesn't really show what a Flatlander's world would look like to a Flatlander. The concept of 2D creatures living in a flat, two-dimensional world was first introduced to us by Edwin A. Abbott in his 1884 novel "Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions".

In the original animation, we started out by imagining our flatlander as being the "one-eyed Jack on an impossibly flat playing card":



This is the original image Jason Orban of OH!Media drew for me as a representation of what I'm describing here. But why did we say "impossibly flat" in the narration? Because no matter what kind of paper we can imagine this Flatlander to be drawn upon, that paper has length and width and some small amount of depth, represented by the thickness of that paper. For us to really imagine a flatlander we need to be thinking about him in a plane that has length and width only, and no depth whatsoever. This is not an easy thing for we 3D observers to imagine, and some people will insist that there must be at least some depth for this flatlander to exist. It's important to realize what we're talking about here: in the same way that a one dimensional line must have length only, no width or depth, for it to truly be one-dimensional, a 2D flatlander must have length and width only, and no depth, or he is not really two-dimensional.

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Each additional dimension adds an additional degree of freedom. If you lived as a point on a one-dimensional line, the only thing you would be able to see would be the two points that are nearest you on your line. Everything else would be hidden from view, and because you existed within a single dimension, there would be no way for you to see or travel "around" those points to become aware of what lies beyond. In fact, the concept of going "around" would be completely unimaginable to you, and you would just take it for granted that your point of view was the only point of view possible.

Adding a second dimension gives our flatlander a little more room to move and see "around" other objects, but the possibilities for this creature, living within a flat 2D plane, are still very limited when you compare them to our world: as we watch the flatlander from above, we are able to see things with much more freedom that what his perspective would really allow. Let's look a little closer at that one-eyed-Jack as he was shown in the animation:



Here's a question we can ask ourselves then: are we seeing the flatlander's left eye or right eye in this picture? From our 3D perspective, we look down upon the flatlander as pictured here and presume that his eye is to the right of his nose. But really, because he is completely flat, this flatlander's eye is "behind" his nose, which means the only thing this poor fellow would be able to see is the inside of his own head! We would need to move his eye to the outside edge of his face if we really wanted to let him see the world around him, like so:

Again, from our imaginary flatlander's perspective, having to have your eyes on the "outside edge" would seem completely normal, and the idea of an eye "within" a head would be completely foreign. But what would his 2D eye really be able to see? We still haven't properly imagined his perspective. As we try to do that, let's think about what we really see as 3D creatures.

Most of us have two eyes. Let's start by covering one eye, so that we're more like the flatlander we're looking at here. If you sit motionless with one eye covered and look in front of you, how many dimensions are you seeing? Most of us would automatically say three (or even four if we consider the direction of time), but really we are only seeing two: we are seeing a flat 2D representation of the world in front of us, projected onto the retina at the back of our eye. If we keep our other eye covered and move our heads around a bit, we'll see changing relationships within that 2D image that give us clues as to what is nearer and what is further away from us, but that is information that our brains are deducing from watching a series of 2D images our eye is delivering to the brain, one after the other. Johnny Lee has a lovely YouTube video showing a "heads up" display he created using Nintendo Wii technology that allows a flat image on a screen to appear as if it has a very realistic 3D depth, and his invention relies upon exactly what we're talking about here: our brains are able to look at a flat 2D image and infer the 3D nature of that image by what happens as we move our heads around.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd3-eiid-Uw

The great thing about the Johnny Lee demo is it clearly shows how our brains can deduce 3D even with only one eye, as long as we can move our heads around. If you add a second eye to our 2d flatlander, or to us as 3D creatures, you give the brain even more information to work with - now there are differences between what one eye and the other sees, and the differences get greater the closer any objects are to us, which allows the brain to infer even more about the 3D nature of the world it's witnessing... but our brains do so, still, by taking in two slightly different 2D images projected on the back of our eyeballs. This convinces us that we are able to see in 3D, but the truth is still that our perception of 3D is happening within our brains, and the information that is coming into each eye is still really only a series of changing 2D images.

So: our 3D eyes are seeing 2D images, and we take it for granted that we can't see what's on the other side of a wall without getting up and moving there. An imaginary one-dimensional creature would only be able to see the Zero-D "points" that are nearest them on their 1D line, and to them the idea of seeing or moving "around" things would be inconceivable, because of the extremely limited freedom of movement their dimension gives them.

In each case, what each creature sees from its current dimension is the dimension below. Now we're ready to go back to our original question: what would a flatlander really see?

Try to imagine yourself now as a 2D flatlander. In our representation of him, we're seeing his world from above - we're able to see "around" things that the flatlander would not. In fact, until we repositioned his eyeball he would not even have been able to see "around" the outline of his own face. What we need to do now is imagine ourselves rotating down out of our nice round 3D world, and becoming part of the flat 2D plane the flatlander exists within. To do that, we need to rotate down into his perspective. This series of pictures shows us going most of the way:
This sequence shows what happens as you get closer and closer to the perspective of the flat 2D plane our flatlander is living within. You would get a similar effect by picking up a piece of paper, bringing it up to eye level and rotating it so that you're only seeing one edge. The closer you get to seeing just that edge, the closer you are to seeing what the flatlander would see - but it's still important to keep in mind that the edge of a piece of a piece of paper in our 3D world is still a whole dimension thicker than the forest of lines, some nearer, some further away, some hidden behind other lines that would be the perceived 2D world of the flatlander.

The original eleven-minute animation for Imagining the Tenth Dimension introduces viewers to the ideas from chapter one of the book of the same name. In the book I say this:

To a Flatlander, we 3D beings would be able to pop in and out of their two-dimensional world as if by magic, and our texture and form would be quite inexplicable. In the same way, we humans would find the 2D information that a Flatlander sees to be a useless and confusing jumble of lines all in the same plane.

If you go back and watch the original animation now, keep in mind that what we're seeing in the section about flatlanders is all from our perspective, looking down on the flatlander's world from "above", which is a direction the flatlander wouldn't even be able to conceive of. Most books introducing people to the idea of flatlanders choose to use this vantage point, and for good reason: because what a flatlander would really see is even stranger than what we showed in our brief introduction to thinking about the dimensions.

Finally, please kind in mind that what we're talking about here with Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a visualization tool, not a scientific proof. But as a visualization, it does gives us ways to imagine lots of things that physicists say about our reality, for instance:

• how our experience of the fifth dimension is curled up at the planck length (because time is a direction in the fourth spatial dimension and the fifth dimension's probabilistic outcomes are being observed one planck length after another)
• the string theory idea that our 3D universe is "locked in" at the seventh dimension by a 3D and 7D brane
• the idea that by the time you get to the tenth dimension you are visualizing the equilibrium state that exists "outside the system" as Godel liked to describe it. Physicist Sean Carroll talks about this "equilibrium state" that exists before and after our observed universe in the June 2008 issue of Scientific American. Other people refer to this state as the "omniverse".
  
• Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, which says there are branching parallel universes being created through choice and chance (this idea was confirmed by a proof offered in September 2007 by a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch), and
• the idea that the future exists only as part of probabilistic waves, as proven by experiments conducted by a team of scientists in Vienna under the direction of physicist Anton Zeilinger.

What's unique about this new way of thinking about time and space is that it makes no distinction between the first four dimensions that we know from spacetime, and the extra dimensions that physicists are talking about: this project proposes that since all of the ten dimensions are spatial dimensions, each new dimension adds an additional degree of freedom, and we can use what we know about the dimensions below to help us visualize the dimensions beyond the four that we live in.

There are lots of other discussions from physics and philosophy that can stem from this way of visualizing how our reality is constructed and what that means to us, I do hope you enjoy the journey as we explore those ideas.

From Imagining the Tenth Dimension,

Rob Bryanton

Related blog entries:
Flatlanders on a Line
Time is a Direction
The Omniverse
Hypercubes and Plato's Cave
Time in Either Direction
Anime, Gaming and Cusps

Next: What Would a Linelander Really See?

Google Suggestions Time Capsule - 2nd Quarter 08

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgvy2GvJ7OQ


Happy second anniversary! My animation and website went live the end of June 2006, and vaulted to popularity a few days later on July 3rd: first as a result of digg, then due to stumbleupon, and on out through a continually widening word of mouth from one site to another throughout the world. This project has continued its popularity for two years now, still averaging 2 million hits a month at the main website. Why? I believe it's because now, more than ever, people are becoming interested in thinking about those big picture ideas of how everything fits together.


Back at the beginning of this year, I became interested in keeping track of the top Suggestions that Google makes when you type a single letter of the alphabet into the search windows incorporated into certain browsers, and how those suggestions change over time, and how much we might be able to draw from this as a record of the memes that rise and fall in our society over time. The original post is here, and although the post was created in January I have continued to update that entry on a weekly basis since then. The graphic above is my attempt to represent those results in a single visual (hopefully you've be able to read most of this and use it as a companion to the original post), and a post that talks about the poll question that was started around the same time relating to Google is here.

I've talked before (in my entry Tens, Google and the Expanding Universe) about Google's battle with spammers and scammers trying to vault their particular site to the top of Google's search results, which is part of the feedback loop that becomes Google's awesome responsibility: because once something becomes a top search result, it is more likely to stay there for a while. Three months ago in my blog entry Googling in the Tenth Dimension I listed some of the hundreds of words and phrases you can type into Google and have pages related to my project come up as the number one search result. As I said at the time, the continually changing parameters Google uses to organize its results will no doubt have made some of the search terms I provided back then to be pushed further down in the search results by now, and some other new ones will, I presume, have risen to the top.

Take a look at my diagram above. Considering how often Google shuffles their other search results, I have to admit I'm surprised at how many of the single letter search results did not change over the six months I've been tracking this information. Still, as a time capsule, this project will be a useful reference to look back upon in years to come... but it does look like some of the single letter search results - particularly those ones shown in red in the above graphic - are not going to be changing any time soon. Oh well, this just pulls us back out to that all-important big picture thinking - how many years will it take for some of the red items above to be toppled? Only time will tell.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton
Next: What Would a Flatlander Really See?

Wormholes

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi2Nh_C8Pzk

In my book I talk about wormholes, an interesting topic to look up in wikipedia, and how the "folds" we talk about in the Imagining the Tenth Dimension visualization are really another way of thinking about the wormholes that science has been theorizing about. My project is unique, though, because it provides us with a "filing system" for how the different aspects of our reality are derived, and this logical organization gives us a way to envision how our universe is kept from wandering off into some other universe where the fine structure constant is different from ours: because it is constrained within the seventh dimension. But ultimately, we are talking about what physicists like Brian Greene are asking us to hold in our minds: a place where everything for every universe and every possible expression of matter and energy exists simultaneously. As Dr. Greene says:

"Just as we envision all of space as being out there, as really existing, we should also envision all of time as being out there, as really existing too." - Brian Greene

If you go to the Preamble link at the main tenth dimension website you will see a list of recommended books to read which connect to the ideas in this project, which includes Brian Greene's writing.

So, the animation for this project continues to generate a steady string of comments and questions. One of the ones that came up recently was this: "would a wormhole be in the 4th dimension? or the fifth?", and my answer to that question would be "depends on the wormhole". This question is also discussed in the tenth dimension faq, but it seemed like a good topic to tackle here in more depth.

Counting to Seven

According to the line of reasoning that comes from this project's "filing system" of how our reality is derived, a wormhole in the third dimension would allow instantaneous teleportation to other locations with no passage of time, a fourth dimensional wormhole would allow time travel to one specific causal future/past, a fifth dimensional wormhole would allow travel to other possible futures and pasts that are logically consistent with our current "now", and a sixth dimensional wormhole would allow travel to other logically incompatible pasts/futures - like where it's 2008 but the attack on the twin towers never took place, or dinosaurs aren't extinct. A seventh dimensional wormhole would allow travel to other different-initial-conditions universes that have a different fine structure constant and different laws of physics from the universe in which we live (and as such most of those other universes would not be a place where our physical bodies could exist or survive).

Eight
That was a far as I took the analogy in my book: since each extra dimension becomes more and more unlike our own spacetime, this gets harder and harder to visualize with each additional dimension. But let's continue this thought experiment now: by the time you're in the 8th dimension, you may well be in the highest dimension which can express matter in any way, and this may be the dimension where you are able to fold across universes which are derived from multiple or oscillating fine structure constants, but as a speculation that's getting pretty out there. As I've said before in this blog, the fact the Garrett Lisi's E8 rotation is also based upon an eight dimensional matrix may be able to be tied into this, but that remains to be seen.

Nine
The ninth dimension could well be what physicists like Wheeler and Boltzmann were thinking about as they described the roiling, fluctuating, underlying fields of quantum indeterminacy where partial bits of order are continually appearing and disappearing ("John Wheeler and Digital Physics" and "Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains" are two blog entries related to this). The ninth dimension would be mainly fragmentary bits of order, some of which could then organize into the dimensions below, and this is where I would place things like "big picture memes" or (as quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd says) initial yes/no states for the beginnings of different possible universes. So a ninth dimensional wormhole might be what you use to jump from the "I prefer universes that start from a high degree of order" meme that our own universe is within, to the "I prefer universes that change very little over their entire existence" organizing pattern that would be elsewhere in the ninth dimension. This all relates to the idea that "information equals reality", a phrase I first learned from Anton Zeilinger, and one that other quantum physicists use as well.

Ten and Beyond
The tenth dimension is the enfolded symmetry state where everything achieves equilibrium (a concept from this project that Dr. Sean Carroll is coincidentally now also promoting) - so no wormholes are possible in the tenth dimension because anything that disturbs that equilibrium state takes us into the dimensions below and the potential expressions of mass and energy again. Likewise, since this project says time is just a direction, not a dimension, and M-Theory says there are ten spatial dimensions plus one of time, I would say you can't have an eleventh dimensional wormhole because time isn't a dimension, it's a direction.

I also say that "time" is always a subset of the dimension above the one you're examining, because time is part of the causal/probabilistic set of expressions that are directly accessible from the current dimension in its current state. As I discussed in "The Flipbook Universe", without the fourth dimension, the third dimension has no way to change from state to state. In "Time in Either Direction" I talked about physicist Sean Carroll's ideas on this - time is only one of the possible ways of navigating through the dimension above. A wormhole would be another, but wormholes (folds) would allow us to jump from one part of the possible realities to another without traveling through the causal/probabilistic relationships that we are party to as we travel down our entropy-derived line of time as a particular direction within the fourth dimension.

Here's a song about the seven dimensions that define our unique universe: it's called "Seven Levels":

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs


While we've been playing with these ideas, we should keep in mind that wormholes are not just science fiction: and folding your mind around these concepts can be a mind-expanding experience.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project, 2nd quarter report

God 2.0

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


Last entry we talked about the "daily parrying" that would cause some people to look at a blog titled "God 2.0" and automatically assume that what is going to be talked about will be non-scientific meandering about the world of the spiritual and the metaphysical. If you're familiar with my blog or my book, you will already know that I am more interested in the middle ground - a place where philosophy and physics, spirituality and science can find ways to agree that they are really thinking about the same things.

The Skeptic
Michael Shermer is the well-known publisher of Skeptic Magazine, and Michael's goal has been to poke holes in the questionable claims of fringe science, the paranormal, and a wide range of other areas that he has targeted with his razor-sharp debunking skills. This is why I found it quite marvelous when I picked up the July issue of Scientific American, and found that Mr. Shermer's regular column this issue is entitled "Sacred Science: can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?".

Reinventing the Sacred
Mr. Shermer's article is about a fellow who comes from my neighboring province of Alberta, Canada: Stuart Kauffman, founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary, who has written a book called "Reinventing the Sacred". To quote from Michael Shermer's article about the book:

Kauffman reverses the reductionist's causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says 'breaks no laws of physics' and yet cannot be explained by them. God 'is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,' Kauffman declares.

I have spent time with Stu Kauffman... he is one of the most spiritual scientists I know, a man of inestimable warmth and ecumenical tolerance, and his God 2.0 is a deity worthy of worship. But I am skeptical that it will displace God 1.0, Yahweh, whose Bronze Age program has been running for 6,000 years on the software of our brains and culture.

Creativity and the "now"
I've talked many times here about the role of creativity in our universe, and how ideas from quantum physicist John Wheeler and professor of cognitive science Douglas Hofstadter can be tied together to show us how a self-excited loop can create not just a universe but life and consciousness as well. In my book I used physicist Richard Feynman's sum over paths idea to show how the past is just as probabilistic as we know the future to be. Now that Anton Zeilinger is publishing the results of experiments he and his team in Vienna have conducted that prove that we are operating in a probabilistic cloud where the only thing that is truly real for us is the constantly moving "now" of our observed reality, the ideas I proposed are being confirmed: and as John Wheeler suggested, this means that there are some indeterminate elements of the past that can be changed by our current observation. As I've been saying here, this means we can all select new trajectories from our current "now" at any time that launch us off on a new path, and accepting the indeterminate nature of the past is key to understanding how much power we are talking about here. As I discussed in Changing Your Genes, the scientific study that shows we are able to switch off and on various genes simply through changes in lifestyle and changes in attitude gives us a glimpse of how the past is not as carved in stone as we've been led to believe: because quantum physics is proving that our currently observed reality is derived from a multiverse of possible choices that exist in both the future and the past for our universe at any particular "now".

Enfolded Symmetry
Scientists like Sean Carroll, David Deutsch, and (of course) Richard Dawkins are atheists. I reference their work regularly with this project. I believe the Dawkins concept of genes as a "River Out of Eden" and memes as ideas that can be transmitted or shared without loss across time and space are both very useful and enlightened ways of imagining the underlying timelessness of our reality. My way of imagining how our reality is constructed agrees with Dr. Carroll's ideas about an equilibrium state which is "outside the system". My project also agrees with the Deutsch team's proof that the parallel worlds resulting from chance and choice are directly equivalent to the probabilistic results of quantum mechanics. Now, here's something new: the June 14 2008 issue of New Scientist Magazine has an article about the award-winning work of mathematicians John Thompson and Jacques Tits, who have offered some mind-expanding proofs about how our amazing universe is derived from symmetries in the higher dimensions. This idea is related to Garrett Lisi's eight-dimensional E8 symmetry group, which I've referred to a number of times in this blog, and which I believe ties back into my project as well: by the time you have imagined an Omniverse which expresses all possible patterns of mass and energy, there is an equilibrium state where all of those possible patterns enfold back into a balance, where everything fits together into a perfect symmetry, which is the natural underlying state. Our universe is defined by higher dimensional patterns which give it its unique laws of physics and its breathtaking intricacy, right from the quarks and neutrinos up to the universe as a whole and all of its possible "spacetime tree" of expressions. In that sense, our cosmos is just a temporary deviation which has been set in motion by the breaking of that symmetry, and our line of time is a return to that perfectly balanced zero which existed before our universe began and which we'll return to after our universe has run its course.

God 2.0
So, while some would object to calling Stuart Kauffman's patterns of emergence that feed back on themselves to create our beautiful and complex universe "God", perhaps "God 2.0" is a useful way to reset our thinking about all this: all we are really talking about here is how higher dimensional patterns could be responsible for the universe we find ourselves in to be selected from the multiverse of all other possible universes, which ultimately, are all part of the Omniverse, where information equals reality. And that is a beautiful thing, worthy of our praise and our wonder.

Here is a song about that very idea: "Thankful".


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Related Entries:
How to Make a Universe
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
The Omniverse
Is God in the Seventh Dimension?

Next: Wormholes

Daily Parrying

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

I'm nearing the end of the quotes I'm going to be making from Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse, I hope all these references have sold a few books for David Jay Brown. But one of the interviews that I thought was particularly eloquent was with Dr. John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Harvard Professor of psychiatry:

The word "God" has become the shortcut term for what has historically been applied to the overarching or the ultimate creative principle in the universe, that is sometimes experienced in humanlike terms--because I think that our psyche can grasp things if we anthropomorphize them--but, in its essence, is mysterious, luminous, numinous, and overwhelming in its sense of presence when one is open to it. The problem is it's all concept now, mostly, because the actual experience of the divine has been pretty well eradicated from the Western psyche by what Rilke called "daily parrying" so that, as he put it, the senses by which we can know the spirit world have atrophied. So you can only know it experientially, and people that know it experientially are not very good at describing it in a way that's going to create the experience for somebody else. Therefore, somebody who hasn't had the experience, or whose senses aren't open will say, well, you haven't convinced me, because I haven't had the experience. So that's usually where the conversation ends... God as a separate entity, a theistic notion of a being that is separate from us--no, I don't have any sense of that. I have a sense of being part of some infinite spirit wisdom, or spirit intelligence, that is sometimes present, real, and alive to me. But I'm indwelling in it, and it in me.

"Daily parrying" - what a great phrase for what happens in science and culture, where people are trained by tiny little hints every day to be suspicious of anything that hints at something greater than us, or that might plug us into a larger sense of our shared connectedness. In "Animals and Kids" I suggested this might be how kids are taught to be suspicious of the moments when they turn off their narrative voice and just "be". In "Spirituality, Connections and the Ten Dimensions" and "Is God in the Seventh Dimension" I quoted a section from my book that expresses similar sentiments to what Dr. Mack is saying above: the way of visualizing reality that we're exploring here does suggest there are organizing patterns from higher dimensions, and whether you call those patterns "God" or something more clinical doesn't change what we're talking about. However, if by "God" you believe we're talking about an entity who judges and punishes, or who makes your football team win and the other team lose because that's what you prayed for, then we need to be clear that that's not what we're talking about here. Is there something that chose our universe from out of the multiverse, a pattern that unites us, a creative process that causes life in all its complexity and diversity to spring forth from simple chemical reactions, and an enfolded whole that we can return to when we die? That's what we're talking about here.

Quoting Max Planck
This also relates to the currently running poll question, quoting good old Max Planck, whose work is central to this way of imagining how our reality is constructed. The poll question asks if you agree or disagree with the following statement from Dr. Planck: "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it". While I certainly don't want to appear to be so presumptuous as to be claiming that my intuitive way of imagining how our reality is constructed should be equated with the rigorous scientific proofs offered by experts in their field like Max Planck, I do take comfort in the possibility that my ideas are simply ahead of their time: already in the two years since my book was published, major advancements have come from physicists David Deutsch, Sean Carroll, and Anton Zeilinger which confirm key predictions about the nature of reality that I made in my own book. I've talked before about books by respected experts such as Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor and Douglas Hofstadter which agree in many ways with my depiction of the shared, multi-layered nature of what is commonly called the soul, and Jill Taylor's viewpoint strongly aligns with my own ideas about the importance of finding ways to quiet that constantly nattering "narrator voice" we carry within us. Clearly, these ideas speak to philosopher Ekhart Tolle's bestselling books as well: it's all about being in the "now". How many more of the supposedly "fringe science" conclusions I've drawn about how our reality is constructed will eventually be confirmed by mainstream science?

Daily Parrying
This all takes us back to a question asked here before - how much of this "daily parrying" is the result of a deliberate effort to keep the general public from becoming aware of the possibilities that are out there (ideas that are explored in entries like "The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea", "The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic", and "Flatlanders on a Line"), and how much is the result of random events? One of the most popular videos from this project, "Secret Societies", takes the extreme position that everything is a conspiracy. This idea is also explored in "The Anthropic Viewpoint" which makes the tongue-in-cheek suggestion that we live in The Great Hydrogen Conspiracy, since hydrogen is the most abundant element! The point we're trying to arrive at here is that if our universe was selected from a larger multiverse, then there must be events and processes we can point to that caused that to happen. I believe that whether you call those selecting patterns randomness, conspiracy, a natural outcome, or God, has more to do with your point of view than what we're describing, and that this subtle "daily parrying" we are subjected to throughout our lives has a lot to with the point of view any one of us now has.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids
Another of the songs associated with this project that deals with the idea of subtle influences forming our worldview is Insidious Trends.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: God 2.0

Changing Your Genes

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYnmqhm7BIU

(Update: some of the ideas in this entry are continued in another entry published one month later, Changing Your Genes Part 2)

In Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory, we talked about how it is surprisingly easy to modify your potential future paths by making adjustments in physical stance or mental attitude. In Local Realism Bites the Dust, we talked about the groundbreaking experiments being conducted by quantum physicist Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna, that are now proving that the only thing that is truly real is our observed "now": amazingly, everything else in the future and the past extending out from our constantly moving "now" is a probabilistic cloud. In entries like The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea, The Fifth Dimension Isn't Magic, and Being More Fifth Dimensional, we've talked about what a powerful idea this is: if everything before and after "now" is only a probabilistic wave function, then we as observers have much more control over the information that becomes reality than the traditional viewpoint has led us to believe.

Genes, memes, and spimes: these are three powerful ways of visualizing the information that becomes our reality from a more timeless vantage point. As we discussed in entries like John Wheeler and Digital Physics, Boredom and Consciousness, and The Omniverse, physicist John Wheeler introduced us to the idea that not just the future but the past can be changed by observation, an idea that makes much more sense if we can accept the evidence of the Zeilinger experiments.

So, while we're not talking about magic here (my role as an observer can't change the force of gravity or the speed of light, or allow me to walk through walls or bring back the dead, and so on), there really are things about the past that we as quantum observers can change: and this is an idea which contradicts most of what we are taught. Most of us believe, for instance, that our genes are locked in by heredity, and as a randomized mixing of our parent's genetic material that occurred at conception, this is not something we have control over now.

Now click here to read about a new study indicating that we can turn genes on and off simply by altering our lifestyle and our mental attitude. Or read below for a few paragraphs from the article:

WASHINGTON (Reuters Life) - Comprehensive lifestyle changes including a better diet and more exercise can lead not only to a better physique, but also to swift and dramatic changes at the genetic level, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

In a small study, the researchers tracked 30 men with low-risk prostate cancer who decided against conventional medical treatment such as surgery and radiation or hormone therapy.

The men underwent three months of major lifestyle changes, including eating a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and soy products, moderate exercise such as walking for half an hour a day, and an hour of daily stress management methods such as meditation.

As expected, they lost weight, lowered their blood pressure and saw other health improvements. But the researchers found more profound changes when they compared prostate biopsies taken before and after the lifestyle changes.

After the three months, the men had changes in activity in about 500 genes — including 48 that were turned on and 453 genes that were turned off.

The activity of disease-preventing genes increased while a number of disease-promoting genes, including those involved in prostate cancer and breast cancer, shut down, according to the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As I've said before, ideas that imply this level of control over our own reality have, up to now, often been ridiculed as quackery, so publication of the above report by the National Academy of Sciences is remarkable. My song "Positive Vibes" talks about similar ideas that the mainstream often ridicule: how much control do we really have over reality? Are we really able to affect changes in ourselves and others purely by sending out positive thoughts into the "ether"? Are we really able to affect our immune systems through positive visualization, or simply through the determined viewpoint of saying "I'm too busy to get sick"? Next blog, we'll talk about the daily parrying that, historically speaking, has indoctrinated us into thinking that such ideas are nonsense.


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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Daily Parrying

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - June Report

The April 08 version of this list is here.
The May 08 version of this list is here.
The July 08 version of this list is here.

As of June 21st, 2008, here are the blogs that have seen the most visits in the last 30 days. Wow! Big changes in this 30 day list from last month, the previous report did not show as dramatic a shift. Please note, for both of the following lists, the number in brackets is the position that blog held in the report for the previous month.

1. Time in Either Direction (new)
2. Seeing the Big Picture - from 40 kilometers up! (new)
3. Disorders of the Mind (new)
4. Being More Fifth-Dimensional (new)
5. You Are the Point (new)
6. Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional? (new)
7. Local Realism Bites the Dust (new)
8. Anime, Gaming and Cusps (10)
9. New Book Reviews at Amazon (new)
10. Top Ten Tenth Dimension Songs (new)

And as of June 21st, 2008, here are the ten Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time.

1. Time is a Direction (1)
2. Tenth Dimension Polls Archive 1 to 10 (3)
3. The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project (2)
4. Tenth Dimension TagCrowd (4)
5. Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains (5)
6. The Flipbook Universe (new)
7. Google, Memes and Randomness (6)
8. The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea (new)
9. The Omniverse (10)
10. Hypercubes and Plato's Cave (7)

By the way, if you are new to this project, you might want to check out the Tenth Dimension FAQ, as it provides a road map to a lot of the discussions and different materials that have been created for this project. And as always, a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas, and the Tenth Dimension Chat room usually has streaming video, along with video clips and live conversations twenty-four hours a day.

Are you enjoying the journey?

Rob Bryanton

Next: Changing Your Genes