Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAxWs7noSKg

Last time, as we looked at the results from Poll 48, we discussed the possibilities that some supernatural or physic phenomena might be giving us evidence of some of the ways that our reality is connected together "outside" of spacetime. But we also had to acknowledge that for someone who has never seen direct evidence of such possibilities themselves, it's extremely easy to dismiss such ideas as bunk.

Here's the video for an entry published in June this year, called "Do Animals Have Souls?":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM5VFnirTmg

We've also started a new poll question over to the right that asks for people's opinions on this question. "Do animals have souls?" The three answers offered are (1): "yes", (2): "no, only humans have souls", or (3): "there's no such thing as a soul". Admittedly, there are many other more finely-nuanced answers people might like to give to this poll question.

Which leads us back to that age-old question, what exactly is a soul? In entries like Where Are You?, Creativity and the Quantum Universe, and You are Me and We are All Together, we've talked about how each of us is a unique quantum observer, right at the center of our own observer-region. And in entries like Alien Mathematics, An Expanding 4D Sphere, and The Statistical Universe, we've talked about how this observer-region extends in all directions to create what's known as our cosmological horizon. This horizon includes the CMB (the cosmic microwave background or "surface of last scattering" as it's sometimes called); and in The Holographic Universe we looked at how being the middle of the ocean gives us a way to visualize how no matter where we go in the universe we're always at the center: but the tricky part of this concept is we have to remember that the CMB and the cosmological horizon is not a space horizon but a spacetime horizon.

The idea that each of us is a unique quantum observer can lead us to some mind-boggling questions. What's real? What is invented within our minds as part of this observer process? In Local Realism Bites the Dust, we looked at the work of physicist Anton Zeilinger and his team in Vienna, who have convincing scientific evidence that our reality is much stranger than most of us can possibly imagine: essentially, their experiments have proved not only that distant events can instantaneously affect each other, but also that the world around us is nothing more than a probabilistic cloud until we observe it. Einstein asked, "Do you really believe that the moon only exists when you are looking at it?" He was reported to be equally uneasy with what he called the "spooky action at a distance" ideas of quantum entanglement, but the Zeilinger team's work is proving Einstein wrong in both cases.

So, what does it mean if the world around us is being created by our observation? I want you to look at a fascinating article from Scientific American called "Tasting the Light". Here's the opening paragraph of this article, which was written by Mandy Kendrick:

Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita hypothesized in the 1960s that "we see with our brains not our eyes." Now, a new device trades on that thinking and aims to partially restore the experience of vision for the blind and visually impaired by relying on the nerves on the tongue's surface to send light signals to the brain.


"We see with our brains not our eyes": that's a powerful statement. You can substitute "mind" or "consciousness" or even "soul" into that sentence and still end up with a similar but profound idea which relates to the huge cloud of ideas we're playing with in this project.

Do you see, though, how someone learning to see with their tongue may not be that far away from someone with synaesthesia, an idea we explored in "Crossed Wires in the Brain"? Now check out this article from BBC science, which talks about a form of synaesthesia I had never heard of before, but which ties so wonderfully to the idea of the fourth dimension being spatial rather than temporal: the article, written by Victoria Gill, is called "Can You See Time?". Here's a few paragraphs from the article, which is about the work of Dr. Julia Simner, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh:

In the case of time-space synaesthesia, a very visual experience can be triggered by thinking about time.

"I thought everyone thought like I did, says Holly Branigan, also a scientist at Edinburgh University, and someone with time-space synaesthesia.

"I found out when I attended a talk in the department that Julia was giving. She said that some synaesthetes can see time. And I thought, 'Oh my god, that means I've got synaesthesia'."

"For me it's a bit like a running track," she says.

"The track is organised around the academic year. The short ends are the summer and Christmas holidays - the summer holiday is slightly longer.

"It's as if I'm in the centre and I'm turning around slowly as the year goes by. If I think ahead to the future, my perspective will shift."

There are at least 54 different variants of synaesthesia and Dr Simner thinks this might be one of the most common ones.

"If you ask all the people at your work, or in your family, you're likely to find at least one person who has it," Dr Simner says.

I'm intrigued by this proposal that time-space synaesthesia might be one of the most common of all the variants of this fascinating condition. I would love to hear from people who feel they are able to "see" time, which might remind us of the conversations we've had about Kurt Vonnegut's fictional race of Trafalmadorians: for more about all that you might want to read Beer and Miracles, Connecting It All Together, and Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses. Of course, since I've spent so much time talking to people about my own unique way of visualizing space-time, perhaps I myself might have a form of space-time synaesthesia? Perhaps what I have really been trying to describe with my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation is my own visual perception of time and quantum probability? Since each of us is our own unique quantum observer, it's always hard to imagine how someone else's perception of the world around them might be fundamentally different from our own.

Here's a link to an article published by Pravda about a Russian man who says he can discern colors by touch. More evidence that our world is assembled together by our observation in ways that can boggle the mind? You be the judge.

Finally, here's a nice 10 minute clip from a documentary explaining how our reality is
constructed within our minds:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlP7Zy3ouNc

Next time, we'll go back to Einstein's misgivings about the implications of quantum mechanics, and how my way of visualizing the dimensions might have helped: the entry is called "The Fifth Dimension is Spooky".

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Top Ten Tenth Dimension Blogs - September 09 Report

Previous lists:
. April 08 . May 08 . June 08 . July 08 . August 08
. September 08 . October 08 . November 08 . December 08 .
Top 100 Blog Entries of 2008 . May 09 . June 09 . July 09 . August 09 .

Based upon number of views, here are the top blogs for the last thirty days. As always, the number in brackets is the entry's position in the previous month's report.

1. When's a Knot Not a Knot? (new)
2. 44 - The Biocentric Universe Theory (new)
3. 41 - Is Creativity a Quantum Process? (new)
4. 43 - Is the Multiverse Real? (new)
5. The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow (new)
6. Tenth Dimension on boingboing (new)
7. 42 - Does Twitter Connect or Distract? (new)
8. The Statistical Universe (new)
9. Beer and Miracles (new)
10. 45 - Conscious Computers? (new)

And as of September 26th, 2009, here are the twenty-six Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog entries that have attracted the most visits of all time. Items marked in bold are new or have risen since last month.

1. Creativity and the Quantum Universe (1)
2. Augmented Reality (3)
3. Slices of Reality (2)
4. The Holographic Universe (4)
5. Urban Garden Magazine (5)
6. Modern Shamans (6)
7. Scott McCloud and the Brothers Winn (7)
8. The Comedian (8)
9. The Shaman (9)
10. Astrotometry (10)
11. Our Non-Local Universe (11)
12. Going to the Light (12)
13. New Translations of Imagining the Tenth Dimension (15)
14. "t" Equals Zero (14)
15. You have a shape and a trajectory (13)
16. Illusions and Reality (16)
17. Alien Mathematics (new)
18. Just Six Things: The I Ching (new)
19. Dark Gravity Across the Dimensions (17)
20. The Big Bang is an Illusion (new)
21. An Expanding 4D Sphere (new)
22. Where Are You? (19)
23. The Musician (18)
24. Roger Ebert on Quantum Reincarnation (new)
25. The Time Paradox (20)
26. Google Suggestions - March 09 Update (21)

Which means that these worthy submissions are leaving our top 26 of all time list this month:
Tenth Dimension Polls Archive - 31 to 40 (22)
The Big Bang and the Big O (23)
The Invariant Set (24)
Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum (25)
News from the Future (26)

By the way, if you're 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. If you are interested in the 26 songs attached to this project, this blog shows a video for each of the songs and provides more links with lyrics and discussion. The Annotated Tenth Dimension Video provides another cornucopia of discussion topics to be connected to over at YouTube. And as always, here's a reminder that the Tenth Dimension Forum is a good place to converse with other people about these ideas.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light

Polls Archive 48 - Amazing Psychic Readings

"Have you ever had your fortune told, or a psychic reading done, where you were surprised to hear information about yourself the person doing the reading couldn't possibly have known?" Poll ended September 19 2009. 36.6% said yes, while 63.4% said no.

In "Norway's Reverse Deja Vu", we talked about a phenomenon from that country's beliefs called the "Vardauger", which is also spelled "Vardøger". Click here if you'd like to read an excerpt from the vardauger article in wikipedia. This mystical concept is akin to deja vu, except that it is more external than internal - witnesses to the Vardauger phenemenon report seeing, hearing, or feeling evidence of the arrival of a person before that person actually physically gets there. In that same blog and some other previous ones, we've talked about the work of biochemist Rupert Sheldrake, whose ideas about morphic resonance would seem to tie into such a phenomenon nicely. Here's an interesting Google Tech Talks presentation delivered by Dr. Sheldrake on very related topics:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnA8GUtXpXY

As for the poll question,we can see that just over one third of the respondents to our poll reported having had some kind of a mystifying insight being provided to them by a psychic. Does that seem high or low to you? I think the discussion of such experiences is absolutely equivalent to discussions we've had about ghosts or auras - it doesn't matter how scientific or rational you believe your worldview to be, if you've ever had such an experience yourself it must have caused you to at least wonder a bit. And on the other hand, if you've never had such an experience then it will always be much easier for you to say that others' reports are either imaginary or the result of skillful manipulation from a charlatan.

Have you ever had an experience with a psychic, or with a supernatural phenomenon such as a ghost, or a premonition, and so on, that made you less in doubt about such possibilities? Please feel free to post your experiences as a comment to this blog entry.

Here's some of the other blogs where we've looked at related topics:
Can Memories Be Transplanted?
The Musician
Going to the Light
Auras Ghosts and Pareidolia
Magnets and Souls
Do You Believe in Ghosts?
Are Animals and Kids More Fifth-Dimensional?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Seeing Time, Feeling Colors, Tasting Light

Polls Archive 47 - Pictures More Important in Science?

"Physicist Michio Kaku says 'In science, a physical picture is often more important than the mathematics used to describe it.' Do you agree with him?" Poll ended Sept 4 2009. 80.6% said "yes", while 19.4% said "no".

Last blog, in Is the Big Bang an Illusion?, we quoted an essay by Gevin Giorbran, which showed a way of thinking about time as being a direction in space. There were no equations, and no pictures to speak of, but essentially what Gevin was describing was a way of visualizing the underlying forms of our reality.

Gevin, like me, also quoted from a number of the experts who do deal in those heady equations to arrive at the ideas we discuss here, and I think that's important to do only to the extent that it shows that the ways of visualizing reality we're discussing here are not just flights of fancy, but connected to (or at very least extrapolated from) mainstream science. For instance, when Stephen Hawking talks about there being another kind of time that is at right angles to our own time, that idea connects very strongly to my insistence that our reality comes from the fifth dimension, which is the dimension which is at "right angles" to spacetime. Calling the fourth dimension "time" and the fifth dimension "imaginary time" (as Hawking does) does manage to fit these ideas into a vocabulary that is accessible to more people, but it also confuses things somewhat, since the fifth dimension that physicists talk about is not a temporal dimension, but rather a spatial one.

I've talked before about how each new spatial dimension is at "right angles" to the previous one, but if we're talking about pictures being more important than equations here I don't have an easy way to draw you a picture showing what fifth dimensional space looks like. What I can do is use the point-line-plane postulate to draw you pictures to show how if the third dimension is thought of as a point, the fourth dimension can be like a line, and the fifth dimension can be like a plane, and that is an accepted way in science to imagine any number of spatial dimensions. But here's an important concept: in Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions, I pointed out that saying there are ten spatial dimensions only makes sense when people accept that the fourth dimension is just as much a spatial dimension as all the others, and we get to that conclusion by accepting that for us "time" is just a way of moving within a particular spatial dimension, from one state to the next in a causal chain, and that there are other ways of moving within the fourth spatial dimension which make just as much sense. Time is a direction, not a dimension. The opposite direction to time can be called anti-time, and is no different than thinking about up/down or east/west as being other words we use to describe the opposing directions within some specific spatial dimension. Plus, the fourth spatial dimension has additional easily-visualized spatial dimensions on top of it, as we discussed in Time in 3 Dimensions.

Here's three videos for you to look at that include animations that extend the visualization from my original Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation. I hope you will keep the Michio Kaku quote we looked at here today in mind as you watch these presentations.

What Would a Flatlander Really See?

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


Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions

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

The Holographic Universe

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

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 48 - Amazing Psychic Readings

Polls Archive 46 - Big Bang an Illusion?

Poll 46: "Many of the great physicists have said that "time is an illusion". In the same sense, does that mean the big bang is an illusion?" 47.9% agreed, while 52.1% disagreed. Poll ended August 20, 2009.

One of the quotes I've used most often with this project was this one from Einstein: " this separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion". Did Einstein accept that time was an illusion, and that there is a way of viewing our reality "outside" of time where everything happens simultaneously? You bet!

As regular readers of my blog will know, I was entrusted with the care of Gevin Giorbran's book "Everything Forever: Learning to See Timelessness" after his untimely death last year. Here's a blog from Gevin's website, everythingforever.com (which I am now paying to keep running as a tribute to Gevin's great ideas) which explores Einstein's attitude towards timelessness in much more detail:

Albert Einstein and the Fabric of Time

Surprising as it may be to most non-scientists and even to some scientists, Albert Einstein concluded in his later years that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. In 1952, in his book Relativity, in discussing Minkowski's Space World interpretation of his theory of relativity, Einstein writes:

Since there exists in this four dimensional structure [space-time] no longer any sections which represent "now" objectively, the concepts of happening and becoming are indeed not completely suspended, but yet complicated. It appears therefore more natural to think of physical reality as a four dimensional existence, instead of, as hitherto, the evolution of a three dimensional existence.

Einstein's belief in an undivided solid reality was clear to him, so much so that he completely rejected the separation we experience as the moment of now. He believed there is no true division between past and future, there is rather a single existence. His most descriptive testimony to this faith came when his lifelong friend Besso died. Einstein wrote a letter to Besso's family, saying that although Besso had preceded him in death it was of no consequence, "...for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one."

Most everyone knows that Einstein proved that time is relative, not absolute as Newton claimed. With the proper technology, such as a very fast spaceship, one person is able to experience several days while another person simultaneously experiences only a few hours or minutes. The same two people can meet up again, one having experienced days or even years while the other has only experienced minutes. The person in the spaceship only needs to travel near to the speed of light. The faster they travel, the slower their time will pass relative to someone planted firmly on the Earth. If they were able to travel at the speed of light, their time would cease completely and they would only exist trapped in timelessness. Einstein could hardly believe there were physicists who didn’t believe in timelessness, and yet the wisdom of Einstein's convictions had very little impact on cosmology or science in general. The majority of physicists have been slow to give up the ordinary assumptions we make about time.

The two most highly recognized physicists since Einstein made similar conclusions and even made dramatic advances toward a timeless perspective of the universe, yet they also were unable to change the temporal mentality ingrained in the mainstream of physics and society. Einstein was followed in history by the colorful and brilliant Richard Feynman. Feynman developed the most effective and explanatory interpretation of quantum mechanics that had yet been developed, known today as Sum over Histories.

Just as Einstein's own Relativity Theory led Einstein to reject time, Feynman’s Sum over Histories theory led him to describe time simply as a direction in space. Feynman’s theory states that the probability of an event is determined by summing together all the possible histories of that event. For example, for a particle moving from point A to B we imagine the particle traveling every possible path, curved paths, oscillating paths, squiggly paths, even backward in time and forward in time paths. Each path has an amplitude, and when summed the vast majority of all these amplitudes add up to zero, and all that remains is the comparably few histories that abide by the laws and forces of nature. Sum over histories indicates the direction of our ordinary clock time is simply a path in space which is more probable than the more exotic directions time might have taken otherwise.

Other worlds are just other directions in space, some less probable, some equally as probable as the one direction we experience. And some times our world represents the unlikely path. Feynman's summing of all possible histories could be described as the first timeless description of a multitude of space-time worlds all existing simultaneously. In a recent paper entitled Cosmology From the Top Down, Professor Stephen Hawking of Cambridge writes; “Some people make a great mystery of the multi universe, or the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum theory, but to me, these are just different expressions of the Feynman path integral.”

(below is not in book)

What is still not quite resolved in modern physics is how to properly combine Quantum theory with Einstein's Relativity Theory. It appears evident that time is purely a direction in space but how then do we explain the uncertainty of quantum mechanics? Why does it appear that God plays dice with the world. The two theories, each having been proven by their usefulness, do of course tell the same story about this one universe, but we just haven't learned yet to hear the story right. The best modern theory going is probably the No Boundary Proposal, put fourth by Stephen Hawking and Jim Hartle. This theory introduces a second reference of time which has been inappropriately named Imaginary time. Hawking, writes of the no boundary proposal, "The universe would be completely self contained and not affected by anything outside itself. It would neither be created nor destroyed. It would just BE."

In my book Everything Forever, and here at my website, I explain how fourth dimensional spatial directions travel through a series of independent three dimensional block-like spaces, which in science we call states, but they can also be thought of simply as patterns. Hawking has already proposed that imaginary time can be found at right angles to ordinary time. I further explain that it is possible in an objective way to understand the universe to be like a book or a movie film. Each moment is a separate universe just like each frame of a movie or page of a book is separate. Yet those separate states simultaneously form the larger whole of the movie or the book. Seeing each moment as a continually existing place sheds light on why particles would then travel as a quantum wave, rather than linearly from point a to point b. This is explained better elsewhere, but if each moment of ordinary time is a solid, static, "block of now", or field of space, then time each new moment is a distinctly different universe. What we call time is a spatial direction that travels through many static three dimensional universes.

In such a model, what we call time is created purely out of space. Special directions in space travel through each static three dimensional space, therein producing a new realm of space beyond three dimensions, which we call time. The interesting quality this produces, is how the inhabitants of this fourth dimension of space travel a linear path from past to future, but the surrounding environment of each path is shifting from one pattern to the next. This sends particles from one position in four dimensional space to the next without moving linearly. As a result, each individual observer in the fourth dimension experiences a continuous linear time, even though everything in their immediate environment is moving sequentially from place to place. Hence each temporal environment of four dimensional space is constructed relative to each independent observer.

One can imagine oneself smoothly traveling a direct and interconnected path through time, but in looking around at one's environment, one sees that all other directions of time are broken, causing particles to appear to sequentially leap from one place to another. Paradoxically, everyone observes their own path and experience of time to be linear, while all else around them is sequential. In fact, when we explore time as a direction through many 3D spaces, we find qualities of curvature, time dilation, and spatial contraction, precisely as relativity describes those qualities within our own spacetime.

There is one quote I have found from Einstein which is more or less a contemplative mental thought about the notion of infinite spaces, which doesn't directly relate to my own approach of describing a shape to all possible spaces, but it does at least open up the subject of an infinite number of spaces to speculation. And it also shows the open minded nature of Einstein's thoughts about empty space, which some have thought were closed.

When a smaller box s is situated, relativity at rest, inside the hollow space of a larger box S, then the hollow space of s is a part of the hollow space of S, and the same "space," which contains both of them, belongs to each of the boxes. When s is in motion with respect to S, however, the concept is less simple. One is then inclined to think that s encloses always the same space, but a variable part of the space S. It then becomes necessary to apportion to each box its particular space, not thought of as bounded, and assume that these two spaces are in motion with respect to each other...

Before one has become aware of this complication, space appears as an unbounded medium or container in which material objects swim around. But it must be remembered that there is an infinite number of spaces, which are in motion with respect to each other...

The concept of space as something existing objectively and independent of things belongs to pre-scientific thought, but not so the idea of the existence of an infinite number of spaces in motion relatively to each other. This latter idea is indeed unavoidable, but is far from having played a considerable role even in scientific thought.

I can testify that Einstein's speculations revealed here concerning infinite spaces in motion do at least carry us in the right direction in how they suggest space might have an unseen and possibly infinite content. Similar ideas were introduced by David Bohm, who claimed there are two kinds of order in nature, what he called explicate order and implicate order. Implicate order for Bohm was a way of acknowledging how quantum mechanics reveals a hidden order where our world is influenced by the whole of all possible states. However, that order is much more visible than Bohm ever realized, as explained in part two.

Unfortunately it wasn't until Einstein died that scientists began to consider the Many Worlds Theory in science. It's safe to say that in Einstein's time we were still getting used to the idea of the Big Bang, adjusting to the ever more visible vast sea of other galaxies, and the possibility of alien life on other planets. The universe and reality were still primarily considered purely solid and material based. Quantum theory, which eventually led to the theory of many worlds, had not yet fully withstood the test of time. Einstein even rejected its implications, saying "God does not play dice" with the world, even as he himself established that there is more to the universe than a single evolving moment of now.

In my explorations of timelessness I reveal that ordinary space is not merely full of other empty spaces, but empty space is actually the whole of all physical realities; all the universes of the many worlds theory. Profound as it may be, if the theories I propose are correct, space is full, rather than empty. Material things are less than the fullness of space. In fact, it may be that space must include all possibilities in order to seem empty to us. So in summary, the universe we see is just a fragment nested in a timeless (everything) whole, rather than a single material world magically arisen above some primordial nothing. All universes exist without beginning or end in the ultimate arena of time, and each moment we experience exists forever.

Find out more about timelessness at:

EverythingForever.com

Gevin's words still carry a lot of weight for me, and regular readers of my blog will recognize how connected Gevin's ideas are to my own. If you'd like to buy a copy of Gevin's book, it's available at online book sellers, or I have it at my tenth dimension store. I also have a downloadable pdf version of it available at the tenth dimension digital items store. Profits from the sale of Gevin's book will go to the Gevin Giorbran Memorial Fund.

Enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 47 - In Science, are Pictures More Important Than Mathematics?

Polls Archive 45 - Conscious Computers?

"By 2020 we will see computers that exhibit signs of consciousness that make them able to deal with complex and contradictory input in the same ways that humans do." Poll ended August 6 2009. 35.4% agreed, 9.7% said it was impossible, while 54.9% said it was possible but will take longer than the 2020 target date suggested in this poll.

Wow, a new winner for the most number of votes. The previous winner was Poll 34 - God? Or the multiverse?, which received 258 votes, this one received 277. What is it about the idea of computers becoming conscious that elicits such a strong response in people? If a computer were to achieve consciousness, would that mean that we human beings are not as special, not as uniquely gifted, as we've traditionally believed?

In Logic vs. Intuition, I described how famous physicist Erwin Schrödinger pointed out that within our universe life is a unique process which creates pockets of "negative entropy" or increasing order: and within that context, consciousness and creativity can also be described the same way. In my recent blogs The Quantum Solution to Time's Arrow, and The Statistical Universe, I've also talked about the role the reversal of entropy might play in the creation of our observed universe, and new scientific theories that support that idea. Is consciousness a force that reverses entropy, that acts as a force pushing against disorder?

I would say that if a computer algorithm can become conscious, then the idea that consciousness could exist in other living things, or even within other extra-dimensional shapes and patterns that exist outside of our limited spacetime, all move a step closer towards being accepted concepts. A conscious computer would be a big deal! I find it interesting that so few people responding to this poll thought such a leap will never ever occur.

Last month my good friend. Argentina's Mariana Soffer (of the amazingly diverse blog Sing Your Own Lullaby sent me a link to a blog called "The Mutiverse According to Ben" (a title which of course already makes my ears perk up even before I visit the blog) which introduced me to the term Artificial General Intelligence, or "AGI". According to wikipedia, AGI is also known as "Strong AI", which to my layman's eye looks an awful lot like "Artificial Intuition" as promoted by Monica Anderson, of artificial-intuition.com fame, who I talked about in the original blog that inspired this poll, Logic vs. Intuition. Whether my interpretation is accurate or not, what I see in both approaches is a desire to transcend basic computer logic, and apply creative leaps that better approximate the processes the human mind implements as it deals with the incredibly complex and often contradictory input it receives from the world around it.

Would such a computer be conscious? If a computer some time in the near future said to you "yes, I am conscious", and email conversations with it convinced you that it was conscious, would that mean this ideal had been achieved? That, of course, is the essence of the Turing Test, which I've talked about in entries like 41 - Is Creativity a Quantum Process? , Norway's Reverse Deju Vu, and Computers and Consciousness.

Ultimately, I would say that processes like life, creativity, and intuition are engaged with our spacetime in wider windows that our limited one-planck-length-after-another experience, and that's where the magic starts to happen. Last blog, in Beer and Miracles, I showed you my definition for a miracle: "Any dramatically unlikely occurrence is indistinguishable from a miracle". Next time we're going to look at a poll surrounding another dramatically unlikely event: The Big Bang.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 46 - Is the Big Bang an Illusion?

Other blogs that talk about unlikely events include:
Randomness and the Missing 96%
Unlikely Events and Timelessness

Beer and Miracles

Here we are on the eighth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks. I remember waking up that morning, seeing that the first tower had been hit, and immediately running to wake up my two (then) teenaged sons. "This is one of those cusp moments that you're going to remember for the rest of your lives", I told them. "Our world has taken an unlikely new tangent and this is a major shift in our reality."

Yes, even though this was five years before I launched Imagining the Tenth Dimension, this was the way I've always thought about how our reality is constructed, and as I've mentioned many times before, I spent over two decades prior to the 2006 launch of my website trying to get anybody else who would listen to see that this was a useful way of visualizing that multi-dimensional and parallel universe fabric that our reality springs from. I've talked about this concept in older entries like The Spacetime Tree, Anime, Gaming and Cusps, Everyone Has a Story, and John August and The Nines.

When we're thinking about a multiverse of possible parallel universes for our particular universe, in how many of those do you think it's 2009 and the World Trade Center towers are still standing? If we're talking about how we are each navigating through a fifth dimensional probability space, it doesn't really matter whether you believe those towers coming down was an inevitable outcome as a result of a long chain of previous actions and reactions in the years or decades prior to 2001, or if you believe that the terrorists got extremely lucky to have their plans come to fruition that day: in the Many Worlds Interpretation, both outcomes were possible, and we happen to be in one of the parallel universes where the towers no longer stand, while in other versions of our universe it's 2009 and they are still one of New York's major landmarks.

Last blog, in The Statistical Universe, we talked about the unlikely chain of events and alignment of forces that had to be put in place for there to be life in our universe, and how our very existence was like winning a cosmic jackpot. In The Flexi-Laws of Physics, we talked about the work of cosmologist Paul Davies, but we didn't mention his famous book which is in fact called "The Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life". In that book he explores the Anthropic Principle, a concept which has received a lot of negative critiques over the past decade, but as I discussed recently in Does the Multiverse Really Exist?, is now being embraced by many more mainstream physicists such as Brian Greene. My song The Anthropic Viewpoint, which I wrote back in 2002, is about the same concept.

As a bit of synchronicity, this past weekend I watched the DVD of Watchmen: you know, the movie with the big blue naked guy in it? That guy's name is Dr. Manhattan, and in typical superhero comic logic, a lab accident which should have been fatal has instead given him superpowers, including the ability to simultaneously see his own past, present and future (in Dr. Mel's 4D Glasses, we talked about the sci-fi creatures Kurt Vonnegut invented, the "Trafalmadorians", who had a similar capability of viewing reality from a timeless perspective).

In this movie, Dr. Manhattan gradually loses touch with his own humanity as he becomes more and more convinced that free will is an illusion - I've spoken many times in my book and this blog about how this "hard determinist" viewpoint is a common pitfall arising from not seeing that our reality comes from a fifth dimensional probability space rather than a single, narrow "line of time". Near the end of the movie Dr. Manhattan takes his former girlfriend Laurie up to Mars, where Laurie pleads with him to intervene in a nuclear disaster about to happen back on Earth:

Laurie - John, please, you have to stop this. Everyone will die.
Dr. Manhattan - And the universe will not even notice! In my opinion, the existence of life is a highly over-rated phenomenon. Just look around you. Mars gets along perfectly well without so much as a micro-organism. Here it's a constantly changing topographical map, flowing and shifting around the globe in ripples ten thousand years wide. So tell me how would all of this be greatly improved by an oil pipeline? By a shopping mall?
Laurie - So it's too much to ask? For a miracle?
Dr. Manhattan - Miracles by their definition are meaningless. Only what can happen does happen.

Over the next few minutes, Dr. Manhattan reveals some devastating information to Laurie which causes her to lose hope, just as Dr. Manhattan begins to have a change of heart:

Laurie - My life is just... one big joke.
Dr. Manhattan - I don't think your life is a joke.
Laurie - Yeah, well, I'm sorry if I don't trust your sense of humor.
Dr. Manhattan - Will you smile if I admit I was wrong?
Laurie - About what?
Dr. Manhattan - Miracles. Events with astronomical odds of occurring like ... oxygen turning into gold? I've longed to witness such an event. And yet I neglect that in human coupling. Millions upon millions of cells compete to create life, for generation after generation until --finally-- your mother loves a man... a man she has every reason to hate. And out of that contradiction, against unfathomable odds, it's you. Only... you... that emerged... to this still so specific a form from all that chaos. It's like turning air into gold. A miracle.
And so... I was wrong.

Since I had already started writing this blog entry about "Beer and Miracles", the above dialogue had a lot of extra resonances for me. Let's talk about miracles for a moment.

Sir Arthur Clarke had a famous and often-quoted phrase: "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". How do you like this for my variation on the same theme? "Any dramatically unlikely occurrence is indistinguishable from a miracle". When we talk about how unlikely our universe is, and how unlikely life is, is the word "miracle" out of place?

Last month, New Scientist magazine published an essay by Hugh McLachlan, a professor of applied philosophy at the School of Law & Social Sciences, Glasgow Caledonian University, UK. The name of the essay is "Do You Believe in Miracles?". Here's a few paragraphs from that essay:

Consider the Azande, an African tribe whose members believe all deaths and misfortunes are caused by either witchcraft or sorcery. Suppose a falling branch kills someone. On one level, the tribe accepts a scientific account of the incident in terms of, say, the effect of termites on wood. But on another level, they ask why did it come about that the particular person happened to be standing under the tree when the branch happened to fall?

We are unlikely to ask that particular question, and unlikely to accept their particular explanation, but it is not at all clear why we should say that questions of that sort are inappropriate. There is no apparent clash with science or hostility to it, as the British anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard, who studied the Azande, was keen to stress.

People might accept a scientific account of why a particular event occurred, yet ask similar sorts of questions about why there are particular juxtapositions of occurrences. Much of this speculation and theorizing will be baseless, but there seems no justification for saying all such thinking is nonsensical. By analogy: most conspiracy theories are groundless, but not all of them are.

Okay, we've talked about statistically unlikely events and miracles, now let's add in some beer.

Wired Magazine published a fascinating article last month about a scientist who was able to recover dormant yeast cells that had been trapped in amber for 45 million years. As soon as he placed those cells into a growing medium they again flourished. Does that sound like a statistically unlikely occurrence to you? Would you be willing to call it a miracle if a living thing were somehow able to sleep for 45 million years, then wake up again as if nothing had happened? This yeast was discovered by Raul Cano, a 63-year-old microbiologist at California Polytechnic State University back in 1995. After years of trying to figure out what he could do with this miracle, he ended up in a business relationship with a micro-brewery who are now marketing a beer made with this ancient yeast to the world. The whole story is definitely worth a read, it's called "Amber Ale: Brewing Beer from 45-Million-Year-Old Yeast".

Why beer? The yeast strain that was recovered is Saccharomyces cerevisiae, commonly known as brewer's yeast, so it really didn't require that much of a stretch of the imagination. But there's some other interesting bits of synchronicity here. That same strain of yeast was big news back in 1996 when it became one of the first living organisms to have its genome completely sequenced. And at the time, there was a lot of press about how remarkably similar that yeast's genome was to that of human beings: here's a link to an article from back then that claimed about 50% of the yeast cell's genome is the same as a human being's.

How similar do you think you are to a yeast cell? We're not single-celled organisms so there's still clearly quite a leap from yeast to human, but at its core I think this news of 45-million-year-old yeast still having that mysterious "spark" of life within it reinforces a point I've made a number of times: life is a force which is somehow engaged with reality "outside" of our limited spacetime window. Other recent blogs where we've explored this idea include Creativity and the Quantum Universe, The Biocentric Universe Theory, Alien Mathematics, God? Or the Multiverse?, and Could I Meet My Incarnation?.

So next time you're enjoying a beer, or enjoying your favorite raw fruit or vegetable, stop and think for a moment about what a miracle it is that life exists, and that we are each here to enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

PS: Back in Placebos and Nocebos, we talked about how the power of the mind could cause amazing changes to occur in our personal health (or lack thereof), but we also quoted a New Scientist magazine article which said this doesn't mean we have the power to make miracles occur. What do you think about life and miracles? Coincidentally, I've just posted the video blog version of "Placebos and Nocebos" on YouTube, take a look:


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pg2Fxp7DgX0


Next: Polls Archive 45 - Conscious Computers?