Imagining the Ninth Dimension

"The string landscape can be visualized schematically as a mountainous terrain in which different valleys represent different forms for the extra dimensions, and altitude represents the cosmological constant's value."

- Brian Greene, from his book The Hidden Reality - Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos

I've been saying that the eighth dimension is as far as you need to go for any expressions of matter, while the ninth can only contain information/meme patterns, preferences for one kind of reality over another. How could I arrive at such an ambitious statement?

With my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project, I begin by saying that a point indicates a position in a system. In Imagining the Sixth Dimension, I mentioned that thinking about the set of all possible states for our unique universe would be thinking about our universe's phase space. In fact, that's the definition of phase space: a space in which all possible states of a system are represented. I believe there's a way to apply this thinking to every single dimension - in a sense, a dimension when considered as a "set of all possible states for that dimension" becomes a finite but unbounded hypersphere, and that hypersphere becomes a point in the next dimension up. Let's go back and see how that logic holds up.

If I'm on a boat in the middle of the ocean, I can see a horizon that appears to be the same in every direction. From this I can deduce that there is a slight curvature to the surface of the ocean, which is topologically speaking a 2D plane, and understand that I'm really on a 3D sphere. From the 2D topological perspective, I could head in a specific direction forever, giving me the impression that I was on an infinitely flat surface, but with the added curvature of the third dimension we can see how "apparently infinite" can be equated with "finite but unbounded".

With the knowledge that it takes a certain amount of "time" for light to reach our eyes, we realize that what we're seeing around us is not space, but space-time, and that as counter-intuitive as this may seem at first it's actually impossible for us to see 3D space: we can imagine and use the logic of 3D shapes, but we can only see them from our moving position within 4D space-time.

From our position within 4D space-time, we look out to the furthest reaches and see a cosmological horizon which is the same in all directions. From this we can deduce that there is a slight curvature to space-time, and that we're really a point moving on the surface of a 5D hypersphere. There are many other indications that our reality comes from the fifth dimension: back in 1921 Einstein accepted this idea as proposed by Kaluza. Holographic universe theories propose that we are an interference pattern projected from the fifth dimension, or from the "edge of the universe" but I disagree with those who say that this edge is far, far away.  Think of it like this: the third dimension is at the "edge" of the second dimension no matter where our imaginary 2D flatlanders are located. In the same way, this "edge" they speak about in holographic universe theories as being at an additional right angle to our space-time reality is not far away, it's right "here" in the next dimension up, no matter where we are within our space-time reality. And Hugh Everett, even through he didn't propose extra dimensions with his Many Worlds Interpretation, did propose that the branching universes derived from quantum mechanics occur within a space which is orthogonal (at right angles) to space-time.

Some quantum physicists are fond of saying that extremely unlikely events such as one of us suddenly disappearing from here and reappearing on the moon are allowable within the quantum wave function, but they are so unlikely that they would take longer than the life of the universe to occur. Likewise, Everett talked about how there are branching tree-like structures which are causally connected, and he even allowed for the possibility that some of those branches might fuse back together further down the causal chain, but he was very clear that causality could never be violated - so the universe where dinosaurs never became extinct or JFK was never murdered or where I died in a car crash last year would exist within the universal wave function as described by the Schrödinger equation, but they are now inaccessible from the universe we are currently observing. Those other universes, in a manner of speaking, are beyond the horizon of our 5D probability space, which leads me to conclude that we are a 5D point moving on the surface of a 6D hypersphere.

This sixth dimensional "phase space", as some have called it, includes all possible versions of our universe, from its beginning to its end. But within that phase space, we never wander off into one of the other universes with different physical laws, because those are in effect "beyond the horizon" of our universe's phase space, and from this we can deduce that the system representing our universe as a timeless whole is a point on a 7D hypersphere.

From here we are beginning to move into discussions of information flow rather than physical realities, but we're not all the way there yet.

In his book Just Six Numbers, Sir Martin Rees tells us that we only need to define six "deep forces" to describe our unique universe. Adjusting any one of those parameters by surprisingly small amounts would cause our universe to fall apart as the laws of physics break down. So if our unique universe is located at a position within the multiverse landscape, or constrained by a D7 brane as some string theorists have suggested, then are we moving, or are we stationary on the surface of this 7D hypersphere? There has been some evidence that the basic physical laws of our universe may have been slightly different at the earliest history of our universe, which would indicate that perhaps we have changed our 7D position slightly according to the logic we're pursuing here. But the idea that there is a certain natural selection occurring at the seventh dimension and beyond also makes sense - if we move too far away from our position, the incredibly delicate balance of forces that allow our universe to exist would collapse, so at nearby positions within this multiverse landscape there might not be universes that cohere into any meaningful structures, but further away another universe completely different from ours could be assembled with its own unique set of intricately connected physical laws and its own unique expression within the sixth dimension and below.

We also talked last entry about how we can imagine a data set of universes within the seventh dimension which would then require the "beyond the horizon" additional degree of freedom of the eighth dimension for us to be able to simultaneously consider other data sets not included within the seventh dimensional one: but to be clear, those data sets could be interchangeable, so this is more of a question of reference frames than it is of some data not being part of the seventh dimension. In that sense, the seventh dimension harkens back to the "garden hose" analogy used by string theorists: it's useful to imagine that the seventh dimension looks like a straight line, but when we move closer we can see the dimension has the potential for additional twists and turns that are inside the "rolled up tube" that is, topologically speaking, the "plane" of the eighth dimension.

(We looked at the following animation of vibrating Calabi-Yau Manifolds before in June 2011, in an entry called "Will the LHC Reveal Extra Dimensions?")

With this project, I'm proposing that the eighth dimension would encompass every possible physical expression of every possible universe. This would even include the extremely unlikely universes that result from oscillating rather than static constants - the degree of freedom to allow such changes would be within the eighth dimension. So no matter what universe we are imagining, we can visualize it as a point on an 8D hypersphere, but in the case of our own universe I suspect that we are not partaking of that additional potential degree of freedom, so we are definitely not moving away from our 7D position within the eighth dimension.

What's beyond the horizon of the 8D construct we've just envisioned? String theorists who talk about there being ten to the power of five hundred possible universes are really describing the different possible shapes the extra dimensions could take. In The Hidden Reality, Brian Greene uses the following image to picture the terrain of possible extra-dimensional shapes: he calls this terrain the Landscape Multiverse (as opposed to the Brane Multiverse, the Quilted Multiverse and so on), and describes how quantum tunnelings through this mountainous string landscape realize every possible form for the extra dimensions in one or another bubble universe. To tie this idea to my approach to visualizing the extra dimensions, the topological "plane" of this landscape is the eighth dimension, and the additional degree of freedom allowing this tunneling to occur would be in the ninth dimension.

(this graphic © 2011 by Brian Greene)

So here we are in the ninth dimension. Now we really are into the realm of organizing patterns, or "big picture memes" as I've called them in my book, where we are finally fully into the "information" side of the "information equals reality" equation. What caused our particular universe to be selected from out of the sea of potential patterns that roil and froth like quantum foam at the ninth dimension?

Back in July 2008 we talked in this blog about Michael Shermer, who's the well-known publisher of Skeptic Magazine. 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 an issue of Scientific American back then, and found that Mr. Shermer's regular column that month was entitled "Sacred Science: can emergence break the spell of reductionism and put spirituality back into nature?".

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.

By the time we are thinking about the ninth dimension as selection patterns that represent a generalized preference for one kind of universe over another, I believe we're in the same intellectual neighborhood as the "God 2.0" concept. And I think Michael Shermer, famed atheist and skeptic, got it right when he concluded his article saying that Stuart Kauffman's "God 2.0 is a deity worthy of worship".

Why do I say this? Because by now we're talking about labels: "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet".  Whether you want to call these selection patterns that caused our universe to be selected from out of this sea of potential information patterns "God", or some other less emotionally-charged name, doesn't change the ninth dimensional reality that we're describing here. As I say in the last verse of my song The Unseen Eye:

Now the universe of all universes
If the truth be known
Is an awful bore, viewed as a whole
But just a tiny shard viewed from any angle
Reveals complexity
It reveals such beauty, reveals a soul
So does it make a difference
How we got to what we see
If it’s really just coincidence
It’s still a wondrous thing

If you are one of those persons who recoil at the use of words like "God" and "soul", I apologize. This project is not an attempt to enforce a spiritual viewpoint onto the nature of reality, but it also tries to show that there are a great many possible connections between these different schools of thought. If you prefer physics over philosophy, so be it, that is one point of view. But likewise, if you prefer spirituality over science, I'm hoping that this project has given you some new food for thought for where the meeting ground between the two might reside.

There are 26 songs I attached to this project (I chose that number as a bit of an inside joke for fans of the history of string theory), and the very last one is called "Thankful". Having a sense of wonder and gratitude for the immense processes which selected the universe we are in right here and right now is, to my way of thinking, a completely appropriate response.

Are you enjoying the journey?

Rob Bryanton

Next: Wrapping It Up in the Tenth Dimension

Previous:
Imagining the Eighth Dimension
Imagining the Seventh Dimension
Imagining the Sixth Dimension
Imagining the Fifth Dimension
Imagining the Fourth Dimension
Imagining the Third Dimension
Imagining the Second Dimension

Polls Archive 34 - God? Or the Multiverse?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ1fwxqqLQI

Poll Question 34 - "Do you believe in God? Or the Multiverse?" Poll ended February 25 09. Interestingly, this poll saw the most participants so far of any of the polls we've had here: it seems people have strong opinions whenever the word "God" comes up in a question. 13% picked "God" as their answer, 32% for "Multiverse", 14% for "Neither", and 39% picked the most popular answer, "Both".

In Polls Archive 27, in which we discussed the question of whether there is really only one electron since they are all completely identical, we talked a bit about recent news items like the following, which suggest we may have to choose between "God or the Multiverse". Here's the opening two paragraphs of Mark Vernon's article, which appeared in the December 8 '08 issue of guardian.co.uk:

Is there a God or a multiverse? Does modern cosmology force us to choose? Is it the case that the apparent fine-tuning of constants and forces to make the universe just right for life means there is either a need for a "tuner" or else a cosmos in which every possible variation of these constants and forces exists somewhere?

This choice has provoked anxious comment in the pages of this week's New Scientist. It follows an article in Discover magazine, in which science writer Tim Folger quoted cosmologist Bernard Carr: "If you don't want God, you'd better have a multiverse."

Just ten days ago, the same conversation was brought up again in a New York Times opinion piece called "God and the Multiverse".

This is a good question, but a complicated one. There's a 45 minute interview on YouTube where Tom Huston, one of the editors of What is Enlightenment magazine, discusses similar questions with me:
A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MteowQVkEHs

In the above interview I explain how I believe that there are selection patterns that created our universe, which depending upon your point of view are God, or just naturally occurring patterns that exist within timelessness, and in that sense I am thinking of a God that fits in with "deism". Our universe is so amazing, huge, complex, detailed, unlikely, that even if we don't ascribe consciousness to those selection patterns they are still something so humbling and intricate that they're worthy of our gratitude and praise.

Unlikely Events and Timelessness:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=Hpf3y_EdHco

I also believe that consciousness is connected together in ways we can't directly see from down here in spacetime, and that connectedness is something that some people think of as God. So phrases like "I am an aspect of God" or "God is in me" make sense within that context. Douglas Hofstadter's book "I am a Strange Loop" and Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor's book "My Stroke of Insight" both tie very easily to that concept as well.

Daily Parrying:

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

I Know You, You Know Me:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfq5kKkA6pw

You are Me and We are All Together:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbGAPR70tTY

As I say in my entry "Daily Parrying", though, this doesn't really support the idea of a God who you can pray to and He will make the other football team lose and your team win just because that's what you asked Him for. I talk about this in my book:

The reader may notice here that it would be very easy to substitute “God” or “The Creator” in place of “the observer” in the above paragraphs. In fact, if the reader is comfortable with the concept of each of us being an expression of God, “created in His/Her image”, each with a holy spark within, then the two viewpoints are quite compatible. On the other hand though, the image of a God who is separate from, standing in judgment of, and meting out punishment to us all is much less compatible. What we are describing here is a reality where each of us is creating an expression of a specific aspect inferred within the “white noise” of the tenth dimension through our individual roles as quantum observers. If the reader finds it easier to accept the phrase “I am an aspect of God” than they do the previous sentence, then they should feel free to use that as their jumping off point instead. As we discussed before, the tenth dimension as we are conceptualizing it here is really the boring part of our discussion, because it simultaneously contains all possibilities. If we choose to imagine a Creator-God who is manifesting Himself/Herself through each one of us, we are imagining an observer who is cutting cross-sections out of the tenth dimension to examine the much more interesting and highly detailed subsets of reality which are contained within the dimensions below.

God 2.0:

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

With this project, I've been trying to show people that there are ways of aligning a spiritual viewpoint with the traditionally atheistic scientific viewpoint. If I say "I believe in God" that immediately creates an image in someone else's mind which may be completely different from what I'm trying to convey, so I tend to not want to say things as simply as that. To finish, here's a song that says whether you believe we come from God or the multiverse, there is still something amazing, complex, and wonderful about the universe in which we live: "Thankful".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIfN1RM9X6I

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 35 - Do We Come From a 5D Hologram?

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

Is God in the Seventh Dimension?

The tenth dimension site is averaging two million hits a month now. The meme that was set in motion since this project was launched in the summer of 2006 keeps growing, as people continue to view the animation, read the book, and discuss these ideas around the world.

By far the most-viewed and most-discussed question at the tenth dimension forum has been this: "Is God in the Tenth Dimension"? Other topics rise and fall in popularity from week to week (as memes often do), but this deep question is the one that people keep coming back to with their own unique views on the matter. I have put my own two bits in from time to time but the discussions there have been passionate and widely varied, and that is all I am interested in doing here: promoting the discussion of ideas.

Regular visitors to this blog or the forum will know that this is the idea I advance in my book: if we are imagining that our universe comes from an indeterminate quantum state, and that (as quantum physicists say) "information equals reality", then everything is just patterns in that information. What's wrong with giving those patterns a name? But the corollary to that idea has to be to accept that calling what we're thinking about "God" makes some people uncomfortable. Giving the exact same thing a name that they are comfortable with doesn't change what we're talking about, it just changes the name. Since I'm such a fan of Richard Dawkins, I say this knowing full well that what I am proposing here flies directly in the face of his book "The God Delusion": sorry about that, Dr. Dawkins.

Ultimately, asking if God is specifically in the Tenth Dimension is not the point of these discussions: what we're really talking about is whether there is a way for the ideas of spirituality and science to co-exist, each acknowledging that ultimately they are talking about the same thing. But this time, let's work through the framework for discussion that I've advanced for how to visualize the dimensions and see where "God" works as a name for the pattern that created our universe.

The tenth dimension as I have portrayed it is the timeless void of quantum fields, the unobserved whole that is "outside the system", and therefore unimaginable to us from within the system. Seems like a good place for an omnipotent being, and in the sense that God can be all things to all people, and that God can be thought of as the summation of everything that is and ever shall be, this is an obvious place to start. The only fly in the ointment here, I think, is that any attempt to observe any aspect of the tenth dimension spills us into the reality of the dimensions below. So, if we leave God up in the tenth dimension exclusively, I would say we're imagining a God who never actually does anything... as I've said before, imagining the "all-vibrations-simultaneously/white light" of the tenth dimension by itself is really the most boring part of the discussion.

Another discussion that has happened recently at the forum is whether the tenth dimension as I've portrayed it should be called a dimension at all, since what I'm really saying is that the tenth dimension can be thought of as the entirety of the ninth dimension, but viewed as a single point of indeterminate size. A visitor named "Alyssa" argued that this is deceptive, and other visitors to the forum then suggested that she think of dimensions 1 through 9 as each being an additional layer of an onion; to which I added the Zen-like idea that we could think then of the ninth dimension as being what happens when you look at the entire onion, and the tenth as being what happens when you don't look at the onion. Clearly, imagining something that is unobservable is tricky whether you're talking about the indeterminate fields of quantum mechanics, or whether you're talking about God. But if we're portraying a God who causes absolutely everything to happen, then the ninth dimension would certainly be a place for Him/Her to be.

My way of visualizing the dimensions suggests that the ninth, eighth, and seventh dimensions show us how to imagine the big-picture memes that organize the information that eventually becomes reality. From the ninth down to the seventh, the ways of expressing energy/mass are gradually narrowed down, until we arrive at our unique universe as an unwavering point in the seventh dimension. In my previous blog entry ("How to Make a Universe") I touched on one of the ideas from my book: if the multiverse contains 10 to the power of 500 other universes (a possibility inferred from string theory), some of those other universes would be much less stable than our own, instantly exploding into nothingness or collapsing back in upon themselves. So here's another possible location for God: we might be imagining that out of all the possible universes, God chose to create the one we're in because He/She prefers creativity over destruction, life over no life, order over disorder, and so on. Are those phrases also big-picture memes, ways of organizing the information that becomes our reality? Sure. But the question then becomes, if those other less productive universes do really exist out there within the multiverse, did our God create them? Or are there other Gods out there who created those other universes, because of their own preference for a different kind of universe than the one we live in? A pantheon of Gods both benevolent and malevolent spring to mind then, a distasteful idea to some, an appealing idea to others.

What about the fifth dimension? If our universe of spacetime is being constructed one frame at a time, by quanta that are each one planck length away from the next, then I have proposed that the probability space of the "next available branches" is contained within the fifth rather than the fourth dimension. This means that as we are constructing what feels like a fourth dimensional line of time, we are actually twisting and turning in the fifth dimension, which gives us a way to imagine how the fifth dimension and above could appear to be curled up down at the planck length for us, and yet those higher dimensions could also contain the astonishingly large concept of the multiverse-filled-with-universes which we have come to imagine.

If everything from the beginning of time within our specific universe is the result of an observation of the quantum wave function, then the fifth dimension looks like a great location to place God, and to see how we are all connected together though the consensual reality that we share, each as our own quantum observer. In other words, the combined quantum observer effect that creates our universe right from the Big Bang to "now" could be God. As I say in my book:

The reader may notice here that it would be very easy to substitute “God” or “The Creator” in place of “the observer” in the above paragraphs. In fact, if the reader is comfortable with the concept of each of us being an expression of God, “created in His/Her image”, each with a holy spark within, then the two viewpoints are quite compatible. On the other hand though, the image of a God who is separate from, standing in judgement of, and meting out punishment to us all is much less compatible. What we are describing here is a reality where each of us is creating an expression of a specific aspect inferred within the “white noise” of the tenth dimension through our individual roles as quantum observers. If the reader finds it easier to accept the phrase “I am an aspect of God” than they do the previous sentence, then they should feel free to use that as their jumping off point instead. As we discussed before, the tenth dimension as we are conceptualizing it here is really the boring part of our discussion, because it simultaneously contains all possibilities. If we choose to imagine a Creator-God who is manifesting Himself/Herself through each one of us, we are imagining an observer who is cutting cross-sections out of the tenth dimension to examine the much more interesting and highly detailed subsets of reality which are contained within the dimensions below.

People who say that God works in mysterious ways, and that what feels like bad luck may actually be part of God's master plan, would be fine with leaving God in the fifth dimension. Personally, here's where I stand with that idea: try as I might, I can't imagine a God who has deliberately created a world that allows evil and inequity to exist as part of His/Her plan. Is there a force for destruction and selfishness and chaos that helps to make our world less beautiful than it could be? For any specific universe, I have placed all the timelines that could potentially have existed (but some of which are now unavailable because of what has come before or what comes after) out in the sixth dimension, and if we are going to imagine that there are forces doing battle to create the world we live in, then that battle must be raging in the sixth dimension. The good guys don't always win, and bad luck happens to the best of us: which would mean the chaos and deliberately chosen paths that cause one part of our world to prosper while so many others suffer is part of the temptations and bad choices that each of us have to acknowledge exist out there in the sixth dimension for our specific universe.

Which leads me back to the seventh dimension. If God is the pattern that created the world and the universe we live in, I think that's the best place to find Him/Her. But I can see arguments for placing God in other dimensions, including the tenth, or even across all dimensions, depending on your own point of view.

I'm attaching two videos that are relevant to this discussion, both of which are in previous blogs which include their lyrics. One is called "The Unseen Eye": if our reality is created by a quantum observer, then there is an Unseen Eye which began collapsing the wave function right from the Big Bang. The other is "What Was Done Today": if the fifth dimensional probability space we are navigating through has been defined by what has already come before, then there are possible futures we can no longer get to because of chance and circumstance, and deliberate choices that have already been made.



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



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ikj7ozGMQM

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Facebook and Secret Societies

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids

I've talked a number of times about the very important idea quantum mechanics teaches us: reality and information are interchangeable. By the time we are holding the biggest-picture-of-all idea of reality in our heads, we are "outside the system" in the domain of indeterminacy: this is where all potential expressions of reality reside, because this is where the information that could potentially represent all possible realities also resides. But also included in what we're imagining by then would be other ways of organizing information which are not expressed as physical reality, and the concept of "memes" is a very useful way of thinking about this.

Google has become such a part of our lives by now, it's easy to forget how much it has created new ways to link information together, and therefore how easily it allows us to map the rise and fall of memes: one of my blog entries that mentions that idea is "Seeing Eye to Eye" . Now let's talk about Facebook, a tool which is linking people together (much as Google is already doing for information), creating brand new networks and connections throughout the world. There is even a fan-created Facebook group for Imagining the Tenth Dimension (thanks, by the way, to Chris Liakos of the University of Georgia for creating this group). The exploding popularity of Facebook is such a cool development because it allows us more than ever to see how ideas and people are all connected together across time and space, which is one of the central themes of my project.

Which leads to the song posted at the start of this blog. What is the difference between a deliberate manipulation of our reality by unseen forces, and the idea that our current situation is just the result of (as Homer Simpson so aptly puts it) "just a bunch of stuff that happened"? The answer, I think, is that both interpretations can be applied on a sliding scale, and that is the nature of any large and potentially random data set: even in a completely random set of numbers, there will always be groupings and patterns that can be teased out if a certain viewpoint is applied (for a very simple example, if I toss a coin 100 times, the outcome is almost certainly not heads/tails/heads/tails/heads/tails and so on, so the list of results will contain sections with more "heads" results and sections with more "tails" results that we could zoom in on). I call this idea "conceptual framing", and I have posted a number of previous blog entries that touch upon that idea.

One of the most-discussed questions at the Tenth Dimension forum is whether God fits into this puzzle we are imagining. Here's something I posted into that particular discussion thread a couple of weeks ago:

Quantum physics says information and reality are interchangeable. The set of data that represents our universe has organized patterns within it. What's wrong with giving those patterns a name?

Since one of the central ideas of my book is that the other parts of the multiverse are just as real as the observed universe we live in, I believe the broadest application of the anthropic principle applies - the reason we live in a universe finely tuned to allow our existence is because there are other universes tuned in ways that wouldn't allow us to exist (and some of those other universes would have intelligent organizations of matter marveling at how lucky they are to be in a universe with constants so finely tuned as to allow their existence).

Are we here because of a God who wanted to create a universe that allowed us to exist? By the time we're thinking about the big picture of timelessness within which all those possible universes exist, I believe there's room for us to recognize organizing patterns within that data which we can call God if we choose to do so.

I talk a lot about the memes that connect us together and the organizing forces that those memes could represent in the higher dimensions. As I say in my book,

in the highest dimensions, the meme that says 'I prefer gravity over no gravity' would be important, while the meme that says 'I prefer the Beatles over the Rolling Stones' would be meaningless...

and also...

Memes that prefer life over no life, continuance over destruction, creativity over repression, innovation over failure, and order rather than entropy would appear to have the upper hand when we think about the version of our own universe that has survived since the big bang, and which we are living in today.

Does the universe we live in have hydrogen as the most abundant atom because of the universe's (or a Creator God's) desire for it to be so, or is this fact nothing more than the result of "lucky" throws of the quantum dice? (I've posted previous blog entries here about the amusing concept of the Great Hydrogen Conspiracy.) Whether you believe one idea or the other has a lot to do with your personal conceptual framing, and like most of this ideas I'm exploring in Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I propose that there are ways to see how both ideas can peacefully co-exist.

The video at the start of this blog was created by Jason Doucette, and the audio is a 1986 recording of me singing the song. Here are the lyrics to that song, which is about the underground connections which may (or may not!) be thought of as being part of the forces that got us to this particular position in our fifth-dimensional probability space.

SECRET SOCIETIES
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

I believe in secret societies and underground confederacies
That move in my life
I believe in sisterly sororities and brotherly fraternities
And they’re part of my life

And there are signals, and there are signs
Right before us all the time
But we stumble deaf and blind
Cause we never realize

There are wheels that turn, that we never see
There are eyes that are watchin you and me
There are tears people cry cause they’ll never be free
Trapped in the arms of a secret society

I believe the guy sittin next to me waits for a sign from me
To show him I know
What he needs, or maybe what I need from him, but he won’t ever let me in
It’s a common tableau

Yes it happens all the time
We’re all sendin out signs
Cause we all need to know
Who are friends are, who’s the foe

Cause there are deals that are struck that play with our dreams
And there are people who move in places unseen
And pinocchios who dance as if they live and breathe
Tugged from above by a secret society

Oh, I believe it’s true


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Thankful 1

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvROwf2KeOg

Another video of me in my living room pounding away at my old piano, singing one of the 26 songs from my book.

We live in a seemingly impossible universe - the fine structure constants are tuned to within surprisingly narrow margins - just a little less gravity and it all would have flown apart into nothingness from the big bang, a little too much gravity and it would all have collapsed back in upon itself by now. How did we get so lucky? That's the conundrum. Some people point to a simple version of the Anthropic Principle which says the reason we're asking how we ended up in this unique universe that supports life as we know it is because if the universe didn't support life as we know it, we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

For me, the version of the Anthropic Priniciple which says all those other universes do actually exist rings much truer. As the current issue of Scientific American discusses, modern science is starting to explore some of the other forms and chemical processes that "life as we don't know it" could be able to exist in other parts of our own universe... and some even more fantastical constructions of energy and matter that become interested in "what happens next" might well flourish in other completely separate different-initial-conditions-universes from our own, out there in other parts of the multiverse.

Whether you believe in a Creator-God that put together this intricate puzzle, or whether you believe in a Dawkins-style "blind watchmaker" of chance and selection which got us to where we are now, there's nothing wrong with feeling some wonder and some humility at how extraordinary it all really is. And saying "thank you" for something as wonderful as all this, regardless of your belief system, is just good manners!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


THANKFUL
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite happenstance
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

And in the multitude of paths
That could have ended before now
I am grateful for the unseen hand
Which led us here somehow

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin

The universe is beautiful
More complex than we can believe
And praisable for what it holds within
A tapestry of threads
That each of us must weave
From each and every moment that we’re in

In this improbable world
In this impossible life
At the end of infinite coincidence
Leading back to the big bang

I am thankful for what I have
I am thankful for what I’ve been given
I am thankful for those I love
And for this life I’m livin