Simulism

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ezPlq2Z59E

Tomorrow's my birthday. Happy birthday to me, wherever/whatever I am right now!

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

A couple of weeks ago I showed you the Augmented Reality my company created to promote the Legendary Pictures re-launch of the Godzilla franchise "Gojira", which is slated for a 2012 release date. It's been really exciting to see all the positive feedback, including this nice review from Robert Silva, who writes for the New York Times' about.com , and this mention on the popular website "Ain't It Cool News".

Life is But a Dream?
With Legendary Pictures' Inception being such a big hit right now, there's a lot of renewed interest in that age-old existential question: is this all a dream? Is there a way for us wake up from the dream and return to the underlying true reality?

The moment in The Matrix when Neo wakes up in the pod raised these same questions. Likewise, these questions come up in the above video, which is based on my text blog Life is But a Dream, a blog which incorporates ideas compiled into a ten minute YouTube movie called The Quantum Apocalypse.

Simulism
Ever hear of simulism? Check out this link: http://www.simulism.org/Simulation
Simulism.org is a wiki created by the Netherlands' Ivo Jansch, and it brings together a number of interesting bits of information about (to quote from the wiki) "the possibility that our existence rests on an unimaginably complex n-dimensional k-state computer grid with rules governing the transition from one state to another". To which I would respond, my approach to visualizing how "ultimately, the ten spatial dimensions represent an information space from which our observed reality emerges as a tiny subset" is another way of approaching the same idea.

One of the pages at Ivo's thought-provoking wiki lists movies that involve people being embedded within simulations where they may or may not be aware of that fact. One film listed there was a new one to me, if you have 19 minutes check it out, I've posted the video here. Created by David Kaplan and Eric Zimmerman, it's called "Play".


A direct link to the above movie is at http://futurestates.tv/episodes/play

Information Equals Reality
Chapter Four of my book is called "The Binary Viewpoint". Here's a paragraph that relates to all this:

From the binary viewpoint, the tenth dimension becomes like the hugest computer memory in the world, containing every possible “0” and “1” that could be combined together to describe every possible universe. The “holodeck” of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame started out as a “simple” virtual reality simulator, but as the writers developed the series, its power appeared to grow to the point where entire universes could be created within its walls. How would a person’s life inside such a world be different from a life in the real world? The somewhat confusing Matrix Trilogy started out with the same clear and profound concept – our experience inside a system capable of simulating every aspect of reality would, to our senses, be indistinguishable from the experience of actual reality.

Are you and I really living in a vast simulation? What difference would it make if we were or we weren't? Either way, the goal should still be to find ways to enjoy the journey. And if we're not, then why not? Find the problem. Make a change. Make things better.

Rob Bryanton

Next - Time is in the Mind, in FPS

The Tenth Dimension Goes Live

Here's something new we're trying now: schedule permitting, every day at 10 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time (which is 4 p.m. CST my time), I am talking live to people from around the world about the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project.

The live chat in its full form can be found at www.tenthdimension.com/chat. A small part of the room is below. As you'll see, this includes a "Copy Chatroom" button that lets you grab a piece of code, so that anyone who wants to can paste this part of the chatroom into their own website.

One of the nice things about this window, which comes from the good folks at meebo, is any YouTube, Google Video, or Metacafe movie can be shared without leaving the chat window, plus links to Flickr photo sets. Any url link can also be shared, and and any of these links to media and websites become thumbnails that remain after visitors leave the site.

Within the formatting of my blog, the video window is not being shown here, but a text-only chat sometimes has its uses as well.

Welcome to the Tenth Dimension. Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

The Wii World

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

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

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

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

To quote Mr. Tsien from the article:

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

Mr. Tsien ends the article on a speculative note:

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

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

Conspiracies and quantum mechanics

Last blog I mentioned "Quantum Enigma", a book by two physics professors from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, which takes a serious look at the role of consciousness in quantum physics. Here are a couple of interesting quotes from the website dedicated to their book:

"Quantum mechanics is the most battle-tested theory in all of science. Moreover, one third of our economy depends on things designed with it. Fine! But it also tells us that by your conscious choice you can bring about either of two contradictory situations. This is so far demonstrated only with small things, but it is today being shown true for larger and larger objects. And it is generally accepted by physicists that quantum mechanics applies to everything."

"For the most part, in our teaching of quantum mechanics we tacitly deny the mysteries physics has encountered. We hardly mention Niels Bohr's grappling with the encounter between physics and the observer and John von Neumann's demonstration that the encounter is, in principle, inevitable. We largely avoid the still-unresolved issues raised by Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Eugene Wigner, David Bohm, and John Bell. Outside the classroom, physicists increasingly address these issues and often go beyond the purely physical. Consciousness, for example, comes up explicitly in almost all of today's proliferating interpretations of quantum mechanics, if only to show why physics need not deal with it. The many worlds interpretation, for example, is also referred to as the many minds interpretation, and a major treatment of decoherence concludes that an ultimate understanding of the implications of quantum mechanics would involve a model of consciousness."

Now I'm not for a moment suggesting here that Rosenblum and Kuttner subscribe to my visual way of imagining the dimensions, but there are many direct parallels between what they are describing above and the conclusions I reach in my book.

Anton Zeilinger, professor of physics at the University of Vienna has been quoted to say "quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality". If what we are navigating through right now is a sea of information across the dimensions, observing one slice out of all the possible slices as we travel down our limited line in the fourth dimension, then the patterns we are observing have as much to do with our role as quantum observers as they do with the sequence of events that got us to today.

So, if there is a multiverse of universes out there, and apparently infinite branching timelines within each of those universes, then there should always be a sequence of events that we could track from the beginning of the universe to now that tells us why "this is the way things are" as opposed to "this is the way things aren't". I'm only being somewhat frivolous in my book (and in my song "The Anthropic Viewpoint") when I say that we are living in the Hydrogen Conspiracy: what hidden agendas and preferences for one reality over another caused hydrogen to be the most popular atom in our universe?

Which is not to say that conspiracies are bogus, but rather that if quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality, then there will always be two ways of looking at how we got to our current situation, only one of which requires us to believe in conspiracies. Personally, I'm inclined to agree completely that our consensual reality in the last hundred years has been manipulated by the powerful to make themselves even more powerful. I also believe that we are nearing the end of that time - as we and web 2.0 wake up, it's going to become increasingly difficult for games that got our world to the precipitously bad situation it is currently in to be played any longer.

In my song Everything Fits Together, there is a chant section that sums this idea up:

There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why
There’s a reason why you feel the way you do
There’s a reason why you do the deeds you do
There’s a reason why you feel the needs you do
There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why

Which is not to say that we are helpless, but rather that the knowledge of how we got to where we are right now can help us to understand what is our own fault and what is the result of other forces acting upon us. The question then becomes: what do you want to change? As Joe Jackson so eloquently put it, "You Can't Get What You Want Till You Know What You Want". I would say those are wise words indeed.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du86lNCvOdA



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfe_3bEH-jE



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdjX72VcKI





A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

The Bicameral Mind

About fifteen years ago I was browsing through a used bookstore when I came across a weighty tome with an equally weighty title: “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. This challenging and fascinating book by Julian Jaynes advances a theory which has continued to resonate for me: that our way of experiencing consciousness/self-awareness is a relatively recent development, perhaps from within the last few thousand years. Here’s what I say about his theory in my book:

Prior to that time, Mr. Jaynes contends, our conscious and subconscious minds were integrated, and we heard suggestions for future action from our subconscious mind as a voice or voices that we often interpreted as messages from the gods or departed loved ones.
We still often exist in that more integrated state of mind, where we live within the moment rather than create an inner monologue watching and describing to ourselves what it is we’re doing. Sometimes, interestingly enough, we must exist in that more integrated state of mind because otherwise there are tasks we would find ourselves incapable of doing. This is particularly true of any complicated physical action: if we are playing a musical instrument, or driving a car, or hitting a baseball, we do these things much better when repetition and the honing of our skills allow us to perform all the tiny actions that make up the activity without having to think about each of them. This has often been shown to be true of great mental achievements as well, where some of the finest minds of our time have reported that their important breakthroughs “just came to them”, or even just “appeared in a dream”. In other words, this theory suggests that splitting our mental processes into a conscious mind which is constantly viewing our actions as if from the outside is not always a useful way to exist, and is not the way that most living organisms exist.

Although Mr. Jaynes died in 1997, there is a Julian Jaynes Society which continues to discuss and promote his unique ideas. In my last blog I mentioned my belief that voices of conscience, intuition, memories of loved ones, storytelling from previous generations, and more metaphysical manifestations such as ghosts or angels could all be possible examples of how a system of beliefs and memes work “behind the scenes”, so to speak, to help define our consensual reality. The Bicameral Mind theory, I believe, can also be used to show us a way that our minds could be processing incoming data from the upcoming fifth dimensional paths that are soon to be available to us as we create our fourth dimensional line, and such manifestations as prescience, intuition, or deja vu could be part of the ways that our minds reveal that data to our conscious minds.

Modern society teaches us to be afraid or suspicious of those moments when we operate without apparent consciousness, even though there a great many things that we do better when we find a way to quiet our “narrator voice”, and exist in the more integrated mode that Julian Jaynes tells us was the way all humans lived in ancient times and back through our evolution from the primordial soup.

My song “Automatic” talks about all these ideas, I hope you enjoy it!

AUTOMATIC
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Musta been runnin on automatic
I simply can’t recall
How did I get here, what was I doin?
No clue at all
Lost my place in the conversation
What were we talking about
Thought I was here, must have been dreamin
Without a doubt

Automatic
Automatic
Automatic
Musta been runnin on automatic

What was for breakfast, just this mornin
I really couldn’t say
Out there circlin another planet
So far away
Where was my head at, was I drivin
Not even seein the road
Was I only goin through the motions
Don’t even know

Automatic…

Julian Jaynes showed me he had the answer
In the bicameral mind
Conciousness broken down into pieces
Oh what a find
We’ve all been runnin on automatic
Since we were back in the trees
But still we made it here on automatic
How can it be

Automatic…

Something beautiful and complicated
Does it ever seem strange
How we could do that on automatic
Hard to explain

Automatic
Automatic
Automatic
Musta been runnin on automatic

Click here to hear the song on Amie Street.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Everything Fits Together 1,2,3

Today we have posted three new videos for one of the songs from my book. All three are for the same song, but each is a very different visual take. You can find them at youtube.com. The videos are titled "Everthing Fits Together 1", Everything Fits Together 2", and Everything Fits Together 3". Individual links for these videos can also be found in the "Tenth Dimension Links" box over to the right.


In a previous blog entry titled "Everything Fits Together", I discussed some of the thoughts that went into the creation of this song. Here now are the lyrics:

EVERYTHING FITS TOGETHER
music and lyrics (c) 2006 by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

It’s the age old question, it always stays the same
People turnin their eyes up to heaven and callin out names
Some may get an answer, some may turn away
When they don’t want to know too much, cause it’s easier that way
Hidden back between the pages, written in between the lines
There’s a spider’s web of connections there for you to find

Cause everything fits together, you may not see that now
But there’ll come a day, when you’ll see the way
There’s always a why and a how
Everything fits together, it’s all part of the show
Soon there’ll come a day when you’ll see the way
And you’ll know (there’s a reason why, there’s a reason why)
And you’ll know (there’s a reason why, there’s a reason why)
There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why
There’s a reason why you feel the way you do
There’s a reason why you do the deeds you do
There’s a reason why you feel the needs you do
There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why
(There’s a reason why, there’s a reason why)

In this world of wonder, in this world of pain
In this world of mysteries that still remain
There’s a hunger growing, we all would love the chance
To see the hidden strings that sing to make it all dance
Just when you thought the universe couldn’t be any more complex
You started climbing up through the levels, one to the next

Where everything fits together, you may not see that now
But there’ll come a day, when you’ll see the way
There’s always a why and a how
Everything fits together, it’s all part of the show
Soon there’ll come a day when you’ll see the way
And you’ll know
Everything fits together (everything fits together)
Everything fits together
Everything fits together (everything fits together)
Everything fits together




A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcdjX72VcKI






A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6nAS2trDuck

Enjoy the Journey,

Rob Bryanton

Memes / Tag Clouds / Spimes

Yesterday, John Brownlee, in his Wired.com blog “Table of Malcontents” posted a lovely recommendation for the tenth dimension website:

John's blog entry


As I said to John in the comments to his blog entry, Imagining the Tenth Dimension is a hobby project for me, but it has been an awe-inspiring experience to see the worldwide audience that has sprung up for the book and the website purely from word of mouth, and transmission of ideas through the web.

As I am always quick to point out, my "way of imagining" is not the accepted explanation for string theory, but it has gotten a lot of positive responses from people who like it as a new framework for discussion. In a previous post, "Time as a Spatial Dimension", I discuss some of my reasoning behind this new way of thinking about time and space.

This project is a creative exploration. It includes 26 songs about the nature of reality which I am now in the process of recording, the first six of which can be heard from the tenthdimension website at this time. I am interested in the links between this way of thinking about time and space, and how it gives us a tangible way to imagine the multiverse. It also ties in with spimes/tag clouds/memes, the granularity of time as predicted by loop quantum gravity, Minsky's Society of Mind, and many other topics from science/metaphysics/philosophy which are being discussed at the tenthdimension forum.

Our reality, I believe, has always been what the new tools we have before us are finally allowing us to see so clearly - that clouds of ideas/memes are navigating through space and time, rising, competing, and falling, and contributing to the consensual reality that we all share. The "long undulating snake" from the animation, then, would be a "spime": an object which can be mapped and tracked over space and time. Bruce Sterling's fascinating speech from the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (which can be heard here is a very useful touchstone for introducing us to the ramifications of this way of thinking.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton


Technorati Profile

The Unseen Eye

In my song The Unseen Eye, I talk about a number of topics which I explore extensively in my book: the nature of time, the Big Bang, the quantum observer, playing dice with the universe, dark matter, and so on. Here are the lyrics to the song, which you can hear using the link in my list to the right, or there are several ways to hear it from the tenthdimension.com website as well.

THE UNSEEN EYE - music and lyrics (c) 2006 by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

(In the distance we hear children, repeating a strange little skipping song out on the playground:)
(“All we are is a point of view
It makes me me. It makes you you.
Quantum waves are many things
Until we view them, then they spring
Into our world as what we see
It makes you you, and it makes me me”)

In the universe of all universes
Anything is possible
Everything has happened, and will happen again
In the universe of all universes
Grey and formless
Till you choose a point, to become the first -- when
You can think of it as data
This dark and shapeless void
Unrealized potential
In the static and the noise
Till in the universe of all universes
The unseen eye
Opened and collapsed the wave, and we entered on in

Now we know it’s the act of observation
That gives the world its how and why
So the big bang is just an illusion
It’s just the opening of the unseen eye

Now any single point that we choose for entry
Leads to a long chain
From the very first yes, or the very first -- no
All the laws of physics, all the rules of nature
Defined in an instant
By the very first choice, or the dice we throw
Though Einstein objected
To imagining a God
Who gambles for Creation
The thought was just too odd
But deep within us in every living creature
There’s a connection
To this shared consensus, of the world we know

Cause we know it’s the act of participation
That gives the world its how and why
So the big bang is just an illusion
It’s just the opening of the unseen eye

And the missing dark matter that binds the universe
The mysterious mass that science cannot find
Is in the many worlds of possibility
That are just around the corner in time

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

And we know it’s the act of observation
That gives the world its how and why
So the big bang is just an illusion
It’s just the opening of the unseen eye
And the unseen eye, is you and I
And the unseen eye, is you and I
And the unseen eye, is you and I


Here's a paragraph from my book about the starting point for these ideas:

"If we can agree that our conception of time as a one-way “arrow” is an illusion created by our unique point of view, then ultimately we can come to the viewpoint that the big bang is also an illusion, as it is just a side effect of collapsing the tenth dimension with the very first yes/no. The point at which we enter the tenth dimensional system becomes the big bang (that is to say, the beginning) for the dimensions below. The currently accepted version of the big bang is known as “inflationary cosmology”, in which it is proposed that the size of the universe increased by a factor greater than a million trillion trillion in less than a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Does this mind-boggling amount of sudden inflation not sound more like the flipping of a gigantic yes/no toggle switch?"

This song is a good example, I believe, of the usefulness of lyrics and melody for conveying ideas that might otherwise seem too intimidating or obscure. As I have discussed in the tenth dimension forum, the 26 songs that appear as lyrics at the end of my book were the original impetus for this project: as I showed the songs around, it became apparent that more explanation was going to be needed to help people understand my thought processes. Originally I had planned to write some notes that would be included as an insert booklet with the CD of these songs. Eventually, though, as I fleshed my ideas out more fully that booklet grew to become the 220 page book called "Imagining the Tenth Dimension" which, much to my surprise, has now found an audience in dozens of countries around the world.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob