My Computer is My Friend

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtwmqNB2gyk


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZEZzqJaA9E

We've talked before about Kurzweil's Singularity, and the Transhumanist movement: both are examples of a belief system which says technology will eventually lead us to our salvation, perhaps even to immortality!

On the other hand, we all have days when computers just seem to not want to co-operate, and it would seem that trusting our futures to these obstinate beasts is a recipe for disaster. Did my computer just crash on purpose to show me who's boss?

That's the tongue-in-cheek viewpoint of this song about that love-hate relationship all of us have from time to time with technology, in a world where just about everything has some kind of a chip in it these days. Bob Evans takes the lead vocals on this foot-stomper, while the video above shows some vintage footage from a time when the computer in my cell phone would have filled an entire room, and might have been used to start World War III.

My Computer is My Friend
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Oh whenever I need something in a hurry
And whenever I need something done right now
When those deadlines have got me oh so worried
There's one thing on which I can always count

My computer -- is my friend
My computer's out to get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's gonna get me in the end

And whenever my files have not been backed up
My computer knows to put me in my place
That's the time my hard drive's gonna pack up
My reputation's gone without a trace

My computer -- is my friend
My computer's out to get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's gonna get me in the end

Everything takes longer than it used to
Nothing's ever simple any more
By the time I've booted up to Windows
Can't remember what I turned the thing on for

Every month I'm spendin' all my money
On more RAM, more drives, more speedy CPU's
But the faster my computer says it's runnin'
The slower my bloated software seems to move

My computer -- is my friend
My computer's out to get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's gonna get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's out to get me in the end
My computer -- is my friend
My computer's gonna get me in the end


So, in the last couple of weeks we've looked at music videos for Crop Circles, Forty Below, Greetings from the Grids, Gimme the News, and now My Computer is My Friend. These five songs have been a bit of a diversion from the usual fare here at this blog, I hope you enjoyed them and accept them in the "just for fun" spirit in which they were offered. Next time around, we'll return to our discussion of how reality is not continuous with More Slices of Reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - You should follow me on twitter here.

PPS - As I've said in previous entries, this music comes from a set of ten songs I performed "live-to-tape" with my friends Bob Evans and Roberta Nichol back in 1997. If you'd like to purchase high-quality mp3s it's only five dollars for the whole collection, go to the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store if you're interested. And just another reminder while you're there, check out the O is for Omniverse pdf, which we've reduced to $10 as a special for the month of February.


A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

Crop Circles

While we continue in a lighter vein with this set of entries, here's a video for a song called Crop Circles which I performed live in 1997 with my good friends Bob Evans and Roberta Nichol. I go waaaaay back with Bob and Roberta, we first played together forty years ago and have been in a large number of different bands playing different styles of music over the years. We started out playing folk music, and Crop Circles comes from a ten-song set that harkens back to the styles of music you might have heard us play at the Regina Guild of Folk Music back in the day. I wrote eight of the songs, Roberta wrote two, and the three of us took turns singing the lead vocal from song to song.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3keLd3Gh5vM

Are some crop circles fake? No question! But I'm amazed to see comments on youtube for this song saying this is me pandering to the establishment and mainstream science, or me trying to convince people that every single crop circles is fake. Is there something at the core of the crop circle phenomenon that is real? As the lyrics to this song say, "I love a good paranoid conspiracy, alien mystery just as much as any Average Joe", and I'm willing to keep an open mind on this topic.

Sometimes a conspiracy really is a conspiracy, or a mystery is a hoax. But sometimes mysterious things (like dark matter and dark energy!) happen for which the mainstream doesn't have a good explanation. I like this song because it's got a great groove and it makes me smile, and it makes its point about how sometimes we don't know what's really going on without taking itself too seriously. My popular youtube video for my song Secret Societies also looks at such things from a deliberately over-the-top perspective, saying that absolutely everything is a conspiracy:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids

Other blog entries that have looked at how conspiracies tie into the Imagining the Tenth Dimension approach include Beer and Miracles, When's a Knot Not a Knot?, and Daily Parrying. I'll be posting a version of the video for Crop Circles with lyrics superimposed in a few days... in the meantime, here's the words if you want to sing along.

Crop Circles
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

I stand before you today as a fraud
A fraud of miniscule proportion perhaps
Compared to the great frauds of the century
But a fraud nonetheless, now blessed
With newfound confirmation that
Mankind is indeed a creature who searches
Searches for deeper truth and inner meanings
And a sucker is indeed born every minute

Now being a prairie-born, prairie-raised prairie boy
I too have heard the tales
Of miraculous appearances of unexplained phenomena
Out in the middle of our golden fields
I'm talkin' 'bout crop circles, and who hasn't marveled
When the local papers break the news
Of a mystified farmer out standing in his field
Trying so hard to explain the latest

Crop circles, another mystery for the ages
Crop circles, another wonder to behold
Crop circles, history writes its pages
Now another wondrous story can be told

Now being a prairie-born, prairie-raised prairie boy
With two close personal friends
Late one night when the moon was bright
We concocted ourselves a plan
To drive way out and sneak into some farmer's field
And perpetrate a little prank
Hopin' for anonymous vicarious fame of some sort
We intended to make ourselves a few

Crop circles, another mystery for the ages
Crop circles, another wonder to behold
Crop circles, history writes its pages
Now another wondrous story can be told

You take a big piece of rope and a good long stick
And you find yourself a field
With some tire tracks that'll hide your path
As you walk out to the middle
Where one of you stands with the rope at the center
And another grabs hold and walks around
And you flatten out the wheat with the side of your stick
Make yourself three or four of them

Crop circles, another mystery for the ages
Crop circles, another wonder to behold
Crop circles, history writes its pages
Now another wondrous story can be told

Now I'm not sayin' that every single circle
They find out there's a scam
And I love a good paranoid conspiracy, alien mystery
Just as much as any Average Joe
But when I surf the web and I buy the books
And our circles are proudly displayed
Right next to all them other circles from around the world...

Well, it makes me just a little sad

Gimme some of them
Crop circles, another mystery for the ages
Crop circles, another wonder to behold
Crop circles, history writes its pages
Now another wondrous story can be told

Crop circles, another mystery for the ages
Crop circles, another wonder to behold
Crop circles, history writes its pages
Now another wondrous story can be told


If you'd like to buy the mp3s of this ten-song set, I'm selling them as a package for only $5 at the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store. And while you're there, check out the O is for Omniverse pdf, which we've reduced to $10 as a special for the month of February.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Dancing on the Timeline

PS Here's a little bonus for you: Bob Evans is a great musician with a dry sense of humor who always makes me laugh. For more about Bob go to bobevansguitar.com, or check out his youtube channel, AcousticTonic. Here's a couple of videos from him in concert that will give you a sense of how much fun it is to see Bob perform, the first is his introduction to the song, the second is the song.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9BCSgXlupk


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1RvLfhFgK_0

PS - Don't forget, "Crop Circles" is just one of a ten-song collection, if you'd like to purchase these ten songs as high-quality mp3s it's only five dollars for the whole collection, go to the Tenth Dimension Digital Items store if you're interested. And while you're there, check out the O is for Omniverse pdf, which we've reduced to $10 as a special for the month of February.

A direct link to this video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjR69ddBK78

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?

When's a Knot Not a Knot?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVA871NjJ0k

Have you got 16 minutes? Then take a look at the following movie, divided into two parts.

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


A direct link to the above movie is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKwAS5omW_w

Last blog, in "An Expanding 4D Sphere", we talked about how tricky it can be to imagine extra dimensions. I mentioned the recently proved Poincaré Conjecture (which would now more correctly be known as the Poincare Theorem), which says our universe is a 3D sphere on the surface of a 4D hypersphere! That's not an easy image to hold in the mind. These ideas and the above videos are all related to the study of topology: and since all of the extra dimensions are spatial, looking at topology as a way to help us imagine extra-dimensional shapes and patterns makes perfect sense.

The wikipedia article on Knot Theory takes these ideas about n-dimensional shapes and patterns even further, if you're interested in the explorations above please read that article.

For me, the point of looking at these extra-dimensional shapes is it helps us to imagine how extra-dimensional patterns representing memes, genes, and spimes could rise and fall in the same way that a hypercube would grow, mutate, and shrink as it passed through our 3D world. In one of my most-discussed blogs of all time, Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, I showed an animation of a rotating 4D hypercube, check that blog out if you're not familiar with those kinds of visualizations. How would our own reality look if you could see more than just 3D? Watch this interesting video and think about how similar it is to watching a rotating hypercube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yPkGJMizOY

Have you got 10 minutes to just meditate on some interesting images that tie into these ideas about imagining shapes that are outside of our normal spacetime? This video was created by a youtube user called 77GSlinger, and it is related to Walter Russell's idea of twin opposing vortices that create our observed universe and its underlying patterns.

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

Imagining the rotating helix used for my project's logo as incorporating these ideas is something I talked about in my blog entry on Nassim Haramein: while the other dimensions are involved in the creation of more specific patterns, at the core of this image is a line joining the zero to the ten, and we can think of the zero as representing the drive towards the infinitely small and the ten as representing the drive towards the infinitely large. Everything else is just cross sections, interference patterns created by those two interlocking patterns. Though neither of these gentlemen are talking about extra dimensions, Nassim Haramein and Walter Russell appear to be talking about similar ideas to mine in that regard: and in The Holographic Universe, we took a look at an example of just how far this idea of our reality coming from interference patterns can be taken.

77GSlinger attaches the following note to the above video:

The physics of Russell's Cosmology also explains the Free Energy Implosion Technologies of the great Austrian Water Wizard, Viktor Schauberger. Schauberger invented Implosion Turbines in the 30's and 40's in Austria and Germany.

This implosion physics defies academic physics and makes academic theory provably obsolete and the professors pushing these socially engineered lies as well.

For a detailed account of the free energy technologies of Viktor Schuaberger and Walter Russell, Implosion Physics, Bio-mimicry, Scalar Mechanics and the many types of Free Energy Technologies currently in existence please see:

http://www.feandft.com/

As regular readers of this blog know, I wrote 26 songs to accompany this project about ways of imagining how our reality is created. To finish, let's look at my most popular youtube music video: this one is about conspiracies, and the patterns that underlie our universe. As I've said elsewhere: when we're looking at these complex interactions, sometimes it can be hard to extricate what is really a conspiracy and what is "just a bunch of stuff that happened".

And likewise, sometimes it can be very difficult to say when a knot is not a knot. What's keeping you from getting to the best possible you that already exists within the multiverse?

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Secret Societies:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids

Next: Polls Archive 41 - Is Creativity a Quantum Process?

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

Song 23 of 26 - Secret Societies

The twenty-third of the 26 songs is called "Secret Societies". Scroll down below the following video for the lyrics and a brief discussion of how this song ties into the project. A blog post which lists all 26 songs, including 1 video for each song can be found by clicking here.


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Br3lpVmids

Here we have a little more fun with the idea that was dealt with in song 15, "What Was Done Today" (has our current world been created by "just a bunch of stuff that happened", or by deliberate manipulation?), and by extension song 11, "The Anthropic Viewpoint" ("Here we are in the Hydrogen Conspiracy"). Here's a couple of excerpts from my book where I touch upon this idea, first from chapter six:

Conspiracy theorists should love the anthropic viewpoint, because it implies that a very specific set of choices have been made to get us to the reality we currently live in. The reason certain families have money and power, the reason certain societies have been able to exert control over our destinies, is because of a long list of backroom deals and hidden skulduggery leading back through the ages. The fact that human beings evolved to become the dominant species might be a result of the “Secret Plan for the Advancement of Mammals”. The fact that hydrogen became the most common element in our universe is, of course, because of the “Great Hydrogen Conspiracy”, which stretches back to a mere 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when atoms first started to form. And most mysterious of all, the fact that Dark Matter and Dark Energy are by far the most predominant forms in the universe may be part of a plot that stretches out much further than our own Big Bang! In all of these examples, the anthropic viewpoint tells us that there are other universes where those conspiracies failed, and other factions rose to dominance. We just don’t happen to be in those universes.

And from chapter 11:

From dimensions seven through nine, we find the other physically incompatible universes which physicists have told us must also exist. These are the universes in which other big-picture memes will have risen to dominance, and there would be particular universes for which certain memes will have a strong affinity. Like the child who takes joy in knocking over a tower of blocks, or a person taking joy in blowing things up or shooting them, there would be a universe just made for the memes that prefer destruction over creation. There would also be universes where very little changes over eternity, and the memes that are drawn to stability at all costs would naturally tend to interact with those physical universes. The fact that our consciousness tends to block out things that don’t change would seem to be a clue about how much the “stability at all costs” meme holds sway in the universe we are living in at this moment.

In our discussion of the anthropic viewpoint, we suggested somewhat in jest that conspiracy theorists should love its implications. Now we’re looking at an interpretation where we’re giving that idea some more weight: there really are other universes where other big-picture memes have “gotten their way”. To the extent that any conspiracy can also be looked at as being just a description of the chain of events that led to a certain outcome, we can apply that same thinking to our own universe that we’re in, and to the other universes we’re not.

SECRET SOCIETIES
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
(originally written for Globe Theatre’s Resuscitation of a Dying Mouse, 1986)

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 figures 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

Other blog entries that touch upon the ideas from this song:
FAQ 12 - Is this about consciousness and the quantum observer?
How to Make a Universe
Facebook and Secret Societies
Conspiracies and Quantum Mechanics
The Anthropic Viewpoint

Next song: 24 of 26 - See No Future

Song 15 of 26 - What Was Done Today

The fifteenth of the 26 songs is called "What Was Done Today". Scroll down below the following videos for the lyrics and a brief discussion of how this song ties into the project. A blog post which lists all 26 songs, including 1 video for each song can be found by clicking here.


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


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ikj7ozGMQM


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

Now we start to get back to the "real" world, the world that all of us live in every day. We've been thinking about all these really-big-picture ideas of the nature of reality, explored dreams of flying and connections across space and time, all part of a grand design of intricate interactions and unimaginable scales that ultimately takes us back to the first song, where we can see that all of it fits together into an underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy, the enfolded zero of absolute symmetry.

There's a middle section to that first song, "Everything Fits Together", where we hear a repeated chant. Let's review those lyrics:

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)

With "What Was Done Today", we return to this complicated idea again. Why is our world the way it is? And more to the point: if we're each a quantum observer creating our own reality (and thoughts become things and like attracts like, etc. etc.), then why are we not all beautiful or powerful or wealthy or healthy, whatever our own particular ultimate-fantasy-life might be?

The answer, I believe, is in the phrase "consensual reality". It relates to the distinction between the multiverse (all possible universes), and the parallel universes related to the spacetime tree of our own particular universe (and the fact that each of those other universes within the multiverse will have their own spacetime tree which is just as real, but separate, distinct, and inaccessible from our own spacetime tree). If each of us is a quantum observer, operating within our own o-region, why does our meandering timeline for each of us within the fifth dimension never wander into one of those other different-initial-conditions universes within the multiverse? It's because our universe is "pinned in place" by a seven-dimensional brane, or in the way of visualizing that we're playing with here, it's because our universe is at a particular position within the seventh dimension.

That position defines, for each of us, the limitations that keep us from moving into those other universes, no matter how much choice, chance, and circumstance come into play. Our "consensual reality" then, is the combined observer effect of every quantum observer within that seventh-dimensional constriction. Each of us has our own observer-region, but we are also part of that shared observer-region that some physicists (John Wheeler, for instance) like to say is the universe observing itself as a "self-exciting circuit". Here are a few blog entries about this idea:

Song 4 of 26 - The Unseen Eye
Is God in the Seventh Dimension?
Boredom and Consciousness Part One

This means, then, that each of us is in a tug-of-war between the constricted choice resulting from our seventh-dimension position, our own free will, and the consequences of other actions that have already happened or that are happening now from our own choices, the choices of others, random chance, and accumulated circumstance. In my book, this complicated interaction is the subject of an entire chapter: "How Much Control Do We Have?".

At the tenth dimension forum, debates about the ramifications of all this have generated tens of thousands of words. Do we even have free will or is that an illusion? Are there deliberate conspiracies that have created horrible imbalances of poverty and wealth, or is this all the result of (as Homer Simpson likes to say) "just a bunch of stuff that happened"? And then we get to an even more startling idea: is our world starting to change as people all over the planet now begin to wake up from their long slumber and realize how much power over their own reality they really have?

Imagining the probability space of possible branches our fourth-dimensional line could select right now from the fifth dimension is something we've talked about many times in this blog, as it's a central idea of the project. With "What Was Done Today", imagining that there are branches no longer available for our current reality (unless we some day figure out how to fold our reality through the sixth dimension, a tall order indeed) is what this song is all about. In various places (the forum, this blog, and in my book) I've portrayed fanciful tales imagining the parallel universes that must exist for our universe where it's 2008 and Elvis Presley or Kurt Cobain are still alive, and how those timelines are not available to us because of events that have already taken place earlier in our spacetime tree, our bush-like-branching structure of choices available to us at both the quantum and the macro level. This song takes that fanciful Kurt/Elvis idea and puts it in a more serious light: there are possibilities that could have existed for our world right now which have been made inaccessible by what has come before... and whether you believe that is the result of the deliberate actions of an influential few, or whether that is the result of "just a bunch of stuff that happened" has more to do with your own point of view than the information at hand.

In song 11, "The Anthropic Viewpoint" I take this idea to an extreme: "here we are in the hydrogen conspiracy, that's the way that it certainly appears to be". With "What Was Done Today" we paint a more realistic picture, but again, whether you believe or don't believe the last stanza about big changes coming in our consensual reality has an awful lot to do with your own point of view. Some people are very excited about "what happens next", which, as we've already explored in these songs, is what life is all about.

WHAT WAS DONE TODAY
music and lyrics (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

All the tiny little hurts, All the sad little tales
All the wounds that turned to scars That never went away

All the evil in the world, All the bad turns of fate
All the ignorance and sloth That never let things change

They steal something precious
They open up a hole
In the lines of possibility
To keep us from our goals
They steal something precious
I see it drain away
Tomorrows that can never be
Because of what was done today

Now if all things are possible
It still must be clear
Because of chance or circumstance
Sometimes you can’t get there from here

And it’s nice to have your wishes
And it’s great to have your dreams
But for a starving child in Africa
They hardly mean a thing
How can they mean a thing?

We’ve all got something precious
A wondrous tiny spark
That drives us to continue
And to fight against the dark
But they’re stealin something precious
I see it drain away
Tomorrows that can never be
Because of what was done today

Big Money
Can’t hear you
Big Power
They don’t care
Big reasons
To change the system
Revolution’s in the air

Next song: 16 of 26 - Turquoise and White

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

The End of the World 2

If, as David Deutsch and his team at Oxford have proven, every branching timeline possible from this moment forward exists as potential within the probabilistic quantum wavefunction, and this is what creates the "bush-like branching structure" of potentially observed states from this moment on, then this ties in so very nicely to the concepts I've been presenting here with my Imagining the Tenth Dimension project: this means the branching fifth dimension of probability space our 4D line of time is being constructed from, as I describe in my book and my popular animation, would be that same idea presented in a simple-to-visualize metaphor. As most visitors to this blog will know, the set of potential branching timelines for our universe (and all other universes) is part of the concept known as the multiverse.

Here's one of the ideas I've had fun playing with regarding the multiverse: if every potential branch from this moment to the next exists within the currently unobserved branches ahead of us at this moment, and only one of those branches will be the one that we are about to individually witness, then this must be true no matter where in the timeline of the universe we care to think about. But if those other branches exist, does that mean there are versions of each of us who did end up observing some of the alternate branches of the multiverse which our current version believes did not happen? Here's some of what I say in my book about this idea:

It seems that no matter where you are in history, at a specific moment there will always be a certain small contingent of the population who are predicting the end of the world. Usually it’s some conveniently distant amount of time away from the present to be a cause for concern, but not so close as to immediately leave the person spreading the news with egg on their face (as I write this paragraph in 2006, the Mayan calendar’s December 21 2012 looks like a good upcoming contender for an end-of-the-world focal point some portion of the public are likely to become caught up with).
But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?

So continuing on with this bit of fun, here is a video of me singing the most "campy" of all the 26 songs I've created for this project.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

THE END OF THE WORLD
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

The end of the world
Oft predicted, never realized
The end of the world
Never here, it’s such a surprise
How could millions be so wrong?
The end of the world
The end of the world
Has already been, it’s come and gone

Looking back through history
We oft encounter prophecies
Of end times so very very near
Next year, five years, ten from now
A state of flux, some way somehow
The process of postponement never clear

The end of the world…

With space and time a continuum
Of everything that is to come
And might have been, in one infinite ball
Multiple timelines, now I see
Apocalyptic destinies
Prophets proven prophets after all

The saucers?
Already landed
Our star bodies?
Already attained
Y2K? The global pandemic?
Huge disasters
The big freakin’ asteroid?
Destroyed the world

The end of the world
Oft predicted, never realized
The end of the world
Never here, it’s such a surprise
How could millions be so wrong?
The end of the world
The end of the world
Has already been, it’s come and gone
The end of the world has come and gone

Just Ten Things

Here's the current results from the previous poll, gang: 35% say I'm talking about physics stuff, 21% say this is about spirituality, and at almost half, 42% say it's both. Fantastic! This is the important thing to keep in mind: even though we're all talking about the same thing, each of us has their unique point of view, and in some cases that point of view has been designed to disallow the existence of other conflicting points of view. So what? We've known that all along, that's the way life is.

So here we are in the fifth dimension (this is a fact physicists have known about since Kaluza proved it in 1919, but for some reason the established media have not been inclined to promote this information: more about the "conspiracy theories" meme in a bit). We are being drawn forward by the future towards absolute zero: not the sad place where everything becomes meaningless, but rather the place where all the positive and negative spins of our probability-space world reassemble back into one, and everything fits together.

Why is the fifth dimension such a dangerous idea? Because there are moral questions that have to be answered. If you are going to admit that all we really are is a sea of information (which many people on this planet like to think of as the Mind of God), chosen from the unobserved reality that quantum mechanics calls indeterminacy, then there are moral questions that have to be answered. Selfish memes and selfish genes point the way for us to see how the patterns that connect us from the beginning to the end of our universe have to include each of us taking some personal responsibility for the creation of good within the world in which we live.

Which leads to the question of whether science preferring to suppress anything to do with spirituality might have more to do with the funding that comes from an old boys network who remain right where they are as long as the rest of the planet doesn't find out what they've been up to and how easy it would have been to stop them if we had only known. As the global village becomes aware of itself, we become a more enlightened and caring world, and that's what the web is starting to do for us all right this very moment in spacetime.

Is it a good thing that the Divas currently in trouble (Lohan, Spears, Hilton etc.) are being monitored so closely that we could actually save their lives instead of letting them self-destruct as some of their predecessors before them did? This is one of the ways that we can see the more enlightened viewpoint is steadily gaining ground. By the time we realize that we are all just different aspects of the same quantum observer, we see how we could be part of the same recurring patterns, created by the opposing organizing forces of symmetry and order, as explained so well by Gevin Giorbran, over at EverythingForever.com.

Still, let's not be mistaken here. There are a growing number of scientists who are seeing parts of the same image I portray at Imagining the Tenth Dimension: everything fits together at zero. Zero is the mind of God viewed in its entirety: no wonder zero has had such a rough ride down through the millenia! The idea that everything ends at an Omega point that is "outside the system" relates to what Gödel was talking about with his incompleteness theorems. Within that omega, gravity determines the amount of grouping, and the speed of light's planck length defines the framing chosen from probability space that defines our particular universe, with its unchanging gravity and its restrictions against faster-than-light travel.

Gravity, then, can easily be thought of as the probability of something continuing to be here an instant from now, based upon the sum over histories paths that got that object to where it is right now. Gevin suggests that at the quantum realm this is also a form of inertia: the more locked in by the overall consensual reality a particular pattern is, the harder it is for free will to make a difference to it. That's why no amount of free will can change the force of gravity, and the multiverse of possibilities that surround us in the fifth dimension is an easy way for us to imagine not just the "bent 4D spacetime" of gravity, but the hidden forces of dark matter as well.

Popular culture and philosophy/spirituality show us the ways that a "big picture" enlightened view is completely compatible with cosmology and quantum mechanics: but that has more to do with the Joseph-Campbell-sized simple truths that everyone knows, which leads some people to belittle the worth of those ideas. Once we understand that ideas are just a part of meme-space, which is just as real as the physical space we see around us right now, we see how easy it is to make a change to some things that up to now may have seemed insurmountable. And you see the ways in which we're all connected together and are co-operating with each other, and the ways that some of us think they disagree with the consensual reality they're in when in the really big picture they couldn't possibly disagree. After all, according to my framework for discussion, we're all just a point in the seventh dimension.

Here's a link to an upcoming article from next week's issue of Newsweek about exciting new experiments showing how the future really can influence the present. The secret of life is about being interested in what happens next. Once you understand that reality and information are interchangeable, you understand what the ancient mystics have known all along: time is an illusion, and everything fits together at zero. Terence McKenna definitely got it right.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

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 Anthropic Viewpoint

Poor Ol' Anthropic Principle - it sure gets kicked around a lot. The first time I read about it in Stephen Hawking's writing it immediately clicked for me: for most of my life I had held the intuition that there are a multitude of other universes out there with different basic physical laws and different timelines than our own. Now that intuition had a name.

If you're not familiar with the term, you can read about the different variations of the Anthropic Principle at wikipedia. There are some variants listed in the article which I had not heard of before - I was familiar with the Weak Anthropic Principle ("WAP"), and the Strong Anthropic Principle ("SAP"), but I was amused to learn that there is also the "FAP" (Final) and the "CRAP" (Completely Ridiculous) versions of this concept as well.

If our universe really is only one of many in a multiverse of universes, then the anthropic principle is a no-brainer: it would be like asking how humans came to be so lucky as to live on land, because if we lived on the bottom of the ocean we would all have drowned. But the anthropic principle certainly has some passionate opposition - some people believe it is an argument in support of Intelligent Design, some dismiss it as unsupportable conjecture (and therefore not a scientific viewpoint), some people believe it proves there is no need for a Creator because every possible arrangement of matter and energy exists out there in the multiverse.

In my song "The Anthropic Viewpoint" I examine the ideas behind the anthropic principle - how did we end up in a universe whose basic laws have been uniquely tuned to support life as we know it? This song blends a number of ideas: determinism, free will, the voices of intuition, the multiverse as it relates to the Anthropic Principle, and Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems (which I also sometimes use to describe how my version of "dimension ten" is different from the other nine in my model). And it's got a good beat and you can dance to it.

THE ANTHROPIC VIEWPOINT
Music and lyrics by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
The only thing that I know for certain
In everything that you say and do
The only thing you know for sure is you
Believe in that and you will be okay
You could live to fight another day, some day

Pay no mind to those tiny little voices
Every day you gotta make some choices
Make ‘em right and you can carry on
Make ‘em wrong and you will soon be gone
And if it seems just a little unfair
Get used to it, cause the stars don’t care, don’t care

In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be

If there’s other worlds then we’ve just missed ‘em
No way to know what’s outside our system
We’re like goldfish livin in a bowl
What’s beyond it we can never know
All we can do is theorize
Cause we can never… get outside, outside

In the anthropic viewpoint…

So here we are in the Hydrogen Conspiracy
That’s the way that it certainly appears to be
What’s the reason, where’s the rhyme
How’d we end up on this line
All those other possibilities
They’re just as real, but they don’t have me
It’s no big deal, not worth a fuss
They’re just as real, but they don’t have us, have us

In the anthropic viewpoint
The reason we’re here is because we’re here
And if it were impossible
Then we wouldn’t be

And here is a cool video created by Ryan Hill, using as its starting point an extreme closeup of my ugly mug singing the song. Crank it up!



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


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton