Polls Archive 41 - Is Creativity a Quantum Process?

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lMsPnYKFjc

Poll 41: "Life uses quantum physics effects such as tunneling and entanglement to engage with reality 'outside' of spacetime, and this is true of all creative processes". Poll Ended June 10 '09, 83.2% agreed while 16.8% disagreed.

I suggested the wording for this poll in my blog entry accompanying "Poll 36 - Do Plants Use Quantum Effects?". Both this current poll question and that previous poll 36 are connected to my blog entry Creativity and the Quantum Universe. I will post the videos for both of those down below. In those entries I talked about the scientific experiments that have shown ways in which life is engaged with more than the "now" of our 4D spacetime. This time around, I'm going to talk mainly about creativity.

Here's a video from the TED Talks series featuring author Amy Tan (best-selling author of The Joy Luck Club). Amy takes us on a similar exploration to the areas my project regularly delves into, blending ideas from quantum mechanics and cosmology with her own thoughts on free will, chance, and creativity. This presentation is light and fun, but underneath Amy is dealing with some heady concepts.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8D0pwe4vaQo

There continues to be mounting evidence that we operate "outside" of the limited little window we call "now". Here's some articles about recent research that shows there are processes which let us decide what we're about to do before we are consciously aware of the decision:
http://www.twine.com/item/126p14182-jk/unconscious-thought-precedes-conscious-incognito-the-economist
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124535297048828601.html

Here is another author speaking at Ted Talks about creativity: this is Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth has some very wise things to say about the negative connotations sometimes attached to the role of being a creative person: the myth that creative people have to suffer for their art is dangerously destructive. Last entry, in "When's a Knot Not a Knot?", I ended by asking that we think about loops and knots, and that we ponder the loops and knots that keep us from our goals. My song Addictive Personality is about those same patterns that we can let ourselves be trapped into, and Elizabeth adds some very important points to this conversation.

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86x-u-tz0MA

Here's videos for those previous blog entries I mentioned above. "Poll 36 - Do Plants Use Quantum Effects?":

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

"Creativity and the Quantum Universe":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

Addictive Personality:

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFvsd6IUoH4

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Tenth Dimension on boingboing

Polls Archive 36 - Do Plants Use Quantum Effects?

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

Poll 36 -"Plants use quantum physics effects in photosynthesis, and this is why it is such an efficient energy conversion process." Poll ended March 25 2009. 72% agreed, the rest disagreed.

This was another poll created as a companion to a specific blog entry, in this case "Creativity and the Quantum Universe". That post was inspired by an article published in the February Issue of Discover Magazine which really caught my eye - written by Mark Anderson, it was called Entangled Life. The article is an interesting summary of lab experiments and serious theoretical propositions that suggest plants do use quantum effects to make photosynthesis such an efficient process, and that such effects as entanglement and tunneling could also be imparting unique fragrances to molecules that are almost identical, imparting healing qualities to substances like green tea, and perhaps even directly contributing to consciousness.

Here's the video for "Creativity and the Quantum Universe":

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

Essentially, then, with this poll question I was asking whether visitors agreed with the suppositions advanced in Mark Anderson's article and reported in my blog, and I'm pleased to see how many were willing to agree with this idea. While I would encourage you to go back and read my blog entry and that Discover magazine article mentioned above, let me underline the interesting parallel I suggested back then.

Paragraph from Discover Magazine article:
Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.

My paraphrased version to show how creativity might be a quantum process:
Instead of haphazardly moving from one idea to the next, as might be seen in work that has no focus, creative ideas travel in several directions at the same time. By simultaneously exploring a set of connections, the "eureka" of a new inspiration can be found. At that point, the exploration process is "collapsed", and the creative person follows the new idea that they find most inspiring.

Several weeks later, in Our Non-Local Universe, I continued the discussion of how our world is connected together in hidden ways that transcend the limited "now" of space-time, and how the principle of non-locality is an accepted fact in mainstream science. With this project, I am insisting that this non-locality is direct evidence of extra dimensions, and that a great many other seemingly mysterious processes can also be understood when we see how the information that underlies our reality exists in additional dimensions. I find it fascinating that this "timeless" perspective is gaining ground, as more and more people accept that our universe is just one of a multiverse of many other universes, and that perhaps all of those universes and multiverses might be assembled into one perfectly balanced underlying symmetry state which physicist Tim Palmer has recently called The Invariant Set and which I (and others) have referred to as The Omniverse.

Which leads back to the parallels I drew above, between the accepted viewpoint that our universe is non-local, between scientific evidence that plants use non-local effects for photosynthesis, and my notion that all life is a creative process, and which means that creative processes are non-local. While 79% agreed with the non-local nature of photosynthesis being what makes it so efficient, I wonder how many visitors to this blog would be willing to follow me further out on that same limb if I were to re-write the poll question in the same way that I re-wrote the above paragraph. What if I were to ask for agreement/disagreement on this statement?

Life uses quantum physics effects such as tunneling and entanglement to engage with reality "outside" of space-time, and this is true of all creative processes.

For me, this statement logically follows, and is a very important part of understanding the way of visualizing the dimensions that I'm exploring with this project. As I say in my book and have repeated in this blog, I would define "life" as any process that is interested in "what happens next", in other words that finds ways to use the non-local nature of our universe to allow itself to thrive and continue. That would be just as true of the first chemical reactions that became the seeds of life in the primordial soup as it is for you and I. Would you agree? Let's find out. You will now find a poll question over to the right here at the tenth dimension blog which asks that question.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 37 - Do Shamans See Other Dimensions?

Our Non-Local Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBPBc4iZtro

Entanglement-at-a-distance does physically exist, in the sense that it has physically verifiable (and verified) consequences. Which proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that some of our most engrained notions about space and causality should be reconsidered.
- theoretical physicist Bernard d'Espagnat

(I've talked before about the underlying patterns of information that create our universe, and of ideas that connect us all together, and how much I like the term Richard Dawkins gave us for this concept: "memes". Memes, as ideas that instantaneously connect together "outside of spacetime" are a great example of thinking about our universe from a timeless perspective. I saw another great example of the kind of synchronicities that arise as people around the world think similar thoughts right after I finished writing today's blog entry. The above quote is from a blog entry posted just a few days ago by award-winning theoretical physicist Bernard d'Espagnat. Click here to read his blog entry in full, and you will see a great many parallels to the blog entry you're about to read.)

Principle of locality
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In physics, the principle of locality states that an object is influenced directly only by its immediate surroundings. Quantum mechanics predicts through Bell's inequality the direct violation of this principle. Experiments have shown that quantum mechanically entangled particles violate this principle: they have been shown to influence each other when physically separated by 18 km, thus the principle of locality is false.

As the above wikipedia definition clearly states, our universe is non-local, despite what our intuition might tell us as we look around at our world. Understanding that our 4D spacetime is really just a shadow of patterns that exist outside of time, within the fifth dimension and above (see The Holographic Universe) gives us a way to visualize how entangled particles can be connected in ways that seem impossible, and this also gives us a way to see how the Shamanistic viewpoint regarding hidden forces which are outside our physical domain makes sense in this context: it's all part of our non-local universe.

The above picture comes from the National Human Genome Research Institute website.

The National Institute of Health published an article recently about ground-breaking new DNA analysis procedures that look at the helix not as a sequential ladder, but as a 3D shape. To quote from the article:

The sequence of the 3 billion DNA base pairs that make up the human genome holds the answers to many questions pertaining to human development, health and disease. Consequently, much research aimed at understanding the genome has focused on establishing the information encoded by the linear order of DNA bases. In the new study, however, researchers focused on how those bases chemically interact with each other to coil and fold the DNA molecule into a variety of shapes.

"We often think of DNA as a string of letters on a computer screen and forget that this string of letters is a three-dimensional molecule. But shape really matters," said Dr. Margulies, who is an investigator in NHGRI's Genomic Technology Branch. "Proteins that influence biological function by binding to DNA recognize more than just the sequence of bases. These binding proteins also see the surface of the DNA molecule and are looking for a shape that allows a lock-and-key fit."

I've talked many times about Richard Dawkins and his "River Out of Eden" concept, thinking about genes as being shapes that are connected across time (or as I like to say, the fourth spatial dimension, since for us "time" is just one of the two possible directions in that dimension). When we've already been encouraged to think of a genome as being a fourth dimensional shape (or as Bruce Sterling likes to say, a "spime"), I have to admit I assumed that 3D analysis of DNA was already in place!

This all relates to trying to think about our reality as existing outside of spacetime - if you think of reality as being only a linear sequence of events relentlessly moving forward on our "arrow of time", you are missing an important part of the picture.

Discover Magazine put up an amusing article on their website a couple of weeks ago, called Twenty Things You Didn't Know About Time. The last two entries in particular caught my eye:

19 Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

20 There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.

With my project, I insist that those two ideas are related - both "before" and "after" the beginning and end of our universe are the same state: but to understand that idea requires a perspective which is "outside" of time as we know it. One of my personal favorite blog entries about this idea is "Local Realism Bites the Dust", which you might want to check out.

Quantum physics tells us that our reality is connected together in ways that seem impossible: instantaneous effects with widely separated but entangled particles make no sense within our sequential physical world... unless you can embrace the idea that our universe is non-local. An article in the March issue of Scientific American, written by David Z. Albert and Rivka Galchen, offers an explanation of Bell's Theorem which arrives at this important concluding paragraph:

Researchers carried out experiments using entangled photons instead of electrons (which alters the angles to use but makes the experiment technically much less difficult) and found results that conformed with quantum mechanics’s predictions. And so by Bell’s theorem there must not be any determinate values carried by those photons. And because that contradicts EPR’s conclusion, the assumption that nature is local is also wrong. And so the universe we live in cannot be local.

Our non-local universe allows for connections that transcend the "now" that we are in at this instant, and that is not some kind of mystical mumbo jumbo, that is an accepted scientific fact. Since that idea can be used to explain so many of the other mysteries we've been exploring with this project (most recently in entries like Creativity and the Quantum Universe, The Shaman, and The Musician) only adds weight to this conclusion, as non-intuitive as it may seem.

Embrace your non-locality! And enjoy the journey.

Rob Bryanton

Next: Imagining the Omniverse - Addendum

Creativity and the Quantum Universe

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBNv8LMbEPA

There's an article published in the February Issue of Discover Magazine which really caught my eye - written by Mark Anderson, it's called Entangled Life. Let's look at some excerpts from the article:

Graham Fleming sits down at an L-shaped lab bench, occupying a footprint about the size of two parking spaces. Alongside him, a couple of off-the-shelf lasers spit out pulses of light just millionths of a billionth of a second long. After snaking through a jagged path of mirrors and lenses, these minus­cule flashes disappear into a smoky black box containing proteins from green sulfur bacteria, which ordinarily obtain their energy and nourishment from the sun. Inside the black box, optics manufactured to billionths-of-a-meter precision detect something extraordinary: Within the bacterial proteins, dancing electrons make seemingly impossible leaps and appear to inhabit multiple places at once.

Peering deep into these proteins, Fleming and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley and at Washington University in St. Louis have discovered the driving engine of a key step in photosynthesis, the process by which plants and some microorganisms convert water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight into oxygen and carbohydrates. More efficient by far in its ability to convert energy than any operation devised by man, this cascade helps drive almost all life on earth.

One of the central controversies surrounding my project is whether it's really correct to apply the thinking of quantum mechanics to the macro world: traditionally, science has taught that the weird world of the quantum wave function--where outcomes are derived from probabilities and randomness, and particles can be in more than one place at the same time--is completely separate from the physical world we see around us. One of the main ideas of my project is that all of these quantum effects occur in the fifth dimension rather than the fourth, and this logical application of what makes one spatial dimension "outside" the previous one works all the way up - we've talked about this logic in entries like Why Do We Need More Than 3 Dimensions, Aren't There Really 11 Dimensions?, and You Can't Get There From Here.

Visualizing the wave function for our universe as coming from the "next dimension up" gives us a way to reconcile how such seemingly strange and unimaginable quantum effects as entanglement and tunneling could be a part of our reality: like the 2D flatlander, who would have some hope of being able to imagine the third spatial dimension as "time" but would find the fourth dimension completely strange and unimaginable, we as 3D creatures are in the same quandary. How can we imagine all this quantum weirdness as being connected to our solid physical world? With my project, I provide a way to visualize the fifth dimension that ties in with that idea and many others.

Here's some more excerpts from that Discover Magazine article:

From tunneling to entanglement, the special properties of the quantum realm allow events to unfold at speeds and efficiencies that would be unachievable with classical physics alone. Could quantum mechanisms be driving some of the most elegant and inexplicable processes of life? For years experts doubted it: Quantum phenomena typically reveal themselves only in lab settings, in vacuum chambers chilled to near absolute zero. Biological systems are warm and wet. Most researchers thought the thermal noise of life would drown out any quantum weirdness that might rear its head.

One of the most significant quantum observations in the life sciences comes from Fleming and his collaborators. Their study of photosynthesis in green sulfur bacteria, published in 2007 in Nature [subscription required], tracked the detailed chemical steps that allow plants to harness sunlight and use it to convert simple raw materials into the oxygen we breathe and the carbohydrates we eat. Specifically, the team examined the protein scaffold connecting the bacteria’s external solar collectors, called the chlorosome, to reaction centers deep inside the cells. Unlike electric power lines, which lose as much as 20 percent of energy in transmission, these bacteria transmit energy at a staggering efficiency rate of 95 percent or better.

The secret, Fleming and his colleagues found, is quantum physics.

To unearth the bacteria’s inner workings, the researchers zapped the connective proteins with multiple ultrafast laser pulses. Over a span of femto­seconds, they followed the light energy through the scaffolding to the cellular reaction centers where energy conversion takes place.

Then came the revelation: Instead of haphazardly moving from one connective channel to the next, as might be seen in classical physics, energy traveled in several directions at the same time. The researchers theorized that only when the energy had reached the end of the series of connections could an efficient pathway retroactively be found. At that point, the quantum process collapsed, and the electrons’ energy followed that single, most effective path.

Electrons moving through a leaf or a green sulfur bacterial bloom are effectively performing a quantum “random walk”—a sort of primitive quantum computation—to seek out the optimum transmission route for the solar energy they carry. “We have shown that this quantum random-walk stuff really exists,” Fleming says. “Have we absolutely demonstrated that it improves the efficiency? Not yet. But that’s our conjecture. And a lot of people agree with it.”

This revelation is amazing enough. But then the article goes on to talk about new research that explores other ways in which the quantum world is very much a part of our macro world, imparting unique fragrances to molecules that are almost identical, imparting healing qualities to substances like green tea, and perhaps even directly contributing to consciousness. Please do read the entire article, here are three more brief quotes:

• Quantum physics may explain the mysterious biological process of smell, too, says biophysicist Luca Turin, who first published his controversial hypothesis in 1996 while teaching at University College London. In 2007 Turin... and his hypothesis received support from a paper by four physicists at University College London.
  

• In 2007 four biochemists from the Auton­omous University of Barcelona announced that the secret to green tea’s effectiveness as an anti-oxidant... may also be quantum mechanical. Free radical molecules, by-products of the body’s breakdown of food or environmental toxins, have a spare electron. That extra electron makes free radicals reactive, and hence dangerous as they travel through the bloodstream. But an electron from the catechin (catechins are among the chief organic compounds found in tea, wine, and some fruits and vegetables) can make use of quantum mechanics to tunnel across the gap to the free radical. Quantum tunneling has also been observed in enzymes...

• Stuart Hameroff, an anesthesiologist and director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona... speculates that anesthetics “interrupt a delicate quantum process” within the neurons of the brain. Each neuron contains hundreds of long, cylindrical protein structures, called microtubules, that serve as scaffolding. Anesthetics, Hameroff says, dissolve inside tiny oily regions of the microtubules, affecting how some electrons inside these regions behave.

Visualizing how much this quantum dance is participating in the creation of the world we see around us is really not that dissimilar to the journeys of discovery that we've just looked at in The Shaman and Modern Shamans. In Music and the Dance of Creativity, we talked about this joyful process of creativity that underlies our universe, and in The Holographic Universe we talked about the new scientific evidence announced in 2009 confirming that for our 4D universe, our "line of time" is not continuous but rather being constructed one planck frame at a time. That new scientific evidence can be added to the list of reasons supporting my conclusion that in order for the quantum world to make sense, we have to see how it is coming from the fifth dimension.

Out of All Possibilities, One is Selected
In entries like Dreaming of Electric Sheep and Imagining the Omniverse, we looked at trying to visualize how our specific universe might be able to "come into focus" from the omniverse, where every possible state exists simultaneously. Let's think about how that is essentially a creative process that we are describing - out of all possibilities, one is selected. Take a close look at Mark Anderson's Discover Magazine article, and his description of how photosynthesis uses quantum effects to achieve such high efficiency. Now, here's a section of that article in which I've substituted some words to help us to see how "quantum weirdness" can also easily be thought of as a description of the creative process:

Instead of haphazardly moving from one idea to the next, as might be seen in work that has no focus, creative ideas travel in several directions at the same time. By simultaneously exploring a set of connections, the "eureka" of a new inspiration can be found. At that point, the exploration process is "collapsed", and the creative person follows the new idea that they find most inspiring.

Seeing the probability space of our "fifth dimensional hologram" all around us, waiting with new ideas and inspirations for us to bring into our reality simply by observing some aspect of the wave function of possibilities, is another way of understanding how much the quantum world and our macro world are tied together, all part of the same continuum, and all part of the ongoing creative process that is happening at every instant in every part of our universe.

Enjoy the journey of discovery!

Rob

PS - Here's a song about how these quantum processes are part of the creation and creativity that is all around us, and that we are a part of as we distill one physical reality from the many quantum paths available to us: it's called "Making It Up as I Go".

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpkehQ97ltA

Next: New Translations of Imagining the Tenth Dimension

The Big Bang and the Big O

A direct link to the above video is at http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=e0iofBT3Vhs

"I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in history." - Oscar Janiger

A few days ago, in Poll Question 30, we talked about death and how natural it is for us to believe that some part of us carries on afterwards. Here's a quote from well-known psychiatrist and psychedelics researcher Oscar Janiger, this is from the 1993 book Mavericks of the Mind, a brain-expanding collection of interviews by David Jay Brown and Rebecca McClen Novick:

David Jay Brown: Have you ever given any thought to what happens to human consciousness after physical death?
Oscar Janiger: I've given a lot of thought to it, but I'm afraid not much productive thought. My bias is that when the current is shut off, we somehow lose our sense of individuality... my thought is that, for myself only, that I'm simply shut down in my present state, and that somehow I--which is now a kind of fruitless phrase--am somehow restored to the earth, or to the matrix, or to what the Germans called the urschleim, or the fundamental substrate of all things, the fundamental primitive primordial stuff of which we are constituted. We go back to before the Big Bang. I always remember the Big Bang as the biggest orgasm in history.

Persons familiar with my project will recognize several ideas here: we are all connected to a larger whole (or, as physicist Michio Kaku puts it, we each have a wave function that gently seeps out into the entire universe), there is an enfolded symmetry containing all possibilities that is "before" the Big Bang (which I've talked about in entries like "The Big Bang and the Big Pie" and "Imagining the Omniverse")... but Dr. Janiger's bold connection of the Big Bang to sexual orgasm is an idea that's new to me. So this time around, let's play with that as a concept.

Rock On!
Are you familiar with the origins of the term rock and roll? Originally, this phrase was a euphemism within the American black community for sexual intercourse, originating in the 1930's. It's a particularly evocative phrase, I think, because it implies something that's more sensual: rather than an unimaginative binary in/out of straight lines and ejaculation, "rocking and rolling" brings to mind curves and creativity, a sex act that is interested in the combined satisfaction of both participants.

In the 1950's, disc jockey Alan Freed is credited with popularizing rhythm and blues records and using "rock and roll" as the new label to promote this predominantly black music style to the white audiences of America. Did the average white American know about the sexual connotations of the phrase? They did not. In fact, with racism still deeply embedded in 1950's American culture, the term "rhythm and blues" was a much more difficult sell because of its common association with "negro" culture, so giving this music style a new name was an important key to helping it find a broader audience.

As a music style, how do you define rock and roll? I've talked before about neuroscientist Daniel Levitin's "This is Your Brain on Music", a wonderfully diverse book which ties together many of the ideas my project also plays with: what gives music its power? What connects music to memory, and what allows music to be able to universally communicate emotion across centuries and across cultures, transcending time and space? Dr. Levitin talks about the subtle interplay of rhythm and groove, the cultural and genetic connections of dance and vocalizing, and yes, how intertwined those are with sex not just for human beings but throughout the animal kingdom.

"It's got a back beat, you can't lose it" - Chuck Berry
For all the rhythmic interplay and emotional connections that the best rock music is plugged into, that snare drum cracking away on the two and four is an extremely important ingredient - it's one of the things that gets people up out of their chairs and makes them want to move, and that dancing is what made puritanical parents of the 50's and 60's reel back in horror, condemning this music because of the sexually suggestive ways they saw their kids bopping around on the dance floor back then.

Dr. Levitin helps put this in context for us. Throughout the history of life on this planet, we see again and again that rhythmic displays and vocalizations are how mates are attracted, and how one creature demonstrates to another that it's healthy and vigorous, in other words a good choice for a sexual partner. In that sense, "rock and roll" was much the same as any dance music that had come before, and not nearly as big a deal or as new an idea as many suggested it was. What rock and roll was doing was the same as any other music that communicates emotion and physicality, and I've talked about this in other blog entries like "The Geometry of Music" and "Information Equals Reality". This also relates to sections of my book where I talk about the genetic connections shared by all living things in patterns that exist across time and space, and this is where I came up with a few fanciful connections of my own:

All of the body’s senses have ways to connect through our minds and our memories to other points in time and space. Sights, sounds, smells, and even textures can conjure up connections that are part of the complex system of memes that make up our individual experience across the higher spatial dimensions we are now imagining as being used to construct the ten dimensions of reality.
How about the well-known experience of a certain smell vividly bringing to mind a moment from the past? Scents and pheremones are known to be powerfully and intricately tied to memory and instinct, in ways that would seem to fold time. Could molecules of a certain scent that bring to mind a certain memory be exerting their power in part because those molecules are clumped together in a higher dimension? If that were the case, the doorway to the memes and memories of a different time and place could be much more easily accessed when the same fragrance is encountered again, because in a higher dimension that different time and place really would be in that much closer proximity to each other.
Sounds also can trigger memory and even instinct. We have already mentioned the squealing sound of chalk on a chalkboard being commonly reviled. Could this be because it resembles the cry of some prehistoric predator which our distant ancestors learned that they should retreat from as quickly as possible? Or, as another example, could the desire to urinate at the sound of running water be a racial memory that connects us to our ancestors who chose to urinate in a place where their urine would be carried away? That would mean the potential ancestors we could have had who constantly chose to urinate in their own standing drinking water supply died of disease, did not become our ancestors, and therefore we have no connection across time to them. As we discussed before, these ideas can also tie into the work of Richard Dawkins, who proposed a new way of looking at genes and how their “desire for continuance” connects them from the past to today in a “river out of Eden”.

It's All About Connections
Isn't it obvious that if we're talking about sex, then we're talking about a connection that we share with all of our ancestors, and if we're thinking outside of time and space then the pattern that represents "orgasm" is something that we share with our fathers (and at least some of our mothers) back to the beginning of sexual reproduction on this planet? But Dr. Janiger suggests an even deeper connection than that, back to the moment of creation for our universe.

Physicists talk about the Big Bang as being the most highly ordered state our universe was ever in. Quantum computing expert Seth Lloyd tells us to think of the Big Bang not as a physical event, but as the first binary yes/no that separates out our universe from all of the other possible universes that could have existed. More and more physicists, including Frank Wilczek, John Moffat, and Sean Carroll have put out articles and books in the last few months which talk about a state which exists "before" the big bang, an enfolded symmetry state from which our universe (or any other) springs, and this of course is one of the central ideas to my way of visualizing reality.

Still, I think it's important when we talk about the Big Bang being equivalent to a huge orgasm that we don't just apply the forward motion explosion/ejaculation image, because from our perspective that's actually backwards! What do I mean by that?

As we've discussed in entries like Scrambled Eggs and Time in Either Direction, when we think about our position within spacetime, and we think about the move back through time to the big bang, we are thinking about a gradual paring away of choices: a move towards the very simple initial conditions which defined our universe's basic physical laws. From our perspective, then, what lies "beyond" the big bang? Not our universe, not some other universe, but the enfolded symmetry of all possible states, where, as John Moffat says "t equals zero". We'll talk about this idea more next blog, but this leaves us with one of the most basic ideas from this project: no matter what you are thinking about in the universe, there is a binary viewpoint, and there is a holistic viewpoint. In quantum terms, this relates to the three states for a particle which can then be used in quantum computing: we can call these a "yes" state, a "no" state, and a "simultaneously yes and no" state. From our perspective, then, the move towards the big bang takes us to the highest grouping order (as Gevin Giorbran so eloquently showed us), or the most primary binary state for our universe (as Seth Lloyd asks us to think of it), but the actual "orgasm" of the big bang is what happens when we move beyond the big bang and back into the enfolded whole that we should all be celebrating as the source of every possible reality.

And for me, that's the connection between the big bang and the big "O".

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: "t" Equals Zero

God 2.0

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

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

Next: Wormholes

Daily Parrying

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: God 2.0

Boredom and Consciousness Part Three

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txe4psJ6pVw


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99oMQvccar0

In Boredom and Consciousness Part Two we talked about how boredom is very much a "conscious" part of our minds. If you are driving a car properly, you are performing a constant series of checks completely automatically: your conscious and subconscious minds are working as one. The brain is entirely capable of taking you from one side of the city to the other without your "narrator voice" interfering with what you're doing. But what if that narrator voice, instead, had been telling you how boring the drive was? You would be much more likely to have had an accident through being inattentive to all of the possible danger signs that our subconscious minds deal with constantly as we drive. Even something as simple and uncomplicated as falling asleep is almost impossible to do if you can't find a way to quiet that darn narrator voice of consciousness, as anyone who has tried to find sleep when they are upset or excited knows only too well.

Do you like to garden? Some people can't stand it because it's so boring. Other people love simple repetitive activities like these because it gives them peace... in other words, gardening can be a form of meditation. And meditation, of course, is actually not that far away from boredom: because meditation is an activity that encourages us to move through and beyond our line of time with an integrated mind, quieting that nagging narrator voice that says "this is boring" and moving into the state that Julian Jaynes tells us we used to always exist within.

Here's what I say in my book about meditation:

Meditation is a particularly interesting example of how people can use the power of the mind to change their health and circumstances. Researchers analyzing the EEGs of persons in a meditative state have seen that the parietal lobe, which processes incoming data to give a person the sense of their location in time and space, becomes much less active during meditation. If the parietal lobe would be what anchors us in the first-through-fourth dimension (time and space), then, could suppressing that part of the brain be what opens the person who is meditating up to the healing paths available to them in higher dimensions?

This same Scientific American "Mind" article on boredom we were discussing in part two also talks about the rising popularity of "mindfulness" training in education, medical, and office settings, which is a form of meditation that helps people to become more in tune with the wonder of their day-to-day lives. Elsewhere in the issue is a review of a book by Jeff Warren called "The Head Trip": Jeff describes consciousness as a wheel that can be broken into twelve states from highly alert to deeply asleep. I was interested to see that what started him down the path of writing this book was exactly what we're talking about here: he was working a potentially boring job as a tree planter, and became fascinated with how his perception of time seemed completely different while doing this job. While some people would look at a menial and repetitive job such as this and find their day agonizingly slow, he found that time passed by almost without him noticing. In other words, one person's boring is another person's meditative state, or even another person's novelty.

When people who have watched my 11 minute animation or read my book say that it's "mind-blowing", my fervent wish is that I have helped to renew and expand their sense of wonder about this amazing universe we live in. There are a great many self-help books and breathing exercises and visualization techniques out there that people can use to change their way of perceiving the world. Imagining the timeless fabric that our universe and all other universes spring from is another: that's why I describe this project on the back of the book as a "mind-expanding exercise that could change the way you view this incredible universe in which we live".

In part one of this entry we talked about the quantum physics idea that it's actually possible for consciousness to change the past: an idea that hadn't occurred to me, perhaps not surprisingly since I have spent so much time thinking instead about how this way of imagining reality expands out what our possibilities from this moment forward might be. But even if the idea had occurred to me first, I suspect I would have just dismissed it as being too "out there" even for me. However, with esteemed physicists like John Wheeler pointing the way, and the research of physicists such as Rosenblum, Kuttner, Krauss and Dent (all of whom are mentioned in that previous blog entry), this idea takes on interesting resonances when we think about meditation and the integrated bicameral mind as being the mental processes where we stop being bored, and start freeing our conscious minds from our linear 4D succession of frames we call "time".

This week's poll question is about 2012, where do you stand? Could those predictions of a coming global transition be tied to McKenna's Novelty Theory (also known as Timewave Zero), or Kurzweil's approaching Singularity, or the many other impending predictions being pointed to by prophecy and ancient wisdom? Our minds, as pattern recognizing machines, have ways of connecting across the information of time and space. Our bodies, built from chemical processes that obey the laws of entropy, can only move in one direction in time, but if it really is possible for consciousness to "tune" the universe, as John Wheeler suggested, then we would have proof that our consciousness can freely move in any direction, and at any "angle" we choose. Thinking of an accelerating shift, where everyone's consciousness tilts at an ever more extreme angle to our 3D space to eventually encompass all of time, allows us to imagine the potential for our world to enter a timeless mindset. The idea that this possibility appears to be approaching at an increasingly accelerated pace is also one of the ramifications of this that is getting more and more people excited around the world. Are you interested in what happens next? I know I am!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Boredom and Consciousness Part Two

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF8bDBmPlVg


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

Are you bored with your life? One of the ideas I've been promoting with this project is an all-encompassing definition of life as being "any process that is interested in what happens next".

As regular visitors to this blog will know, I have come to believe that there were certain organizing patterns and forces that can be seen to have influenced the creation of our universe right from its beginning, and that each of us is a participant in the ongoing act of creation that was set in motion back then and which continues to this day. In Boredom and Consciousness Part One, we talked about the respected physicists like John Wheeler have even suggested that the quantum observer could change not just the present or the future, but the past right back to the big bang! Still, no matter what perspective you approach this idea from, we have to recognize the name that is given to those organizing patterns and forces is contentious: and since some people are uncomfortable with words like "God", I have tended to call these the "big picture memes" that we can see were a part of the narrowing-down processes that caused our particular universe to be the one selected out of all possible universes within the multiverse.

Most of us (but not all of us!) believe that we have free will, which implies that we have some degree of control over "what happens next" as we travel down our 4D line of time, twisting and turning in the fifth dimension down at the planck length. What this means, then, is that very simple truths like "attitude affects outcome" have profound implications if in fact the parallel universes that are created by the branching choices of our actions really do exist, and we have talked in previous blogs about some of the modern cosmologists who say that this is indeed the case. Are you bored? Depressed? Ill? Then of course you will tend to make different choices than if you were excited/happy/healthy. There's nothing unscientific about simple statements like these.

In my book I talk several times about what happens when we stop being interested in what happens next:

...many of us are painfully familiar with the experience of watching a loved one who, due to illness, extreme depression, or simple old age, have had their soul material gradually dissipate or be ground away. This can reach the point where we can see that the person that used to occupy that body is no longer there, even though the body continues to function. Where did they go? Perhaps they really did lose coherence and drift away. Or, more likely, most of the meme-set that made up that person lost interest in the diseased and tired body they were in and has already freed itself from its confines.
Witnessing the death of any living creature shows us one of the great mysteries of the universe: what leaves the body?

For our planet, every living thing is based on water. To quote from Paul Davies' article on alternate lifeforms on earth in the December issue of Scientific American:

...even the hardiest microorganisms have their limits. Life as we know it depends crucially on the availability of liquid water.

A couple of blog entries ago we looked at the relationship between music and creativity, and not long before that we looked at a song of mine ("Change and Renewal") which proposes that creativity and water may be more closely tied to each other than any of us realize. In a sense, this is because the opposite of creativity is death: with no water, there's no life, and therefore no creativity. So, as I say in the song: "take a drink of water and find a new idea". :-)

We could also say that the opposite of boredom is novelty. But boredom and novelty are much more subjective terms, because they are based upon the way that our conscious minds perceive reality: in other words, one person's boring is another person's novelty. In part one I talked about synchronicity: the joyous connections our brains can make from seemingly unconnected bits of information, and how that can make it feel like the universe is trying to tell you something. I had been planning last week to write about Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind, but then two magazines arrived in my mailbox the same day and I saw so many connections to what I was thinking about that I felt it was important to explore them.

The first of the two magazines is the new special issue of Scientific American "Mind": the cover story is dedicated to the study of boredom, and there are quite a few articles within that issue that relate very nicely to what we're talking about here. The other magazine was the latest issue of New Scientist magazine, which has as its cover story "The Smart, Strange World of the Subconscious".

The article in New Scientist makes the point that neurobiologists sometimes prefer to use terms like "non-conscious", "pre-conscious", or "unconscious" in these discussions about the subconscious. This is because it's much easier to define what is a conscious activity for our minds, than it is define all of those other processes which are bubbling beneath the surface, some of which are operating at much higher operations per second, and some of which are stretched out into much slower processes. We have already talked in this blog about how consciousness is thought by modern science to be a process that, for most people, operates at between thirty and ninety "bings" per second.

One of the studies discussed in the Scientific American "Mind" issue concerns persons with long-term substance abuse problems: an ongoing study of 156 addicts at a New York methadone clinic revealed that the only reliable indicator of whether an addict is about to relapse was their reported level of boredom. My song "Addictive Personality" talks about the pitfalls that can happen when people are trapped in repetitive loops that lead them to believe that "what happens next" will always be the same as "what happened before", a sure-fire recipe for boredom:


Julian Jaynes, in his epic masterwork "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind", proposed that our current mode of operation, with a conscious part of the brain that is "narrating" our activities from moment to moment, and a subconscious (or non-conscious/pre-conscious/unconscious) part of the brain that is processing data "behind the scenes", is a fairly recent development. He proposed that only a couple of thousand years ago humans lived in a more integrated form of consciousness, where conscious and subconscious processes were not divided. This seems to imply that everyone existed in a semi-dreamlike state, a state which modern society has taught us to be suspicious of: which is strange, because there are still many activities that we perform much better when we are not "Thinking" about what we're doing. Athletes talk about being "in the zone": the place where they become one with their activity, rather than thinking about all of the component parts, is how they achieve success. Be it musicians, public speakers, or a teenager on their first date: the times that we become self-conscious about what we're doing or saying, we are much more likely to not be at our best. Here is another video with me in discussion with master musician Jack Semple where we touch upon some of these ideas:




Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS - We wrap up this exceedingly long entry in part three. Click here to read part three now.

Music and the Dance of Creativity

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


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIMsoZd76a8

As a composer, I create things for a living. Some people say "oh, I'm not creative." I say "everybody's creative!". The above video is of me chatting with one of my favorite musicians, Jack Semple, about some of the ideas that surround this blog entry, and the ideas I explore in my book.

Creativity is the one thing each and every one of us do every moment of our lives: our conversations are unscripted, our actions unchoreographed, it's all one big creative improvisation. And the process of chance, choice, and circumstance that moves our universe from the big bang to the enfolded end is, at its root, a creative process as well.

Here are two things I have been saying with this project: "life is any process that becomes interested in what happens next"; and "that which ceases to change ceases to exist". In a previous blog entry called "How to Make a Universe" we imagined starting from quantum indeterminacy, selecting a starting point and a successive series of quantum frames which become the line of time for a particular universe. Keeping in mind that for our universe, each quantum frame is a particular "now" that is one planck length away from the next, we can see how the patterns in the Information that becomes our Reality can have groupings and interactions, and places that those resulting interference patterns and shapes begin and end. Whether we're talking about vibrating superstrings, memes, or life itself, the moment that something stops changing/vibrating/interacting as we move from one quantum frame to the next, the thing that is represented by those motions ceases to become part of the timeline being created: which brings to mind an eternal dance of creativity, both at the quantum level and out here at the physical level as we navigate on our fourth dimensional line of time through the fifth dimensional probability space available to us, which is curled up down at the planck length for each successive "now".

In his wonderful and enlightening book, "This is Your Brain on Music", Daniel Levitin (as a neuroscientist and former rock musician/engineer/producer) reveals some startling things about the dance of information that is encoded into music. According to Daniel, in the majority of the world's languages, the verb "to sing" also means "to dance" - which shows us how intimately tied together music and the physical expression of emotion are for we human beings. He also reveals that scans of neural activity in people who are listening to, performing, or even composing music reveal that this is not a primarily-right-brain function as many had surmised: in fact, activities involving music appear to trigger activity in almost all parts of the brain that have been studied in Dr. Levitin's research.

As a composer, of course, I admit to a strong bias towards any research that shows how magical and fully engaging music can be, and any time that I am asked to create a piece of music I marvel at music's power to connect emotions across space and time, to entrain people's heartbeat or breath, to cause them to move in a joyful way or become agitated and fearful. All of this ties in to the ideas that we have been talking about here: we are all patterns in time and space, memes and spimes that are interacting to create life as we know it.

We are also part of really big picture memes, which are patterns in the highest dimensions that have caused our universe as it exists to be the one that we're in, and saying this is not necessarily invoking higher spiritual powers: it is a simple statement of fact to say that our universe exists as one out of many possible universes within the multiverse, and the patterns that organized the information that became our reality are part of the creativity, the grouping and symmetry, that is innate within any pattern, be that random or guided.

There's a great Google Tech Talks video featuring Dr. Stuart Hameroff, who says that modern consciousness research has been exploring how every instant that the brain interacts and processes the incoming data from the external world can be thought of as a "frame" of consciousness, and this is being referred to by researchers as a "bing". According to their studies the average human being is operating at somewhere between 30 and 90 "bings" per second. In my field, this seems significant because the lowest note on a piano is at 28 cycles per second, and video in North America historically has been shown at 29.97 frames per second: both numbers being just on the bottom edge of that "bings per second" range. In other words, for human beings any repetitive pattern that is above 30 cycles per second tends to be perceived as being continuous (musical notes and quantum frames of time, for instance), and vibrations or patterns that repeat more slowly than that begin to be perceived as individual events.

In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we're playing with ways of visualizing reality that encourage us to think about the really big picture of the underlying structures and patterns that contribute to the universe we live in. In terms of memes as being ideas that are connected across time and space, music is one of the most powerful and flexible tools we have at our disposal for helping us to see how it all fits together in the dance of vibrations and patterns that are part of our beautiful and creative universe. This is probably why one of the reviewers for my book described it as a "strangely 'musical' way of imagining superimposed dimensions".

Whether we're talking about quantum physics or creativity, it all seems to keep centering on our role as conscious observers: our "bings per second" rate shows why, for us, everything above about 30 cycles per second begins to blur together into continuous waves, while everything slower than that dividing line is perceived as individual events. In musical terms, sliding through those more and more separated events would take us through rhythms, note durations, phrases, repeating structures within a composition, entire musical pieces, the other times that same musical piece was performed, the other times in history that elements from within the piece were used, and the connections that those elements have to the big-picture memes that give those elements their emotional or physical connection, again and again throughout the history of our world.

To sing is to dance, to be alive is to be creative, and our universe itself is a creative process. There is a sliding scale of vibrations that can exist within our universe --with the fastest wavelength possible being at the planck length and the slowest being the single cycle from the big bang to the end of the universe-- and with our consciousness right at the center point of that set of vibrations.

Now, here is a version of one of the 26 songs attached to this project which explores that idea: "Big Bang to Entropy". A previous blog lists the lyrics: this is a new version of the song performed by Ron Scott. While our consciousness tends to think of vibrations slower than 30 cycles per second as individual events, it's fun (and perhaps mind-blowing) to also think about expanding our perception to think of those much longer repeating patterns as also being notes and songs, that we really could hear if only we slowed down and expanded our conscious perception of the universe.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton