Forty Below

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzAmOfq8dSs

Last time, in Greetings from the Grids, we talked about the supposition that growing up on the wide open expanse of the prairies might affect a person's point of view. Another of the things that is remarkable about the prairies is that it's not unusual to have periods of extreme cold in the wintertime. Have you ever experienced forty below? Fahrenheit or Celsius, doesn't matter, it just happens that the two temperature systems cross over each other at this point. There does seem to be some kind of a dividing line as you approach minus forty, it's a whole different kind of cold and it's really hard to convey just how different it is to someone who hasn't personlly experienced it. In entries like Anime Gaming and Cusps and Seeing the Big Picture 3, we've talked about how there are moments in each of our lives where important branches take place within our probability space. Without getting too melodramatic about it, every time you go out in forty below you are dealing with weather conditions that could kill you if you're not careful or unlucky, and it's not a good idea to ignore those possible cusps that are all around you when you deal with extreme weather conditions such as these.

So: other than showing you the lyrics to this song and having you watch the above video, I want to make one important point: just because it was fun to add to the visuals, I put in some shots of dogs out in the cold. The fact of the matter is, at forty below exposed flesh freezes in minutes, and much faster than that if there's any wind, so conscientious pet owners do not leave any but the most furry of their furry friends out in this bitter cold for longer than it takes them to do their business and get back inside.

Does adversity build character? Does what fails to kill you make you stronger? Or do you have to be a little bit crazy to want to live in a place where the temperature actually hits this extreme? Hard to say, could be a mixture of all three. Here's the lyrics to this song, lovingly assembled from a lifetime of observation of this intense slice of life on the prairies:

Forty Below
- words and music by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

When it's forty below, snow sounds like styrofoam
It squeaks beneath your boots, high and chirpy
When it's forty below, Fahrenheit and Celsius become one and the same
It's just too damn cold, everyone agrees completely on this one

When it's forty below, your gob freezes in mid-air
Makes a round little marble that rolls across a frozen snowbank
When it's forty below, you go outside grim and fierce, a warrior
Or stay huddled inside, defeated by wind and temperature

Oh, and the frost on your front window turns thick as a blanket
A fuzzy white candy coating, can't scrape it away
And dogs'll soon start walking on three legs, switching
To keep whichever foot's coldest up close to their furry little bellies

When it's forty below, sound gets brighter
A distant jet sounds like fabric endlessly tearing and tearing
When it's 40 below, your car feels like a stranger's, your wheel stiffens
Anything plastic's probably gonna shatter

When it's forty below, jumpers carry lifeblood
From one vehicle to the next, red to red, black to ground
When it's forty below,the test of your samaritan spirit comes
When a perfect stranger in a parking lot asks if you've got cables

Yeah, and out on the highway, unless you're a fool
You've got a candle and a cup and some matches
A bit of candy and a shovel, all packed away in your trunk
Insurance for some terrible day of reckoning that could come...

When it's forty below
When it's forty below
When it's forty below
When it's forty below.


I hope you enjoyed this song, which I performed "live-to-tape" with my friends Bob Evans and Roberta Nichol back in 1997. Just a reminder, this is just one of a ten-song collection of songs we performed back then, 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.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob Bryanton

Next: Gimme the News

Seeing the Big Picture Part 3

Michel Fournier had to postpone his record-breaking freefall parachute drop again today because of a problem that developed with his oxygen supply. A newswire story is here.

In my blog entry Your Fifth-Dimensional Self, I talked about one of the recurring themes from this project:

...we all are attracted to the occasional story of someone who has overcome seemingly insurmountable odds: and that's true whether we're talking about achievements through hard work and determination, or lucky lottery winners, or the indomitable spirit of a person who has made the best of a difficult situation.

In a blog entry about one of the 26 songs attached to this project ("Senseless Violence"), I quoted the following from my book:

Everyone remembers what they were doing the moment they saw the World Trade Center towers collapse. Everyone remembers the day they won a big prize or the day they saw a loved one die. And even with perfect strangers, we are drawn to the moments we recognize as being important cusps in that person’s life. This is why it is human nature to want to drive slowly by the car accident, trying to catch a glimpse of what happened, or why we all will look at the newspaper picture of the latest lottery winner. No matter whether the event was good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate, we all have a tendency to think “what if that had been me?”

And, in a blog entry about The End of the World, I talked about how this way of visualizing reality first started to be formed in my mind:

...as a child, I was trying to explain to myself why some moments in our lives seem so heavily significant, so deeply ingrained in our memories, while other moments quickly fade. I came to the conclusion that it was because those moments were when important “cusps” occurred: moments when our possible future paths diverged significantly.

Coincidentally, the idea of "cusps" has turned out to be a recurring theme for the blog entries I've created this month: Everyone Has a Story, Anime, Gaming and Cusps, Collective Intelligence, Cognitive Surplus, Chaos... all have dealt with that concept from slightly different angles.

Where am I going with this? That's what I love about the Michel Fournier story: here is a man who, regardless of the outcome, has created a new and important cusp for his life, and for our consensual reality, by attempting to do something no one else in the world has done before.

I hope that he is enjoying the journey.

Rob Bryanton


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

UPDATE: Unbelievably, Michel's attempt came to an end a few hours later when the helium balloon came loose from its tethers and ascended skyward without him. What a disappointment! A news story with a video clip embedded is here.


This is a continuation from Seeing the Big Picture, and Seeing the Big Picture Part 2.
Coming up next: Disorders of the Mind

Collective Intelligence, Cognitive Surplus, Chaos

A couple of weeks ago I started a series of blogs about the Fifth Dimension, in celebration of my easy-going article published in the current issue of Urban Garden Magazine: the article is entitled "The Fifth Dimension is a Dangerous Idea". Now, here are a couple of blog entries I'd like us to take a serious look at:

Henry Story discusses the Fifth Dimension
Henry Story discusses the 10 dimensions of reality

I recently came across the above two wonderful blog entries by Henry Story, the first of which I know I saw briefly back when they were published but at that time I was so immersed in launching my project that I didn't really do justice to his thoughtful presentations, which he wrote partly in response to my eleven minute animation. Now that I have spent some time at Henry's blog I am in awe of the leading-edge work he is doing with the Semantic Web (a concept I touched on last fall in a blog entry called E8 and the Semantic Web), meme-tracking, and other "Web 3.0" developments. Henry works at Sun, and he writes The Sun Babelfish Blog, check it out.

As it turns out, Henry found my animation through a blog posted by Nova Spivack. Nova's blog, Minding the Planet is equally awe-inspiring: and I am linking to Nova's blog entry about a chapter he wrote for a new book on the subject of Collective Intelligence. Again, rather than fill this entry with quotes from these people's writing, I invite you to read his chapter, which is an eye-opening exploration of just how fast our world is changing right now, how useful the Semantic Web is going to be in helping this change along, and how services like Twine.com (which comes from Nova's company Radar Networks) will be part of our toolset as these advances occur.

Another related idea is being promoted by Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody. Yes, "Cognitive Surplus" is one of those buzzword-memes making the rounds right now, but Clay explains the idea well. Take a look at a couple of recently-posted videos of him discussing these ideas:




Direct links to these videos are at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNCblGv0zjU


Clay makes the point part way through his presentation that it's very hard to predict the outcome of the changes that are happening now, because it's more like the complexity of predicting the weather rather than predicting (for example) gravity. I found this particularly interesting as an idea because of an upcoming blog I was working on about how the regions of chaos and sudden bifurcations to new states can be very similar to what we just tried to imagine in "Anime, Gaming, and Cusps": what comes to mind as we try to visualize a five dimensional labyrinth made of 10 directions all at right angles to each other? How could we create a map showing the cusps and tipping points, the interactions of memes, genes, and spimes that work (in concert with randomness and the patterns that spring from randomness) to create our reality? For me, this brings to mind those diagrams I was first introduced to in James Gleick's "Chaos: Making a New Science": regions of seemingly random noise that are actually complex interactions of tiny systems, interspersed with sudden jumps to new coherent states, as a map of our fifth-dimensional probability space from moment to moment. How's that for a visualization of the background layer creating our beautiful and intricate reality one planck length at a time from the fifth dimension?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: The Top Ten Tenth Dimension Songs

Anime, Gaming, and Cusps

A direct link to the above video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjOWWafK3U4

I've been told that some of the concepts from Imagining the Tenth Dimension are reminiscent of what you can learn from Japanese anime or videogames. Since I'm a guy in my fifties, I kind of missed all that, other than second-hand inference through watching my kids play games like Legend of Zelda back in the day, but I have now watched modern anime like the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (a clip from the show starts this blog) and been fascinated to see the connections: "Melancholy" is about a teenage girl who, as it turn out, is the prime quantum observer for our world, and she is becoming disinterested in what she is observing. What happens to the rest of us in that situation? It's fun to imagine such fantastic extrapolations from the basics of quantum theory.

Reading the entry from wikipedia about Vector Prime (Transformers) is also startling for someone like me who learned to think about these ideas from the freewheeling explorations of theoretical physicists like Kaku and Greene, and not from watching cartoons:

Born from the living material of the very multiverse itself, Vector Prime was appointed the guardian of space and time by Primus, and is uniquely attuned to its flow. Within his clockwork frame hum the subtle mathematics that govern all that is, from the spin of galaxies to the movement of sub-atomic particles...
Vector Prime’s perceptions are not limited to one linear pathway in time – thanks to a temporal mechanics analyzer, he is able to observe all possible pasts, presents and futures within his sensor range, giving him the opportunity to select optimum courses of action.

Still, saying that the concepts I use in Imagining the Tenth Dimension are familiar from Japanese pop culture is not saying that these concepts are wrong, or fictional - rather, I'm saying that thinking about reality as coming from a timeless multiverse and indeterminacy has strong connections to belief systems much older than what we know from Western civilization, and this is a point that I've been making from the start of this project. There are things about this way of imagining that connect to zen buddhism, kaballah, African and Aboriginal mythologies, and on and on it goes. If we're trying to find the place where physics meets philosophy, then it shouldn't be surprising that these additional connections keep springing up.

Cusps
But while we're talking about games, there is also something very "first person 3D shooter" about what we're imagining here: as you work through one of those games, there will be paths that open up before you, and choosing one path could allow you to continue, while another path will do you in. Imagining a tree of branching choices would be something the game designers took into consideration: in other words, if there were only one way to get through to the end it would be a fourth-dimensional game (since Time is a Direction in the fourth spatial dimension), but if there were multiple paths to the end then the game could be considered to be fifth-dimensional. Whether we're talking about a life, or a universe, or a video game, those important branching moments might be called "cusps": this is an idea I explored in my blog entry "Visualizations".

We should keep in mind, too, that cusps don't have to refer to simple left/right yes/no types of decisions. A cusp moment could have a great many possible outcomes, some inconsequential, some momentous, and many of shades between the extremes, and the idea of a "bush-like branching structure" of possible outcomes is very relevant here (regular readers of this blog will recognize that I often use this 'bush-like branching structure' phrase to refer to the proof published last fall by a team of scientists at Oxford under the direction of physicist David Deutsch, indicating that the wavefunction of possible outcomes at both the quantum and the macro level from any particular moment in spacetime are mathematically equivalent).

In "Flatlanders On a Line", I talked about the set of all branching choices for a person's life or for the universe being like a labyrinth, and that if one of us in the fifth dimension could be handed a large balloon that lifted us above the walls of choice, chance, and circumstance that we had been traveling through and limited by, we would be in the sixth dimension: it would be like being handed a "map to the game". Just like Edwin Abbott's Flatlander who was lifted above his 2D plane to be able to see his world from the third dimension, from our sixth-dimensional vantage point we would be able to see all of the other possibilities that exist within state space for our universe but which are currently unavailable from our position within the fifth dimension.

90-Degree Angles
Let's be clear though: saying that a fifth dimensional probability space can be thought of as being like a 2D maze that we could find shortcuts through from the next dimension up is still very much a simplification, a way to help us visualize something that is not easily visualized. When we're in a 2D maze there are only four directions we can travel, each at right angles to the next. Imagining a fifth-dimensional labyrinth requires us to imagine that at every point in the labyrinth there are ten directions we could possibly travel, and each of those ten directions is at right angles to the next.

Now that is a mind-blowing image of roiling chaos and cusps to try to hold in your head! That's why, as we discussed in entries like Hypercubes and Plato's Cave, sometimes it's more productive to visualize the shadows of the extra dimensions rather than to wrestle with trying to imagine the unimaginable.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Collective Intelligence, Cognitive Surplus, Chaos

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4b7MqbpYTM

Song 20 of 26 - Hang a Left at the Lights

The twentienth of the 26 songs is called "Hang a Left at the Lights". 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=xCTkcMADHk4

This song and song 21, "Making It Up as I Go", have similar ideas behind them. Both also share a lyrical approach which is more pop music oriented, no unusual words like "anthropic" or "entropy" to clue us in that these are about anything more than the subjects that are usually dealt with in popular music. This song also harkens back to song 10, "Addictive Personality" - and the idea that each of us are choosing from a fifth dimensional probability set to create the fourth dimensional line we look back upon as the life we have experienced. Those important cusps need not be so momentous as breaking out of a destructive loop of addiction - which is why this song is more fun, but really is expressing a similar idea.

Simple ideas like this one are, of course, not unique to this set of 26 songs. Natasha Bedingfield's "Unwritten", for instance, expresses a very similar concept in a finely crafted pop music confection. But in a world where people can believe they are trapped and unable to change when that is not the case, this is a very important message for artists to keep delivering: yes, sometimes people through no fault of their own are trapped in a bad situation. But it's also important to remember that sometimes it really can be just that easy, to say "now I will choose a better path than the one I've been on".

HANG A LEFT AT THE LIGHTS
words and music (C) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

As you’re headin down your highway
You know you gotta read the signs
You gotta watch the other drivers
You gotta stay between the lines
You gotta listen to your wheels
Cause they’ll tell you bout the road
You gotta watch out for distractions
And think about where you’re goin

Maybe it’s time to hang a left at the lights
And choose another way
Maybe it’s time to put on the brakes
Cause sometimes it’s okay
To hang a left at the lights

Are you writin big fat cheques
That your body just can’t cash
Burned your candle at both ends
Well it’s never gonna last
Are you surfin on the top
Or are you draggin in the dirt
Are you headed for a fall
Are you headin for some hurt

Maybe it’s time to hang a left at the lights…

Gimme that roadmap, where the hell’s that star sayin “you are here”
Gimme some directions, this time try to make ‘em clear

Time for a tuneup
Time to change the oil
Top up my fluids
Check my sparks and coil
Thanks to the pit crew
I’m ready for another lap
But this time will be different
If things start to turn to crap

I’ll be sayin maybe it’s time to hang a left at the lights
And choose another way
Maybe it’s time to put on the brakes
Cause sometimes it’s okay
To hang a left at the lights

Next song: 21 of 26 - Making It Up as I Go

Song 9 of 26 - Senseless Violence

The ninth of the 26 songs is called "Senseless Violence". 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 this video can be found at revver.com/video/384964/senseless-violence/

For most of the the 1980's and into the 90's I was music director/composer for the local professional theatre company here in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada, the Globe Theatre. I wrote the music and lyrics for this song originally for a "musical comedy about what drives people to fascism" called Resuscitation of a Dying Mouse back in 1986 (spoken text and original concept for the play was by the Globe's playwright-in-residence, Rex Deverell). Ron Scott created the above video using footage from archive.org, while the version of the song we're hearing here is still the original 1986 recording, which is why it sounds the way it does, with 80's drum machine and samples.

So what does this song have to do with this way of imagining the dimensions? One of the important ideas is "cusps": if the fourth dimensional line of time comes from a probability space in the fifth dimension, then there can be long stretches where we all go about our lives uneventfully, but then an important "branch" happens that moves us to a very different trajectory. Some of those branches are good, some are bad, some are just branches where we were faced with a choice which we made or chose not to make. To quote from the book:

We all have parts of our day where we are completely unaware of the passage of time. In the Julian Jaynes point of view, these would be the parts of our day when the “narrator voice” of our consciousness ceases its constant monologue, and we merge back into the unified point of view of our ancestors, and, indeed, of most other living things. At those moments, we continue to act as quantum observers, but there is nothing remarkable about the process to stick in our memory.
What we do remember are the moments where an important branch occurred in the “straight” line of our fourth dimensional experience. Thinking fifth-dimensionally, our personal timeline (or “world-line”) might be proceeding uneventfully, but then we reach the moment where a major decision, a random event, or the actions of others resulted in a blossoming or a branching extending out from that “straight” line of our life-path. Everyone remembers what they were doing the moment they saw the World Trade Center towers collapse. Everyone remembers the day they won a big prize or the day they saw a loved one die. And even with perfect strangers, we are drawn to the moments we recognize as being important cusps in that person’s life. This is why it is human nature to want to drive slowly by the car accident, trying to catch a glimpse of what happened, or why we all will look at the newspaper picture of the latest lottery winner. No matter whether the event was good or bad, fortunate or unfortunate, we all have a tendency to think “what if that had been me?”

SENSELESS VIOLENCE
words and music (c) by Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)
Senseless violence (Senseless violence!)
Crime in the streets (Crime in the streets!)
Don’t talk to strangers (Don’t talk to strangers!)
Or people you meet (Cause they could be just as dangerous!)
These are dangerous times that we live in
These are dangerous times that we live in
Senseless violence (and you can’t get away)

All the latest atrocities on the six o’clock news
Everybody’s cranin their necks to see the view
And you are too
Somebody killed a cop parked at a roadside restaurant
Somebody went crazy pulled out a gun
Shot up the place, just for fun

Senseless Violence (Senseless violence!)
Crime in the streets (Crime in the streets!)
Don’t talk to strangers (Don’t talk to strangers!)
Or people you meet (Cause they could be just as dangerous!)
These are dangerous times that we live in
These are dangerous times that we live in
Senseless violence (and you can’t get away)

You got your foot on the brake
Cause you can’t take your eyes off the car crash scene
You’re all movin so slow, wonderin who it might have been
It’s a little obscene
When you see the need to feed upon such butchery
Get some popcorn and coke and find a seat
It’s solid entertainment on the silver screen

Senseless Violence (Senseless violence!)
Senseless Violence (Senseless violence!)
Senseless Violence

Here are some other blog entries that touch upon the ideas from this song:

FAQ 7 - Isn't Free Will and Illusion?
You Can't Get There From Here
Infinity and Impulse Control
See No Future
Your Sixth-Dimensional Self
The Dark Side
Death?

Next song: 10 of 26 - Addictive Personality

Visualizations

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdcsuI_uH-4





In the last few months I've talked a lot about the David Deutsch team at Oxford, who in September 2007 published a proof equating the probabilistic outcomes that occur at the quantum level with the branching timelines that occur as a result of choice and chance at the macro level. I've talked about how we can imagine our 4D line of time as having branches that occur from time to time when important "cusps" occur, and that the image we could hold in our minds is like a dandelion gone to seed, with the observed line of time proceeding from moment to moment being the stalk, and the blossom at the head being where the upcoming branching set of choices are presented to us.

At the quantum level, then, that "dandelion head" of available choices is really occurring every unit of planck time, and we are traveling down our line of time with those choices being selected for us without our conscious participation. We've talked in this blog before about Dr. Schrödinger’s poor old cat, simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the box and finds out whether an atomic particle has decayed or not: and most people would agree that the probabilistic outcome that happens in this thought experiment is not influenced by the hopes or free will of the person opening the box. In other words, the particle decays or doesn't decay, and it appears that we witness one or the other quantum outcome regardless of the good wishes or animosity we bear towards that darn cat.

At the macro level, most of our day is the same way: out of the unimaginably large number of outcomes that are taking place down at the quantum level, there are some that are more likely because of what has come before, and some occasional much more significant outcomes that take reality off into some new tangent. Likewise, we don't actively involve ourselves in deciding for the most part about the reality around us, because it is happening automatically without any conscious decision-making on our part: walls remain solid, gravity remains constant, objects at rest tend to stay where they are, and so on.

But even in a universe where no active choices are made by anyone or anything, we will still end up with worldlines that resemble the images in this blog: there will be uneventful long straight lines of no surprising change, there will be sections of noisy chaotic turbulence, there will be occasional bifurcations, there will be important cusps where a lot of new possible outcomes suddenly become available. Tracing along any one line in these images, following the twists and turns that our perceived worldline happens to take, then, is like the one particular reality we end up experiencing out of all the possible realities that could have existed.

Taking any one of those paths, then, is what moves us along the line of time, and this process is happening at both the quantum and macro levels one planck length at a time after another.

Here's an important key: because the quantum and macro level are really going through the same processes of probabilistic outcome (as per the Oxford team's proof described above), branches to new states at the quantum level affect the macro level, and changes at the macro level affect the quantum level. Can we, as macro physical creatures, consciously choose outcomes at the quantum level? No, because that's not the scale we operate at. But choices deliberately made at the macro level change things at the quantum level, because it's really all the same continuum, just being viewed at different scales.

This is why it makes sense to talk about our physical reality in the same terms as our quantum reality, and this is where we find how free will fits into this picture: because at both levels there are choices that are happening whether we choose, or whether someone else chooses for us, or even if we make no choice and random chance and probability chooses for us.

With this project, I have portrayed those branches as being in our "probability space" in the fifth dimension. The pictures in this blog show us a visualization that gives us a hint of how beautiful and intricate those bush-like branching patterns of choice and chance could be: imagine, for instance, that each of these pictures represents someone's life. "Here's the time I almost got hit by a drunk driver, here's the time I almost went to med school but changed my mind, here's where I got married, here's where the planes hit the towers", and so on. A person's life, when viewed from down here in the fourth dimension, ends up travelling down only one of those available lines at each junction, but it's always fun to play the "what if" game and imagine the other outcomes that choice and chance might have presented.

What we're looking at in these images is a visualization tool, and of course Imagining the Tenth Dimension owes much of its popularity to its eleven minute animation, a visualization tool that gives people a way to imagine ten dimensions. But here's something interesting: the three images we are looking at here are really all pictures of the same thing. They are the map of the connections within this very blog.

They were generated by a website which has been around for a while, called "Websites as graphs". Even more interesting, I think, is what you will see if you click on this link:
generate tenthdimension blog as graph
as you will then be able to watch an animated image somewhat similar to the ones in this entry being generated in real time, tracking all of the connections to this blog and its nearly one hundred other entries that have been created over the past year since its launch. You can also click on Create the Graph of Any Other Website on that page, and it will ask you for a URL. If you have a couple of minutes, give it one of the big sites like Amazon or AOL and watch all of the connections being drawn.

This all connects to the higher dimensional thinking we've been playing with here, exploring how ideas are connected together across space and time, and how higher-dimensional patterns are what created the universe we live in and the preference for one reality over another from within the multiverse of all possible universes. What we're playing with are creative visualizations of the nature of reality, and whether you believe there is nothing above the fourth dimension of spacetime, or whether you believe the fifth dimension and above are part of a Calabi-Yau manifold, or that all of the particles in our 4D universe are derived from an E8 rotation, there are ways that visualization tools can help us to imagine what would otherwise be unimaginable.

And my way of visualizing the dimensions is just another way of doing that very thing.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

PS: If you go to my blog entry The Google Suggestions Time Capsule Project you will see that I am continuing to update the list of Google Suggestions that I am keeping track of there.

Your Sixth-Dimensional Self

One of the more extraordinary claims I make in my book is that what we think of as the "soul" is more akin to Marvin Minsky's "Society of Mind" concept, and that we spend our lives integrating and rejecting various meme-systems floating out there in the dimensions, and the particular subset we have taken on at any one moment defines who we are... but this is a system that changes somewhat over our lives. This gives us an easy way to answer the old conundrum, where do all the new souls come from? There were less than ten million of us on the planet in 10,000 BC, 2.5 billion of us in 1950, now we're around 6.5 billion! Statistically, the chances of any one of us here today being the reincarnated soul of a person who lived on this planet in the last two thousand years are becoming vanishingly small, down into lottery ticket territory. Unless...

By the time we have imagined that timelessness is a real description of our place in the cosmos, and that what we think of as a soul is a specific collection of memes, then there is no reason to assume that there is a limit to the perceived number of souls, or the locations in time of those souls. In fact, there is no reason to assume that you couldn't walk up to someone on the street right now and realize that you have met another incarnation of yourself! But it gets even stranger than that.

Living on a Mobius Strip
According to my way of imagining the dimensions, in our physical bodies we are each on the equivalent of a mobius strip, travelling down a specific "line of time" in the fourth dimension, unaware of the twists and turns that we are making in the dimensions above. I have written much about what this means in the fifth dimension, including the fact that Theodor Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed that the field equations of gravity and light can be combined if they are defined in the fifth dimension, not the fourth-dimensional space-time that seems to have become stuck in the general public's mind more easily. Most people are unaware that the basic aspects of our physical reality are being defined in the fifth dimension.

Imagining my fourth dimensional body as an undulating snake, with my conceived self at one end and my deceased self at the other, is one of the starting points of my visual way of imagining the dimensions. Imagining the fifth dimensional branches of choice and possibility that extend out from this moment shows how a hard determinist could look back in time and see the proof that there is only one reality, because after the fact that is all we can see; while a person believing in free will can look forward into the fifth dimension and see that their future is not written in stone after all. However: going through that exercise artificially diminishes the size and import of what has come before, since the undulating snake leading back to the beginning of my physical body seems to be much smaller than the exploding dandelion seed of the possible branches set before me from this moment forward.

"Angels of Possibility"
So now, let's think of our bodies in the sixth dimension, which contains all possible timelines for our particular universe. Where is my sixth dimensional self the largest? If you think about it for a moment, you will see it is at the moment of conception. From there, the branching possibilities that will get me to some version of my adult self are exponentially larger than any time thereafter. This seems to relate to Terence McKenna's "timewave zero" concept, which suggests that novelty increases as the end of the universe approaches, but it is the mirror image at "right angles" to his idea: the possible cusps of change that an embryo or even a small child have before them are absolutely immense compared to the more limited subset that we have left to choose from by the time we are adults. Here is one of the more often-quoted paragraphs from my book:

"The beautiful blossoming potential we see in a newborn child is an immensely attractive thing. The angels of possibility that swirl around a toddler’s head can be breathtaking if we catch even a fleeting glimpse. And there is nothing as sad as the tragedy of a child who has been mistreated or abused, and whose life may never be the same because of it. Even from our limited window in the lower dimensions, it is easy for us to intuitively understand what is magical and wonderful about the promise of a child, a promise that is held within the sixth dimension."

Religious teachings which say we should approach the Lord as a little child resonate with this idea as well. That reverence, that sense of wonder, that appreciation of the novelty and the vast potential that are held in every instant of time, in every quark and neutrino, and in the spirit energy all around us is part of an awakening that all of us as adults yearn for. On the other hand, whether we are talking about the death of a spirit or the death of a physical body, what we are really talking about is what happens when those processes cease to be interested in "what happens next".

"And in The End..."
What does timelessness mean for me? Because time is an illusion, it means that once any of us breaks out of our physical reality, there we will find all the other branches of our sixth dimensional selves, waiting to greet us and compare notes on the journey, and see how everything fits together.

And that is what enjoying the journey should always be about.

Rob



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

Death?

Let's talk about death.

Seeing a vision of your own impending death is not something that should be shown to children until they realize that dying young is unusual, and that there are many times in your life when you will almost die but something will save you. Realizing this important fact should help a child to become more well-rounded and less fearful in their interactions with the world.

Still, whether we accept it or not, there is a part of each of us that eventually dies (and perhaps that part dies much too soon!). I’ve been told that in Disney cartoons, the only people who die are parents or predecessors: if this is true, Disney has been around for much too long for this to be an accident. Why would Disney choose this? The death of a loved one is something that everybody has to see eventually. By only showing people other than children dying in entertainment aimed at children, has Disney made a conscious decision to give their audience a way to start considering the possibility of death, without traumatizing them? All kids need to be taught a certain amount of caution, but has Disney deliberately made it their policy not to kill off the characters kids are most likely to personally identify with in a show? It would be interesting to know more about this.

Seeing a vision of an impending death of yourself or a loved one is potentially very useful because if the vision is far enough into the future then you can probably find a way to dodge every bullet and continue on – and continuing to be alive is one of the ways that you can continue to navigate the fifth/sixth dimensional matrix of the multiverse (my reference to dodging bullets and The Matrix is completely intentional here). Stories of near-death experiences are legendary: people in extraordinary moments like this sometimes talk about how time stretched and they were able to see everything crystal clear. As adults now, for each of us there will almost certainly be those crazy moments we can look back upon and see how we narrowly survived death (through luck, skill, the actions of others, doesn't matter what the circumstance might be). But of course, there must also always be the one time when you really do die, and one last time each of us may well see the elastic nature of our perception of time. That same “stretching” of time, I believe, has a lot more to do with the number of important cusps we are passing on our fourth dimensional timeline than most of us realize, but that’s a whole other discussion.

If a time traveler from the future appeared beside you now, and showed you the things you had to do to avoid your own impending death, wouldn't you want to take that person's advice? Again I am reminded of Al Gore's story, "it was like a man from the future came back to tell me about the bad things that were going to happen". Warnings from the future can come in many shapes and sizes. Dogs use well-developed senses like smell and hearing which are better at telling the future than the more immediate senses such as touch or taste - by the time you can touch or taste impending death, it is probably too late. If you can "smell trouble brewing", you stand a better chance of survival. Are dogs from a bit in our own future then? Sure, if you'd like to think of it that way. The early warning system that a dog can provide is not that different from Al Gore's man from the future: because dogs sometimes know when bad stuff is coming before the rest of us do. Being able to smell things or hear things that are further away in time and space than what we humans are capable of gives them that power.

Here is one of the more "out-there" concepts from my book: the miracle that we see as "life" is an interference pattern between the quantum wave function of the physical system and the systems of memes and spirit that occupy the more metaphysical world. Both of those systems can interact with each other to create the spark of life, and that spark of life is readily apparent to us when we look at living things or dead things:



This is a video of an interesting illusion of life that demonstrates in a simple way how such a complex result as life could really be nothing more than a moire pattern, a pattern of constructive interference. We see a bowl of corn starch mixed with a bit of water (which we can think of as the physical world) being vibrated by a specific frequency (which we can think of as the meme-system world). Our brains look at the resulting movement and see something that seems very much like life. Does the corn starch come alive? Of course not! But this demonstration is useful for helping to show us how two systems can have a simple interaction and begin to show us the behaviors that we know of as life.

At the end or the Cornstarch Monster video, when the vibration is removed, the appearance of life goes away. In the version of the ten dimensions I am advancing here, I would propose that the same thing is happening: when a person physically dies, those vibrations that were animating the body in the physical world could continue on (as ghosts, spirit guides, or the voices of the ancestors, or just shared memories and experiences from those left behind) or they could dissipate into a greater realm of memes and beliefs that I am proposing must be part of the tenth-dimensional framework we're imagining here.

Finally, just for fun, here's a new video for my song "Seven Levels". Lyrics to the song were posted in a previous blog.



A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7r2NJop0cs

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

The End of the World 1

I’d be curious to know how many cultures there are in the world where it’s appropriate to yell “shit!!” when one sees impending death approaching. The phrase might also have been “dirt!!”, or “dust!!”, or the more florid “oh no, the impending doom I see potentially laid before me is going to remove me from this life and return me to the eco-system as my component parts!!”… in other words, I am about to become shit.

Throughout history, there are always doomsayers who are predicting that we are all about to become shit. The end of the world is upon us! The end is nigh! Here’s what I say in the book about this idea:

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 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?
From the anthropic viewpoint, then, it seems we become like Schrödinger’s Cat, simultaneously alive and dead. The fact that we don’t actually perceive ourselves as being dead is because if we were dead we wouldn’t be here to ask the question.

Which brings us back to one of the reasons I first conceived of this model for Imagining the Tenth Dimension – as a child, I was trying to explain to myself why some moments in our lives seem so heavily significant, so deeply ingrained in our memories, while other moments quickly fade. I came to the conclusion that it was because those moments were when important “cusps” occurred: moments when our possible future paths diverged significantly. My friend Ron Scott told me of a moment he once had where he stood on an empty street, and absolutely nothing significant happened, but the moment seared itself into his memory. Perhaps, I would suggest, that was the moment where, in a number of the fifth-dimensional branches available to him at that instant, something bad happened… a drunk driver careened around the corner and mowed him down, or a nearby building exploded, or a satellite fell from the sky and took him out (a trivia moment for my fellow Northern Exposure fans).

Sure, everybody remembers where they were when they first heard about the planes striking the towers in New York. No question, on that day everyone on the planet had their fourth-dimensional timeline wrenched into a new direction from the available fifth-dimensional paths, and as a significant cusp moment each of us will remember that day for the rest of their lives. But each individual life has such moments, and important branches need not be nearly as devastating as that one. Why do so many of us like to look at the picture of the latest lottery or big game show winner? It’s not that different from craning your neck to see the car crash as we drive by - we recognize and are drawn to the cusp moments in other people’s lives. And perhaps some of our most cherished memories are ingrained because of the bad cusps which our fifth-and sixth-dimensional selves recognize that we managed to avoid in this particular version of reality.

This takes us back to the anthropic principle and the multiverse, as my version of the tenth dimension portrays these concepts. So now, here, for your viewing pleasure, is another video for my song “The Anthropic Viewpoint.”



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


On a side note, the Google Books listing for Imagining the Tenth Dimension has now become active. Clicking on this link allows you to search for any word or phrase that interests you within this book, or within all books participating in the Google Books program. Since the index for my book is also listed there, this gives people an easy way to browse. Finally, for anyone who is confused about my background or my intentions with this project, I would invite you to read the introduction to my blog, linked here, as well as the "About Me" over to the right of this blog.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob