Polls Archive 34 - God? Or the Multiverse?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unlikely Events and Timelessness:

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

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

Daily Parrying:

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

I Know You, You Know Me:

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

You are Me and We are All Together:

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

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

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

God 2.0:

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

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

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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

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

Is God in the Seventh Dimension?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Facebook and Secret Societies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

and also...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, I believe it’s true


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeClGTuhCy4

My mom passed away this past week, thank you all for your prayers and best wishes. I'm so very happy to be able to say that she slipped away peacefully and I was holding her hand as she passed. A permanent memorial to mom can be found at nora-bryanton.last-memories.com .

What happens to us when we die? Does it all just end, or does some part carry on? I have my own firm beliefs on this, which I discuss in my book, and at the tenthdimension forum on a regular basis.

My song "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" is one of the 26 songs found at the end of my book. It was originally written as I contemplated my own death, but it has been on my mind as family and friends gathered to pay their last respects to mom. Here are the lyrics:

NOW I LAY ME DOWN TO SLEEP
music and lyrics (c) Rob Bryanton (SOCAN)

Now I lay me down to sleep
To rest my weary head
If I should die in slumber deep
Remember what I said

It’s not the end of the world
It’s not the end of the dream
It’s just the end of a body
Not the end of a soul

So what am I so afraid of?
A little bit of sorrow?
It all continues flowing on
The past into tomorrow

Now I lay me down to sleep
My journey finally through
A list of things undone, unsaid
So much left to do

So what am I so afraid of?
The thought that this has ended?
Did I try my best to be
The person I intended?

It’s not the end of the world
It’s not the end of the dream
It’s just the end of a chapter
Turn the page and move on

Now I lay me down to sleep
To rest my weary head
If I should die in slumber deep
Remember what I said


Enjoy the journey,

Rob

Everything Fits Together in the Zero at the End

The poll is now ended and the results are in. 33% per cent say Imagining the Tenth Dimension's about physics, 20% say it's about philosophy, and 46% picked my personal fave, "all of the above". Fantastic! Great to know how many people are following the direction we're headed here.

Everything fits together in the zero physicists are now proving we are heading towards. Understanding the relationship between probability space and the physical realities each of us have come to exist within has some very profound implications... and the moral questions raised are not always comfortable ones to deal with.

There is good news at the end though: the fact you are here now means there are parts of you that are here forever, in the timelessness that most physicists agree our reality is carved out from. I have been using Julian Jaynes's marvelous ideas to show an important insight into all of this: the trick is to tune into those integrated bicameral-mind moments where you get your narrator voice to shut up for a sec and just "be". That's when you become more productive, more capable, and more at peace with the observer that is "you" within the fifth dimension. You also become more open to those forces from the future that are warning you about what's coming right at this very instant. Why is a troubled, negative mind in constant chaotic turmoil? And why, on the other hand, are those zen moments of ancient wisdom so clearly tied into the positive side of all this? Once you enter the mindset of timelessness, you are centred back on the unity of the observer and the observed, and you connect to the future that already exists for all of us as the goal we know we are headed towards.

Is this wacky set of ideas actually reflected in hard science? The jury's still out, but that's where I believe we're headed. Does this make it any less about eternal truths than any other piece of art or Joseph-Cambpell-sized meme-shapes in the higher dimensions? If reality and information are interchangeable concepts, then there is no reason that both ways of thinking shouldn't align out there in the meme-space and spime-space that are both so clearly part of that duality of information/reality we exist within.

Does that make you, or me, an idea in the Mind of God? Learning not to be afraid of that idea has been a hard journey for twentieth-century science. Think of the "wacky" ideas from the last hundred years which physics and cosmology have come to accept. Think of how many of these have been portrayed as "too strange to imagine" by the general press. Why is it not public knowledge that Kaluza proved and Einstein eventually agreed that our reality exists in the fifth, not the fourth dimension? Why is the zero-one-both state of subatomic particles portrayed as being so unimaginable, when seeing those three choices as a positive spin and a negative spin pushing against each other in the fifth dimension (the place where both can exist simultaneously) is really not that hard to do?

Why has there not been more made of the accelerated-expansion universe that Gevin Giorbran predicted years before it was observed? Because there are spiritual ramifications to this idea, and historically there has been an ingrained mistrust of anything spiritual amongst many of science's established edifices. Thankfully, that era is coming to an end now, if only because there are scientists now willing to accept that both viewpoints can co-exist without either denying the validity of the other.

Our universe is not without hope for the future, because our ultimate end is not a meaningless heat death. Attitude affects outcome, and being interested in "what happens next" is key. As negative forces pushing against positive forces create patterns in possibility space, grouping and symmetry give us fractals and fads, great and small truths, and life itself within the multiverse.

In fact, that future is what draws each of us forward right now: towards symmetry, the perfect balance, the beautiful but once much-maligned zero. If you've got all that straight in your head, then welcome to the tenth dimension! We've been waiting for you.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Just Ten Things

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Physics or Philosophy?

That's this week's poll question, folks: "Is Imagining the Tenth Dimension about Physics or Philosophy? Or both?".

"Or neither?", some might suggest, should be the fourth answer, but I would argue that quantum mechanics tells us that's the same thing as "both". The simultaneous yes/no that we spring from in the "outside the system" realm of indeterminacy may sound like it has a zen-like yin/yang to it, but it can also be described thusly: "both the yes and no occur, and we have no way to know this information any more than that". This is one of the concepts explained so well in Seth Lloyd's book, "Programming the Universe": Seth is one of the pioneers in quantum computing. Is the universe really just a giant quantum computer, processing the information that is reality? I believe my proposed framework for imagining reality is very compatible with this idea.

Which gets to the basic question: is Imagining the Tenth Dimension a useful tool for helping to envision the nature of reality, even though it was created by someone who's not a physicist, and is not even pretending to be one?

Here's the thing: of course there are going to be other ways of imagining reality which happen to agree with physics! It would be far far stranger if there weren't other ways that science and art, or cosmology and philosophy/spirituality happened to agree on things that are essentially true about where our reality comes from and why we're here.

People from an astonishingly diverse range of backgrounds, then, who are drawn to the Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation and my book tell me they recognize things they know are essentially true, and this is what connects all of the fans of this project together. Today (Monday, July 23rd '07) we started a new experiment: the Live Chat window at the tenth dimension site now also has a Live Video feed within it, where I can converse with people in real time. A recording of today's first live camera feed can be found here, and a transcript of the text chat portion can be found here. This is just the beginnings of an experiment, but it shows lots of promise. Hey, new experiences are what life's all about!

A couple of weeks ago I had a new and humbling experience with a faith healer named Jason, who is an old friend who has now become a minister: we laid hands on my mom (thank you everyone for your prayers and good wishes), he prayed and sang, and mom cried and laughed at the same time at the power she felt pulsing into her from his hand on her. "A beautiful expression of the immense power of positive visualization, and one of the best parts about any faith-based belief system" was probably how I would have eventually filed the experience away. But then something changed the experience for me.

I was talking to my mom later that evening, who was still feeling energized by the session - and I remarked that I could see that as soon as Jason laid his hand on her forehead we could all see had an immediate and intense reaction. "Oh no, Robbie", says she, "it wasn't that hand, it was the other one, down in the middle of my back." Well, without even thinking about it I immediately told her the truth: that wasn't Jason's hand in the middle of her back, because that's where my hand was.

What can I say? Much as my mom has loved the occasional back rub over the last few months, there's never been a time I've put my hand on her back and she burst into tears at the beautiful and powerful energy she felt. Which leads me to my next physics/philosophy/all-of-the-above idea. Just for fun, let's try to imagine Jesus now as being an aspect of a powerful meme, a shape in the ninth dimension, that is carved out from the indeterminate yes/no choices of the information vs. reality realm the big bang has divided out for us down here in the fifth dimension. Does this smack of the dangerous blending of science and religion that Richard Dawkins has been trying to eliminate?

I am a huge Richard Dawkins fan, and I am a firm believer in our existence being the result of the selfish genes and the selfish memes that got us here today. But by keeping his focus so narrow on science and science alone, Mr. Dawkins runs a risk: deny that there is a spiritual aspect to our reality which is also true, and you give the impression that you believe there is no morality to our existence, no right or wrong.

Find the simultaneous yes/no and quantum mechanics tells you you've found the underlying truth about our existence. And I believe that leaves room for some optimism that we are actually headed towards something good within the timeless multiverse my animation portrays. Is that such a bad thing to imagine?

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Gravity and Light

In an ideal world, every interface should be able to be boiled down to a simple interplay between only two currently available choices, so that even a very limited input device (one operated by a physically challenged person, for instance) can navigate, right from the very first yes or no. Finding what the most basic choice is can be the hardest part of designing an interface!

Some people are not comfortable with the idea of "Thoughts Become Things", because it feels so counter-intuitive to the observed physicality we see around us. Is everything just vibrations and constructive interference patterns? Is a person's consciousness and our physical reality all just a reflection of a complex vibration across the dimensions? In the model proposed in "Imagining the Tenth Dimension", we begin by talking about the geometric concept of a point. Later in the book, it becomes clear that this "starting point" can be in any dimension we choose to imagine it (if it's in the third dimension it could be at position x,y,z; in the seventh dimension it could be at position t,u,v,w,x,y,z; and so on). If the tenth dimension encompasses all aspects of indeterminacy, then no matter which of the nine dimensions you choose to place that first "point", its position collapses out a particular reality from the multiverse... in other words, it becomes the first yes/no, and by its selection it is already reducing the available options to a certain subset of the indeterminate whole.

I would argue that no matter what dimension you place that first point, the first thing that point defines is the value (or range of values) for gravity in the universe (or universes) that you are selecting. Physicists tell us that gravity is the only force that travels across all dimensions. Therefore, even if the information is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, any reality (ours included) can't have an indeterminate value for gravity. What do I mean when I say this information could be irrelevant? Well, for instance, if I define a set of co-ordinates in the third dimension to create a cube, I can determine the volume of that cube. Whether that cube exists in our universe or in some other universe with a different value for gravity, I can still determine its volume. But as soon as I am imagining a cube that physically exists, I am defining it as being in a real three-dimensional universe, which means that even though I am only assigning the x,y,z co-ordinates and values for this cube, its existence as a real object necessitates that it also be part of an implied subset drawn from the wave of quantum indeterminacy: a reality defined from the ninth down to the first dimensions. If gravity is everywhere, then any subset of reality must be limiting the available choices for gravity.

What if the point I'm thinking about is in the seventh through ninth dimensions? Then we can imagine our point, because it is of indeterminate size, as encompassing multiple values for gravity. Whether it would actually be possible to create a three-dimensional reality from a seventh-dimensional point encompassing a range of values for gravity is a science fiction question, a challenge for the imagination.

The second thing that can be locked in is the value for how close one point can be to the next in the reality we are choosing to examine. For our universe, this value is known as the planck length, and its value tells us why nothing in our universe can travel faster than the speed of light, and why our reality breaks down into quantum indeterminacy when we try to examine things that are closer to each other than the planck length - it's because "time" is not continuous, it is granular. Time gives us this illusion of being a continuous fourth-dimensional line, but it's actually being created by a series of three-dimensional points each representing our universe in a particular state-space, and each of those points is one planck length away from the next. While it's entirely possible to imagine a universe constructed from points that are closer together or further apart than the one we live in, they would be part of some other subset of the multiverse.

But how can something as complex as physical reality be boiled down to just a vibration across the dimensions? Here's an analogy: think about a sound wave. Using the interplay of only two factors, amplitude and frequency, we can create something as simple as a sine wave, or as harmonically complex as the human voice, or as dynamic as a thunderstorm. In the digital realm, the degree of accuracy with which a sound can be represented is reflected by the number of bits used to represent the amplitude, and the sampling rate used to represent the frequency. Once the bits and sampling rate are high enough (and any audio geek will tell you these numbers should therefore be much higher than the 16 bits and 44.1K sample rate of a CD), any sound imaginable can be properly represented.

The speed of light, then, shows us the "sample rate" for our universe, which determines what frequencies can be properly represented in the waveform of our physical reality. As we approach the speed of light or the planck length, reality breaks down, it can no longer be properly represented.

Consciousness, in its own way, can be boiled down to an interplay between gravity and light, but consciousness is not confined to the physical world, so those words can easily be used metaphorically. Still, an idea can have a certain gravity (or lack thereof), and a frequency (or mix of multiple frequencies) which, like the amplitude and frequency of any other waveform, allows us to create any idea imaginable. In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, I argue that the clouds of memes and spirit that exist across time are part of what we take on to become a unique personality, and because those factors are not rooted in the limited physical realm, they can be transmitted across generations, and also be responsible for simultaneous inspiration or the sudden ascendency of new memes. The biggest-picture-of-all memes which have existed since the beginning of our universe have such a long waveform that they could easily be represented by a much lower sample rate - but since time is really an illusion, what we are really talking about here is just another way of viewing our slice of the multiverse.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob

P.S. - the new "Utopia" issue of What Is Enlightenment? magazine is now hitting the newsstands. Please flip to page 26 and read the fantastic article by Senior Associate Editor Tom Huston about the Imagining the Tenth Dimension project.



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



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



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



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

Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension

This week an excerpt from chapter three of my book was released in the online magazine CRAM, check it out.

The very first issue of this magazine caught my eye when I saw the following three tidbits at the top of the very first page:
“+ About 2500 people in the United States have the last name Cram, accounting for .001% of last names. + Card Random Access Memory (C.R.A.M.) was a type of magnetic storage device used in the early 1960’s. + The 1940 twelve-inch Cram’s Terrestrial Illuminated Glass Globe is notable for a few reasons…”

Aha!, I said to myself. It’s clear to me that this magazine understands the points I have been making with the tenth dimension project: that there are systems of belief, collections of memes, and shared consensual reality that connect us all across time and space. Those 2500 people with the last name CRAM, even though they represent only .001% of the last names in the US, would represent a random access database that would be surprisingly representative of the many ways of looking at the world that all of us share, and would also allow us to quickly find some of those in the world who have unique points of view.

I’ll be the first to admit that I may have been reading more into the connections between those three tidbits than was intended by the editors of Cram. But I stand by the interpretation: as this project (the 11-minute animation, the website, the book, the songs, the videos, and this blog) have found their way into the world, I am continually surprised at the new connections people find to my way of imagining the ten dimensions and their own systems of belief.

In the past week I have been contacted by a number of people with strong Christian beliefs, thanking me for giving them a way to describe a reality which seems connected to science and cosmology but leaves room for there to be creator, or a force in the world that is working towards an ultimately positive outcome. In the book I approach this idea several different ways – from the anthropic viewpoint, our universe seems to have already been selected from a multiverse of universes, the vast majority of which would have been inhospitable to life as we know it. From the role of the quantum observer collapsing/observing reality from an indeterminate wave of possibilities, we already seem to be on a trajectory established at the big bang which is moving us along on a timeline towards a version of our universe which will last much longer than the many less stable configurations which could have been selected. I also touch on ideas of how the voices of conscience, intuition, memories of loved ones, storytelling from previous generations, and more metaphysical manifestations such as ghosts or angels, spirit guides and even alien presences could all be possible examples of how a system of beliefs and memes work “behind the scenes”, so to speak, to help define our consensual reality.

What I try to be very careful to do in the book is not force one way of interpreting all this upon the reader: whether one chooses to believe in a Creator who drives this whole impossibly complex mechanism forward, or if one believes in a Blind Watchmaker of chance and natural selection, what we our now experiencing as our reality is the same. As I say in Chapter Two:

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


There are many more interpretations of my way of imagining the dimensions which people have brought to me – I was immediately surprised, for instance, at the number of people who had taken various hallucinogens and felt that what they had seen and experienced could be interpreted through the filter of what I’m presenting. As I’ve said a number of times in the tenth dimension forum, I don’t have any experience with hallucinogens myself, but I find such suggestions fascinating.

In the past week I’ve also received several emails from people convinced that the end of the world is coming in 2012, another topic I explore in the book. In the book I said that I expect that this is a rising tide of belief that will become increasingly popular over the next few years. The End of the World is also one of the 26 songs I have written for this project, and this idea will no doubt be a recurring theme in future blogs.

I should also point out that the Amazon “Search Inside this Book” function is now activated for my book, so that any ideas explored in the blog can also now be typed into Amazon’s search function to read excerpts from the book. Referencing the Index for the book will also provide you with search terms for further exploration.

Enjoy the journey!

Rob