The Tenth Dimension FAQ

Frequently asked questions about "Imagining the Tenth Dimension: a new of thinking about time and space":

1. Who is Rob Bryanton, and why did he create this project?
2. Aren't there really only 3, or 4, dimensions and the rest is unproven?
3. Why ten dimensions and not some other number?
4. Doesn't science (M Theory) say there are 11 dimensions?
5a. I've watched the animation but I still don't understand the logic, can you help?
5b. Doesn't the animation misrepresent what a 2D flatlander would see?
6. Is it really possible to "fold" a dimension, and what would happen if you did?
7. Isn't free will an illusion, and isn't everything about our universe inevitable?
8. Is this science? Philosophy? Both? Neither?
9. Does God/spirituality fit into this way of imagining reality?
10.Is this project about Kabbalah, chakras, meditation, hallucinogens, etc?
11. Is this project about memes, creativity, connections across time and space?
12. Is this project about consciousness and the quantum observer?
13. Is this project about the end of the world, the Mayan calendar, Kurzweil's Singularity etc?
14. What are the resources being provided with this project?
15. How can I find out more about the 26 songs Rob created for this project?

Please respond to this post with any important questions you think should be added to this FAQ list.

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


A link to this video can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySBaYMESb8o

FAQ 14 - What are the resources being provided with this project?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

14. What are the resources being provided with this project?

The forum for this project is at tenthdimension.com/forum
The most recent post to this blog is at tenthdimension.com/blog
The main address for this project is tenthdimension.com
The text only version of the animation is available at tenthdimension.com/textonly.php
The original animation can be viewed, downloaded, or embedded from revver.com
A page that links to the animation directly, and provides links to other content is here.
An annotated version of the animation with lots of video blog links is here on YouTube.
There's a continuously playlist of project related videos at tenthdimension.tv.
You can click here and here to read two short free-verse poems that sum this project up.
Click here for a blog entry listing hundreds of words and phrases that can be entered that bring up links related to this project as the top response (this list is, of course, a snapshot in time since google's responses change on an ongoing basis).
You can hear all 26 songs Rob created for this project here, which also connects you to discussions of how these songs fit it into this way of visualizing reality.
An archive listing and discussing the polls from the tenth dimension blog is found here.

This project is based upon a book by Rob Bryanton, "Imagining the Tenth Dimension - a new way of thinking about time and space".
You can search through the book using Google Book Search, or using Amazon.com's Search Inside This Book.
A summary of the chapters and their content can be found here.
A summary of reviews for the book can be found here, and more can be found here.
A pdf of the review of the book by Tom Huston of What is Enlightenment? magazine can be donwnloaded here, or viewed at the What Is Enlightenment? site here.

There are 26 songs associated with this project. Videos for those songs, as well as numerous video blogs by Rob Bryanton can viewed at Rob's channel on Youtube.
These songs, and others by Rob Bryanton, can also be purchased at amiestreet.com
The book, a high quality version of the animation in flash and quicktime, and the songs are all available for download under a Creative Commons license at tenthdimension.com/digital
Also available there are the book in Audiobook format, as well as a downloadable pdf.
Hard cover and soft cover versions of the book as well as Tenth Dimension T-shirts are available here.
Gevin Giorbran's wonderful book Everything Forever is also available at the store.
These books are also available for purchase through your local Amazon and other online booksellers.
The followup to Imagining the Tenth Dimension is called "O is for Omniverse", go to omniverse.tv for more about this exciting new project.

FAQ 13 - Is this about the end of the world, the Mayan Calendar, Kurzweil's Singularity?

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13. Is this project about the end of the world, the Mayan calendar, Kurzweil's Singularity, etc.?

Well, indirectly, yes, but this is not the prime focus of the project. If we are really acknowledging the existence of a multiverse of universes, and a spacetime tree of different probabilistic outcomes creating parallel versions of our own universe, then it must stand to reason that throughout history there will be people who have made predictions that in other versions of reality came true. Which also means that we can't discount the possibility that some portion, no matter how small, of the predictions that are being made right now could also come true at some time in the future branches of the spacetime tree that our observed reality ends up being upon.
Once we've seen a major prediction not come true (Y2K, for instance), some of us can become dismissive of all such predictions (whether those predictions be good or bad). Imagining the parallel universes of possible outcomes that are coming towards us in our probability space means that we have to consider each prediction about the future on its own merits.
Here are some blog entries about these ideas:

The End of the World
Death?
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains

While persons promoting the Mayan Calendar beliefs, or Ray Kurzweil and his predicted coming Singularity, are not talking about the destruction of the world, they are talking about an end to times as we know them, and a shift to some new mode of existence for our world. Here's one of the sections from the book where I deal with the subject of predictions:

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

FAQ 12 - Is this about consciousness and the quantum observer?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

12. Is this project about consciousness and the role of the quantum observer?

Absolutely! Now that famed physicist Anton Zeilinger's experiments in Austria are proving that "realism" does not exist - in other words, the universe really is being created by observation, this project is more relevant than ever: read about Zeilinger's work in Local Realism Bites the Dust. Physicist Sean Carroll's ideas about an equilibrium state which exists "outside of time" is also clearly related to this, read about Dr. Carroll's theories in Time in Either Direction. In the animation, the image of a person viewing one part of the indeterminate waveform to collapse (or more correctly, to observe) the version of reality they are in is key to this discussion. But there is much more to it than that. Here are some blog entries discussing these ideas:

John Wheeler and Digital Physics
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
Boredom and Consciousness Part One
Boredom and Consciousness Part Two
Boredom and Consciousness Part Three
Infinity and the Boltzmann Brains
Disorders of the Mind
Constructive Interference
The Bicameral Mind
Seeing Eye to Eye
Conspiracies and Quantum Mechanics
See No Future
What Do You Want to Change?
I Remember Flying
Addictive Personality

FAQ 11 - Is this about memes, creativity, connections?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

11. Is this project about memes, creativity, connections across time and space?

No question! Here are some blog entries that discuss this set of ideas:

I Know You, You Know Me
Collective Intelligence, Cognitive Surplus, Chaos
The Geometry of Music
Music and the Dance of Creativity
The Universe as a Song
Connections
Intuition
YouTube and Conceptual Framing
Memes / Tag Clouds / Spimes
Spirituality, Connections, and the Tenth Dimension
Selfish Genes and Selfish Memes
Facebook and Secret Societies
Information Equals Reality
Visualizations
Google, Memes, and Randomness

FAQ 10 - Is this about Kabbalah, chakras, meditation, hallucinogens?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

10. Is this project about Kabbalah, chakras, meditation, hallucinogens, etc.?

Where Are You?
Jake Kotze and Mystical Numbers
David Jay Brown and Psychedelics
The Shaman
Modern Shamans
You are Me and We are All Together
Nassim Haramein
Jumping Jesus
Placebos and Nocebos
Song 16 of 26 - Turquoise and White (a song about meditation and positive visualizations)
Song 2 of 26 - Seven Levels (a song about the interesting connections to the number seven)

This was one of the surprising outcomes of this project for me: I'm no expert on these ideas, but a number of visitors to the tenth dimension forum and my channel on youtube have written in to say they see strong connections between some of the items on the list above and my way of visualizing reality. For a project that is trying to find a central meeting point between science and philosophy, physics and spirituality, this may not seem like a surprising outcome, but the breadth of the different belief systems that people have said they see connections to is a thrill. Here are some blog entries about this:

Vibrations
Tuning Into Reality
Crossing Your Arms to Change Your Trajectory
Boredom and Consciousness Part Three

You might also be interested in the "Altered States" area of the tenth dimension forum. And Tom Huston's article about this project in What Is Enlightenment magazine also touches upon these ideas, you can view a pdf of that article by clicking here.

FAQ 9 - Does God and spirituality fit into this?

(Click here for the complete Imagining the Tenth Dimension FAQ list)

9. Does God/spirituality fit into this way of imagining the dimensions?

Talk about a hot button issue! In the tenth dimension forum, questions surrounding God have generated hundreds of posts. But this is also the source of division in this project: some people become immediately suspicious when they see a scientific discussion that acknowledges the possibility of spirit, and some religious people assume that this project must be atheistic because it talks about science.

The goal of this project is to come up with a way to meet in the middle, and that is both its strength and its achilles heel. Luckily, there are a growing number of people in the world who are willing to discuss the middle ground this project is exploring: where science is revealing the truth about the nature of our reality, and that truth has to acknowledge the role of consciousness, creativity and free will.

Here are some blog entries discussing various ideas surrounding this topic:
What's Around the Corner
I Know You, You Know Me
God 2.0
Is God in the Seventh Dimension?
God? Or the Multiverse?
Gevin Giorbran - Gone But Not Forgotten
The Stream
Beer and Miracles
Happy Birthday Paul

Tom Huston's article about this project in What Is Enlightenment? magazine also does a good job of exploring the spiritual side of this project, you can view a pdf of that article by clicking here. And here is an interview where Tom discusses these ideas with me at some length.

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