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 the forum or readers of my blog 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 (as he originated the powerful concept of memes), 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 tenth dimension 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 an entry in the General Discussion area ("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.

Finally, here are two of my songs that are relevant to this discussion, both of which you can find the lyrics and videos for in The Songs section of the tenth dimension forum. 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.


Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Are we approaching some sort of global shift in consciousness, and could that be triggered from higher dimensions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe

2008 will be the tenth anniversary of the surprising announcement that the expansion of our universe is accelerating, an idea that seems counter-intuitive: if our universe started from high energy/high order (the big bang) and is moving towards low energy/low order (maximum entropy), that implies the image of a clockwork toy that is winding down, and that image does not fit with a universe of accelerating expansion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brane_cosmology

This month's Scientific American features a great article about "branes" and how the accelerating expansion of the universe may be proof of the existence of higher dimensions (I propose this as a possible explanation in my book as well). The article by Cliff Burgess and Fernando Quevedo, is called "The Great Cosmic Roller-Coaster Ride": please check it out.

2008 is also the tenth anniversary of Google, the search engine that has changed the way we interact with information more than any other invention in the history of mankind. "Don't be evil" is their unofficial motto, and that's a great one: the power of Google to inform and guide the general public's impression of what ideas are important and what ideas are popular is immense, and the on-going war from get-rich-quick scammers and spammers who try to manipulate Google's search results for their own profit is a huge part of that story.

The Imagining the Tenth Dimension way of visualizing reality can be used to tie all these ideas together. "Information Equals Reality" has been the prime focus for my blog entries in the last few weeks: this basic idea from quantum physics shows us how "everything fits together", and the desire to find a unity within a diverse range of ideas is what this project is all about.

http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2007/11/information-equals-reality.html

If Information Equals Reality, then absolutely everything about our reality can be thought of as patterns and shapes in the information that is the underlying fabric of quantum indeterminacy. Subatomic particles, fractals, life, consciousness, and our observed universe are all patterns that result from the flip-book of third-dimensional "now"s that we are stringing together from one frame of planck time after another.

In the Imagining the Tenth Dimension animation, sound is an important part of the information being conveyed: for instance, no matter what dimension we are exploring there is the arrow sound effect representing a particular point, a scrape indicating lines being constructed from joining one point to another, and the card-riffling sound effect to show that anything we think of as a continuous line is actually being constructed one point at a time, if we can only look close enough.

Burgess and Quevedo's article explains how our universe might be the result of the interactions of a three-dimensional brane with a seven-dimensional brane, with the ends of certain superstrings constrained by branes they are sliding around within. To use my flipbook analogy, then, we can see how the illusion of continuous reality that we are experiencing is actually a series of 3D states for our 3D universe interacting with a 3D brane, and each observed state is one planck length away from the next: each observed state can be thought of as a page in a gigantic cosmic flipbook. The flipbook from the big bang to "now" appears to be one specific set of flipbook pages (which we think of as the 4D line of time), but each "next available now" page that could possibly be selected for our flipbook comes from a fifth dimensional probability space, and the fifth dimension is where Kaluza proved our reality is defined. Every parallel universe that could have resulted from our big bang, whether it is observed or not, exists as a potential "flipbook" in the sixth dimension, and all of those possible states are locked together by the seventh-dimensional brane our universe is also interacting with.

The idea I advance of our universe's basic physical laws being a result of our specific "location" in the multiverse (as a "point" in the seventh dimension, or as a result of our interaction with a 7D brane), then, can be tied into this concept. As usual, though, I will take pains here to caution readers that I am not claiming my way of visualizing the dimensions is the explanation for string theory, any more than it is the explanation of Kabbalah, zero-point field theory, Japanese anime and videogame plots, metaphysics, or any of the other diverse range of belief systems which fans of the tenth dimension project keep pointing me towards as having interesting resonances with my way of visualizing reality. 
 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spime
From moment to moment, day to day, Google has been tracking the information that makes up our reality for almost ten years. Ideas that can be tracked across time and space are known as "memes", and physical objects that can be tracked across time and space are known as "spimes": which means that the flipbook of "now"s we have imagined from the big bang to today can be thought of as a spime that represents the story of our current universe from its inception, and that idea is a very powerful meme.

I've always marveled at the audacity of Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button: the idea that out of all the information in the world, Google might be able to show you the very best link of all still seems like mysterious magic to me, and I admit to never wanting to use that button because I like to have choices. Still, the Google toolbar's Suggestions window is a great example of the accelerating information space we live in now: try typing in just the letters of the alphabet one after another into that window, and read the top ten suggestions (there's that number again!) that come up for each. This gives you a snapshot in time of what is important, what is talked about, what is the dominant set of memes within our culture right now. Both memes and spimes are multi-dimensional shapes, each with a beginning and an ending someplace out there in the timeless multiverse.

The feeling that we live in times that are accelerating towards something larger, as a result of the rapidly accelerating meme-space we live in, might be connected to the same higher-dimensional effects that are causing our universe to accelerate its expansion as well: I believe both are eventually going to be shown to be the result and the proof of higher dimensions in the information that is creating our reality.

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton