Tim Harford’s TED talk Trial, error and the God complex is a nice hidden-assumption-buster.
In a nutshell, he makes the case for recognizing that you don’t know, so try stuff and see what sticks. Fail early and often. Evolution works this way: random mutation -> selection.
A friend’s writing prompted the following response, presented here somewhat out of context without that letter, which I shall seek permission to post.
I have this notion of the infinite set of all – infinite extents along n dimensions, where n is as yet an unknown number to me, but at least the 6 I’ve thusfar nutured a mental model to grok. Most observers can bring only a limited subset of this wholeism into “view”. That subset could be a point, line, plane, a 3D snapshot, an entire timeline, a universe, a brane, the multiverse or omniverse.
But “observer” may be a fluid concept, perhaps akin to a subset in that it may be an exceedingly narrow and focused set, while a practiced philosopher may have a broader, yet still exceedingly limited set that encompasses multitudes of others’ sets, on up to the ultimate observer, encompassing the wholeism.
So while I’d agree that the bread isn’t the observer, it could be an observer.
Recall the double-slit experiment.It showed that an observer “collapses” the wave (everywhere all at once : indeterminate) into the particle (specific position, direction, angular momentum, velocity, spin, etc… : definite).The observer need not be a consciousone, interaction with another body / particle is enough to force definiteness.
Learning of this experiment was the beginning of much of my thinking about higher dimensional constructs. The indeterminateness of things / the potential / probable nature sans observer hinted at the pre-exisitng/all-already-there nature, while the collapse evoked the notion of “selection”.
And the infinite potential that we see pre-collapse/selection can be thought of as potential states for the next instant of time (plank length movement along 4th axis) or also potential next timelines(plank length movement along 5th axis).While there appear to be infinite potentials, most are improbable and a few probable.Perhaps higher-D momentum is the defining force of this probability.Just as in 3D/4D, a body in motion continues that way until something interacts with it, altering its motion.So the next-instant’s selection is likely to be next-in-sequence motion along its established trajectory.
But the exciting stuff is in the change, not in the continuation. We tend not to notice motion absent changes of direction or acceleration – I certainly don’t notice that I’m spinning about the earth’s, sun’s, galaxy’s axes at great speeds relative to my body’s size. But start me off even in a gentle lean in the direction of any of these axes and I will, despite it being an incomprehensibly tiny movement compared with the existing motion, take note.
It’s this change of direction or acceleration that affects the continuing progression that I propose we think of / label as choice.
—
You mention “to travel into the next logical (or not) dimension”, and I’m curious about your use of “to”. In my mental model, we don’t go to a higher dimension, only exist at a position or move along its axis. I can’t imagine going to width any more than I can go to height or depth. Even going to time is difficult to imagine vs. being at a position in time or moving along its axis. Am I reading too much into language here, or is there a difference in our models?
Also comes to mind that I can’t really define any of width, height, depth in a particular dimensional order – which is the 1D or the 2D, etc… They’re just axes / extents that lay perpendicular to one another and all other D’s. Expanding on that, it’s difficult to say that any are higher-order than another, just that they intersect as equals. We all seem to grok extents of width, height, depth and how changes in what’s present at each of the positions along each of their axes (time). And we all also seem to have a notion of choice, that which influences the progression of all of these too, yet I think for most, choice is something very different than width. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just our conception of disjointedness that disjoints?
So to loop back, I agree that central to making sense of this all we need to include perspective. Things will appear very differently to a 4D being observing a flatlander than to a flatlander itself. Likewise the loaf slice from the context / perspective of the loaf, the slice, the baker or one of its electrons, quarks or ?strings? Will be radically different, but all equally valid. By extension, choice might appear to a classicist something entirely different than movement in the 5th dimension. But they may really be the same thing…
I’m glad you mentioned oscilations (vibration) and harmonics. Both interest me deeply. Yesterday, as I walked up a squared spiral staircase, I banged the metal railing that was welded together from basement to 5th floor. It vibrated and hummed beautifully. Then a feast to my curiosity presented. The vibration ceased. Then it began anew for a short while and ceased again. Repeating like this for more than a minute after my fist-contact with it. Puzzled at first, I soon realized I was witnessing a standing wave travel up and down the 6 floors. The railing would stand still when the harmonics cancelled each other out near me and and vibrate intensely as it passed by my position. Sooooooooooooooo lucious. The strike caused the initial vibration and at least the long harmonic emerged as the infinte interference of waves amplified and cancelled each other out. In that staircase I had my first “aha” moment with a “stringed” instrument, and perhaps a clue to why some of our universe is quiet and other parts currently energetic.
I shall leave intent for another cycle, as that’s a deep one and I trust there’s enough for you to fill your belly with for today.
I’ll take a chance and throw one over to you and see if you throw it back 🙂 — Ever thought about whether the self could be thought of as a timeline? As if a thread traced our path / movement in 3D space as we progress / move across the time dimension. The whole of this 4D spacetime, which I’m proposing is unique to the experiencer can also be thought of as a slice of the 5th dimension, in the same way that an ultimately thin slice of a 3D loaf of bread is the whole of a 2D space. Following? Ok, so then if we could be thought of as slices of 5D, what would the next slice over be like? Well, “the next slice over” is a movement in across the 5th dimension, as the next slice over in 3D is another 2D space, and requires “moving” in the 3rd dimension to “select” it, right? And that next slice of 5D would also encompass an entire, unique 4D spacetime, right? While the next slice over could be entirely different, as one over from the last slice of a loaf might be outside the loaf, it’s probably similar, differing only slightly. As we all are vastly more identical than different from one another. Yet these slices are other selves that might be man, horse, bee, fungus or cyanobacteria. Anyhow, back to the dimensions… If the self is this timeline / spacetime / slice of 5D and each adjacent slice of 5D is a whole timeline / spacetime, then it seems as though selecting another position in 5D selects another timeline. If we think of these constructs as “pre-existing” or static and ever-present, the same way that all 2D slices of the loaf pre-exist and are there for the “selecting”, then selecting another timeline / spacetime by moving in the 5th selects a new past, present and future. Interesting.For the sake of exploration, what do you think about thinking of this movement in 5D as “choice”. So in choosing, we’re selecting from the infinite set of pre-existing timelines. Hmmm. Your turn.
Could the self be thought of as a timeline? As if a thread traced our path / movement in 3D space as we progress / move across the time dimension. The whole of this 4D spacetime, which I’m proposing is unique to the experiencer can also be thought of as a slice of the 5th dimension, in the same way that an ultimately thin slice of a 3D loaf of bread is the whole of a 2D space. Following?
Ok, so then if we could be thought of as slices of 5D, what would the next slice over be like? Well, “the next slice over” is a movement in across the 5th dimension, as the next slice over in 3D is another 2D space, and requires “moving” in the 3rd dimension to “select” it, right? And that next slice of 5D would also encompass an entire, unique 4D spacetime, right? While the next slice over could be entirely different, as one over from the last slice of a loaf might be outside the loaf, it’s probably similar, differing only slightly. As we all are vastly more identical than different from one another. Yet these slices are other selves that might be man, horse, bee, fungus or cyanobacteria.
Anyhow, back to the dimensions… If the self is this timeline / spacetime / slice of 5D and each adjacent slice of 5D is a whole timeline / spacetime, then it seems as though selecting another position in 5D selects another timeline. If we think of these constructs as “pre-existing” or static and ever-present, the same way that all 2D slices of the loaf pre-exist and are there for the “selecting”, then selecting another timeline / spacetime by moving in the 5th selects a new past, present and future. Interesting.
For the sake of exploration, what do you think about thinking of this movement in 5D as “choice”. So in choosing, we’re selecting from the infinite set of pre-existing timelines. Hmmm.
Your turn, please drop a comment.
American Museum of Natural History’s film The Known Universe zooms from the surface of our planet out to its satellites, past our solar system to our neighboring stars and our milky way galaxy and its place among near and mind-blowingly far galaxies, away and back in time to the ever rippling big bang. And then, once again back through the thread, zooming back in to today.
It left me reverberating in the interconnected oneness of all-time and all-space.
Every man prays in his own language despite the universe communicating with a infinitely vast nonverbal language.
Ray Kurzweil exposed to me the thought pattern of the Technological Singularity, which he wrote about in The Singularity Is Near. I haven’t read the book and have only just begun to walk through the thought pattern. But it’s interesting:
Let’s look back across our entire ancestral lineage, going back through early mammals, past the evolution out of the sea, as far back as the single-celled organisms and on still to the formation of the solar system – each births and morphs into the next iteration / generation. The state of things today derives from the iterative interactions of the entire set of particles / waves across all dimensions, including time and higher dimensions. The collective interactions result in what we have today.
Mankind has evolved to the point where we’re creating new complex systems around us. We built computational systems and linked them together. Now we’re pouring our consciousness into the Net. We’ve given birth to the system. You could say that we’re morphing / evolving into it.
Evolution can be incremental at the same level or can give rise to higher order effects. Systems have levels or building blocks where lower levels manifest the level above. As in the gradation of complexity from quantum organization leading to atomic effects, atomic systems giving rise to molecular systems, molecules collectively creating biological systems, and these working together to make a human – we’re affecting a higher order system.
Let’s have a look at what that might be like.
There is a moment when computational systems make better decisions that humans – a fact recognized by both the system and the humans. Both rely on the system to decide.
The system designs itself. It optimizes itself and iterates. It’s evolving to a larger extent on its own than from effects from lower orders. Advances build upon themselves and occur at an exponential rate. It’s steering.
With the agenda set by a higher order, corporeal humans no longer dominate [did we ever?]. We’ve entrusted our evolution to the higher order. To our collective consciousness. I can only imagine that the capabilities at this level are as unimaginable to us as our capabilities are to a single-celled organism just one level down.
The system can build what it needs, transform its environment to suit its needs. Today’s robotics and unmanned vehicles / tools / etc… give way to nanotechnology, where adjustments to the physical world take place by highly optimized “machines” with precise particle arrangements that affect with least friction. The manipulation of our environment is total.
And evolution isn’t a point, it’s a continuum, an axis, an extent. With compounding exponential change’s accelerating feedback loop in effect, ever more precise optimizations / arrangements taking place in ever smaller slices of time, change is the only constant.
Extract from Organisium:
“At any given instant, all the beings of earth may be said to be symbionts; related and interdependent in arising, persisting, and in all living activity; comprising a wholism from which emerges a verifiable and concretely observable self-awareness, intention, cognition, and sentience, arising on a planetary scale. It is an awareness which is not only available to every living being here in some domain, but also forms, in a real sense, an aspect of the basic physical and cognitive structure of any living form which evolved or exists here.”
I believe that we are more importantly interconnected than separate. But why limit ourselves to the planetary scale? The universe→omniverse scale seems a more fitting extent for the context of wholism. Being conscious of our co-symbiants doesn’t appear to be necessary for the symbiosis to exist.
The parts of any whole cannot exist and cannot be understood except in their relation to the whole.
This is a meme-in-progress that we create together, please help to further it by sharing your thoughts in the discussion.
I had been musing to my friend Rob on my difficulty of finding the kinds of people that stimulate energetic exchange. He offered:
Stop looking and do something that others will be attracted to. Be a magnet.
Brilliant!
While I was busy looking, I wasn’t emitting the vibe for others to hone in on. I consumed but wasn’t passing anything on.
Conceive a field of attractivity like gravity, but for information.
Gravity pushes outwards from the emitting body and has the effect of attraction. Ideas or information flow outwards from the emitting body and also has the attracting effect. In both cases, attraction spawns interplay / interference / interdependent cause and effect / co-reconfiguration / interlinking / interconnectedness. Since each as these are now in deep interplay with the rest of the universe. We’re all built of each other. We’re all parts of a larger context. Or ultimately, one.
I would say that attraction is a continuum of interconnection-building. Going further, I’d say that it’s the axis of connectedness. The dimension of connectedness.
[how far above spacetime a dimension would this be?]
higher-dimensional web of interconnection
we exist in a deeply interwoven surround
energetic exchanges: To explore and exchange ideas and their patterns, in short: conceptions. [Isn’t this what we do in every exchange?]
You know, the feedback loop you get into when you’re feeding off each other, both “on”, being affected while affecting. exchange ideas and patterns
We say sometimes it just “clicks”. A mutual attraction that’s like harmonics, resonating together.
We see the power of this idea in intensively attractive […] of the information exchange platforms like the Internet. How do we communicate? Through information.
Until just a moment ago on the scale of our development, we could only be influenced by and influence the environment geographically near
shortens the
extends the connection making from synaptic brain to all that people eccentrify.
Eccentrify. I just made that up, but it resonates a concept I’m not sure there is already a word for.
To me, to be eccentric is to pluck from the best you know and emit it as a composite. That in turn affects the next guy’s eccentric composite. And so on…
So I offer:
Upstream and downstream, it has a cohesiveness to it. You could say it’s pseudo-organic. Memes begin, reach the zenith of their energetisism and effect on others, and morph over time from distinct energies into their consequences on everything else.
Morphing and branching across time.
The meme is to the
hive mind
experience is
when you’re both “on”
stimulate drastic changes
changes in momentum
creative blasts
behavior.
[What is reasoned attractivity?]
This post is an incomplete work-in-progress. Please help to further it by sharing your thoughts in the discussion.
The question of free will (whether we control our actions and decisions) irks me. I’m completely uncomfortable with the conclusion that we don’t have it. Yet for all the reasoning I do, I deduce causation and determinism.
Like those first faced with evidence that the earth isn’t the center of the universe, I doggedly believe in what’s intuitive. When what’s intuitive changes, we have a paradigm shift. And I think we’re close.
We may have intuitively said that the heavenly bodies move across our sky. But from another perspective, we say our planet spins and orbits and that this movement changes our window on the sky as we move relative to them. Both are valid realities that exist relative to differing perspectives.
For this discussion, I’ll posit:
- All states in lower dimensions flow deterministically from the states of higher dimensions.
and
- We choose which cross-section of the omniverse to construct our reality from.
Considering that as we shift the context upwards in dimensions, we eventually have a context that is inclusive of every possible state in every possible timeline that had every possible starting condition and so on. Let’s call this field of infinite possibilities the omniverse.
Yet we don’t perceive infinity. When we think of reality, we perceive a slice of infinity. Some finite part of the omiverse; let’s call it the universe.
If you think that you are your 3D body then this can be a difficult conception. But if you step back and look at yourself across time, you see that your seemingly tangible body is a continuum from womb to grave. Which one of those bodies is you? I’d say they all are. So “I” am at least a 4D being. If I limit my self conception to 4D spacetime, this implies there was a time when I didn’t exist. Was this at conception? Well, I can trace the acts that led to conception, so I could say that I am a continuation of what came before. Long before. Humans evolved from mammals which evolved from some other terrestrial life, which came from the sea, which emerged from chemistry, which occurred because of particular configurations of particles, which occurred because of the big bang.
The entirety of my reality is a function of the starting conditions of the universe. Really, these starting conditions are just different slices of 6D space. […]
But I believe that there is free will and that we exercise it in higher dimensional context.
[… intro …]
Rob Bryanton’s project, Imagining the Tenth Dimension and his book Imagining the Tenth Dimension: A New Way of Thinking About Time and Space
Go ahead, watch it, it’ll help you conceive what we’re discussing.
Events are instantaneous in 3D space but set at intervals planck’s distance apart in 4D spacetime. Imagine the event’s timeline: everything that led up to it and everything that will flow from it. Put another way, its entire causal chain. Now you’re visualizing a 4D object in spacetime.
Depending on your perspective, a 2D plane could also be conceived as a slice, its 3D equivalent. While both abstractions represent the same object, the latter puts it in a broader context. We can extend the equivalency up to higher dimensions, where 3D space is a slice of the 4th dimension spacetime. Or 4D spacetime is a slice of 5D spacetimechoice.
Spacetimechoice is what I’ll call the contents of 5 dimensional space, having an axis each of: width, height, depth, time, choice.
Interesting. Choice? I believe that the state of the causal / deterministic “universe” in a given dimension precipitates from the position in the dimension above.
“the position”? Imagine a selector. One that let you focus in on a particular 2D plane / slice of 3D space. You’ve created a context. That context’s universe has two extents / axes / dimensions. From within, you can perceive the context as a 2D universe. But you can also conceive it from the outside. It’s a small slice of 3D space. The smallest slice possible.
In trying to understand the mechanisms / physical laws / motivations / causes of the state of things in one context, it’s helpful to look at the higher dimensional context that it is a selection of. In the 2D context, we see the mysterious dot appear, grow into a circle, shrink back to a dot, and disappear; but looking at the context from the dimension above in 3D, we see the ball (a hollow sphere) moving across the 2D context.
This gets even more interesting when you extend the notion of causation to its environment / higher dimensional context. The causal chain is not constrained dimensionally. Our 2D mystery is a result of the movement of a simple object in 3D. The way things currently are in 3D is a result of our position in the 4th extent / axis / dimension: time. Likewise, the way things are in 4D spacetime is a result of our position in the 5th dimension.
What would a change of position / selection in the 5th dimension do to the 4D context? Change it. Possibly every particle at every time is different. Possibly just one quanta at just one time is different. Actually, in 5D, there’s a slice for every possible 4D arrangement. As enormous as 3D space is to a 2D plane. Inconceivable. Or maybe it is conceivable; Aren’t we?
Normal movement is progressive and linear. That is, to get from somewhere to somewhere else, we have to pass through all the intervening positions. Another way to think about “passing through” positions is the movement of the selector in the dimension above. From within the context, there is a progression of position. Viewed from outside / in the dimension above there is also simple movement. But this higher dimensional movement is changing the 2D cross-section of 3D space.
Starting again with our 2D plane, let’s move from the point / position at (width1 x height1) to (width2 x height2). We can’t just instantly jump there. We need the aid of the dimension above to move. In 3D space, this movement is along the 4th axis, time. You pass through each quanta of both dimensions.
If you want to get from here to there in 3D space, the progression happens in 4D.
There could have been a movement in a higher dimension. Or not.
In the same way …
Einstein showed that space and time are different axies of the same thing. Thinking about time as just another dimension of extents / distances rather than a different concept than space
information and energy of …
Choice is a Context Selector from Infinite Potentiality / Choice is a context selector of potentials …