December 8, 2008
- Hidden dimensions of String Theory (or, A Rabbit Hole) -
Well, so it’s Sunday, and my essay has yet to materialize out of thin air.
It seems these things will always be harder than I think they’re going to be. Yet, I’ve been asked for a summary, and I think it would be good idea for me to put this together in as few words as possible, as a sort of skeleton or seed for the rest of it to come out of. Plus, I spent a large part of tonight talking at length about “So, what’s this essay you’re writing, anyway?”, and I’m just in that kind of mood.
Before I get started though, I would like to say that links to relevant sources will be provided in the final work(s), but not here. I have about 20 different tumblr posts collecting various threads of information (lexemes? wexes?) that I am weaving together (tantra, yoga) into whatever this will be when it’s done, so I want to wait and make sure that the information is indexed in such a way as to make reading/understanding this as easy (and hopefully as fun) as possible.
Ehem, so…
It all started with the comment that the visualization of data will be the language of the future. That’s great, I thought, but how is that different from the way we currently use data? Websites are visualized data (HTML code), so are bodies (DNA code), so is everything (atoms, quarks, etc.) etc. Still it peaked my interest enough that when I later read the following, it damn near knocked me out of my seat:
“…quantum physics requires us to abandon the distinction between information and reality.”
- Anton Zeilinger
And I was further shocked, a bit later, when I found out that Einstein’s “e=mc(2)” theory had just pretty much been proven for the first time (which was the article’s interpretation, not my own), as scientists had shown that pretty much 95% of the mass of all subatomic particle comes from the energy created out of the movements and interactions of those particles. In other words, matter is mostly just energy, or, for you Buddhists out there, form is emptiness and emptiness is form…
So, we’ve got a language (i.e.: a way of interpreting and discussing/sharing reality) made purely of data/information, and a reality that pretty much just IS ONLY information. And this informational reality only appears to be physical, when it’s really just fluctuations of energy within an emptiness/vacuum.
Now, if we could manage to become aware of this underlying informational form of reality, and use it as the basis for communication, then we’d have the beginning of that universal language. All subjective definition within language would drop away, as we would all be trading interpretations of the same pure data, which everyone had the same access to/understanding of. McLuhan’s Auditory/Electric/Tribalism comes in handy here.
But what does that mean for us here, so far above that sub-quantum informational level? Well, because everything is so small, it is at the quantum level that we can see the effects of particles traveling into and out of the time stream. That is, because the basic rules of our reality begin to break down, we can begin to experience what lies beyond them. And what is that?
For the sake of my essay here, it’s a probablistic, undetermined, purely informational state. That is, we travel through the 4th dimension of space/time by making decisions which collapse these potential states into a determined physical reality.
Except we are beginning to understand that this determined physical reality is completely illusory, because we can see (or at least imagine) beyond those space/time limits. Reality is only physical for us at the moment it coalesces into the physical and then it immediately fades back into information (as memory.) We tune into it like a radio station, or a string on a guitar, or a wavelength of light. The rest of the time it exists in a purely potential state, which we are only now, at this point in human history, becoming aware of.
And that state consists entirely of Information. Pure data, which we organize in such a way as to make sense of the present with reference our past, in order to create a future for us.
Visualization of data (instead visualization of matter/energy), therefore, is not just the language of the future. It’s the way we see the potential realities, the seeds of our future experiences, as part of our present experience of reality. Because it’s all right here. Past, present, future, everything that happens happens HERE & NOW. It’s just the data that changes, and I hope that we will soon be able to visualize that data as it’s changing, and choose which data streams we follow on into the future. Because the data’s streaming on anyway, so we might as well start to swim.
Or, as my zen sensei put it is his dharma talk today, it’s as if we are suddenly waking up on a highway, going 75 miles an hour, and a voice whispers “so, do you want to take the steering wheel now?”
So yeah, that’s the genesis of it. From here it falls away into Tantra, Buddhism, Multiverses, Time Travel, Conscious/Identity/Evolution, Scientific Morality, Attainments of Perfection, Artificial Intelligence, Reichian Cosmic Energy Streaming, and a bit of Dante’s Paradiso as well. We’ll see how much of that I can fit into a coherent essay, but hey, it’ll be fun trying. Hope you stick around for the ride.
SO much to think about.
Well, heck, so I’ve got a scientific viewpoint here, of sorts. I’d call ‘data’ what you get from a measurement. That pre-existing stuff, the quantum soup from which measurements coalesce like dumplings… that pre-existent stuff is /much better/ than data. So I feel that the ‘everything is information’ guys have always been missing a trick. Information is the shit left over after the soup has been digested.
But maybe that’s all semantics. What’s a word anyway? A label for a bit of quantum soup, a way of making sense of it. I mean, that is, if it makes sense, the sense of the soup was pre-existent and the word follows it. So, in the case of /true/ Words, in the beginning was the Word. It’s surprisingly easy to make up false words.
As for McLuhan’s electric tribe, for me digitization has only taken us ever further from that 60′s vision. Digits are an extension of fingers, and we’re living in a stranglehold.
I’d like to read the mass article… presumably that’s about CERN and the search for Higgs? The only half-decent explanation of that I’ve read was in a little book called ‘Void’ (heartily recommended, for also having a good stab at the nastiness of general relativity).
I went recently to the UK National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, as part of a pilgrimage to the end of the world. What struck me was how boats have always come round again throughout history, the same /form/ being realised through different /media/. And the same thing when you see the relics of Roman empire in the British museum, it’s like an Asterix book, you have to laugh. The /form/ is primary, and some of them have a reality more real than any of their instances. I really think we have to lose this word ‘data’; it’s clouding the vision. There are Things that pre-exist that, /which computers can’t touch/.
It’s early and my head’s a bit fuzzy, so I don’t know how any of that came across. Just a brain dump, probably full of all sorts of preconceptions. I’d certainly like to read more of your writings about all this kind of stuff, thanx.
Comment by speedbird — December 8, 2008 @ 4:25 am
“Information is the shit left over after the soup has been digested.” Awesome. =)
Yeah, I’ve always thought of language as sort of a layer in the mind that comes after/above/outside-of direct experience/god/reality/whatever. But, thanks to McLuhan, I am coming to think of this is a tendency, rather than a hard fact. I think perhaps we can stretch communication into this realm IF we can create a new form of communication. Don’t know if math really has anything to do with this (as you were saying on Tim’s blog) because as you mention here, math is a measurement. It’s through math that we make sense out of the soup, and what I want to do is see & experience the soup directly, but in a communally shared manner.
This is where I think that McLuhan comes into it. That might be the next thing that I may delve into, the way he dovetails with all of this (whatever it is) that I am exploring.
As far as boat forms, I think what you’re noticing there is the evolution of a meme (as much as I hate to give any credence to Richard Dawkins), which may be the forms that arise out of the pre-measured primordial soup.
Mass articles (there’s two that I’ve found) are here:
http://www.physorg.com/news146415074.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16095-its-confirmed-matter-is-merely-vacuum-fluctuations.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=tech
Sorry, too lazy to type out the HTML there, but I’m sure you’ll manage. ;)
And thanks for the recommendation, I’ll have to check out that Void book. Any chance you could provide a link or an author? My tentative searching as so far turned up only this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void
Comment by Ian — December 8, 2008 @ 12:38 pm
Hi Ian, nice blog. I’ve posted a link to your blog in my “Interesting Links” section at my Imagining the Tenth Dimension blog.
Always nice to hear that other people are developing these ideas. Yes, absolutely, with this way of visualizing, every aspect of our reality is ultimately information, and with each lower dimension you are selecting a subset of that data, honing things down finer and finer until you arrive at the 3D world we see around us (and of course you can keep honing down from there to the point of indeterminate size, where we start and end, as I discuss in the blog entry I posted today, “A Point Within the Omniverse”).
Nice to hear that you’ve been looking at my material. Here’s some other entries you might find helpful in your questions about reality, data, and dimensions, some of which you may not have run across yet.
Thanks for writing!
Rob
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/06/local-realism-bites-dust.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/05/fifth-dimension-isnt-magic.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/06/wormholes.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2007/11/e8-and-semantic-web.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/11/imagining-omniverse.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/11/big-bang-and-big-pie.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/09/why-do-we-need-more-than-3-dimensions.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/09/time-in-3-dimensions.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/08/twisted-dimensions.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/08/unlikely-events-and-timelessness.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/06/randomness-and-missing-96-per-cent.html
http://imaginingthetenthdimension.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-would-linelander-really-see.html
Comment by Rob Bryanton — December 8, 2008 @ 12:57 pm
http://www.amazon.com/Void-Frank-Close/dp/0199225907/
I guess some bits of this little book are a bit /too/ concise, but then it does have a go at a whole heck of a lot of cool stuff!
Comment by speedbird — December 9, 2008 @ 4:07 am
Thanks!
Comment by Ian — December 9, 2008 @ 3:17 pm
Glad to materialize here. Good day or night everybody!
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