Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Scientific Philosophy, Universal Origins and the head honcho upstairs

I will preface this by saying that I am not a scientist, or anyone else with an expertise on matters of dimensionality and physics and the like. However, I had some ideas that I would like to posit.

We'll start with a point, like this one --> .

It's not much, it has zero dimensions.
Making it a line gives it freedom in one dimension (the line goes from left to right).
Making this line a square gives us freedom in two dimensions (left, right, forward, back).
Making this square a cube now gives us freedom in three dimensions (left, right, forward, back, up, down).

I could go on about higher dimensions, but this video explains it better than me:







Imagine, if you will an apple. If an apple could visit the second dimension, a denizen of that dimension would only see cross-sections of the apple. This video explains it better than I ever could:








Now you know as much as I do about this dimensional stuff. I had two thoughts though...

Assume for a second that Time was the fourth dimension. That would mean that any fourth dimensional entity coming through a three dimensional universe would alter in appearance. Hmmm, maybe this is what age is?

Think about it, everything that is born must die and as a consequence, would age. To that end, perhaps our birth, life and death is merely the passage of four dimensional entities through the third dimension. Maybe we're three dimensional projections of a fourth dimensional self?

The reason I think about this is because of something called the mind-brain problem. In Artificial Intelligence, there's a debate (at least there used to be) about the separation of the mind from the brain. The idea being that there is no clear physical explanation of what makes the mind. If the mind is an emergent property of the brain (i.e. it just arises from the complexity of the brain), then how does it affect the body? How is it the case that me thinking about raising my arm affect my body doing it?

The idea that we're parts of higher dimensional entities is appealing, but there's no scientific basis in fact for this, but from a philosophical point of view, it is intriguing. What if two or more people were the projections of the same higher dimensional entity? What if this was actually the soul?

Also, what stops those higher dimensional beings from being projections of even higher dimensional beings? In theory, one could abstract (just as noted in that first video) up to a final singularity, which would all there is, was and ever would be, the Alpha and the Omega.

Again, we (humanity) don't have scientific evidence for this, it is merely an exciting conjecture.

The other thought I had was about our universe. The current scientific theory is that our universe is expanding, a result of a collosal explosion called the Big Bang. We know this because there is the Cosmic Background Radiation as well as the observed effect of the rest of the universe rushing away from us (like when I play the piano in a hotel lobby).

I wonder, what if our universe was a fourth (or higher) dimensional entity that was passing through the third dimension (or at least our 3 +1 dimension)?

I don't think this idea holds much water the more I think about it. This analogy wouldn't explain the *expansion* as we're seeing it. Ah well.

Still, it is tempting to think that, perhaps, just perhaps, there's an explanation for a cosmic supreme entity. I don't think it would fit the definition of God as defined by any religion. This kind of philosophical conjecture can at least be tested (once you've defined a prediction that *can* be tested in a proper manner). Maybe the people who follow us will look at our conjectures now and smile the way we do when our kids talk about The Great Pumpkin, Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.