Musings of a One Dimensional Character
We live in a world where time and space bend inwards on themselves and cease to be, where endless particles blink in and out of existence reflecting the light of collapsing stars against a multihued sky. We stand on the horizon looking into the gravitational darkness of our night.
We live on the world of Calabi-Yau, a world sustaining six distinct, if tiny, villages from which we see all universes and all times from different points of view and with distinctly different capabilities. We can travel through the multiverse exceeding the speed of light on flights of thought powered by an Alcubierre drive. We see universes born and die. We are all time and all space and yet we are neither.
Our villages are central to the universes with branches into multiple universes and worlds. Our routes among the stars would be akin to those routes of the Silk Road, widely diverging caravan-ways among countries, regions and continents. Our dimensions span infinity. If we existed in your world, some of our villages would exist on mountain tops from which we view myriad valleys beneath, each with its own divulgations. Some villages would be on the edge of vast oceans spanning worlds in an ever changing waterscape of flow. Still other villages would be on fertile plains, providing sustenance for all in need.
In an attempt at humor, my four dimensional friends call me Tesseract, or Tess for short, deriding me for being a one dimensional creature even though I cannot conceive of what being a four dimensional being must be like, much as you, dear three dimensional reader, cannot conceive of what life in one dimension must be like.
I am a string, so small that I cannot be visualized, but only calculated mathematically, as is my world.But to me, my world is real and I can conceive of no other despite rumors of a world so large that mine is but a fleeting moment in time. My world is my existence and my existence is interaction. Without interaction I would cease to exist.
In our villages, time is of no importance. We have no trains to catch, no appointments that must be kept. Events happen and we flow in synchronous harmony with them. We come to exist where ever we have to be because things only happen in my ever changing world in relation to one another.
Because I cannot be visualized as an actual entity, you will have to wear imaginary hyper-reality glasses that have been fitted with Heisenberg Uncertainty transition lenses to open my world to your human three dimensional reality by manifesting me as a photonic realization. I warn you, though, that as I describe my world, it constantly changes in response to my observations making my description obsolete as what I describe no longer exists by the time I describe it.
But such is the nature of Calabi-Yau.
Once fitted with the lenses provided, my size, my lack of dimensionality and my temporal insignificance will no longer be an impediment to our communication. With the hyper-reality glasses you will be able to visualize me as a cat, an appropriate metaphor as I am a cat - a cat that plays with string. I humbly implore you to wear these lenses throughout our journey despite my brief excursions into your reality to ease the more complex transitions into unconventional time and space relations.
It is well known that in a three dimensional world such as yours, time passes differently whether you are in the mountains or at the level of your seas. So it is with my story, one that encompasses the past, present and future simultaneously. I beg your indulgence if, at times (no pun intended), the sequence of events do not follow a linear progression for I personally have no concept of what time passing feels like. The flow of time is internal to your world and your preconceived notions, and not mine nor that of the known universes.
My existence as a one dimensional creature puts me in a unique position when it comes to considering consciousness. I can, of course, not only transverse the multidimensional world in which I live, I can understand all universes in which it exists.
But existence and understanding brings with it, a series of confusing questions that run counter intuitively to that which is experienced by a single world creature. In your world, religions have introduced a concept of heaven and hell. Briefly explained, those who have done good are welcomed to a heaven, those who have done evil suffer in a terrifying concept defined as hell.All well and good in your world.
A human’s capabilities are, therefore, infinite both for good and evil in your world.Man becomes the god of his own destiny which, like the man itself, can be good or evil.But the god of all existence is not the musings of a single man or a single religion, for this god exists outside the realm of reality, not limited by the frailties of humanity, and thus able to be everywhere at everytime. This god exists only in quantum reality.
But in mine, where there are multiple worlds in a multiverse, parallel concepts of heaven and hell become infinitely more complex. Can the same person in one universe be evil and in another, be saintly? If so, can what religions express as a “universal” concept be different in different universes? Is there a multiverse version of heaven and hell and if there is, what of the person who is behaves differently in different universes. Does, in a multiverse, the concept of heaven and hell become a function of an individual’s consciousness rather than conceptual actual places?
And what of what you time-enabled beings call dreams?Your scientists are conflicted on what dreams are, but all agree it is an activity of your own brain during sleep - a function of your subconscious. I ask that you allow your mind, your consciousness, to cross into my dimension for a brief moment and consider what dreams could be in a multiverse where you, indeed, actually exist across infinity.Dreams, then become a link to different dimensions, different realities of you in different universes, on different worlds. Your dreams become the portal to your existence in different worlds - a realization that more of you , in fact, do exist. An exciting adventure opens for you in which you can be anywhere, everywhere, any time, every time. It means, if faced with an impossible decision or problem of infinite complexity, that you can rely on your multiple consciousnesses to transfer their consciousness, their understanding, their intelligence to you.
Being a being of the quantum world, I am a multiverse creature able to travel freely through all iterations of the multiverse in time and space. Having no actual life, I cannot die and find it impossible to understand, at this moment, your concept of life and death. I will, therefore, rely on your scientist Erwin Schrödinger to help me answer what I know is on your mind. In his famous theory, he envisioned a cat being alive and dead at the same time. I would suggest to you that your existence takes on the same paradox.In the quantum world you are both alive and dead simultaneously - in one (or many) universe(s) you are alive and functioning.In still others, you have ceased to exist. Not a comfort, I realize, to you as the individual reading this essay, but that’s the way of a quantum world.
What does death mean in a universe where the laws of physics may be different?In an infinite number of universes, the possibilities can be infinite - is death the loss of only physical reality leaving a spiritual consciousness, something you refer to as the soul, alive and functioning allowing you to reach a plane of immortality?Does it mean that a loved one who has lost his or her physical reality is still alive in a parallel universe? Is the concept of a ghost, just one of many multiverse versions of yourself that were able to break the barrier between universes?
In a multiverse, does the term subconscious even apply? By subconscious I refer to the part of the mind that is not fully awake. A mind not awake but not fully detached, but in a realm between the two and yet able to influence your actions and feelings. In a multiverse such as mine, subconscious becomes that which is outside your reality. It becomes consciousness in a different dimension and should ideally be called hyperconsciousness because it is a state in which one becomes aware of one’s multiple persons in a different universe in a different dimension.
An astute individual such as yourself, dear reader, will immediately realize that there is no physical way to connect multiverses let alone parallel worlds without a guide such as myself. Only one dimensional organisms like myself can cross trans-dimensional barriers and thus enter alternate universes at will.
But human consciousness can transcend limitations placed on three dimensional beings without the constraint of time or space.With that consciousness comes the sense of self and its physical manifestations so while there can be no actual, physical linking of two or more worlds, because of the reality of consciousness that linking can appear to be real to the individuals involved. You can guide your consciousness into believing what you see is real and expressed as a series of actual events while the events are more a matter of the mind than one of physical reality. Different dimensional realities can have different physical realizations so who is to say what is real and what is not.
Reality doesn’t have to be real, it just has to be real enough. The realms of the physicist and the realm of the philosopher superimpose in a quantum world. What is impossible in one realm may be the accepted in the other. And since, in the quantum worlds, anything that can happen, does or has or is, - the opening to another world as a function of consciousness is not only possible but has already happened. To be truthful here, there is nothing about reality that is real. Reality changes before it can be analyzed. Reality disappears as you observe it, changing into a different reality. There’s no way to contain a reality. There’s no box you can put it in. There’s no way to preserve reality by freezing. Logically, then, reality must be unreal.
I am a cat, or, to be more exact, the cat. Or to be even more precise, I am a photonic realization of a cat. I look like a cat, I think like a cat and, if you could feel me, I a would feel like a cat. But in reality, I am you. To be even more exacting, I am your consciousness.
Reality exists for only one instant in time and for only one person. Any other person cannot experience your reality because that person cannot exist at your precise moment in time and space. There is no reality in the past because in the past there exists only a memory. There is no reality in the future because the future exists only as a prediction. Reality exists only as a unique ephemeral moment in time. It exists only for a single individual in both the physical and imaginary worlds. One must be cautioned to never waste a moment of one’s reality because once gone, it never exists again.
Reality is simply a state of mind . When a person dies, that person’s reality ceases to be. Future predictions of his or her reality cease to exist along with the living person. The only thing that remains is a memory. Even that memory fades with time. Once those whose reality included that memory dies, so does all of the original memory. Transferring its reality to a new memory is essential for it to continue to exist.
It is the nature of reality that you cannot travel back in time to your own past as you are now. Since reality exists only for an ephemeral moment in time, once past it can never exist again. However, you can exist again in the past reality as you were then because you would be existing in that reality. You will be, however, as you were and thus have no knowledge of your future because to you, that future has not been yet. This means you cannot travel back to a time before you existed, because that time, for you, was never a reality.
You can, however, send things into the future that affect the future’s past. For example, you buy a house now that will not be ready for your occupancy until six weeks in the future. But now, after taking some measurements, you start to order furniture to be delivered when the house is ready for you. The future event has now affected your behavior in the future event’s past. This is retrocausality because, in actuality, the future may or may not ever occur but still has affected the past.
That is your reality as a three dimensional being. Now in my quantum world, time is not linear. The past, the present and the future can and do exist simultaneously so, as a one dimensional being, I can travel in any direction in time. The future, past and present are all the same to me. Retrocausality is a way of life for me as all my actions in the present affect my future and past.
If it is true that reality exists only instantaneously, what then is existence? Existence must become a finite series of infinitesimally small steps bound together by the covalent bond of time. Man’s existence thus assumes all the characteristics of a quantum string plagued by the uncertainty of chaos, but also able to reach the outermost bounds of the universe as fast as one can imagine them.
Unless you read these words, they do not exist. Very much like the results of a quantum experiment that are changed when they are observed, the fact that you are reading the words makes them exist. If you did not find this essay, then to your consciousness it would not exist and the words in it would not exist to you. True, they may exist in another consciousness, but not in yours and you would never know that. So your assumption would be that they do not exist and your assumption would be your reality. In a true quantum fashion, then, this essay can exist and not exist simultaneously and only by your observation does it come into existence. Your observation of it, brought it to life. Conversely if no one reads these words, then they cease to exist because there is no one that knows of their existence.
Hold on a minute, you say, you are making the old argument about a tree falling in the forest and whether it makes a noise if there is no one there to hear it. That is true in the physical world, but in the world of quantum mechanics, it is different simply because of the nature of waves and particles and how physical objects exist in a quantum reality. In quantum reality the tree that falls in the forest may or may not exist at the same time.By questioning its very existence, the tree changes. So what we are actually questioning is not the sound of a falling tree, but whether or not the tree exists at all if no one is there to observe it.
Albert Einstein, who could not accept quantum mechanics, once responded to a similar question by stating that “I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.”.But in my quantum world, Einstein’s words must questioned. As physicist Pascual Jordan said “ observations not only disturb what has to be measured, they produce it… we ourselves produce the results of measurements.”
just one confession and then I must go. I do doubt my own existence at times.I have no recollection of being a child, I do not remember my mother, father or my siblings, I seem just to have appeared one day.I assume I am alive because I am thinking and talking but how can anyone be sure that they are not just a passing thought of another creature. Do I truly exist or is my existence a puff of smoke, a dream, an hallucination?Descartes clarified his famous statement, Cogito ergo sum, by explaining “we cannot doubt of our existence while we doubt.” So perhaps the very fact that I am able to question my existence, confirms the fact that I do indeed exist.
And so, as with all things real, my time with you, dear reader, is ending.I thank you for allowing me these moments of existence.Your willingness to read my story has given me, a one dimensional being, a fleeting breath of life as you know it. For the first time, I am aware of both having lived and having experienced the fear of the non-existence of death. Linear time and physical reality, even for one who has existed only as a photonic realization, has taken a toll on this now old cat.Old age is a strange feeling for one who was once ageless and infinite as it must be for you who was once young and thought of one’s self as infinite.I must now return to Calabi-Yau where my story began and will begin again when another of your kind reads these words and grants me reality once again, just as you will live again when your existence ends, in the memory of another.
I have gained this knowledge through our interaction that I yearn to pass on. It is the nature of quantum existence that no one in your universe or in the multiverse that I have known, exists alone. Each of our very existences, one-dimensional or three, is dependent on someone knowing of our existence. Without being known by at least one other, we do not exist for we are each a part of the other.