Physics

Consciousness and the Fifth Dimension

I think, therefore, I am — both the spinning and the laser of the cosmic DVD

Albert Einstein, widely regarded as one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century — if not of all time — had one great failure in life. This, despite spending the last thirty years of it fruitlessly seeking a solution to that most vexing of scientific challenges. As he lamented, “Most of my intellectual offspring end up very young in the graveyard of disappointed hopes.”

What was this quest that compelled him unto his deathbed and yet left even that great genius stumped?

It was the “holy grail of modern physics” — the search for a grand, unified “theory of everything” that finally reconciles the disparate theories of general relativity (Einstein’s great claim to fame) and quantum mechanics (a field he utterly loathed, famously stating “God does not play dice.”)

Numerous solutions to this quandary have been proposed over the years, the most promising of them being what’s known as “string theory.” Although far beyond the scope of this essay to delve into, one of the more intriguing outcomes of string theory is not just the possibility, but the necessity of there existing extra dimensions beyond the familiar four (three of space and one of time).

Another intriguing possibility suggested by string theory is the idea popularly known as “the multiverse,” which, although there are many competing varieties of how it might manifest itself, nonetheless all rest on the fundamental concept of what we know as “the universe” being merely a single node in a vast (even endless) multitude of interconnected universes, just one facet of an infinite-sided cosmic crystal.

Beyond the possibility of higher dimensions and endless universes, two further ingredients are required before we explore the thesis of my title in detail — that of consciousness and the fifth dimension.

The first of these is what’s known as Everett’s “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics. Although not the one favored by the majority of physicists today, who lean instead upon Niels Bohr’s famous, if paradoxical, “Copenhagen interpretation,” it still has its modern adherents and has recently been making something of a comeback. But regardless of its popularity or lack thereof, considering it has in no way been categorically ruled out or disproven, it’s fascinating to consider its full implications.

In a nutshell, what it says is that for every physically possible outcome of any subatomic interaction, rather than a Schrödinger “probability wavefunction” collapsing into a single “real” outcome (which only becomes real once “observed”), that instead, every single possible outcome, in fact, happens. And what allows this is the existence of an infinity of parallel realities — one for each possible outcome.

In other words, not just “shit happens,” everything happens.

Every time you roll a die, for instance, it actually lands on all six numbers — in six different realities. The one we observe is just the one we happen to be in. Rolling that exact same die at the exact same time, your near-exact, alternate, doppelganger self in a nearby, parallel universe observes and experiences a completely different result (and yet thinks his or herself every bit as uniquely nonfungible and one-of-a-kind as you do while doing so).

Probability, then, is not just a measuring of the possible. It’s a real measurement of the relative numbers of actual, similarly arranged universes weighed against the whole collective totality of the multiverse. The percent chance that something might happen is really the percent chance that the “you” that you are is residing in a particular incarnation of the multiverse, or, in other words, a particular universe.

So, for example, if the odds of you hitting red or black on the roulette wheel are 47.4% (don’t forget about the green zero and double zero that give the casino its “house edge”), what that actually means is that for every thousand universes of the multiverse, in four hundred and seventy four of them, the ball lands on your chosen color. And in five hundred and twenty-six of them, it doesn’t.

But it never actually lands on just a single color or number (even though it appears to do so to a single “you”). Instead, it simultaneously lands on every possible number at the same time, spread out over as many universes.

Now, I know this all sounds pretty far out there, but the beauty of it is that it’s not some kind of New Age, spiritual woo or merely dreamy, stoner speculation. It’s fully supported by the most “proven” physical theory of all time — quantum mechanics. It’s a legit contender for describing the reality we actually inhabit. Which is beyond trippy, to say the least.

The final ingredient needed for today’s exploration is one that, while intimately familiar to every single one of us — in fact, the most familiar thing possible in the strictest sense of the word — is nonetheless still a near complete mystery to science. That mystery is called “consciousness.”

Despite the best efforts of neuroscientists, we still don’t fundamentally understand what consciousness is, or how inanimate matter can somehow give rise to it as an emergent property of having a brain, which itself has been variously described as the most complicated thing in the universe, having more neural connections than there are stars in all the galaxies combined.

So, with those four ingredients in place — higher dimensions, infinite universes, all physical possibilities being realized across these endless universes, and the fact that we as self-aware, sentient, thinking, feeling beings possess consciousness — let’s begin.

We’ll start back where this essay began, with Einstein and his general theory of relativity.

Without having to bother with a single equation or anything even resembling math, one can summarize its most profound consequence in a single word — spacetime. That is, the notion that despite space and time feeling like radically different things to we who experience them, that’s merely an artifact or illusion.

They are, in fact, intimately related, four aspects of a single, shared, four-dimensional framework. Space and time are inseparable, and from a mathematical perspective, indistinguishable. “Left” is no different than “yesterday.” “Next week” is no different than “down.”

Interestingly enough, this idea was first posited way back in ancient Greece, long before even Socrates came along (thus the label “pre-Socratic”) by a man named Parmenides.

He believed that the entire universe was static, a “block universe,” and that all change was merely illusory. As he cryptically put it (boldfaced emphasis my own):

Being, it is ungenerated and indestructible, whole, of one kind and unwavering, and complete. Nor was it, nor will it be, since now it is, all together, one, continuous.

…The same and remaining in the same state, it lies by itself, and thus remains fixed there. For powerful necessity holds it enchained in a limit which hems it around, because it is right that what is should not be incomplete. … For nothing either is or will be other than what is, since fate has fettered it to be whole and unmoving. …equal to itself on all sides, it lies uniformly in its limits.

Replace the word “fate” with “the equations of general relativity” and that passage pretty well describes Einstein’s paradigm-shifting theory to a tee.

What it means for us then, is that the entire universe — not just spatially, but temporally as well — already exists. Just as every point in space is somewhere “out there” in physical space, so is every point in time — past, present, and future. (In the interest of read time however, I’ll have to defer exploration of the implications of this on destiny and free will to a future essay.)

A helpful analogy for visualizing this notion of unified spacetime is to think of a DVD (a digital video disk). When you hold a DVD in your hand, the entirety of the movie is contained within that disk. Not just one particular scene, not just the beginning, middle, or end, but all of it.

Meanwhile, when you insert the DVD into a player and press “play,” although only one particular instant of the movie is shown on your screen at any given moment, the entire story is nonetheless still contained within the disk as a whole. The only reason you see a particular moment is because the laser inside the player is shining on a particular section of the physical disk, and reading the information contained in microscopic pits etched into a thin sheet of foil embedded within it.

So think about what that actually means. The entire movie is contained within the physical structure of the disk. But we have no way to experience the movie by just looking at the disk. If we hold it in our hands, it just looks shiny and rainbow colored. To actually experience it, we have to play it. And to play it, the disk has to be spinning — in other words, moving through both space and time.

Now here’s the critical bit. Imagine, for a moment, that you weren’t the person watching the movie, but rather, were a character in the movie. And imagine if someone in the movie with you (who happened to be a genius and Nobel Prize-winning physicist) explained to you that your entire life — from beginning to end — is actually just a bunch of pits burned into the surface of some “higher dimensional” object you can never directly observe and can scarcely comprehend.

And furthermore, even though time as you know it is all contained within the disk of your movie — just as space for you is — there’s in fact, a second, higher dimension of time outside the disk, which enables it to spin within the higher spatial dimension that contains the player.

Still following? Good.

Now, let’s step back and see how this analogy of the DVD relates to the real world.

In order for us to experience consciousness, to experience the subjective passage of time, that “endless series of moments” that constitutes self-awareness, requires movement. As polymath mythologist Joseph Campbell poetically phrased it, “Movement is time, but stillness is eternity.”

If you could somehow press a magic stopwatch and freeze time, you wouldn’t be sitting there thinking, “This is so strange. Everything is frozen. Nothing is moving. Look at those birds suspended in mid-flight, that spilling drink suspended in mid-fall.” No, you wouldn’t be thinking anything at all because you wouldn’t be thinking, period.

Thinking, like life itself, is a process. That is, it’s something that plays out over time. It’s movement.

Each moment in time, if it can ultimately be broken into discrete, digitalesque, “Planck time” units, as string theory suggests, is like a pit or non-pit on the cosmic DVD. But even if every single moment of your life is scripted, is pre-existent in its entirety, is pre-embedded in the DVD, your conscious experience of those moments is not part of the DVD.

How could it be? Consciousness requires movement. Movement requires time. And normal, everyday, familiar time as we think of it is already part of the DVD, it’s already baked into the concept, into spacetime.

But this other, higher order, secondary time in which the disk spins, over which the laser passes from pit to pit, must exist, or the process of consciousness would have no realm in which to operate. It would be static, frozen in Parmenides’ block universe and thus, not just unconscious, but unthinking, just an endless collection of disconnected moments with nothing tying them together in any way other than their proximity to one another on the disk.

So, in summary, we know that consciousness exists, because we personally experience it. And we know that in order to reconcile its existence with general relativity and the concept of unified spacetime, there simply has to be a secondary time dimension in which consciousness operates.

Without such an extra dimension, consciousness would not be possible. It would have nowhere in which to exist, no means in which to “play out” as we directly perceive change, as we become progressively aware of the sequential slices of spacetime that constitute the “arrow of time.”

Of course, a hypothesis such as this one is no better than any of the assertions made by religion without a means of directly testing it (and thus, potentially refuting it). And, being neither a neuroscientist nor a theoretical physicist myself, I’ll have to leave the devising of such tests to others.

But I hope, if nothing else, this exploration provides food for thought and a useful avenue for further explorations of the grand tapestry of life and of physics we call reality and existence.

Colby Hess is a freelance writer and photographer from Seattle, and author of the freethinker children’s book The Stranger of Wigglesworth.

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