The Multiverse, Human Consciousness; and linear Time
An essay on the limits of human perception
Most of us take for granted that the way we experience this three-dimensional world, the patterns of perception, the signposts that demarcate our passage from one stratum to the next, from one episode to another are somehow embedded in the universe itself, that there is such a thing as the material world which we experience in three dimensions, that our brains themselves are not organizing the world into the patterns we see, that the measurements and observations we make, are not organized in our brains through complex algorithms analogous to the algorithms our computers use every day now to make sense out of a plethora of data continually streaming into our consciousness. Our brains, every day, do what our largest AI processors do, but at a much larger scale and with much greater processing capacity. The precise calculations that it takes for our fingers to move, our eyes to focus, and our organs to work properly, are mind-boggling if one thinks about it, and all of the complexity of each individual person, begins first in a single cell in the womb of our mothers. How many generations have this cyclic process been going on? We can hardly imagine, much less calculate.
Upon reflecting on the complex processes we go through from single cell to fully mature adult, all the milestones we must pass through, from learning to control our limbs to learning language, to mastering the plethora of skills we need to survive in an often hostile world, orienting ourselves, and finding our place in this complex environment every day, it is no wonder that we have evolved patterns of sleep and waking, to give our brains the downtime they need to process the vast data that we take in every day, organizing much of it into memories so that we when wake up the next day we are prepared to go forward into our unknown futures. But even this itself, this sense of duration, this passing from one moment to another, can be understood as a pattern created for us by our brains.
The physicist David Bohm, in his groundbreaking book, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, outlines his theory, that the universe itself has embedded within it a complex holographic pattern, which has streamlined the data, facilitating a way for us to efficiently organize it into our limited brains. We experience the world in the way we need to make sense of it.
This insight raises serious questions. Is this way we perceive the world the only possible way to perceive it. Because our brains tell us there are three physical dimensions, and linear time, do these in fact exist beyond the algorithms of our sense perceptions? Or is not the universe more complex than the patterns we have developed to make navigation within it sustainable for us? Is it possible for a differently organized brain to perceive realities that are beyond our current perceptions? We all have known people with color blindness, who cannot perceive certain colors, but does that mean these colors don’t exist. We all seem to suffer from experiential prejudices which blind us to certain forms of perception. Could it be possible that we could experience a leap in consciousness that allows us to perceive now hidden realities? Before Lister and Pasteur, most of the world did not believe that germs existed. Could there be other patterns that we simply haven’t developed the ability to see? Technology in the last 150 years has allowed us to extend the range of our perceptions to then unimaginable limits. What will we discover about this universe and the laws through which it operates in the next 150 years?
