excerpt from 2010

from Frontiers of Death: Into and Beyond the Singularity (2010) by Gordian Phock, US$23.18 £13.49 CAN$22.68 (R. Kham and Co. Press)

Spacetime is a substance. While the arrangement of spacetime is essentially unknowable, we have theorized that it is something like a membrane. So imagine a two dimensional sheet. A universe is a bulge in this membrane. So to imagine the universe, just imagine a bump, an imperfection in the perfect sheet of spacetime substance. That imperfection is the only way one could ever even notice the spacetime substance – though in reality there are innumerable defects and warps in the spacetime substance. But that would make it very complicated to explain here, so we'll leave that alone for now. The point is that we know spacetime only because of the imperfections in it.

Now, if this model were accurate, you wouldn't be looking at a two-dimensional sheet, you'd be looking at a complex structure that would be measurable in terms of, dee-one – its length – dee-two – its breadth – dee-three – its height – as well as infinite others, which are independent of the dimensions that our brains and sensory organs are designed to detect. Clearly this is not solipsism. Clearly, the universe is not a product of our minds. It's not right to say that the universe exists only because we do. To say that is shorthand, as it is when we say that spacetime is arrange in a membrane, but it's not accurate. It'd be arrogant to think that our minds produce the universe. They are after all only aspects of the universe, and, further, there are dimensions that are literally too small for most of us to perceive. The fact is that, measured across dee-eleven, the entire bulge in spacetime that we call the universe is only one-trillionth of a millimeter across. Before novas, some scientists theorized the existence of such tiny dimensions. Today, we know they are real because there are people who can perceive them, including myself.

In the simple sense of measurable axes, all dimensions, even the ones we cannot see are merely degrees of difference. That is the definition of a dimension that I use here – a unit of difference. All difference is physical, it’s just that the differences are usually too small to sense as discrete phenomena. And the simple reason for that is that usually life is too simple a thing to negotiate very complex forces. Of course, evolution and natural selection and all that are very complex phenomena, but evolving bodies are things that still take place in but three dimensions. Three dimensions is just complicated enough to allow life to exist and develop, and just simple enough to make the enterprise of living plausible.

An example of how it is difficult for life to exist in more than the apparent three dimensions. I can see in the eleventh dimension, dee-eleven. I have a special brain biology that permits me to detect 'length' on this axis, and with that, thankfully, my brain also has defenses against my dee-eleven sense. Imagine actually perceiving a universe where no particle was farther apart from another than one trillionth of a millimeter. You’d go insane. I'd go insane.

What is it like to see the world in dee-eleven, then? What do you experience when you look through spacetime along that axis? Looking across dee-eleven is a lot like having a memory. In fact, it’s practically the same thing. Unlike a memory, I can turn my dimensional sense on and off. But, just as is the case with a memory, I can sometimes look at places where I’ve been before. Remember no matter where it is in the universe, it’s really only one trillionth of a millimeter away, so essentially all I have to do is look in the right direction. My defenses against going insane are tied to places I’ve already experienced. Those are the only places for which it’s safe for me to use my dimensional senses. Having already encountered a given location in the past, say Mount Saint Helens, the quantum processes that underpin the gross-scale electrical and chemical processes that occur in my brain (and in everyone's brain) have already adapted to the particular setting of Mount Saint Helens. All I have to do, then, is look in the right direction, see that Mount Saint Helens is really occupying the same space as you and I, calculate the path from here to Mount Saint Helens, and step in the right direction. Stepping is too easy of a way to describe it. More like I vibrate my surroundings in the right way, and I slide along the dee-eleven axis. I scoot in my seat just a little bit, and I’ve reconfigured my position in spacetime. Boom! I'm there on the volcano! I use sonic waves to spread a curtain of tri-dimensional matter apart – that’s what lets me scoot in my seat and be at Mount Saint Helens – and then I use encoded language to guide my movements through the dimensions that I can't see. Of course, poetry, magical spells, famous speeches, and sometimes just music will suffice as encoded language. Scatting is particularly efficient. Different pieces of language and other sounds can be used, if pronounced at the correct frequencies, as coordinates to specific places in the world. All sounds are maps through the higher dimensions; that is the nature of sound.

All this goes to show that it is possible for people to interact with dimensions that they cannot sense. This is possible because even the dimensions that we cannot see are still experienced in some manner, as time. Time is the difference between young and old, the difference between is and was and will be. It is a difference that cannot be objectively measured. Time is a placeholder for all the different, seemingly unseen ways that things can be connected to one another in the universe. So it is real, we just tend to perceive the effects of time subjectively – which goes to show, again, the connection between consciousness and the universe. Our human experience of the universe is only as long as our life spans, from the moment we start consciously interacting with it to the moment we cease to live, cease to exert our consciousness on the world. Even normal people, when they move a brick from one pile to the next or push a pen across a piece of paper, are constantly performing quantum level operations through the tools of length, breadth, and height, and with the assistance of time. Which is to say, with the assistance of all the other dimensions. And they don’t even know it.

The end of our existence – death – is the end of our ability to perform operations on the universe. We are quite rightly afraid of it. That which defines our existence is our amazing ability to manipulate our environment, on all its levels. When we stop being able to exert our wills, what is there for us? Because they are not experienced in the limited three or so dimensions that life, and certainly human brains, can usually accommodate, death and birth are special situations for the universe. Simply put, pre-birth and post-death are literally outside time, but only because the experience of time is indigenous to life. Beyond life, time comes into greater definition. In doing so, time ceases to exist as its own entity, just as the picture on a television screen is resolved into individual pixels when one examines it very closely.