The Fourth Dimension: Is Inter-Dimensional Shift the Source of Creativity?
The study of psychedelics has recently been revamped through
small sample size experiments run by John Hopkins and NYU. There are three main components to any intelligent machine according to Alan Turing: store, executive unit, and control. Control is paralleled in the human mind as what is known as the frontal lobe. The last to develop in an evolutionary timeline, this portion of our brain is associated with problem solving, spontaneity, judgement, impulse control, and others. Specifically, psychedelics target a network known as the default mode network involving the medial prefrontal cortex within the frontal lobe. The medial prefrontal cortex is associated with self-assessment and introspection. The default mode network controls such processes as introspection, the theory of mind (ability to recognize that others’ states of mind differ from your own), ego, and mental time travel. Two other areas of mind associated with the default mode network are the medial parietal cortex, associated with perceiving locations centered outside of oneself (heading direction), and the medial temporal lobe, associated with declarative memory (conscious memory of facts and events). Psychedelics target this default mode network causing a release from self-assessment of oneself, a breakdown of the boundaries between conscious and unconscious thoughts, and a release from a grounding of knowing that locations in your mind are in places other than where you physically are. I can sum up this experience as one word, awe. What early scientific studies showed at John Hopkins and NYU was that psychedelic use can have significant positive long-term effects on depression and addiction. Over 80% of smokers quit and did not return to smoking 6 months after a psychedelic experience and that number remained at over 50% one year after the experience. The same rates applied to subjects with depression. What truly is happening when the default mode network is targeted with psychedelics however goes beyond altering physiology — it is precisely what it means to enter another dimension.
What truly is happening when the default mode network is targeted with psychedelics however goes beyond altering physiology — it is precisely what it means to enter another dimension.
Before entering the fourth dimension, it is useful to think of the dimensions we can visualize. Imagine you are a square in 2d-land. We can borrow Edwin Abbott’s title from his book “Flatland” as our name for 2d-land. A square in flatland knows nothing of a 3rd dimension. Its sense of dimensions extend to right-left, forward-back. That is not to say that this square does not experience the 3rd dimension, its conscious awareness is simply restricted to a 2d world. However, we as 3d beings are well aware that there is another dimension which allows us to manipulate the square’s world in ways it cannot believe imaginable. Say the square had eaten a little dot in flatland and that little dot lay within the square. The square sits content with its meal inside of it. But we, being mischievous 3d overlords, decide to startle this square very much. We reach down, grab the dot contained in the middle of the square, pull it into the 3rd dimension (up-down), and place it back outside of the square. The square knows nothing of what has happened! It believes that the dot has simply vanished out of its stomach and appeared once again outside of its body. Yet it causes the square to wonder, what if there is more to the world than I know? It generates awe and awe is the beginning of creativity. Dr Robert M. Bilder described creativity as a combination of novelty and value, loosely defined as “the edge of chaos”. The square has just had an experience in which it was still grounded in its dimension but very much had that experience of chaos. It gets the square’s brain turning, what if there is another dimension? What if there is an up?
Creativity [is] a combination of novelty and value, loosely defined as “the edge of chaos”
Now the square has no way of expressing the third dimension as we know it. If the square’s friends ask it, well if there is an up, point to it, the square would have no way of doing so. It is not a 3-d creature. Now enter, the fourth dimension. As 3d beings, there is no way for humans to point to the 4th dimension. Up-down, left-right, forward-back, now these are easy enough. But what’s next? There is no way for us to point to this next dimension but what is useful is taking the idea of a shadow. Now while a square cannot very much visualize a third dimension, it can see the shadow a 3-d object casts in flatland. A cube casts a shadow somewhat like this in flatland:
Similarly, while we cannot picture a fourth-dimension, we can picture the shadow a fourth dimensional cube projects onto our 3d world:
This shape is known as a tesseract.
So, simply by changing our mindset from that of a 3d creature
to that of a 2d creature, we were able to open up an entirely new possibility of a 4th dimension. It is through inter-dimensional shift that we were able to arrive at a conclusion that changes the very fabric of our universe. If a tesseract were to travel into our world, we would have no experience of what this tesseract truly looked like expect in the portions we can see at any point in time from a 3d perspective. Imagine for example, a coffee cup sliding through a square’s flatland. At any point, the square can see nothing but the set of 2d points of the coffee cup which currently are in sight in its 2d world. The square will never see the coffee cup in its entirety within a 2d perspective, only the set of points that travel through it.
Now enter the physicists’ version of the fourth dimension — time. With the premise of 3d objects only being able to truly see other 3d objects, we can surmise that this can be the basis of our inability to see forward in time. We cannot travel along the time axis or dimension simply because we are not time-dimensional creatures. Yet, the experience of time does not escape us. The same way a 2d object lives within a 3d world and is still subject to its restrictions, we are still within a time dimensional universe and subject to time’s restrictions. Without getting so far as to completely stretch the mind, let us take this idea of time as a fourth dimension to understand why creativity begins when the barrier between 3d experience and 4d is broken — or to put it in the square’s terms, when the square is knocked out of 2d, floats up into a 3d world, looks down at its 2d universe, and then returns to flatland.
When we are no longer grounded in a mental temporal continuum that says I am here now that was there then, then we begin to create and understand creation in an entirely new way.
When we are no longer grounded in a mental temporal continuum that says I am here now that was there then, then we begin to create and understand creation in an entirely new way. Take for example Albert Einstein’s discovery of relativity. His discovery came about when he imagined himself shooting across the sky on a beam of light and looking back at a clock. What Einstein was visually manipulating was his sense of time, was his experience of the fourth dimension. Einstein wrote:
“The physical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined… This combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought”.
Michael Faraday, a scientist never formally trained in mathematics, developed our current conception of electric and magnetic fields. He created complex visualizations of electricity and magnetism as fields and tubes that travel through, curve around, and bounce around space. By manipulating his thought in a visual 3rd dimension, he was able to arrive at his marvelous conclusions. When we set goals for our future, we are manipulating our mental temporal dimension, bringing ourselves to a point in the future. And it is this ability for imagining a different temporal possibility which allows for creativity in the current moment. This is the basis of self-transformation or the realizing of a different possibility of the state of the self within a moment. Without the inter-dimensional mental shift of time and the breakage of a barrier placing that imagined scenario of oneself as separate from oneself in the moment, there can be no room for creativity and so called self-actualization. Bruce Lee wrote in a letter to himself:
I realize the DOMINATING THOUGHTS of my mind will eventually reproduce themselves in outward, physical action, and gradually transform themselves into physical reality; therefore I will CONCENTRATE my thoughts for 30 min. daily upon the task of thinking of the person I intend to become, thereby creating in my mind a clear MENTAL PICTURE
The ability to move beyond the personal experience, imagine yourself in a different point in time and space, and looking back to the 3 dimensional world you were once trapped in is the essence of psychedelic experience as well. A woman in her 60’s describes her experience of psychedelic treatment through a John Hopkin’s study as follows:
“‘During her journey she grew feathers and flew back in time to witness various scenes in European history; she also died three times, watched her soul rise from her body on a funeral pyre on the Ganges, and found herself ‘standing on the edge of the universe, witnessing the dawn of creation.’” (source).
Now beyond the spiritual and personal aspect of inter
dimensionality, there is the computational. Machine learning can offer evidence as to why the human mind depends on inter-dimensionality. Assuming that the neural network model of machine learning is an adequate parallel to the human mind, we understand that learning and processing takes place in multiple layers. An input layer, followed by multiple middle layers, followed by an output layer. The input layer can be thought of as human eyes inputting a specific image. Middle layers can define features of this image including borders, colors, edges, shapes, etc. Each middle layer has a specific weight attached to each node within the layer. Finally the output layer is the synthesis of information from these middle layers outputted to allow us to recognize that this image we saw was a table and not a dog. This neural network model, the computational parallel to the human mind, depends on these multiple layers. How are these multiple layers represented? Matrices. In essence the neural network is a multi-dimensional matrix. It depends on inter-dimensionality. And this is even without getting into Simulation Theory, the idea that we are living in a simulated universe. I’ll simply leave you with a link for further reading here.
I propose that inter-dimensionality and inter-dimensional shift is the framework to think about creativity. Any form of creation or personal transformation can only take place with a shift in dimensionality. Time is an innate component of our 3 dimensional existence yet is not within our 3 dimensional boundaries. All of us are born experiencing time, but it is when we shift our view point to understanding that it is an experience that we cannot point to that we begin to put ourselves in a state of awe — the boundary of chaos. It is here that we begin.
