Thoughts on thoughts, multi-dimensionality and gods, part 2

If you read part 1 and were left thinking "wait, where do gods fall into this?", it's not that you didn't understand me. Part 1 and 2 were supposed to be a single post and had to be split. You might have guessed where they will come in, however, 10 points for you if you did.

Anyway, as I said in part 1, after my initial conclusions, I revisited T. Something that had been bothering me was that, if T is no more and no less than the sum of the entire existence of a human, then for T to reflect on her own existence she would have to introduce a change in that existence. After all, thinking is a process and as such requires time. Therefore, if T actually is aware of her nature, then her nature changes. So it seems that T is actually only the mega-you for a fragment of her existence, and then she is something else.

So what is she know? Is she the sum of someone else's existence? Is she something completely different? A mixture of both, I'd say. Being 4D, she can easily be in two or more places at the same time. She can be in all places at the same time, for that matter. So, it's possible that T was, at some point, the sum of me, and then someone else's. Or everyone's. At the middle points between being you and someone else, she could be anything. Doesn't really matter

Of course, if at some point T is nothing more than the sum of a person's existence, then she can't have memory of the past. Memory would include being more than just one person, it'd be an entire person and then some. So, I see two options: Either T has an added property that allows her to remember who she's been in the past but doesn't interfere with this world, or that memory is not a part of T.

The latter option seems far more plausible to me. It's not T that holds memory of every person she's been. There's someone else that enters the equation, someone who is to T as T is to us, a 5-dimensional being who's the sum of everyone T has ever been. We shall call him P.

Now, if T was at some point everyone, we only need one P. If there is, for whatever reason, a larger number of T's, then we could go with one P that includes all T's, or multiple P's. If we chose the former option, the process ends there. If not, we are faced with much the same choice, and we can repeat the process indefinitely as long as we have dimensions, which I see as infinite. Sooner or later, because the amount of multi-dimensional beings must reduce or remain constant after each step, we arrive at one single being that contains the sum of the life of every thinking being that ever existed. That being now can let her own N-dimension time go by without having to transform into another sum. She can now reflect upon the vast collection of knowledge and draw conclusions from it. She's a thinking being, in a sense, similar to ourselves, although with a completely different time-space perspective and huge memory bank that collects the experiences of every thinking being ever. Lets name her N.

Now, let's say there is an infinite amount of universes with thinking beings, separated at the dimensional level they perceive but connected at a higher one. Repeat the above process in each of them, and you get an infinite number of N's. Since the universes are connected if you go high enough in the dimensions, there are N's coexisting at every dimension level that's high enough to contain one and beyond. And what should we do next? Sum them all up, of course.

But the amount of beings is infinite, isn't it? So we could keep on summing up, repeating similar processes as those described in parts 1 and 2, and get ever more complex thinkers, who, as they analysed all the thoughts contained in their memories, would start drawing more and more conclusions, which would be all summed up and already known at a higher dimension level, ad infinitum.

And that's just it. What I was going for is precisely this, the infinite succession of thinking, conclusion summation, and rethinking based by the summation. The infinite-dimensional being that sums it all up. And what do you call a being that exists both in our universe and beyond it, which is an embodiment of infinity, and that knows everything that can possibly be known? Whatever you damn well like, I guess. I chose Aleph.

You probably noticed that I've made quite a few assumptions throughout this analysis. Each one of these seems intuitively correct to me, but as I said before, my intuition proves nothing. All I can say is that it feels right to me. I'm not basing any life-changing decisions on this.

By the way, if you were wondering about my naming, T is a reference to tetra (four), P to penta (five), N is usually used to fill in for an unknown natural number, and Aleph is a reference to the story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges and to Aleph numbers.

Thoughts on thoughts, multi-dimensionality and gods

When I'm going through my life, waiting, eating, travelling, or performing other activities that don't require a lot of thought, I like to avoid boredom by thinking stories, either developing ones I thought of before or creating one on the spot. When I get bored with one (relatively fast), I create another one. The problem arises when I'm bored with the last story and the next one hasn't appeared. In this situations, I'm bored, have nothing to do, and probably won't for a while, so I need an alternative: somewhat incoherent pondering of vaguely philosophical matters. That's how this blog was born, in fact.

The latest instance of this started by me considering other possible forms of thinking beings. I started thinking about something I've read about possible reasons we exist in 3-dimensional space, which led me to wonder about how a 4-dimensional being (which I shall now call T) would perceive our world. If what we perceive as time is that extra dimension, then T can essentially move backwards and forward through time, leading to a considerably greater understanding of the world. I'd like to elaborate on that, but I'll leave it for later.

How would T manifest in the 3-dimensional world we perceive? Well, for starters, T being 4D means that all of her can't exist completely in 3D space. Only a "slice" of T can be in 3D at any moment in time. If you have trouble understanding what I mean by slice, it helps to move things down a dimension and think of it as a cube (or sphere, or cone, or any other 3D object) trying to exist in a 2-dimensional world. At most, only an infinitesimal slice of the cube, with area but not volume, can be perceived by the inhabitants of the 2D world. If volume is the added dimension, then volume for 2D is time for 3D. As the 2D world moves through its time (volume), the slice of the cube that is in their world is a different one. If each infinitesimal slice is different from the previous, then the 2D people see this as "change", while it simply is revealing another part of the object. If that analogy was useful, great. If not, sucks to be you, because I can't think of another way of explaining it. I'll assume you understood, so we go back to T.

We can't see all of T at once, but as time goes she appears to change. And when my train of thought arrived at that conclusion, I thought of this: that wouldn't seem too unusual to the people observing it, would it? In fact, we see it all the time. Any human we see, for example, could be the result of a 4D being that intersects the 3D world. Now, the sum of all the statuses we observe since T appears until she disappears is the real T, the way T sees and understands herself. In the case of a human being, this would be the totality of their existence, from the moment sperm and egg join to the point bones decay and there are no physical remains. But, more importantly, it covers the period between birth and death, aka life. So there could be, "out there", a T that has, as part of her mind, the sum of the entire experience, memory, thoughts, emotions, etc. of the entire life of a human being. Could be you, or me. Could be we all are in fact a T intersecting the 3D world, and there's someone living in the 4D that already knows everything you are going to do, be and think for the rest of your life. T is in fact more you than yourself, considering that you are only a part of her.

At this point ended my original analysis on T and how she is so much cooler than you. Or me, for that matter. I was not exactly sure how you'd go about demonstrating any of this. Maybe it's a necessary consequence of multi-dimensionality. It seems intuitively true to me, but intuition is not a reliable way of obtaining knowledge, and I can think of no way of testing it (which makes it mostly irrelevant). But as I said originally, it was mostly a way of temporary entertainment.

But of course, I was bound to be bored again, was I not? And so I revisited T later on. I'm leaving that for a later post.

[By the way, I based this mostly on a 3-dimension space 1-dimension time model for simplicity. Current theories usually include quite a few more, but it works the same way.]