If extra dimensions of space and time exist and are discovered as a result of investigation of super-string and M-Theory then it is also possible that human consciousness may one day be trained perhaps with technical assistance to perceive the extra dimensions of space and time. Human beings presently perceive the manifest four dimensions of space and time with some training of one’s subjective understanding. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer pointed out that Kant’s idea that the noumenal realm of objects gives representations that are perceived directly by human consciousness without some sort of transformation by an automatically functioning human understanding is wrong. The external or ’empirical world’ of reality provides sense data that is structured by the human mind into three dimensional images and with motion also; time.
Schopenhauer pointed out that blind people receiving their sight late in life may perceive the visual world of objects one-dimensionally until their ‘understanding’ breaks through to give them a three dimensional picture and one of time and it’s motions of objects. An equivalent transformation could theoretically take place when extra dimensions are transitioned in some way technically in both a physical and psychological evolution.
An October 13, 2007 article in NewScience reported the work of physicist Itzhak Bars in developing the theory of a five or six dimension universe with two dimensions of time. The extra dimension of time in his paradigm would not be noticeable in the four dimensions of this ‘shadow’ universe that from our perspective has an extra ‘hidden’ dimension of time and maybe another of space.
Perhaps there are extra existing pathways across space time that will become apparent. Yet humanity is posed on the brink of environmentally induced self-destruction perhaps so it may not have the time anyway…c’est la vie regard to trans-national corporations and environmental havoc-if their isn’t a profit in it it cannot matter and must be communist goes the ‘reasoning’.
The idea that consciousness exists ‘at the purest point of connection between ‘space and time’ is an interesting notion. Consciousness would perhaps then be that ‘purest point’. If one uses such a concept it should be a moral description of consciousness instead of another physical or substantive description-for one has introduced a third element into the equation or scenario that I am not sure exists; a spiritual or conscious reality apart from space and time, or a product of it.
What consciousness is considered by some to be- a whole greater than the sum of the parts in an ability to have self-awareness- that isn’t what I meant by extra dimensions of time.
In superstring theory space-time is posited to have extra dimensions that originated during the period of hyperinflation at less than 10 to the minus 43rd power of lifespan…it grew from far smaller than a quark to larger than a grapefruit at superluminal speed-possible because light speed, photons and the physical force limitations did not yet exist…extra smaller and non evident dimensions were created along with the four dimensions of space-time humanity experiences in mind.
If one thinks about the 3 dimensions of space as having a direction each, it is easy to consider time as another direction like those of space that have a direction too in which the other three dimensions of space exist. Spatial dimensions have a direction in the sense that they are expanding ‘outward’ following the big bang, coinciding with time. On the face of it, logically, if spatial dimensions may be traveled in all directions of the dimension’s axis then time should be as well available for travel along it’s axis. The concept that time is a ‘monopole’ dimension with an existence that annihilates its prior dimensional axis is somewhat counterintuitive. At the least one wonders if time dimensions do not create standing waves of time in space-time in some places, or if time’s dimensional manifestation is non-uniform not only within the context of relativity theory experienced at differential rates by subjective acceleration through space-time and subjective experience but implicitly in localized fields of space-time. The relationship of the time dimension to space and the potential detachment of one from the other is another factor in the consideration of possible extra dimensions of time.
The posited smaller dimensions perhaps flow along in the expansion of space-time of this universe that is sort of counter-intuitive…relativity theory has time passages occurring in the standard four dimensions locally and in relation from-oneself and one’s metabolic lifetime too I suppose. One’s own world-line or speed through space-time and place specifically has a character unique from others. On a different tack… how can smaller dimensions not extended into the broad time dimension of this universe and join with it in order to share its extension? How is relativity in space-time of the Universe ‘conserved’ in particles or strings/branes too small to appear in this universe with certainty?
If the universe has extra dimensions of space that are hidden away why can’t it also have extra dimensions of time hidden away? If time was created in the inflaton along with spatial dimensions why couldn’t more than one time dimensions exist that was made too?
