We all know that mankind exists in a three-dimensional world, called space, and which permits him to understand shapes and movements around him. We usually refer to those three dimensions as height(up/down), depth (front/back) and width(left/right). And even if our vision is two-dimensional, we are able to perceive a third dimension by moving in our environment. You can understand this by analysing the dimensions of a picture. It really has two dimensions, namely up/down and left/right. Same thing for the pattern that light is drawing on the retina of the human eye. But a good artist is able to induce a third dimension in this picture, what we call depth(front/back). In the real world, this third dimension is not directly accessible to our eyes, it is only by moving around since we were born that we learned to perceive this new dimension.
Our mind is then builtwith this imaging: able to represent any space or data it wants using a three-dimensional diagram. If you've ever done or read scientific research, you might have noticed how it is hard to grasp a phenomenon if you have more then three variables to analyse. The human brain is able to cast variables on spatial continuums to represent abstract data. But going into the forth variable, you're stucked with a problem: whether to remove one of the first three variables to be able to add the forth one...but then you only link it to two others and miss part of the whole picture. You might want to add a forth line on your paper, but then you loose the spatiality of your graph and your brain might go back to a two-dimensional perception.
On the other hand, shapes and movement in space can all be written into mathematical expressions. The 3D worlds that computers can now produce are an example of the application of those maths. Even if the screen of the computer is a 2D space, like a picture drawn by an artist, mathematics permits us to simulate an added dimension of depth that we all understand and which gives us the illusion of walking in a believable 3D world. We also know that mathematics are not limited to three dimensions. The number of possible dimensions is unlimited. On top of the regular x,y,z you could add w,t,a,b,c,etc... The only problem with that is: how do we spatially represent those results? And further, can we handle much more data input than our brain is used to? The only way to know is to try.
The goal of this project would be to create a 4D world which a user would have the possibility of moving into. As much as you have to learn how to use 3D software, a subject in this experiment would have to learn how to use 4D software. The mathematics behind this is just a matter of computing. While in a 3D world, the computer assigns you an initial (x,y,z) position and you can modify those values by pressing keys on your keyboard or moving the mouse. Let's say for instance that left arrow goes left, right arrow goes right, up arrow goes ahead and down arrow goes backward. If you're allowed to fly in this virtual world, the plus(+) key would bring you higher and the minus(-) key would bring you down. Pressing those six keys at random will change the picture displayed on your computer screen, and if the computations are modeling reality, your would tend to believe you are moving in a 3D world and be able to grasp in your mind how this world is shaped. You know it's not a real world but only a set of numbers.
Let's say that we add a fourth pair of moving keys, for instance the PageUp and PageDown keys. And let's say that we instructed our 4D software to change your position on a fourth dimension called "w" when you press those keys. Watching your computer display change while you press those new keys, what would be your intuition of what you're seeing? Would it still be a believable spatial world in front of your eyes? Or would it just merely be colors and shapes changing and moving without reference to the world we are used to?
My hypothesis is that yes, at first, it would seem to anyone that what we see cannot be undestood as a real world. But someone persisting in using this software might come to perceive and understand new things, and expand his consciousness into grasping a new way of viewing reality. That we put a name on this new dimension, be it time, energy, consciousness, or anything else is not important at first. Maybe only the intuition of the persistent software user will be able to name this new reality once experienced.
There might be no difficulties finding people to use this software once it is built. The Internet puts us in contact with the whole planet and we can easily set a web page allowing people to download the software and have a form enabling them to inputtheir feedback about what their experiences are. We could also limit the experiment to just a few people that we are in close contact with, just to be sure that we have richly elaborated details about what the use of this software is inducing. Or we could just make this software available, leaving users to judge by what this forth dimension is all about.
But the real problem is about creating the software. As a programmer, I know what it means to program a 3D world. It is only a matter of time, but it could be a very long time as you go through all the bugs, especially when you deal with a fourth dimension and you don't even know what it's supposed to look like. An other option would be to contact someone that already has a 3D program done and would like to donate of his code(or his time) to enable the upgrade of the software to a 4th dimension.
I guess everyone has heard about auras. Whether they believe it's real or not is very controversial in today's world. For here is the ongoing battle between the material and the metaphysical vision of reality. And even for those who do believe in them, only a few can say that they've seen auras aside from pictures. Being able to see auras we call a gift which is not given to everyone; most of us cannot because we are not "gifted", and so cannot access this information - unless they see a clairvoyant when they really need that information. But at the price most charge, you don't want to go there everyday.
On the other hand, there is this new emerging technology called Kirlian photography. Actually it's not that new, it's been around since the beginning of the century. But with this New Age movement growing, and with more sophisticated cameras being developed, more people today are aware of this technology.
So just to be sure we agree on what we're talking about, I'll briefly summarise what are auras and the nature of Kirlian photography. The aura is known as an energy field that surrounds the human body and which radiates from it. It is not visible to everyone but only to the gifted or trained eyes. It can have different shapes and colors and is not static but changes frequently, depending on the mood of the person who emits it. So seeing an aura immediately gives us information about who we are dealing with, information normally taking month or even years to obtain at the pace we usually get to know people. And sometimes we do not get this information at all.
Kirlian photography is an electronic process that permits us to grab the picture of an aura on film. It is said that we can only capture part of the aura with this process, because the technology is physical and auras can go far beyond the physical world. Others would say it's only a physical phenomenon, named the tesla coil, and has nothing to do with the human state of mind.
For those believing there might be something to the Kirlian effect, it would be interesting to do a systematic study of this phenomenon. We can choose from different design options what is more suitable for what we are seeking. One is to set a lab with a Kirlian camera where we would have people coming in to have their aura picture taken. At the same time, we would have them answer a psychological/emotional questionnaire and we would compare both data to see if there is a link. And the more the same people came back into our lab, the more we would have data on the changing frame of each specific person.
We might also want to sell this camera to anyone who wants to buy it, and supposing that it can be hooked up to a computer, have CU-SeeMe like sessions over the Internet with only people with their auras displayed being able to log in. It could then be left to the participants to intuit for themselves the precise meaning of all the shapes and colors they are seeing. We could also log in all data that is passing through these sessions and keep it for future analyses.
Whatever the choice, big challenges await us if we decide to engage in this project. The first is the design for the Kirlian camera. Although there is a lot of models available on the market (you can even order some on the Internet), I'm not sure a computer-interfaced Kirlian camera has been made. And I don't have enough knowledge in electronics to build something like that. I have contacts who would have the knowledge needed, but to bring them into such a project is another story. They just don't believe in it. (Perhaps if we offer the Divine Presence about our desire, help will come to us?)
Secondly, we need software to receive and analyse all the data the Kirlian camera is going to produce. Aside from the imaging processing itself, the software would need to distinguish between what is the physical body and what is the aura. This is not an easy programming job. And even with that done, how to analyse the data brings even more questions.
Final barrier: if we choose the CU-SeeMe like sessions, we have to have a server able to drive those sessions. It could only be a matter of money to pay for computer and software, but it could also be a matter of disk space. Because with all this data coming in, how do you know which is valuable and which is not? Just to give you an idea of the problem, an image of 100x100 pixels of 16 colors would take 10k on a hard disk, giving a 50% compression rate with a GIF or JPEG format. Even if you keep one picture per second, a hundred seconds(1 minute and 40 secs.) would take up one meg of data. Let's say you want to keep a whole conversation lasting an hour, just to have the feel of a changing mood. You're now just under 40 megs of data, just for one person. How many hours of data from how many people would be needed to draw a conclusion? I only know it would take a lot.
Two common points emerge from the projects I have detailed in the previous sections. The first one is an experiment lightly designed around a software that could be distributed over the Internet, enabling mass participation. The second is the possibility that the conclusions of the experiment could be drawn by the subject himself, making it a highly intuitive activity. The first benefits I see from that are ones of planetary concerns: providing an easy means to bring people to new awareness levels. The second would be about a new way of making science. Results would not be seen only by the experimenters, leaving the subjects in the dark of knowledge as is often the case in medical or psychological research. Instead, the scientist can himself be a subject and all the subjects can draw conclusions for themselves. This way, knowledge is spread to everyone but is kept inside, closer to the soul. Especially with the aura experiment, supposing it proves conclusive, you could no longer do things without knowing the motives of what you're doing. That could change a lot of things in the way we relate to technology and its consequences.
There a re other issues I would raise, involving data processing, and what tools to use. But for me, it goes further than that: The question would better be what data to process. I am curently looking at one tool called SQL which is a widely-used standard for accessing databases. It is mostly a pseudo-English query language interface which enables anyone, even non-programmers, to retrieve information from big data files stored in computers. That way programmers only need to concentrate on what data might be accessible and users can then ask for whatever subset of the whole data, in the format they want.
What does a database have to do with higher purpose? Well, in a sense, when you meet someone, you meet a database. Your brain is a big database with zillions of gigabytes of data stored since you were born (or even before if you believe in reincarnation). I guess we must have a way to store the data we've being fed by our senses, emotions and thoughts. And we also have a way of retreiving this data, altough some or a lot of it might be lost(we call that forgetting). This system is generally called language. As words are a tool to recall events we lived before. And with a database, we exchange words through a computer, but what it comes down to, is data exchange between two minds. If we recognise the same types of data, we are able to send each other information that will be coherent to each other. If I say that I love you, you'll grab something out these words, and you can answer something back to me that will inform me of your feelings towards me. But try to type this sentence on a computer: "command not found" would tell you what it feels about you.
Actually, it tells you how the computer feels. It tells that it doesn't feel at all because it has not been instructed to feel. It also tells you that it doesn't understand those words and what you're talking about. This is because a computer is only a collection of non-evolving static programs doing exactly what they are being told, nothing more, nothing less. But what if the computers were instructed to learn from our mistakes and really care about what we're looking for? Wouldn't it be a new way to access data? Computers would be associates of mankind in the search for information instead of solely storing devices. They would be able to think and feel like we do.
From the above thinking, a lot of questions might arise. What is an emotion and how can I store it in bytes? Computers have no soul, so don't think about feelings and thoughts coming out of them. But computers have no ear and eyes and still, they can record pictures and sounds, show or play the data later on. They just don't understand that data (not instructed to). They can also internally represent a 3D space without ever seeing the real world and then show it to you. But try to tell the computer to show you a beautiful woman working in rose garden. To achieve this image on a computer would be very time-consuming. But a human being doesn't need a lot of imagination to see this picture in his mind while reading the sentence. And it takes less then a second to build this image in a brain.
So reading words generates images in our mind. Put a set of words together and read it. Your brain retrieves data so fast, you don't notice a thing, this process being so natural to us. And soon we have a picture in our mind. And if others could directly connect into our brain, I'm sure they would agree that it is a correct interpretation of the sentence read.
Now, what is missing in our computers that might enable them to do the same thing? I think it all comes down to collecting data and building a coherence around it.Data processed by the computer should be understandable by it the same way input is to us. The computer should able to record all inputed data in a real-world modeled info-center. It should keep track of the coherence of the data being entered and ask questions when it is entered incoherent data. For that, we might have to give it tools that it doesn't usually have.
First, we would need to give him eyes in order to be able to see the person he's talking to. One point about the human vision is that we always relate to someone who tells us something. Relationships are always personal. If we drive forward the aura project, we could develop a tool that would enable the computer to see us, and from there, relate to us.
Next, give the computer a spatial representation of the world. All data entered should have a 2D or 3D (maybe even 4D who knows) graphic associated with it. Even abstract concepts like "liberty" or "emotional" can have pictures associated with them. Try it and you'll see. So by always having space in its mind, the computer database can be constructed and related to the real world. All data can be linked together by giving them a spatial meaning.
The computer also needs to be able to process all this data and always seek to make links between them. This is called thinking. As soon as no request is being processed for a specific user, the computer should go into a deep meditation where it analyses all the data. It would then temporarily interrupt this task when asked for something by another user.
We would also need a language in order to communicate our desires to the computer. And it would also need to answer us back with this language. Altough our program could respond with a graphical display when apropriate, a conversation would need to occur. But instead of fixing the legal words that the program understands(as it is normally the case with nowadays computers), all the words would be data-entered before, and they could be used to understand new data. This is the process of learning.
All this would surely create a huge database that could not be stored on one single computer. Instead, we could design a system that takes advantage of the Internet to store the data worldwide. Each computer would have a subset of the whole database but everyone would have the software that can access it.
Finally, we need the program to understand all this data. This is called a kernel. Usually a kernel is not a big quantity of data, it is just basic instructions as to how to access the data. But it has to contain all the knowledge needed to retrieve, understand and display the data needed. A kernel cannot learn new processes unless those processes are themselves data that the kernel will use to extract more data. So here would be the revolution. No instructions are given to our main program except how to read other programs that tells it what to do and how to do it. But the main program could be able to change those programs if it no longer finds them coherent or suitable for the understanding of relevant data. This is mostly what we humans do when we change our mind about something. To understand why we change behavior in this way will enable us to give that power to the computer.
Feel free to ask questions or raise objections to what I have written here. I think this is just a starting sketch, and I'm sure you can bring more insights to these visions or even discover new directions I didn't think about. Bear in mind, please, that I sometimes feel unable to express my exact thoughts because French is my first language. But overall, I feel I've pretty much covered the subject...and I'm waiting for your replies:
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