|
"FOR twelve
hours I moved in and out of dimensions of both space and time.
The incomprehensible became comprehensible. Realities within
realities blossomed and faded. From the infinitely large to
the infinitely small, unbounded and unfettered mind flashed
across landscapes of incredible depth and beauty...time
ceased, there was no past or future."
Well, a little
brown mushroom can certainly change your outlook on life. The
above is an anonymous account, posted on a website earlier
this year, of the effects of consuming a hallucinogenic fungus
called a psilocybe. The fungus induces what most people would
consider to be an altered state of consciousness, an
experience of a crazy, mixed-up universe.
But is it?
Could this experience be a true reflection of reality - as
true as our everyday experience of three space dimensions and
one of time? Metod Saniga thinks so.
Saniga is not
a professional mystic or a peddler of drugs, he is an
astrophysicist at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in
Bratislava. It seems unlikely that studying stars led him to
such a way-out view of space and time. Has he undergone a
drug-induced epiphany, or a period of mental instability? "No,
no, no," Saniga says, "I am a perfectly sane person."
But a
dissatisfied one. Saniga was frustrated with the kind of
space-time portrayed in mainstream science - Einstein's
space-time - because it does not fit with ordinary experience.
Most people feel that time flows: we experience a present
moment that is moving forward through time, and the past and
future look very different. But according to conventional
physics we inhabit a universe where time and space are frozen
into a single unchanging space-time. All the events that have
happened or will ever happen are marked by points in this
"block" of space-time, like bubbles suspended in ice. Past and
future have the same footing, and there's no flow.
Why doesn't
this accord with our experience? The answer given by many
philosophers of physics is that our experience of flowing
time, and a distinct past and future, is an illusion. But to
Saniga, this is ducking the issue. In the end, he says,
science has to be based on perception: we can do experiments,
but at some point we have to rely on our own perceptions to
interpret the results.
If that is so,
physics should be able to explain our perceived flow of time.
And more than that, if subjective reality is the ultimate
source of scientific data, then there are a lot of different
subjective realities to take into account. Time and space can
seem to behave strangely in near-death experiences, during LSD
and mescaline trips, and in fits of mysticism or madness. A
true picture of space and time, Saniga says, ought to
encompass every possible experience.
OK, so where
do we start? It's not exactly practical to try every drug
going, or deliberately flirt with death. So Saniga went
hunting through the literature instead.
He discovered
a host of accounts written by people who had gone through
peculiar states. "I take these subjective experiences to have
the same standing as standard experiments and observations,"
he says. The experimental results you get with this attitude,
however, are far from conventional.
One of the
most common states described in the literature was an
experience of "eternity", in which all time is compressed into
the present. It can be induced by hallucinogens such as magic
mushrooms, and Saniga also quotes mystics who appear to be
able to put themselves into this state at will. Psychoses can
lead to other strange experiences of space and time. A
psychotic patient describes how time can stand still during an
episode: "Time does not pass any longer. I look at the clock
but its hands are always at the same position, they no longer
move, they no longer go on. Then I check if the clock came to
a halt. I see that it works, but the hands are standing
still." (Giornale di Psichiatria e di Neuropatologia
vol 95, p 765). This standstill is often accompanied by a
feeling that space has lost a dimension. Everything has become
flat.
In other cases
the past may come to dominate, so present and future no longer
exist. Time can seem to flow backwards, or even be "chaotic" -
chopped into pieces and re-ordered. Taking mescaline can make
time feel chaotic. In the 60s, a user wrote: "I was
experiencing the events of 3.30 before the events of 3.00, the
events of 2.00 after the events of 2.45, and so on. Several
events I experienced with an equal degree of reality more than
once." (The Drug Experience, Orion Press, New York, p
295).
There are a
lot more where those came from. On a casual reading, it is
difficult to see any structure in the mass of accounts, but
Saniga says that you soon get the hang of it. "If you gather a
large sample of such experiences you start to see a definite
pattern."
And so, being
mathematically minded, Saniga started to construct a
geometrical model of space-time to reflect these accounts. "I
was trying different structures - fractal geometry for example
- but in the spring of 1995, I saw a picture in a book." That
picture was of a geometrical construction called a pencil of
conics, and it became the basis for Saniga's grand unified
model of space-time.
To enter this
altered state, you need nothing more dangerous than paper,
pens and a length of spaghetti (uncooked). Or a reasonably
good imagination.
In Saniga's
picture, time is rather more complicated than the straight
line that you and I might visualise. It is an infinite
collection of curves arranged on a plane. The curves all
belong to a geometrical family called conic sections or
conics, which includes circles, ellipses, parabolas and
hyperbolas formed when a circular cone intersects a plane.
They can be drawn on a sheet of paper in an arrangement called
a pencil, in which all the different conics share four points
in common (see
Graphic).
Now imagine
that each curve is an event, or a moment in time. Draw a
little dot on the plane, on one of the lines in the pencil of
conics. That is you - your point of view. You'll be sitting on
one particular curve: the present moment, says Saniga. There
are also an infinite number of conics that the point lies
outside. Call these moments the past. And the infinite number
of conics that the point lies inside? That's the future.
Are you ready
to enter an altered state now? Take the point-that-is-you, and
move it so it is right on top of one of the four points in the
pencil where all the curves meet. Suddenly everything changes.
Now the point is exactly on every curve. According to the
model, that means every moment is the present - you are
experiencing the whole of time in one big fat "now". Could
this correspond to the mushroom eater's feeling of
eternity?
If you're
feeling adventurous, you could try moving yourself to one of
the two lines that join the four points and cross at the
centre. These are also conic sections, but they're unlike all
the other curves, and Saniga thinks they could represent time
at a standstill.
That takes
care of time, but what about space? Saniga represents each
space dimension as another pencil, an infinite set of straight
lines all passing through one point (see
Graphic). To represent three dimensions, Saniga adds three
pencils of straight lines in three planes. Each line stands
for a position in one of our perceived space dimensions. Draw
another dot to represent yourself. Walking from your house to
the shops, for example, would mean shifting the dot from one
line to another line nearby.
Now move the
dot all the way to the central point of the pencil. Then you
would be on every line, so your perception would coincide with
every place in that spatial dimension. You would feel as
though all places were one place. And indeed some of the
accounts describe a feeling that sounds similar.
Now you are
ready to put everything together and find your place in
space-time. Draw a pencil of conics on one sheet of paper.
Draw three pencils of lines on three more sheets, and slot
them into the pencil of conics so that they share the
interesting points where all the lines come together (see
Graphic). This time, instead of drawing a dot to represent
yourself, poke a long piece of uncooked spaghetti through the
model, anywhere you like.
This is where
the model begins to pay off. Now you can read off your
perception of space-time by seeing where your personal
spaghetti hits the different pieces of paper. If you're
normal, you'll have poked it through all four pieces of paper
at four unremarkable places (bear in mind that in the full
model, the paper and the spaghetti are all infinite, so it is
quite hard to avoid hitting all four planes). That means you
find yourself at just one place in each dimension of space,
and at just one time. You experience a single present moment
with a memory of the past but no knowledge of the future. Well
done.
But weird
things can happen in Saniga's space-time setup. What if your
pasta of perception hits one or more of the special lines or
points on the model? You might find that you are stretched out
in space or experiencing all places as one. If you hit the
crossed line in the pencil of conics that intersects with the
central spatial dimension, you might not see that space
dimension properly - you might experience this as time
standing still in a seemingly flat world.
Saniga says
there are 19 distinct ways to arrange your line of perception,
and claims that they fit all the different kinds of experience
of time and space that have been reported. His model even puts
these states into a hierarchy of strangeness, depending on how
many aspects of normal perception are changed. The oddest one
of all is if you poke your spaghetti exactly down the line
where the three space pencils join. Then you find yourself
present at every point in space, and simultaneously
experiencing time as an eternal point. That, according to
Saniga, is how the psilocybe mushroom eater felt.
Once you get
your head around it, Saniga's grand unified space-time seems
rather neat. But that does not mean it is correct. Saniga's
interpretations of the subjective accounts are themselves
subjective, and it isn't easy to see all the patterns he sees.
The accounts are also full of contradictions. One of his
mystics, for example, says: "The now that stands still is said
to make eternity." This seems to be conflating two supposedly
distinct states.
Might we find
some objective evidence to support the model? Saniga admits
that his mathematical model can't make many testable
predictions. But there might be one or two. Just by glancing
at the geometry, for instance, it looks as though one spatial
dimension has a slightly different status from the other two.
While the two outermost spatial pencils are in geometrically
identical positions in the overall setup, the middle one is
unique. That may imply that one dimension of our space behaves
differently - that space is lopsided, in a sense.
If so, could
physicists actually detect this, by some precise observations
of distant quasars, or cunning experiments with lasers? "This
is very difficult...I don't know," says Saniga. But earlier
this year some physicists suggested that a feature of string
theory called spontaneous symmetry breaking may give a
"preferred" direction to space-time (New
Scientist, 16 August, p 22). So a lopsided space-time
is not inconceivable.
There is
another hint that there may be something in Saniga's strange
ideas. It comes from an abstruse bit of mathematics called
Cremona transformations. These take one 3-dimensional space
and distort it into a different one. It is a little like using
a projector to beam a picture onto a tilted screen, distorting
the two-dimensional image. In one of the simplest of these
mathematical projectors, part of the necessary geometrical
machinery turns out to be the set of four pencils in Saniga's
model. So maybe his space-time is less arbitrary than it
initially appears.
Other Cremona
transformations produce entirely different kinds of
space-time: dimensions with a finite number of points, or with
some dimensions missing. And one of the adjustments gives a
very odd picture: a universe with three dimensions of time and
one of space. Saniga speculates that the universe might
originally have been created this way, and only switched to
three dimensions of space and one of time shortly afterwards.
Could some cosmological observation identify this strange
primeval space-time with its inverted dimensions? Perhaps -
but there is no sign of it so far.
Einstein's
space-time, though, can be used to make a lot of concrete
predictions about things we can measure. And so far it fits
with our observations. The way that light is deflected by
galaxies, the existence of black holes (almost certainly) and
gravity waves (probably), all add up to pretty good
quantitative evidence.
Perhaps we
should be thankful that Einstein worked out his theory while
stuck in the staid surroundings of the Swiss patent office
rather than during experiments with mind-altering drugs.
Especially since Saniga still has not answered that original
objection about the flow of time - it's not included in the
model. He has certainly made a distinction between past and
future, but some people think that will be explained by
conventional physics, too, either in some as yet undiscovered
quirk of quantum gravity, or simply because of the special
state of the universe at the big bang (New
Scientist, 1 November 1997, p 34).
Although
Saniga's model is intriguing, it is also highly inconclusive.
Indeed, while a few people interpret the model as telling us
about an objective, physical space-time, far more believe that
if he's really on to something then it is probably telling us
about the human brain. After all, drugs and insanity don't
just alter our perceptions of space and time. LSD can induce
colourful kaleidoscopic visions, but no one claims that these
are valid physical realities. They are just patterns created
by overstimulated neurons in the visual cortex (New
Scientist, 30 June 2001, p 26).
So it is
possible that Saniga's model pinpoints an unexpected
connection between all sorts of different brain malfunctions:
a clue to how our mind handles space and time. Some brave
biologist might even find a way to relate the pencil model to
brain architecture and neurotransmitters.
Saniga's
interpretation is even more controversial, taking the idea of
subjectivity to its logical extreme. "I believe that
space-time is a characteristic of consciousness," he says.
"Consciousness is more fundamental than space-time." So,
having modelled the perceptions of space-time, claims Saniga,
it does not make sense to ask whether this corresponds to a
"real" physical universe, because that perception actually
generates space and time. Does this mean there is no objective
physical reality at all? "I believe that there exists what
oriental philosophies call the 'absolute', which is beyond the
grasp of any conceptual approach," Saniga says.
And it is
here, perhaps, that Saniga starts to lose any scientific
sympathy he might have gained. However, although he admits
that his ideas are wildly speculative, he is unapologetic.
While most scientists would say they are seeking an objective
reality, Saniga thinks there is nothing scientifically wrong
with taking a different tack - it might even turn out to be
useful. "Normal science is based on a third-person
perspective," he says, "but we need to move to a first-person
perspective and put it on same basis as physical
observations."
Whether you
agree that it is worth making the leap really depends on your
attitude to subjectivity - and Saniga's is a little different
from most people's. But, hey, what's the point of subjectivity
if you can't make of it what you want?
| 
)
