When I was a youngster in art school, I had a dream once that I lived on what appeared to be another planet in a small, idyllic community where everyone knew each other and lived together in harmony. It was a green paradise on an ocean bay, warm and heavenly. I saw from above that the town resembled a circuit board, with the buildings arranged like processors, capacitors, diodes, resistors and transistors. As the dream ended, I saw that I decided to leave there, alone, by walking across a stratospheric land bridge suspended above deep time, and into a frozen, untouched wilderness.
When people talk about the possibility that the universe is a 4-dimensional sphere, they invoke the analog relationship between a hypothetical 2-dimensional world and our actual 3-dimensional world. The idea states that 2-dimensional beings living on the surface of a 3-dimensional sphere may be able to deduce the existence of the sphere by being able to set off in any 2-dimensional direction and eventually arrive where they began. Similarly, if the universe is a 4-dimensional sphere, we should be able to set off in any 3-dimensional direction and eventually arrive where we started. Also, since we, as 3-dimensional beings, can see inside of 2-dimensional shapes, it stands to reason that a 4-dimensional being would be able to see us inside and out.
The ideas are very interesting and I do believe that we live in a 4-dimensional universe, but no one talks about how time is affected by the transition from 3 to 4 dimensions. I believe that sequential time exists only inside 4-dimensional bubble universes like ours. A 4-dimensional being would not be limited by 3-dimensional space or sequential time. That means that a 4-dimensional being would not only be able to see us inside and out at once, but also from beginning to end. From a 4-dimensional perspective, every moment within our 3-dimensional existence would exist simultaneously. Any moment of any actual person's life could be visited at will in the highest level of detail. From a 4-dimensional simultaneous time perspective, everything created inside the universe exists forever.
Knowing this, bringing others into existence takes on a new meaning with the explicit responsibility to ensure the quality of their existence. In what state do you want your children to exist forever, in a dangerous state of ignorance supported by privileges taken from others by force? Do you want them to live and die for existentially unsupportable customs arranged by greed and maintained through disinformation?
When I say that human beings are not animals, what I mean more precisely is that we are not natural predators. If we were, we would not be equipped with donkey-like teeth. Our specialized minds are not for killing each other or other animals. The problem with agreeing with the proposition that human beings are animals is that human beings have a dismal understanding of what animals actually are. It does depend on the context, but to agree with that proposition in this world may be to give one's consent to treating human beings as fundamentally irrational, existentially inferior, factory farmable herds of burden. This existentially dysfunctional vulgarity of a world is fueled, after all, by the inferiority industrial complex.
I have called humankind a nascent information species because most of us are only now becoming aware of how information defines our lives. In actuality, though, all animals are information beings. The only difference between us, of course, is in the physical form capable of receiving and transmitting information. Keep this in mind for the next time you have the opportunity to communicate with another animal. Instead of words, we can use actions. When I find a single ant in my house, with the knowledge that it is able to communicate its experience to other ants, I gently give it a ride outside instead of killing it.
We are metainformation beings. That is to say that our special ability is the ability to process the information of information. Intelligence is most definitely a force of nature, but it's important to understand that its strength is not as a consuming force. Intelligence is the orderly and creative force of nature. It is the source of life and the evidence, I believe, of 4-dimensional metabeing. Capable of transcending 3-dimensional space and sequential time, the mind and its imagination offers a taste of it.
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