Weird Ideas on the Infinite Microcosm

This is an entry I found in my old LJ archives. It's not knowledge, per se, or even well-founded ideas. It's more like out-there notions I've had about the universe that I put into words on September 22nd of 2003. I thought I'd place it here as well, because as weird as they are, these ideas have a place in a Journal of Knowledge.

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The Infinite Micro/Macrocosm

It is a pet theory of mine that the universe extends infinitely outward and inward - it lends a certain fractal elegance to the world, because no matter how far outward or inward you go, there would be endlessly recursive pattern and order. Having infinite levels of smallness and bigness also places one (and everything) squarely in the middle of it all - one is both infinitely small and infinitely large depending on your perspective. It also opens up free-your-mind hippie conceptual possiblities, like saying that universes are contained in our fingernails, and our whole universe might be in a much larger being's fingernail and so on. When I look up at the sky I feel like a speck in a sea of nothing, but it's strangely comforting to think that I, too, might be also a vast sea of nothing where infinitely countless specks live and feel small in. Atomic theory already tells us that we're mostly empty space anyway, so all we need is tiny people on tiny planets living there within the quantums of quantums in every atom, looking out as far as their little telescopes can reach, the boundaries of their universes set by the outer limits of the electron clouds. Extravagant sorts of wild hypothesizing to be having while eating pepperoni pizza on my lunchbreak.

Shaking It Up

Then it occurred to me that these universes might be problematic, and indeed my own universe might be too in this view. Say I clip my fingernail universe off, or shave my chin stubble universe off, or any number of sudden movements. Or even the slowest, most gentle changes in momentum I can possibly do... those little microcosms are being rocketed back and forth at seemingly infinite speeds in any direction every time I turn, or twitch, or do anything at all. Wouldn't all of these universes be thrown apart, utterly shattered, continuously, like little snow globes of people, planets and pulsars? Likewise, our own universe could not possibly exist, they too would be thrown apart every time the uberbeing we are contained in wants to eat a donut - and his universe similarly, all the way up and down the chain none could survive the slightest movement on any scale of being. This pet theory of mine has serious problems. Until I had another idea.

Time Unbound

The idea is that perhaps there are not only infinite scales of space, but also time. What if as things get smaller, they also get faster? Or slower, to look at it another way -- a second of our time might be millennia of millenia to the universe inside my fingernail. As relative time slows down, those movements on the macro scale will also slow, relative to the time frame of the inhabitants of that universe. Entire lives, civilizations, universes would be passing by every moment, and these would be moving so fast that even the most sudden movements on our scale would be so miniscule on their time-frame that they would be unnoticed. Similarly, our universe goes on a certain timescale that makes our entire history, from Big Bang to utter collapse and annhialation, a blink of an eye or less to that macroscale being we are a part of. And so on, up and down the scale. I'm not certain, having only thought about this for half an hour, but I think that would solve that particular problem. And there's a certain elegance to postulating infinite scales of time following infinite scales of space. It follows the defining feature of my personal paradigm -- that the world makes sense, and simply so, because it is the result of infinitely simple rules repeated over and over to form the complexity we see.

Speed of Light

A thought that occurred from this infinite scale of time and space was this: perhaps this is the reason for the speed of light. When one approaches the speed of light, relative time supposedly slows down in relation to the observer. A person on a approaching-light-speed ship would feel that things were going about normally, but everything around him was slowing down. Mass also increases, to the point where reaching light speed the mass becomes infinite and time stops -- hence the speed of light becomes an uncrossable limit in this universe, something that we cannot break. But the speed of light pokes another possible hole in my theory of infinite scale -- these microuniverses would have the same limit, would they not, and so their world could not move fast enough to keep the pace required in their scaled-down time frame. Universes can't explode and collapse in a fraction of a heartbeat if they are limited to the same speeds as we are. I'd rather not throw out my pet theory, but I'll have to if it comes to this, or Einstein's theory, which is much more well-thought-out than mine. But I don't have to.

See, the speed of light in our universe is enforced by mass. It's not actually an absolute speed limit, it's a relative speed limit that is set by the ratio between mass and change in space vs. change in time. In our universe, it works out to a certain mile per hour based on distances and times that are relevant to us. But in this grain-of-sand universe, the time frame is geometically smaller, at first seemingly requiring faster-than-light speeds to operate, but the distances and mass involves is geometrically smaller too. So that same Einstein constant can be used on the microcosmic scale and everything would be fine. They would run into that exact same barrier, but due to everything being on a equivalently shorter scale, their universe would function in the same way as ours. On the opposite end, beings living on the macro scale would discover that same time-space barrier -- their mass would be geometrically higher, seemingly making the speed of light lower -- but relative to us their time is geometrically slower, so from their perspective the speed of light may be covering the same relative distances. And so on, up and down the scale. As scale increases so does mass, and perceived time slows so that motion never surpasses the space-time constant, but on each level the speed limit for that scale universe also remains constant. Kind of a neat idea. But this brought up a new question in my mind -- all of this talks about the relationship between absolute time and space, and the relative time and space of the observer on each scale of size. What about consciousness itself -- the subjective perception of space and time. Are there scales of being as well?

The speed of thought

Let's say that your mind is sped up by some hyper-drug that causes your whole thought process to move faster. You're now able to do things twice as fast, anything from do math problems to shop for groceries to react and dodge things you normally could. When you do this, does your own consciousness speed up? Or does it slow down for you -- or to put it another way, do things around you seem to be moving slower relative to you, while you do your thoughts and actions at the same perceived pace as before? OR, does everything seem to be at the same pace, so that things around you seem to be moving just as fast as before, only you are more able to keep up the fast pace? There are extreme cases in comic books, like where a character called The Flash keeps an entire city safe by running down every street and stopping crime wherever it occurs, continuously every minute. Think about how long it would take for us to jog through every street of a large city. To The Flash, would it seem like that much time, or would it seem like a blink of an eye to him too, only his mind and body are working so fast that he can keep up with it. Yes, it's a comic book, but beings living in the tiny universes inside my fingernail or in grains of sand etc. are all The Flash. Their lives and their universes would pass in the blink of an eye, but would it seem like a blink of an eye to them, or a lifetime? In other words, is there an absolute constant of consciousness, or is that also relative to the observer?

If the speed of consciousness is constant, microuniverse beings with infantesimally small lifespans would be aware that their lives were ridiculously short. The whole thing would whirl by in their minds at a seemingly infinite clip and would be over, but in that time they will have been born, grown up, dated, gotten married, had kids, grown old, and passed away. Similarly, beings on the macrolevel would be aware of how slow things were happening - their lives would feel like it was moving at a snail's pace, though they would be possibly unbothered by it. This idea at first feels wrong to me -- because I think that the slowness or quickness of time is entirely related to the pace of the subjective experience. I postulate that consciousness moves at a pace relative to the observer, and internally it seems absolute it takes in different amounts of information based on the scale of the universe it inhabits. But there are personal experiences that confuse me on this. Having taken a certain prohibited drug that disables the time/space sensing part of the brain that regulates perception of time, I have found that during that time of use I found time to be extremely slow. I at first assumed that since it seemed to be moving slowly that I was moving slowly -- but I found out that I could actually speak and act at a normal pace without major concern. But I was moving and acting at my normal pace, not any faster or slower, but to me it seemed like everything was slower or I was quicker. Now, my previously held view that consciousness relates to the real-time perception of changes in time and space runs into some serious issues when I realize that there is a specific physical part of the brain that tells us how our actions and observations relate to the perceived flow of time, and drugs can alter its input or disable it completely. What does this say about consciousness? Is our perception of the flow of time not linked to the scale of our universe, nor to the nature of consciousness itself, but to a particular mechnism of the brain that, if altered, can give us an entirely different experience of that timeflow? This third problem with the universes of scale idea is possibly the most devastating problem. And it might raise problems in this universe as well. Could there not be people in this world that, despite living perfectly normal lives, experience life as moving much, much more quickly than we do, thanks to an inborn variation in whatever brainpart regulates perception of time? Or people whose relatively short lives feel to them like millenia? It's hard for me to wrap my mind around this one, but right off the bat I can say that I have experienced life moving faster and slower and felt, under influence, times where I was unable to tell. I see no reason why people could not live at either extreme. This would mean that for possible infinitely big and infinitely small universes, the relative internal speeds and laws are functions on the scale of their mass and size in the absolute, but the experience of living in those universes, like the experience of living in our own, could be following any scale at all...