Traversing dimensions

If time is the fourth dimension, what if the fifth dimension is emotion?

You need four numbers from all four dimensions in which we live to set up a meeting, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson explained so well on on Business Insider: location, given by three numbers (x, y, z axis--latitude, longitude, altitude--with the z axis often assumed to be ground level, as with "meet me on 46th and 8th") and time, given by another numeric measurement. What is the next most important, and universal, descriptor of a specific place in space and time? The emotions of those present.

Emotions affect the way we see the world, precisely where and when we are. Bring a different set of emotions into a situation--be it a business meeting, a second date, a baseball at-bat--and the arc of the situation will change.

We do not need to concern ourselves with assigning emotions to inanimate objects like rocks or trees. We might exist in five dimensions and they might not, and that’s OK. But perhaps they do, at least some of them--perhaps a tree does have emotions, which it exhibits over decades or centuries, rather than over the minutes or hours of a day as we do. That's another topic for another day.

 

If we are to physically step out of our three dimensions into the fourth, we may find that everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is happening now. Tyson discusses this in the video which was spurred on by Interstellar, Vonnegut discusses it in his novels, I contemplate it often. As Tyson puts it in the video, "I can access all points of my three-dimensional space; yet I am a prisoner in the present, forever transitioning from the past into the future... If you go to a higher dimension, it's not unrealistic to think that you step out of the time dimension and now you look at time as though we look at space... If your whole timeline is laid out in front of you, then you have access to it."

 

Now, as emotional beings, we are able to influence our mental state to a point--but nothing can create the raw emotional response of a new experience lived for the first time. And so perhaps the ability to truly control one’s emotions is the fifth dimension: travel through space as we do today (up to the third dimension); travel through our timelines (the fourth); live every experience in any mental state (the fifth).

The next question, then, is what are the five still-higher dimensions required for superstring theory? I can postulate, but that, too, is a topic for another day.