Immortality and theologyĭunne saw no reason why an individual mind should cease to exist in its higher levels of time, simply because the brain had died at the physical level. In the last weeks of his life he came up with a mathematical idea which he believed drew Serialism and God fully into the scientific framework of Einstein's relativity, and would incorporate it into his last book. ![]() Among other embellishments, quantum uncertainty allowed some superposition of possible futures, which in turn allowed for free will. In his next book, The Serial Universe, he declared that both Relativity and quantum mechanics were most naturally understood from a Serialist perspective. Although no mathematician, he dived into the growing furore over how to interpret quantum physics. As modern physics developed over the next ten years, he extended his theory to keep up. Science and SerialismĪlthough Dunne's early ponderings predated Einstein, by the time he came to write An Experiment with Time he was able to draw on Relativity to support his treatment of time as a dimension and even to include a rather simplistic idea of the Lawrence-Fitzgerald contraction, commonly known as time dilation, in his arguments. Yet he still clung to his Serialist interpretation as the only way a human could approach the subject with scientific rationality. No more than two or three time dimensions were actually necessary. Later in life, and much influenced by writer JB Priestley, he came to the concusion that the serial regress was a delusory understanding induced by the limited nature of the human mind to grasp ultimate realities. Serialism had become a complete philosophy of existence. And philosophically, it sought also to embrace his metaphysical aspects within an overal philosophy of existence. His next book, The Serial Universe, sought to integrate Serial Time with the emerging physics of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. This package of dreams, time, serialism and immortality became the subject of his first and most enduring book, An Experiment with Time.īut really, as a scientific rationalist philosophy, he was jumping the gun. ![]() Dunne was a committed Christian and so this became his scientific proof that God existed. Last came a "supreme general observer" at the far end of the series. Freed at last from the shackles of the brain, you become immortal. Next was the idea that when the brain dies your timeline across spacetime ends but your timelines in higher dimensions, where the physical brain never appeared in the first place, do not. This neatly explained his precognitive dreams. One was that the higher levels of consciousness could range through physical time, remembering the future as well as the past, when not distracted by the chattering brain. To his delight several things came out of it. Eventually he came back to the infinite series of times and minds, and called his theory Serialism. The whole thing was absurd.īut any other explanation for our experience of Time was even worse. ![]() But, like others before him, he realised that he needed a third time dimension in which a higher level of the mind travelled over the second one, and so on in an infinite series of time dimensions and levels of consciousness. From the age of nine John William "Ian" Dunne had been chewing over the nature of Time - was its foundation the waypoints of yesterday, today and tomorrow, or was it the travelling between them, the moment of "now" in which we feel eternally trapped? Presently he (re)discovered the idea that there was a second dimension of time in which the mind travelled over the fixed landscape of a four-dimensional spacetime.
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