Tag Archives: parallel universes

Learning Curve

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K, I’ve said before that I’m an adherent to (a rather bastardized version of) the Multi-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and to parallel universes by extension. Don’t ask me to elaborate on that in anything approximating a technical jargon, but I can spin loose and fast notions and concepts together all night if I had to. Certainly not with any authority, but with wonder and awe to anyone willing to listen.

More importantly, I have a hard time stating up front whether any of what I’m about to say next is “real” or not, because, for all I know, it very well could be. What I can do is assert that I have no bloody proof one way or the other, but, in classic fashion, I won’t hesitate to speculate and conjecture up some ideas as they come to me.

I wonder about the collective conscious. If it exists, it’s notorious for being invisible, intangible, and otherwise non-directly knowable. We can only infer it’s supposed qualities based on it’s perceived effects, which are highly subject to, well, subjectivity. But like most things, it’s difficult to disprove completely. It may be more sensible to discount it until we discover something more concrete about it, but doing so could be limiting our full view of what might really be going on.

In the meantime, I’ll take the difficulty in disproving negatives (or rather, the art of ignoring established improbabilities) under advisement and proceed, regardless, with a suggestion that the collective conscious may, in fact, exist. In some senses, it may be indistinguishable from certain concepts of “God”, if that helps (it doesn’t, I know, but just humour me).

Here’s my supposition: I can’t help but wonder if there is not some kind of over-arching consciousness that serves as a memory or experience bank for us temporal beings, one that allows us to draw on future learning without necessarily being aware of what we’re accessing or even when.

Think of it this way: A large majority of non-open world videos games still follow a vaguely linear progression. Hell, even open-world games still have fairly established event sequences, only with more flexibility. But in whatever case, when something goes wrong, the power is in the player’s hands to revert to a prior save or check point, and redo certain actions, only with a heads up. Knowledge gained from prior attempts now carries over and allows the character to accomplish things they might not have before.

The thing is, the character, even though they’re the ones directly living out the events, does not retain memory of their actions or of the events they experience. All of that lies within the domain of the player (in so far as I am aware of the level of sentience typical video game characters possess. Please correct me if I’m wrong). It’s a classic divide that anyone who’s ever played any table top RPG’s, having given it any real thought, has probably stumbled around.

Player-character lines may also make up a wider relationship dynamic within a larger multiversal structure. I have no idea what exactly that structure looks like, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the collective conscious is (at least from our perspective) a kind of passive monitoring system.

Maybe that’s a bit of an ego-centric head trip. If we’re the character, and the collective conscious is whatever passes for a player on that level of existence, then we’re the passive sensory platforms feeding information back up to it, and it, whatever it is, is ultimately what may be calling the shots.

But who can say for sure? Maybe it has nothing to do with ‘up above’ and ‘down below’. Maybe it’s no more a lofty, executive-level operating system overseeing our lowly, experiential-level of existence as yin is to yang. Perhaps it’s just two (possibly interchangeable) sides of the same coin.

What I would assume, however, is that there is a multitude of alternate versions of ourselves out there in the multiverse, not only in same-moment parallel universes (where similar events are happening in sync), but also dynamic-moment parallel universes (where similar timelines are being experienced at different points along their sequences). So, this would mean that the me that I was 3 years ago, say, is experiencing the events of 3 years ago, only that it is doing so presently. Equally true, potentially, is that the me which is experiencing events taking place at the tail end of 2016 (3 years from now) is also doing so presently (albeit without my direct awareness of it, of course) as well.

In fact, any point in time that has happened, any alternate version of events which might have happened, any version of events which could be happening now instead of those which presently appear to be actually taking place now, as well as the host of all possible future events which the present me has no direct knowledge of as of yet… all these things and more would be plain to whatever over-arching collective consciousness (or god-like being) may or may not exist.

What’s fascinating to me is not so much that it brings my free will into question so much as that I feel safe trusting it, whatever it is (could be nothing, and I’m wasting my breath and effort even trying to describe it. Who knows?). As far as I’m concerned, this collective conscious behaves in such a way that I can only infer to be for my good, in the same way that a player, more often than not, conducts a character’s actions in such a way so as to lead towards favourable events and outcomes more often than not.

I believe that “luck” is a direct result of unknown collective conscious processes

I don’t feel compelled or controlled by anyone or anything in particular (that doesn’t exclude the possibility that I actually am, only I am unaware of that fact or incapable of perceiving it), but I do see that my life, for the most part, is good. I understand that an untold number of other versions of me could very well have met unfortunate demises in other universes, but that an over-arching, memory-and-experience-banking side of me (whatever my place might be within the collective conscious) learns.

It believe that it (that I?) makes mistakes and adapts, and as a result, there are an equal number of untold versions of me (including this one that I have explicit awareness of, the one that I call ‘me’, the one that is typing this up right now), who benefit from the ability of my collective self to learn from my collective experiences in order to realize beneficial outcomes whenever possible.

I don’t know what all there is to learn, but if it’s good, then I don’t want it to be for just me. I see no reason why this dynamic wouldn’t also be true for every person rather than just me. Perhaps there’s an ever wider enveloping collective conscious that not only looks over all versions of a single person at all points in their multiple existences, but also a grand collective conscious that brings together all of the collective consciousnesses of all people.

[Edit: I believe the classic sense of “collective conscious” refers to something consisting of the conscious impressions of many souls in a given realm or area, such as perhaps that of humans — or of all life — on Earth. The description of “collective conscious” I have been talking about instead looked at an isolated individual’s potential collective self spread across multiple universes/timelines first before giving consideration the more classic sense second]

Now I begin to wonder if there wouldn’t be a perpetual blur between where one person ends and another begins… Perhaps this is evidence for the need for what feels like immutable separation of persons. Or, perhaps, that is just a natural side effect of being ego-centric. Maybe other versions of myself have absolutely no trouble feeling a fluid sense of oneness amongst ourselves and likewise with others. Such a concept eludes my ability to imagine vividly, but I find the idea fascinating nonetheless.

Infectious Ideas

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So, as part of the thematic foundation for The Story I am working on, I keep rolling over the ideas of death, life, reincarnation and other various afterlife-related thoughts. Here’s the thing: Elyen, the story, focuses very heavily on multiple universes. That’s key. Couple that with my fascination for:

1) anything to do with FTL phenomena,

2) the impending technological Singularity/birth of smarter-than-human AI,

3) quantum computing,

4) evolution,

5) chaos/entropy vs order and control, and

6) the relative nature of time/eternal vs temporal phenomena

[Edit: 7) the wonder of biology]

…and we get an incredibly rich mixture of concepts from out of which can emerge any number of plausible philosophies, including those along the death-is-only-the-beginning line of reasoning.

To give a type of example — and just to be clear, as abstract, pseudo-technical and intellectual-sounding as these concepts and my particular take on them (including the following example) may sound, I have absolutely zero factual proof that any of what I have to conjecture is actually valid — think about the following event:

You’re walking down the street, on the sidewalk of course, and you come up to an intersection. It’s a busy and bustling city, so there are traffic lights and such to direct the flow of vehicles and pedestrians safely in turns. You wait for your right to proceed across the street. Once the light changes, you begin to do so. Suddenly, a vehicle approaches heading directly towards you from your left side on, moving dangerously fast and showing no signs of stopping.

In any number of universes, you could be distracted at that moment. You could be listening to your ipod with the headphone volume cranked up. You could have initiated your crossing a few seconds earlier or later (depending on your proclivity towards j-walking or not paying attention right away when the light changes, for example). Others could be crossing with you, walking faster or slower. Road conditions might be slippery. The exact conditions could have been anything. This is just one time that you happen to find yourself crossing one particular street out of potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of times crossing the very same street.

What happens? Theoretically, everything. But only one possible outcome will ever actually be realized by you, personally. What that is remains utterly unknown until it happens. Obviously, certain possibilities appear to be incredibly more probable than others, but there’s still always a statistical chance of experiencing a fluke. More to the point, let me ask you something: Have you ever had a close call? Ever find yourself in a situation very much like this? Nearly struck by a vehicle who’s driver failed to slow down and come to a stop or swerve out of your path as you were about to cross? Ever actually been struck in a situation like that?

Ever die from a collision like that? Or at all?

What kind of question is that? I’ll tell you. In my view, I actually do seriously question how life and death works sometimes. I do believe death can visit us all, perhaps at any moment if it’s our time, but I do also acknowledge that I could be wrong about that. Yes, I see the graveyards filled with the bodies of those for whom death has inescapably brought about the end of their physical lives. Many countless people who once lived no longer do, but I don’t believe that things are nearly as cut and dry as they may appear to be.

A time or two, I have experienced a close call, as with the above example. In these moments, I feel a rush of fear and excitement, the tell tale fight-or-flight reactions brought about by a surge of adrenaline. Again, I have no proof of this, but I’ve come to suspect that there’s more, much more to that feeling than simple physical responses.

I believe in parallel universes, as stated already. In a vast number of those universes, I died. And in those brief moments, I believe that I’ve felt it. At least, other versions of me (including yours truly) did.

Here’s the thing: all matter can theoretically exist in a wave-particle duality. What we see around us are atoms and molecules that have been “collapsed”. As in, if a brick is a brick when we look at it now, it’s still going to be a brick if we look away, and still going to be a brick when we look back a short time later. There’s exceedingly little possibility that the brick might spontaneously become a puddle of water, or a small animal, or any other truly non-brick thing without some interacting conversion process affecting it first. The substance it’s made of is fixed, and once it is fixed, it won’t spontaneously unfix and refix as something else (presumably).

When it comes to the future, however, the unknown of events which are yet to be, it works kind of like this: In front of you is a picture. It’s really blurry. However, the longer you look at it for, the clearer it gets. If you look at the picture long enough, and if the clear picture is of something you recognize, then, in all likelihood, you will eventually identify it before long. However, while the picture is blurry and still of something as-of-yet unknown, it might as well be a blurry picture of anything.

So what if it really was a picture of anything? What if the blurry picture was a composite of thousands of differing, but perhaps similar, images, all morphed into one? However, as it becomes clearer, the number of pictures from which it is comprised begins to drop down from thousands, to hundreds, to tens, to a few, until eventually, finally, just one.

What if that is how the future works? Full of possibilities counter-weighted with probabilities, and as we near each successive, seemingly instantaneous moment, each new frame or slice of unfolding events, each new “now”, the picture unfolds revealing it’s singular clarity, but not without first having whittled down the possible other outcomes which might have been instead.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, in a multiverse where the unfolding events involve a street, a pedestrian, and a car failing to stop at their red light all brought together, the “pictures of the future” involve all the possibilities mentioned above (distraction, slippery conditions, loud music, etc.) and many, many more besides. However, the way that the entirety of the events actually plays out can only involve one fixed, final, irrevocable outcome for someone experiencing them.

Per universe.

My argument is that similar, nearby universes played out similar events and arrived at slightly — or perhaps greatly — differing outcomes. Perhaps countless numbers of them.

In any number of those outcomes, for those of us who are alive now and reading this and able to relate to the experience of a close call event like in the example above, is it really all that much of a stretch to believe that we’ve died in some of them? To press the point, the “closer the call” was (the more anxiety/fight-or-flight responses we felt, etc.), perhaps what really happened was that we felt the reverberations of our own deaths more acutely than in situations where the events leading to our deaths in other universes were much more remote.

I believe that universes abide by a proximity principle, and this may, perhaps, be one of the only ways we sub lightspeed-existent human beings have of interacting with other such otherwise unreachable places in the truly wide, fascinating and mysterious world that we may find ourselves in.

So, I’m not saying we’re all free to jump in front of cars, but I would hazard a guess that should a car strike us and kill us in one universe, we would instantaneously snap into awareness of ourselves in a universe where we did not die. This idea may rightfully be challenged by the idea of fate and whether or not we all, in fact, have our inescapable, predetermined time to die. At this time, I have no thoughts to weigh in on that matter, but I’m sure I’ll dream up something that seems sensible for the sake of The Story soon enough (I swear, I don’t purposely try to create alliteration in my phrases, but it does seem to happen a lot).

Also, it is an inescapable fact that universes in which we die, assuming they’re not also universes where it is routinely common to come back from being legally dead, are also universes in which we would leave behind loved ones. That’s never fun, for anyone involved. So, just to stress the point, don’t jump in front of cars. All I’m saying is, if it’s not your time (if there even is such a thing as “your time”), you won’t even realize how often you die on a regular basis in nearby universes anyways, so even if this idea infects you and blows your mind open a little, don’t fuss about it. Seriously. Why? ‘Cause you live in a universe where you’re too busy living, and that is honestly awesome. So go on, live and be, let whatever happens will happen. Just be sure look both ways when crossing the street.

[Edit: There’s much about these notions that have bothered me to think about in the years since initially musing about them. One example is the case of serious injuries. At what point can/does/should transference to a different, safer, but highly similar universe happen? I have no answers, only hopeful ideals]