Comments on: Narratives in the Multiverse

By: Mac Tonnies

Mac Tonnies — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:54:15 +0000

A Flickr stream! Hooray!

By: Rudy

Rudy — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:44:54 +0000

Thanks for all the good comments on the multiverse. I may try and write another post about it before too long. This week I've been working to get a photostream going on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rudytheelder/. The slide show is cool. It's pretty much all photos that you've seen on the blog. I'll be working my way back into the past, adding more. You can buy quality prints of the photos at rudy.imagekind.com. I started writing Nested Scrolls. It's a memoir after all, and not an SF novel. I'll post more about this fairly soon.

By: MarcL

MarcL — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:59:00 +0000

Greg Bear’s new novel, City at the End of Time, centers on a small cast of characters with this ability to jump to other universes. What drives Bear’s story is the notion that all the options are closing down, there are no more branches left, everything is coming to a head–and they are running up against a hard wall where the universe ends, and encountering ripples bounced back from that barrier.

By: Josh

Josh — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 07:45:33 +0000

Rudy, I’ve loved your writing for years now (since high school) and only just found this blog. I love the format, with the counterpoint between photographs and writing. It really is brilliant. Do you take the photographs yourself?

I have a hard time seeing life as the parallel traversal of a tree alone. After all, I can only say I’m aware of my one path through the Hilbert space of worlds. To resolve this paradox, one idea that’s occurred to me is that our consciousness work in way more akin to a lightning bolt than a branching tree. Although as the spark forms it branches through the air, the majority of electricity is conducted through the path to ground which suited the bolt best (or first) during its formation. To extend this metaphor, maybe our awareness of life is a kind of extradimensional afterimage: a flash in four-space which persists along a fifth axis of hypertime. But in that case, we could never experience our own death…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:51:41 +0000

“our minds somehow co-create the universe with God, helping Her/Him craft the best possible cosmic novel from the welter of possible worlds, or, putting it differently, helping the Maker carve the most beautiful universe from the Hilbert-space-quarried block of possibility-stone.”

This might be the only reason minds like ours exist, at least in a gnostic/pkdickian sense.
Also, many (most?) people make bad choices, perhaps robotically – therefore, not actually helping to carve the most beautiful universe. Being aware of the other branches might help you create a more awesome gnarl.

By: Steve H

Steve H — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:14:24 +0000

One of my friends thinks we may surf along from world to world, thinking we survived that bad auto crash instead of stepping sideways into a world where you were only injured, side-stepping bad luck that actually kills one of you, moving further and further from your original universe until you finally die of old age. So cheer up! You’ll probably die in bed. It also explains why all that stuff from our childhoods isn’t there anymore; it was never built in this universe.

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 09:01:04 +0000

Hmm, I was chatting to a friend about something similar the other day. The idea that a persons life is the path steered and enforced through many possible worlds. The path gives rise to the sensation of having a single liniar existance and history. The fun sci-fi part is that the ‘jumps’ from world to world should be detectable in the same way that a dream state can be detected when one realises that something in the perceived environment has broken from the waking norm. Thanks Rudy, that post tidied up a bunch of thoughts for me.

By: Ian

Ian — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 08:03:05 +0000

what if the the ‘hilbert space’ looked like the Earth (on out to the stars..) ?

not just a silvered tree next to a cliff. not just a head of broccoli or a fractal fuzzybush.
not just an ocean or some river. not even just a valley of villages or a ‘greater’ megalopolis,
but the whole Earth, this world of worlds (of worlds).

or what if this world was the deChardin Noosphere. THIS is the Platonic world. the repository of metaphor systems and submetaphor systems.

and maybe this Earth is not “a mere world” but it’s “a Hilbertworld”, a metaworld (a structure of worlds to be found at a ‘lower’ level than this one).

then, you can sandwich those, with hilbertworlds ‘above’ this one (this one-among-zillions),
and also, zillions of worlds ‘under’ this Earth (this Earth can be seen as a kind of map).

you could even wire all these mappings to Earth itself, no need for other levels:
Earths futures are all (encoded/symbolized/manifested/reified) as trees, rivers, leaves…

but with zillions of Earths, ‘sideworlds’. metaphorically these are leaves, atoms, or people..

national ? coastal cleanup day is tomorrow.. but it also includes rivers, creeks and lakes..

By: Mac Tonnies

Mac Tonnies — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 07:14:18 +0000

What did you think of Greg Egan’s “Dust” concept (see “Permutation City”)?

By: Kelson

Kelson — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 21:21:03 +0000

Jeebus. And we’re all the richer for it, too.