{"id":647,"date":"2008-09-19T12:04:51","date_gmt":"2008-09-19T20:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=647"},"modified":"2008-09-24T20:41:14","modified_gmt":"2008-09-25T04:41:14","slug":"narratives-in-the-multiverse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2008\/09\/19\/narratives-in-the-multiverse\/","title":{"rendered":"Narratives in the Multiverse"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new issue of my SF webzine, Flurb #6 <\/a><\/b>, is off to a good start. We got good mentions on BoingBoing <\/a>and in io9<\/a>, we scored ten thousand visits in week #1, and the contributors are happy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sept 17, 2008.<\/em><\/p>\n

I recently read a novel, Neal Stephenson\u2019s Anathem<\/a><\/em>, in which time has a branching quality, and the characters have an ability to sniff out the best universe for them to be moving forward into. Or, put differently, they have an ability to project themselves into the more favorable regions of the Hilbert space of all possible worlds. (Stephenson uses his own made-up name\u2014something like \u201cHemm space\u201d\u009d\u2014for this manifold of polycosmic configurations.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Logically, I\u2019ve always felt there to be something fundamentally incoherent (not to mention story-killing) about the SFictional notion of picking an optimal world from many equally real possible worlds.<\/p>\n

My sense is that if time really branches, then you wholeheartedly go into each branch; you\u2019re conscious in each of them, and there\u2019s no single \u201clit-up by the searchlight of the mind\u201d\u009d that zigzags up through the time-tree to limn the path that you \u201creally\u201d\u009d take. The whole tree is lit. You really and truly think you\u2019re in each branch that something like you is in.<\/p>\n

Restating my logical feeling in terms of the more static Hilbert space view, I\u2019m saying that a version of my mind should be psychologically present in each of the possible worlds that contains a copy of someone like me\u2014and that there should not <\/em>be any single narrative thread of bright points marking the privileged sequence of possible worlds which I \u201creally and truly\u201d\u009d inhabit. The whole block is lit and equally real, and, once again, I fully feel like I\u2019m in each possible world that contains someone like me.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Turning however from logic to emotion, I do <\/em>have an appreciation and a longing for the heroic concept that I really am <\/em>selecting a best possible path. I mean, that\u2019s of how a human life is fact lived. You consider the possible outcomes of possible actions, and you direct your actions so as to realize the more favorable results.<\/p>\n

That is, after all, one of the big evolutionary values of human-type consciousness: the ability to mentally simulate possible futures. And so we adjust our actions to enter the better worlds. As a result, we have an emotional, experiential sense that the bad, unchosen paths are in fact shriveling away to the left and the right.<\/p>\n

But if this human sense of things reflects a real phenomenon, as novels like Anathem suggest, then we\u2019d have to suppose that 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Of course an atheist will bridle at this formulation. But we don\u2019t really need to talk about God or the Maker\u2014we can instead talk in terms of the cosmic state function converging on some particular Attractor. But simply as a manner of speaking, it\u2019s often easier to talk about \u201cGod\u201d\u009d.<\/p>\n

Setting that issue aside, there\u2019s a more important issue to mention in connection with the notion that we might be helping the Cosmic Attractor choose the universal history. The point that I want to stress is that, although some aspects of your worldline are determined by you, some are not.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Yes, when you drive carefully and avoid having an accident, then you can say that is your personal doing, your own guiding of the world\u2019s narrative. But when you get on an airplane and your plane happens not to crash, that\u2019s not your doing at all\u2014unless you want to get into superstitious, synchronistic, or magical modes of belief.<\/p>\n

In cartoon terms, when the falling safe lands on Elmer Fudd instead of you, that\u2019s random luck, isn\u2019t it? Or would you instead say that you moved the universe in a good direction or that Elmer Fudd at some level wanted to die? Better to say that the Cosmic Attractor or the Divine Author felt it makes for a better overall \u201cnarrative\u201d\u009d to have you live on instead of Elmer.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

So, okay, we\u2019re supposing that we humans help determine a unique history of the world, and I\u2019ve just made the point that we don\u2019t do it entirely on our own, and that some external, cosmic considerations come into play as well. But if do have some influence, we can think of ourselves as somewhat heroic.<\/p>\n

And if this heroic view of the world is true, then we really don\u2019t <\/em>live in a multiverse, or in a Hilbert space. There really is just one <\/em>true history of the world\u2014or, not to be too strict, maybe a pruned-down skeleton of only a few <\/em>possible histories, with these few forming an elegantly branching frame of a limited number of possible paths\u2014I visualize a beautifully a silvered old bare tree on a cliff. This would be a multiverse quite different from a dense and meaningless thicket in which every goddamn possible thing happens all of the goddamn time, with every piss-ant atom\u2019s dither of a photon-beep splitting the world yet again in two.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Just now I was having a dream about selecting particular paths through the multiverse. I was standing before a painting on an easel, or maybe even in a whole studio room of unfinished paintings, touching up scene after scene. And as I painted, I could look out into the world, and I could see the realities changing as I altered my paintings of what had gone (or would go) down.<\/p>\n

Near the end of the dream, I was working on an actual acrylic painting that is in my actual studio, that same painting called \u201cThe Wanderer,\u201d\u009d in which the white-haired man resembling me is finding his way along a mountain path, glancing over his shoulder at his past, a cliff of odd-shaped rocks where perhaps some demonic figures lurk…and in my dream I was trying to finish the picture with the curve of the ongoing path.<\/p>\n

And then I awoke in a sweat, came upstairs, and wrote this note, starting at 1:23 a.m. Strange.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about going to Paris to take a commission to write the libretto for an electronic-music opera about the logician Kurt G\u00f6del\u2014whom I had the good fortune to meet with three times in 1972\u2014and right before going to bed tonight, I was looking through my books on G\u00f6del, and I found one that, at least for a moment, I couldn\u2019t remember having seen before. I had this eerie feeling that G\u00f6del\u2019s spirit was meddling with this branch of reality, making sure that this particular book found its way into my hand. The book turned out to be a memoir by my old Institute for Advanced Study mentor, Gaisi Takeuti, with an essay about the end about the time when G\u00f6del was \u201con narcotics\u201d\u009d and thought the true power of the continuum was alef-two. And that\u2019s in fact how I met G\u00f6del, he became interested in me because I\u2019d given a talk on that odd doodle of a paper, and Takeuti told him about me. Strange.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And now, upstairs, having woken from my dream of the multiverse, it strikes me that if it really were possible to surf one\u2019s way among the alternate worlds, then that\u2019s exactly what I (in concert with the Cosmic Attractor) did this summer. Instead of me dying, we dodged the coffin and, against the odds, I got well.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m liking this branch of the multiverse, this region of Hilbert space.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Sept 19, 2008.<\/em><\/p>\n

I finished my painting \u201cThe Wanderer\u201d\u009d this morning. Usual reminder: you can buy prints or notecards at rudy.imagekind.com<\/a>, and \u201cThe Wanderer\u201d\u009d is on this site as well.<\/p>\n

I got the original background by means of a trick I\u2019ve used before: I take the left-over paint still on the palette from the last painting, thin it down, and quickly paint the shadow shapes that I see on the fresh canvas\u2014the shadows from the trees over my back yard (my usual studio). I don\u2019t have to think about the shapes, I\u2019m just filling in colors in the patterns of the shadows that are actually on the canvas. I like bringing in the natural gnarl this way. And then I looked at the patterns for a few days and eventually\u2014with my wife\u2019s help\u2014I started seeing it as a mountain landscape. <\/p>\n

The critters on the rocks on the left are doodles from my subconscious, but it could be that they\u2019re memories from the Wanderer\u2019s past. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And to bring it to life, I added a Wanderer, modeled on the figure in Hieronymus Bosch\u2019s \u201cThe Pedlar.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always suspected \u201cThe Pedlar\u201d\u009d to be a Bosch self-portrait, and by the same token, \u201cThe Wanderer\u201d\u009d is my own self portrait. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe Wanderer\u201d\u009d represents my own life\u2019s journey, with me currently at a somewhat confusing bend in the road, and the future entirely uncertain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new issue of my SF webzine, Flurb #6 , is off to a good start. We got good mentions on BoingBoing and in io9, we scored ten thousand visits in week #1, and the contributors are happy. Sept 17, 2008. I recently read a novel, Neal Stephenson\u2019s Anathem, in which time has a branching […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":661,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647\/revisions\/661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}