Quantum Consciousness

I'll be blogging on this topic soon. Use the comments section to beat me to it!

Separating Space from Heaven

Rabbis and Christian theologians alike have noted the absence of the word "good" on the second day of Creation, but have not agreed on why it is not there. The text of Genesis 1:6-8 is facially consistent with a scenario in which the four space/time dimensions "blew out" as the result of the actions of cosmic intelligences.

And God said, "Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters." And God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse. And it was so. And God called the expanse Heaven. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. (Gen. 1:6-8.)

Picture four out of twelve dimensions shattering, with ten times the mass of our observable universe hurtling out into space and time in all directions. Picture the horror and the grief of those intelligences unshaken at the center. This tragedy would separate what we call "Heaven" from what we know as the material universe--and nobody could ever call it "good."

Trapped in Time and Space

Those of us who were born into time and space think of it as natural. We accept the laws of physics as not only given, but as good--they enable carbon atoms to exist and join into complex chains that make biology possible. But humans may well suffer from a four-dimensional provincialism that can't imagine the horrible limits space and time would impose on a being from before the Big Bang.

Imagine a multidimensional sphere one Planck length across which contains at least ten times the mass of our observable universe. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle would permit any particle to move at any speed from 0 to the speed of light anywhere within these boundaries--so the constraints of physics as you and I know them would not apply within this hypersphere. If intelligent beings emerged within this sphere, they would appear as gods or angels to us.

Now imagine the perfect symmetry of that sphere distended for some reason. Perhaps a hundred trillion angels choose to follow a single leader leader in one orbit and their combined mass creates a bulge in hyperspace. Let that orbit expand until it exceeds the Planck length and their perfect freedom becomes constrained at Heisenberg's limit. If nothing pulls them back, the bulge could turn into a blow-out--the universe's first environmental disaster.

What happens to a hundred trillion intelligences hurled out of Heaven into space?

Applied Metaphysics

Want to test your metaphysics? Turn it into a novel--or a series. I'm working on that here.

Decision-Making with Fractal Futures

IF we live in a "multiverse" (which, for purposes of this blog, means a universe with branching timelines) human decision-making becomes a logical exercise with some interesting implications for people who still believe in a "monoverse" (a universe with only one timeline).

In a multiverse, one may assume that EVERY possible future will become actual. This means "you" will experience an accident EVERY time you drive your car. I put "you" in quotes because "you" also won't have an accident--some of your timelines arrive safely at your destination while others end very badly.

Would you rather be wearing your seatbelt when they pull you from the wreckage of your car? It won't help you much in the timeline where you die on impact. It won't help in the timeline where the car rolls over and you might have been thrown free if you weren't strapped in. But it will help in a lot of accidents--in fact, it might save your life.

So here's what makes a multiverse interesting: you only get to climb into the car once. All the timelines start the same way. You either buckle your seatbelt or you don't--and you will be glad (or sad) you did (or didn't) in every foreseeable scenario.

A rational decision-maker in a multiverse should act in such a way as to minimize regret. If he doesn't buckle his seatbelt, he will be thrown free of his car just before it explodes in one timeline, but will be paralyzed from the neck down in another. Traffic statistics show that the sum total of sorrows will be lower if he buckles his seatbelt.

I'm not dead yet!

Despite 13 months of silence, the rumors of my passing are exaggerated.

A Fractal Future

Humans spend much of the present pondering the future. Christians have a branch of theology for the subject (eschatology, the "doctrine of the last things"). As a general rule, our beliefs about the future influence our choices in the present, and, conversely, our choices in the present contribute to the outcomes in the future.

Our instinctive understanding of time tempts the average human to try to "figure out the future." Some people lean towards fatalism ("I guess I'm destined to fail") while others try to outwit fate ("I won't meet Death in the marketplace!"). Either way, they react to some particular picture of the future.

Einstein's conception of time made him reject ancient Judaism and much of twentieth century science. Einstein believed the universe was governed by iron laws that determined every outcome from the beginning, and therefore rejected the notion of a personal God who judged men for their choices. He famously disagreed with Niels Bohr over quantum physics, insisting that "God does not play dice with the universe." It was his second great blunder (the other was his admitted "fudging" his own calculations to eliminate the evidence for an expanding universe well before Edwin Hubbell discovered that galaxies are flying away from each other).

Einstein thought of time as a fixed line out of an infinite past into an infinite future. Aristotle had a different idea--he did not believe in "the future," as such. He discussed the truth value of the statement, "There will be a sea-battle tomorrow" and concluded that a statement about the future has no truth value. Today's "Open Theists" enlarge upon Aristotle's position--they say that God knows everything that is, but does not know the future, because "the future" does not exist.

David Deutsch goes to the opposite extreme: in The Fabric of Reality, he argues that every possible future exists. Einstein's time is a one-dimensional line, Deutsch sees time expanding into a two-dimensional plane of possibilities. (Deutsch might argue that all time's branches form a multidimensional hypersolid.)

I'd like to suggest another option--a fractal future. In this model, some but not all futures become actual. I'll try to explain the implications of this in a later post.