Have you ever had a dream, whether in the depths of sleep or
while lulling through the more tedious aspects of your daily routine, where
somewhere out there is another version of you, living a fuller, more complete
life, one that consists of far more Adventure, Excitement and Really Wild Stuff
than is generally available? Or have you ever considered what would have
happened if you had taken a slightly different decision, or the road less
travelled, or if you’d not drunken quite that much and ended up in the police
cell?
One of the staples of Science Fiction is the Alternate
Reality, or where a decision taken takes the whole universe down a whole
different Trouserleg of Time. I can recall, in fact, having several dreams
where I’ve encountered myself in different dimensions, replicated multiple
times in different cosmic scenarios. I have to say I wasn’t too impressed with
my alternate lives – they all seemed to be much the same, except for the
universes where I had inexplicably died in bizarre and/or highly amusing circumstances.
In fact, some scientists postulate that this is entirely possible – the so-called
multiverse hypothesis, where every decision causes a whole new universe to pop
into existence, so that for every time you went left, a different you went
right, and for the You that finds itself hungover in a police cell there’s a
brighter, slicker, shinier and generally more sober You that finds him/herself
in a far more salubrious environment.
The bastard.
It’s a highly attractive theory – just imagine that you are
replicated over and over again in countless myriad universes, free to keep
making decisions, sometimes – well, actually, more often than not – making mistakes,
but somewhere in this countless number of infinities, in this limitless ocean
of repeated times and spaces, there’s a little you who makes all the right
decisions and ends up with the perfect life.
The bastard.
I always thought it would be great to be able to travel all
across these dimensions, meeting myself, as it were: In fact, there are those
who believe that this can, rarely, happen, and accounts for people seeing
Dopplegangers, or themselves from the past/future and so on. Unfortunately, I
have come to see it as all a bit bunk. And why?
Well, it’s this whole the-decision-causes-the-universe-to-split-off-into-a-new-universe
thing. Why a decision? Why not a random chemical interaction? Why not the decay
of an atomic particle? Why not a gust of wind? The whole multiverse hypothesis
seems to me to rest on the presumption of decisions causing change, which in
turn requires the sentience necessary to make a decision, and indeed the self
awareness that is in turn necessary to understand that decisions make
differences.
In other words, a universe that behaves in such a bizarre
way, that it goes and spawns a whole brand new shiny universe that is exactly
the same except for one tiny detail, seems to be a bit on the extravagant side.
It means that the universe is in effect designed to foster sentience, which
strongly suggests that it is, in some way, sentient itself. After all, getting
whole new universes popping into existence simply because I decide not to have
some jam on my toast is actually quite a
clever asexual reproduction strategy, and means that our universe (whichever
one it is now) can keep on going literally ad infinitum.
We should also consider that a lot of what we consider to be
decisions based on free will are nothing of the kind, but are pretty much the
random outcome of the chemicals sloshing round our brain and/or the interaction
with our environment, according to an increasing body of research into brain
function and psychology, which means that if the universe is popping out
versions of itself based on the fact that my noggin is currently mired in
booze, it’s doing it for all the wrong reasons. Unless of course, the cosmos
knows I’m pissed, and therefore decides that I’m in no state to go round doing
ad hoc universe-popping.
So, the whole idea of a sentience-supporting realm of
existence bothers me, because it strongly implies a created system. In
addition, it strikes me that one could, in theory at least, eventually develop
a computer that could track the movement of every particle in creation from the
Big Bang onwards. If so, it would be easy to see how the movement, life and
decay of each particle leads to order, then life, then to sentient life, which
then, because of the fact that it is being observed, cannot be truly said to be
independently sentient, being the outcome of the movement of various Quantum
Stuff. And then we’re really buggered, because it means that our universe is
Deterministic rather than Relativistic.
In the end, although I wouldn’t mind taking a trip down the
different Trouserleg of Time, I think we have to accept that this is all the
cosmos we’re going to get, and in fact it doesn’t much give a stuff whether we
eat the White Chocolate Magnum or the one covered in chopped hazelnuts.
