by AnonYMous
This seems similar to repetitive or subliminal programming. I know that just hearing something repeated many times programs our minds to believe it is true, this is why I hate TV. But I would think I could consciously control some of these influences on my behavior.
Of course every individual is aware of these influences, but still thinks they personally are not affected by them. Yet even small things you would never notice can have a dramatic effect on your thoughts and feelings. For instance, researchers have shown that holding a warm drink or a cold drink in your hand will change the way you think about the people around you. Physical warmth associates with emotional warmth. So the fact that you are holding a warm cup of tea in your hand right now actually makes you feel greater positive feelings towards me; amplifying associated feelings of warmth and comfort and trust.
--This made me quite self-conscious of the tea I was holding and I had a brief flicker of doubt about my guest's intentions. For a moment, I felt like a puppet.
There is one final interesting idea I would like to mention. All of your thinking and considering when making a decision takes time, and the chance of making one decision or another changes depending on how long you think. Usually various factors put pressure on any time-based decision. Thus when you actually make the choice to stop considering and finally make a decision can vary greatly. In the context of the multiverse, as you sit there thinking, various you's will separate into their own universes; some where you have made a quick decision and move on, some where you take a few minutes and consider many options, and some where you finally run out of time and put the decision off until later. In the end, every decision has some random nature to it. People of this paradigm tend to think and feel that their mind is some separate entity from their body, from the world around them. Yet most scientific research points to a much more symbiotic relationship. Scientists call this embodied cognition. You do not have perfect control of your external environment or your internal environment. Quantum effects are everywhere. The world is a fluctuating field of possibility, and your mind is part of that world.
The Magic Bus
--He stopped for a moment. Took another bottle from the now near empty crate, and continued.
The reason I wanted to explain this link between quantum effects and consciousness is that the quantum nature of living things allows me greater freedom in choosing which variations of the universe I can observe.
What do you mean?
In a dead world, things behave more consistently, more predictably than in a living one. For most objects, their likely path is a very predictable one, where small and likely quantum changes do not make much difference. However, in organic systems, quantum variations can lead to very different worlds. Though there are many worlds created on a dead planet, they are generally pretty similar. However on living dynamic worlds, things are far more interesting. Think back to the bus scenario, in which you saw that in the future, a bus would hit you if you crossed the street. In that situation, you saw the future, realized you would be crushed, and therefore decided not to cross the street. You went into a building and up to the 50th floor instead. Now you observed a universe where you were safe. This time, imagine you still want to cross the street, so you ask me if I could see a scenario, another variation in the multiverse, in which you cross the road, but the bus does not hit you.
So I want to experience a world where I still cross the road. I don't change my motion, the bus must change its motion.
Yes. If that bus, instead of being a bus, was a giant boulder rolling down the street, though it is possible, it would be very difficult for me to see a variation where you will not be hit; since small changes at the quantum level won't alter a boulders trajectory that much. But with a real bus, being driven by and interacting with humans, it is very easy to see likely possibilities where the bus will be nowhere near you when you cross the street. For instance, the bus driver could press on the break just a little heavier or lighter approaching a bus stop. A passenger could slip walking up the stairs into the bus. The bus driver could decide to change the radio station or daydream for a few extra seconds before starting off again. Now, delayed for millions of possible reasons, all relatively likely, the bus is a few seconds behind schedule. More passengers have time to make it to the bus stop and the bus misses a green light slowing it even further. Outside influences also have a huge effect on the bus. A driver of another car cuts the bus off when he happens to see a pizza shop, which reminds him that he is hungry. A stray dog decides to run across the road, or the bus driver decides to avoid running over a dead cat in the street. Just about anything can affect the buses trajectory, from within and without. You can see that because of its interactions with so many life forms, there are millions of possible scenarios where the bus would be nowhere near you when you cross the street. Small subconscious decisions like which way to look, or how to move, lead to huge differences in the many worlds.
It seems to me you need time to affect the trajectory of the bus, you cannot simply change its motion at the very last second.
Yes, it is physically possible for the bus to instantly teleport to some other part of the universe, but it is highly unlikely. It is through time that subtle quantum effects manifest very different possibilities. Generally, coordinates in space-time that are near each other are more similar than coordinates that are distant. The moment you arrive at a fork in the road, you can make a choice that will lead to change, but the change only becomes dramatic after you have walked down that path for a while.
--I stopped to pour myself some more tea. While I remember clearly all of the words spoken in our conversation, I do not remember clearly how I felt much of the time. Possibly because emotions and feelings do not occupy spatial positions in my mind the way facts do. I now know that the actual memories and impressions of past events can change over time, so I do not even know for certain how I actually felt. But I believe, from what I said next that I was making a genuine attempt to understand.
All this talk of forks and paths reminds me of the famous Robert Frost poem 'The Road Not Taken'. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the undergrowth." He then finishes with the famous lines, "I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference."
It is very telling that one of the most popular poems by one of the most beloved American poets discusses the different possibilities that your life can take. Those possibilities are dimensionally separated from each other in the multiverse, like paths in a forest. At the beginning, since you are one traveler, you choose one path, and at first, not much has changed. Taking one step down one path or the other, things generally look the same around you. You need time to follow these paths, before significant differences in the many worlds can be observed. A few minutes walk down either path and you will indeed be looking at very different environments. Even if both paths just continue into the forest, you will be observing completely different trees and animals down each path. Though you generally only think of diverging paths when you see dramatic choices or events in your life, these forks in the road happen all the time. They are all around you, every moment things are changing, both internally and externally.
I can see how these effects create random action in life forms. Do they just not manifest in non-living systems in any significant way?
Quantum effects influence everything, though they are especially influential in natural chaotic systems such as the weather. In a chaotic system, tiny changes in the initial condition can create massive changes in the long term. Very small variations at the beginning create very large differences at the end. Hence the infamous Butterfly Effect, where a butterfly flapping its wings helps to create a hurricane far away.
That is a very popular reference though it is hard to believe that a butterfly can
make such a dramatic difference.
The Butterfly and the Cat
Your scientists call this branch of science Chaos Theory. As explained in the butterfly effect, it is actually pretty simple, and indeed dramatic. A very large and complicated system like the earth's weather, will develop differently with even the smallest change in its initial condition. If we were to map the weather from this moment, there is some set of conditions. Now imagine that only one small change is made. One butterfly that is sitting on a flower, decides to fly to a different one. This tiny change, the butterfly at rest or the butterfly flapping its wings is significant enough that in a chaotic system, it will change the outcome of that system. In some cases weeks later causing a hurricane where there would otherwise not be one. The effect is usually not so dramatic, but it will always lead to two different weather patterns: one where the butterfly chose to fly and one where it did not. To the inhabitants in both universes the results will seem completely natural. And remember, there are millions of butterflies and billions of other things, great and small that will influence the system. The subtle differences we do not notice that influence chaotic systems are generated by even subtler quantum effects. You can think of chaotic forms as quantum forms amplified. Remember the idea of the super computer that could predict the future? If you still tried to use one to predict the future in many worlds, no matter how powerful, the small uncertainties in the motion of particles will start to create errors, and soon the errors will multiply, creating larger errors. At some point, the future predicting machine will predict a world so different from the one it probably occupies, that its predictions will be worthless.
But if we somehow knew the positions of all the butterflies and all the insects and humans and everything, would we not get an exact result? Is chaos perceived randomness or true randomness?
Remember that in chaos theory, any change in the initial state of the system will create different evolutions of that system. What do we know as a fact from the Heisenberg uncertainty principle? That you cannot know the initial state of any system. All things, great and small have a wave function, hence their position and momentum is not precise. You would have to believe that it is impossible for quantum effects to have any influence over what you would call a larger system. Even to this day some scientists believe there is a real dividing line between quantum and classical worlds. This has been a big source of argument for a long time, and it started with an interesting experiment regarding a cat.
I think I know the cat you are referring to.
It is a pretty famous cat. In the early stages of thought about quantum mechanics, scientists really didn't see much link between quantum effects and real world results. That unsavory concept of God playing dice. Quantum effects worked at an unspecified micro level, but larger objects behaved predictably. This didn't create a big philosophical crisis immediately. Humans created an imaginary line that divided quantum and classical effects. But there was a famous thought experiment that brought crossing that line into the greater imagination of the scientific community and the general public. That was the thought experiment called Schrödinger's cat.
I knew you were going there, and I particularly like that thought experiment. Though I don't think I really understood it as clearly as I think I do now.
The experiment was thought up, with input from Einstein, by Schrödinger in 1935. It was initially created in an attempt to show how ridiculous quantum theory, especially Bohr's interpretation of it really was. In the cat experiment, Schrödinger proposes a problem. What if quantum effects really do influence a macro object? You know the details?
Yes I do. A cat was placed inside a black box. A cyanide capsule was placed in the same box. A radioactive material that had a 50% chance of decaying within an hour, and by decaying releasing a particle was placed outside the box. If the material did decay and lost a particle, that particle would hit a fuse that released the cyanide, which would kill the cat. While if it did not decay within the hour, the cat remained alive.
Correct, a 50/50 quantum dice roll decided the fate of the cat.
Yes, so the question was, until you opened the lid to observe the results an hour later, was the cat alive or dead? According to the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat had no fate; it was neither dead nor alive, until you looked inside. Or perhaps it was both dead and alive?
There are some interesting implications no matter how you interpret it. First, that in a single universe, a cat could be both alive and dead, or neither alive nor dead. Then there is the implication that since you are the measuring device, by opening the lid, you somehow have control over the fate of the cat.
Maybe the cat, obviously knowing if it was alive or dead before you opened the box, already collapsed its own wave function?
All of this speculation about the cat's fate is a moot point. As you understand now, from the start of the experiment there would be many universe variations created. In some worlds the cat would have died almost immediately after you started the experiment, because the radioactive material decayed almost immediately. In some worlds the cat died after 30 minutes or right at the end, and in approximately half of the worlds, it would not have died at all. To me this experiment is pretty meaningless, but to you, since you cannot see coordinates in the future, this experiment is quite dramatic. First, it shows that there are scenarios where micro objects can affect macro objects. Thus there is no black and white division between micro and macro worlds. Moreover, this shows that even at a very close coordinate in time, say a few seconds, quantum mechanical effects can create two dramatically different universes, one in which the cat is dead and one in which it is alive.
This type of situation doesn't happen too often in the real world though.
It is true that the situations where quantum uncertainty can make such a huge impact on macro objects, almost immediately, like a single particle instantly killing a cat, are not very likely. But these processes, at a subtler level are occurring all the time, everywhere within the multiverse. It is just that these fluctuations do not usually result in a living or dead cat at such close coordinates in time. Yet over time, small changes at the micro level through a long chain of events, leads to large changes at the macro level. Thus I do not need a fancy contraption and cyanide to kill the cat, but I do need time, and some options. I can observe a relatively likely possibility, a simple molecule that influences a larger molecule, which influences yet a larger group of molecules, which influences some water molecule, which influence a raindrop, which hits a butterfly, which influences the butterflies motion, which influences a hurricane, whose winds collapse a house on top of a cat. The results are the same, one dead cat. The difference is simply a matter of time. Another way for me to kill the cat would be to choose to observe a world in which the internal working of the butterfly's brain influences the butterfly to fly off, instead of staying on its flower. It flies off, starting the long chain of events that create the hurricane that leads to the death of the cat. In the end, I have many ways to skin a cat.
But to decide which initial situation is best, you would need to see into the future to see the result.
A good insight. Without the ability to see what you would call future coordinates, the fact that I can observe multiple variations at once would do me little good. I must be able to see where these variations will lead. Otherwise I would be like a blind person who has the ability to choose which fork in the road to take, but can't see where the road will lead. It is similar to having no choice at all. I would be just as helpless as you; like a fish flopping around in the river of randomness. Or like Robert Frost, sighing about making a choice, then looking back and wondering what the other choice may have lead to. The poem after all is titled 'The Road Not Taken', not 'The Road Less Traveled'.
So you can see many possible events and also see where they will lead.
Yes, but to a limited extent. Again, I liken my developed ability to see other coordinates in time to your developed ability to see coord
inates in space. The farther into the future or past the event is, the less clearly I see the event. This is a very common ability for beings who can observe many universe variations. Life forms that can observe many worlds, but who have no idea where those worlds will lead, do exist, but are not that common. These beings have no concept of time outside of their current moment.
So they see many events at once, but not their consequences. This would seem very confusing.
Of course their mind will make sense of the confusion for them. They might think of your single event consciousness as extremely dull.
Perhaps they could observe multiple worlds and have a mental image of what the future could be. Using their imagination, as we do.
This is actually one of my research areas. I am curious to see how these abilities evolved from more primitive sources like yourselves. Creatures who have a more limited understanding, a more limited ability to observe time and the variations of the universe. Did one ability come from the other organically? For instance after a species developed the ability to observe future time did it only become natural that at some point, it would also develop a sense for the variations of the multiverse? Perhaps it did not internally evolve but only happened once a species migrated to locations in the multiverse where time or universe variations become easier to observe.