If, as the James Bond song title goes, “You Only Live Twice”, then you experience more than just one of life’s pathways in one form or another. There’s one life for yourself as apparently real reality; one life for your dreams, which is a form of self-created virtual reality. And so the main themes to follow are the intermixing of not only a multi-path reality, but a reality which might be instead virtual, but not as in a wetware dream state, but as the product of software, software generated by someone, or something else.
There are many versions of reality, some of which I’ll cover in future essays. I’d like to focus this time of what I’ll term ‘single-path reality’ versus ‘multi-path reality’. Some definitions and examples are in order. A single-path reality has a unique beginning, a unique middle, and an unique ending, and if you rewind the clock, turn back the book or e-book to page one, or start the film again at the beginning (or the DVD or CD), then proceed forward, the exact same sequence of unique events happen in the exact same unique order. The Novel “1984” starts with “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” and ends with “He loved Big Brother.” Every time, for every reader, Winston Smith takes a single unique path, with no variations.
Khan, from the motion picture “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” picks the exact same fight in the exact same manner with the exact same people and ends up getting blown up every single time. You never get the alternative where Khan wins and Captain Kirk, the Enterprise
A CD plays the exact same tracks in the exact same order with no variations (providing no human intervention in picking and choosing track order) each and every single time – again, a single-path reality.
A multi-path reality is one where replays do not of necessity give identical results. If George Orwell rewrote “1984”, maybe Winston Smith wouldn’t love Big Brother at the end. “1984” would then have a multi-path reality and the reader could pick which version they wanted.
If someone remakes “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan”, maybe Khan will live to fight another day – again, a multi-path virtual reality will then exist.
A rerecording of the CD might alter the track order, or add new selections and delete others, or have a different artist(s) provide the contents. Again, a multi-path reality has been generated.
Now, extrapolating from recorded medium to the reality we perceive in the here-and-now, are we in a single-path reality or a multi-path reality? And is that real reality or virtual reality? Unlike a novel or movie or piece of music, you can’t rewind the cosmos and start again ‘in the beginning’ and see what transpires. If you could, perhaps events will play out again exactly as they already have – a single-path reality. Perhaps Mother Nature might create an altered or second version of events – a multi-path reality might ensue where there might not be either you or I or even a Planet Earth. There’s no real way of telling for absolute sure.
I’d like to believe that our reality is a single-path reality; a single-path reality being the be-all-and-end-all of cosmic physics. That’s because I’m a firm convert to causality – cause and effect. If you start with X, Y & Z bits and they are subjected to A-laws and B-principles and C-relationships, then you end up with say #####. If you rewind the clock back and start all over again, you should end up with ##### and not say *****.
I suspect however that our reality is a multi-path reality, for reasons quite apart from invoking parallel universes, an infinitely cyclic universe, the Multiverse or the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics (all of which do lead to multi-path realities).
Since we can’t rewind the clock, the next best thing is to take apparently identical situations and re-run the scenario, one after the other. For example, take the same two chess players, the same chess pieces, the same chess board, the same geographical location, time of day, all the nitty-gritty bits-and-pieces down to the last detail. The second game will most likely be different than that of the first encounter. And that’s not something confined to sports, or only humans who apparently have a metaphysical concept imbedded between their ears called ‘free will’.
It’s common knowledge in biology that under identical experimental conditions, the lab rat will do as it damn well pleases! You can’t predict with 100% confidence that the same animal will do the exact same thing under seemingly identical conditions the second or third or fourth time around. Scientists tend to learn to expect the unexpected. So, maybe lab rats also have a form of ‘free will’.
Two seemingly identical seeds will not of necessity respond in identical fashion to identical stimuli. And weather conditions seemingly identical – same pressure, same temperature, same humidity, same wind direction and velocity – might produce two decidedly and drastically different outcomes by the conclusion on each of two consecutive days. No one thinks that plant seeds or the weather has any form of ‘free will’.
If you take two identical uranium atoms and leave them alone, after a period of time, one will and one will not have decayed – gone ‘poof’. Even in mathematics there’s a branch where quantity A plus quantity B does not equal quantity B plus quantity A. You may think that strange because you normally think of mathematics as a single-path reality. Two plus three equals three plus two, with no variations allowed on the theme. But mathematics can mirror the ‘real’ world and in the ‘real’ world the order of things makes a difference. There’s a decided deference if you put your bra on first, and then your blouse, vis-à-vis putting your blouse on first and then your bra! Or, you can jump off a bridge and then die, but it’s rather more difficult to die and then jump off a bridge.
Translated, it would appear that our cosmos seems to be probability based from the human level right down through some branches of mathematics. There are variables that operate in every conceivable scenario so there are differing outcomes in apparently initially identical scenarios.
To be continued…
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