The Paraself

I enjoy taking long walks, even if, down the subdivision of dirt roads that is my rural areas' equivalent of the suburbs, there is not actually anything to do but look at the same old, same old scenery. Of course, the scenery isn't the point, it's mainly to keep my body occupied, get away from the house for a smoke or two, and free the mind from having to do anything save sit there and do its thing. Every once in a while, if I walk long enough and meet certain other still nebuluous conditions, something gets jogged loose, and I have one of those moments when large ideational chunks calve like glaciers and rearrange themselves, instantly, into a new configuration.

Lets back up for a second. You've heard at some point I assume of quantum mechanics, and may have come across the Many Worlds Interpretation of that theory, a speculative but very credible formulation wherein quantum effects give rise to an invisible multiverse that consists of every possible world. Conventionally, there can be no contact between parallel universes: once they split, in the quantum of time in which one state has the possibility of shifting to one or the other outcome, no further influence is possible. Just as the present is untouchable save for its immediate past and can touch nothing but its immediate future, so parallel universes are out of bounds.

(Well, that's not entirely true. The formulation of gravity within brane theory indicates it as the one force able to radiate through all dimensions, and due to this by far the weakest. That it would be gravity that has this property is especially interesting to me in light of where I'm going with this piece.)

This doesn't stop science fiction writers from speculating on travel between those universes, however, and it's thanks to their efforts and shows like Sliders that I can be so confident that you've come across this particular idea before.

Now, consider for a moment Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance, in which like not just attract like (as in the law of attraction) but like forms affect like forms. This explains not just heredity but also instinct, as well as personal memory and a whole host of other tendencies within the universe. Although Sheldrake is a biologist and did his early work in botany, his morphic resonance theory is not, strictly speaking, a biological theory but a quantum one.

Now, hold on to that part about the theory regarding its explanation of personal memory. In the theory it is advisable to think of the brain as a transciever rather than a computer, as its function is to more closely resemble itself than anything else in the universe and thus to take advantage of morphic fields to send information within itself. Broadly speaking, the reason you remember recent events more accurately and fully than distant ones is that present-you is more like recent-past-you than she is like little-kid-you. But, there's still enough in common between the the quantum form of you now and you when you're very young that you can retain some memories of even very distant events.

What about you-in-the-future? I can already here some of you asking. Well, at any given moment the universe is splitting off into new, irreconcilable daughter universes, and so as you think into the future you're inevitably confronted with a combinatorially increasing number of potential yous. And so, in contrast with past you (of whom, at any given moment, you can remember only one) the signal from all those future yous, while present, is diffuse and mostly cancels itself. Which isn't to say, of course, that no contact is impossible. Only that it would take something pretty remarkable that got a large enough number of future-yous shouting at you in unison, in order to push some amount of signal through the noise.

But I'm not really here to talk about the future, though it is I grant you a fun thing to talk about.

Really, it's the present that interests me. What is the presnt, really? This infinitesimal moment on which our awareness balances its journey through time? We live in it but how well do we know it? Well, I needn't belabor the point, given the readership here, so I'll get right to another one: it's very possible to imagine each moment as one amongst the almost uncountable infinity of possible configuration states of the universe.

No doubt you've seen it on TV. One moment, frozen in time, motionless as a painting but in three dimensions (and often as not, one of the characters can move around in it.) Imagine your immediate surroundings frozen in this way, and now expand that to include your whole city, country, the world, and then the universe. That is what a moment looks like. Now,picture it moving one step forward, one little infinitesimal change: some parts almost certain to undergo no change at all, others as uncertain as the wind and it's out of that chaos that a tree is woven of the timelines.

In fact, this brings us back again to morphic fields: one moment is most like its immediately preceding moment, and its immediately subsequent moments, and so we experience time as we do, from effect/cause to cause/effect and so on, endlessly rolling forward through the cycles.

Now, sometimes, on a bad day when you're in a really terrible mood and thinking all kinds of despondant thoughts about life and the lack of justice of your place within it, you've wondered no doubt about how things might've been. About the other lives you might have led, if you'd done this differently, gone that way, went out with that girl instead or trusted yourself a little more (or a little less, depending on circumstance.) How different of a person would you have been? Happier, better, stronger, richer, married to a prettier woman or more skilled, able to play that guitar or write that code or catch that fish ... then again, there's other yous that are dead in a ditch, or about to be with a needle in your arm, or bankrupt or merely unloved. Past a certain point, there's no knowing where the path of a different you might take them.

According to the Many Worlds Interpretation, all of those others yous exist. All of them. Even the ones you just thought of now, the impossibly ridiculous ones you thought of just to test the theory, them too (that said, they're likely very unlikely, a small infinite set within a vastly larger fractal system ... but then, measured against the expanse of the multiverse, we are all of us both hugely unlikely and inevitable. What seems likely and what not is a measure only of distance between two moments, rather than an inherent superiority of one versus the other. From the standpoint of a ridiculous you, you are yourself impossibly silly.)

I call this vast, wistful cloud of potential and might-have-been other yous the paraself. The paraself, strictly speaking, might be thought of as all potential selves, past, present, and future, including as a matter of course the past you actually remember, and the future you perceive as likely. Or you might define it as all of the moments within the multiverse that include you as a character (supporting or starring, depending on how you look at it.) At any rate I imagine your mind is boggling somewhat now so I'll let it do that a second and then we'll get back to business.

Yes, I hear some of you say, this is all very interesting in an abstract sort of way but give us something practical, damn it! We're busy people. We've people to activate, societies to build, a world to save!

So here goes: might morphic resonance be used to contact other probabilistic 'locations' within the paraself? Similarity allows the communication, after all, and while of course any self that would be interesting enough to want to contact would also be quite different but ... how different is that, really? After all, you're probably pretty different from how you were ten or twenty years ago and yet ... you remember, don't you? At least, you remember some of it.

How then might one establish contact? Well, the logical way to go about it of course would be through thought. Obviously, this other you within the paraself branched off from an otherwise shared past at some point, so to follow them it might be wise to remember as clearly as possible everything about that time, to be there inside as fully as possible and then ... give things a slight nudge, perhaps, in a different direction.

The interesting question of course is how much contact one might gain with another self, how much information might actually pass between you and the paraself. It's all well and good we're talking about an elaborate sort of day-dreaming here but ... if the other self is truly there, might it be possible to transmit useful information through the paraself? To use it as a sort of referrence library, from which knowledge and skills might be accessed?

I wanted to illustrate that last bit with a scene from the Matrix, any of several shots of Neo plugged into the chair in the command room of the Nebuchadnezzar, learning kung fu in the time it takes ordinary mortals to learn what's on TV tonight, but, as luck would have it ... I can find no such image. So I'll just leave this off here, encapsulating finally more or less the sum of the epiphany I had on that walk two weeks ago and leaving the subsequent experiments (their logical subject, the aptly termed myself) for a later essay.