Depressingly impossible thought of the week:

We assume that every human we see around us-- our friends, family, kids, adults-- experience the same sort of self awareness and sense of existence as we do. In other words, for all 6 billion people on the planet, there's a soul in the driver's seat for each and every one of them.

And most of us also assume belief in some supreme being or beings, so even when all else fails... you at least know there's something out there bigger than you imposing some sort of reason on your existence.

But what if, in actuality, your awareness is the one and only in the entire universe? Meaning everyone else you see isn't a complex and rich personality, but rather is an empty shell that just coincidentally happens to exhibit behaviors that would seem to suggest a soul.

This is not unlike saying the entire universe as you perceive it is nothing more than a lengthy dream, only more life-like than anything else you've experienced simply because you haven't "woken up" yet. This isn't entirely unimaginable because everyone has had a dream of waking up thinking a dream was over, only to wake up again-- realizing you were having a dream within a dream.

Another way to state this idea is to say that your interaction with external events is isolated-- everyone else exists not in the same sense that you do, but rather just in the sense that your perception of the universe imposes their existence.

Could this really be the way things are? Is the universe completely populated by soulless caricatures of intelligence, and you're the only one single awareness that exists and will ever exist?

I really hope not, or it would be one lonely, lonely universe.

It seems, at times, that I might have an extraordinarily limited perspective of the universe. Considering for a moment the magnitude of shit that exists out there that we will never experience (and could never even imagine experiencing), it seems to dwarf the infinitesimal sliver of existence for which I am an observer.

For example, imagine a perspective where a lifetime is measured not in tens of years, but in billions of years, and traversing across galaxies is as easy as going from city to city for us. You could see the life cycles of stars, the formation of new planets, life, evolution... and truly appreciate the vastness of the universe. We, on the other hand, exist for such a vanishingly small amount of time on such a small little chunk of the universe.

It's also limiting that we are experiencing time in a one-dimensional, collapsed manner. The past is continually fleeing from us and the future is nebulous... but that could easily just be our perception.

It's like we're stuck on a train, with only a rear window, traveling at a constant speed forever. We can always look back and see from where we came, but we have no idea how the track turns up ahead, or even if it will be running for much longer. How ignorant must we look to an observer who can see the track in its entirety? To something not bound by our limited perception of time, its idea of the universe would be quite different than ours.

But maybe it's good that we suffer this "limited perspective" of ours. When you're only around for less than a century, the only appreciable wonder we can experience in the universe is each other. The Earth, the stars, space, and time are not going to give a damn about what you or I do with the rest of our lives, but the people around us will.

Friends will come and go, love, hate, death... all complex and powerful forces that we, in our limited perspective, can nearly get a hold of and experience them as they change and evolve throughout our lives. Could somebody who can skip around galaxies on a whim really appreciate something as delicate and fragile as love?

So maybe we don't have that limited of a perspective after all? Maybe the most impressive things to witness in the universe are the relationships and emotions we experience with others happening right here on this frail little blue marble spinning around one lonely little star...

Infinity is a pretty weird concept, to be honest. You can't really have an infinite amount of anything (at least anything that's real). Pi has an infinite number of shit digits after it, but math is an entirely man-made abstract concept... so that doesn't count.

But maybe the entire universe itself is infinite? It might seem so... with our lonely little asses whirling around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy... which in turn is just one of 125 billion or so galaxies we think are in the universe. And when the number of stars is something with more than 20 zeros after it, it seems like it might as well be an infinite universe out there.

But even unimaginably huge is nowhere near infinity. An infinite universe is one that either extends forever in time or in space-- or both. But what-ever-the-hell exactly does that mean?

An Infinite Amount of Space

A universe with an infinite amount of space in it seems like it wouldn't really be that big of a deal. But exactly what would take up all that space? Lots and lots and lots of shit to be sure. Anything and everything imaginable would be taking up that space. Just like in the infinite series of digits in pi you can find any arbitrary long sequence of numbers any arbitrary amount of time, you could come up with any imaginable physical entity (a person, a planet, a galaxy) and eventually, somewhere in the universe, it would exist.

In fact, if the universe were truly infinite in space, then somewhere there is somebody almost exactly like me on a planet almost exactly like Earth probably writing some shit blog entry like I am now. Within an infinite space, eventually at some point, all possible physical configurations would exist.

Another similar view is one of the many theories behind the nature of quantum mechanics: the many-worlds interpretation.

Typical Quantum Bullshit

If you know even a little about quantum theory, you know a) it is some counter-intuitively mind-boggling crap, and b) an outcome to any quantum experiment is not deterministic; rather there is some distribution of probability for various outcomes occurring. Although good 'ol Einstein disagreed when he said "God does not play dice", the countless experiments seem to refute this idea.

The many-worlds interpretation basically states that instead of the quantum wave function of a system (that random probability of outcomes) collapsing into a single state when we measure it, there are actually universes where every possible outcome exist. In other words... for every possible quantum state of every system, there exists a separate universe with that outcome.

For the classic Schrödinger's cat example, the cat does not exist in the superposition of being both alive and dead, but there are at least two universes: one in which the cat is alive, and one in which the cat is dead.

In this sense, there could be an infinite number of universes... all with different outcomes to various quantum events. Imagine-- every decision you've ever made in your life... there would be an entirely separate universe in which you chose something differently.

All in theory of course.

Whatever

So is the universe infinite? No clue. But if it is, then there are certainly some very weird consequences about the nature of our reality. Who knows, maybe there are an infinite number of you in alternate universes... living out every possible life you could live.

Or maybe it's all just bullshit.

I have no idea how I came across this the other day but I found it mildly interesting. And by that I mean it leaves you thoughtful for a few fleeing moments, but then you basically forget about it and carry on with your life as normal. Anyway, the following is taken mostly from the wikipedia article outlining philosopher Nick Bostrom's idea:

The Premise

Bostrom's argument first requires us to make the following assumptions:

1. It is possible that some day, a civilization (us, or anybody in the universe really) would have the technical ability and resources to create a computer-based simulation containing self-aware intelligent entities.
2. It is likely that this civilization would run a huge (~10⁹ and up etc.) amount of the simulations, for observing behavior, research, or whatever.
   
3. The nature of the simulation is such that an individual inside the simulation would be unable to detect that they are not in "the real world", as their entire reality as perceived by them (IE a false reality) is provided solely by the simulation.

Basically, think The Matrix. From here, if one assumes that 1-3 are at least remotely possible, then which of the following is more likely?

1. We are the one real civilization that will eventually develop the simulation, or
   
2. That we are one of the billions of simulations that have run?

If you agree 1-3 are at least possible, the the following trichotomy emerges:

1. Intelligent species will never reach a level of technology to create simulations accurate enough to be mistaken for reality, or
2. Species who reach this level of technology and are capable of running such simulations, don't tend to do so, or
3. We are almost certainly living in a simulation.

Uh... Okay?

So essentially, this entire thing hangs on assumptions 1-3. Assuming humanity doesn't wipe itself out, maybe those aren't that huge of assumptions. Interestingly enough, even if you consider the probability that 1-3 are true to be very small, the vast numbers of simulations that would be run still make part 3 of the trichotomy very very likely.

Like I said, think about it, let it marinate, and then go on with your life. This sort of thing is just one of many skeptical hypotheses, a theory that basically says we have no idea what the hell is really going on with life.

Interesting...

Most likely due to my love of Back to the Future at a young age... I have always been fascinated by time and time travel. I read books about it and even tried to "build" a time machine in my closet (at age 7, of course). I even checked out time travel novels from the "Sci-Fi" section at our elementary school library and the local public library (yeah I was a nerd as a kid...).

This interest in time was re-invigorated in my senior physics class in high school when we started to learn about Einstein's Relativity theories... in particular Special Relativity. In a nutshell... one aspect of his theory states that the consequence of the speed of light being constant regardless of reference frame is that time is relative. That is, the rate at which different observers pass through time can be, and in fact is, different.

This effect is all but un-observable in normal-day contexts, but as velocities approach the speed of light, the effects of this "time dilation" become more evident. These effects have been observed in a multitude of experiments and its effects are exploited in modern communication devices like GPS and other satellite systems.

Einstein's theories provide a very predictable and accurate description of time experiments in all domains. But something I've always wondered about is the general perception of time.

Both Newton and Einstein's description of time base it on the fact that time progresses from the past towards the future... and the current point in which we occupy is the present. But what if that description is merely our perception of time, but is completely inaccurate as to the actual description of time?

Reality Check

Before I go any further into this ridiculous entry I think it's important to note the futility of trying to determine the accuracy of perception. The world is what we perceive it to be because that is the only means by which we have to observe. It is by this fact that we will never know whether or not our perception is accurate. This is a weird thought and pretty damn hard to really grasp... but think about simple situations.

If you see a ball on the ground, how do you know it is REALLY there? We perceive it to be there because light bounces off it and is focused to the back of our eyes, causing a chemical reaction that signals our brain to "see" an object. We don't actually see the object but rather the effects of the object (in particular, the chemical reactions to the photons that bounce off of the object).

That being said... let's continue!

Linearly Progressing Time

The way in which we perceive time, and the way in which almost all scientific contexts describe time, is as the independent variable. It progresses continually with our without our permission. One way to describe time in this interpretation is that it is linearly-progressing and single-dimensional.

This "interpretation" of time is the most natural, and is built into our minds intrinsically. Based in this context, the past is over and done with and never to return, the present is right NOW, and the future is unknown and yet to happen.

An Alternative Idea

But what if the concepts of past, present, and future are just manifestations in our mind? Maybe chronological ordering isn't something natural but rather a false construct used by our minds to make sense of something more complicated. It's possible that instead of such definitive descriptions as "before" and "after", that collections of events are far more general.

One could even go further to say that it is possible that time itself is a complete fallacy, that in fact all events exist at once and everything that is to happen, in actuality, already exists. Concepts such as causality and simultaneity dissolve because, in fact, no such framework (i.e, time) is available for these concepts to hold any meaning.

Further consequences of this concept would be that the past, present, and future are all the same: the past is no more gone than the future is unknown, and the concept of the "present" is completely arbitrary.

Pushing Einstein's theories around a little bit seems to even slightly suggest this: another consequence of his theories about relativistic time and length is that the concept of simultaneity is relative as well. That is, the fact that two events are held to be simultaneous is relative to an observer.

Observer A can say Event X happened at the same time as Event Y, and be correct, while Observer B can assert that in fact they happened at different times. Given the relationship between their positions and velocities, they might both be correct, within their own reference frame.

Going a little further, one could suggest that given any two arbitrary events in spacetime, there exists some reference frame from in which those two events can be correctly held to be simultaneous to a given observer. This suggests that both your birth and death can be seem as happening at the same time... given the correct reference frame. Another way to look at this is to realize that an observer in another reference frame could have witnessed events that you hold to be in the "future" before you've witnessed them. This suggests that your death might have already happened within somebody's reference frame.

Combining that extreme perversion of relativity with the notion that time is not what we perceive it to be... we arrive at some interesting conclusions. For example: the future... as much as it might seem "free" an up to you to determine... already exists and in a sense, has happened. In fact... this would mean that every action/choice/decision you seem to make within your own means is already set and is as concrete as something that happened in the "past" and is already done.

This can be thought of as instead of living in the present and determining your own future, your mind is simply trying to digest the universe, and in doing so, creates the illusion of time to better understand it.

What the hell??

The above is posed more as a thought on which to ponder than an actual stating of a theory or anything concrete. It's an interesting example of the complexities associated with time and the concept of perception vs. reality, and just overall some weird shit to think about. So don't flip out about it... just read it over and let it marinate in your mind for a while... or talk to your buddy about it next time you find yourselves jasterbatingly pussy-footing around on an otherwise uneventful evening.

This is all for now, congrats if you made it through my first "deep post"... if you have anything to add feel free to comment... otherwise... I must bid you adieu (thanks geoff).

-B. Valosek, relativistic inquisitor