If CREATING NEW UNIVERSES Is A Game Then Here Are The Rules; or Schrodinger's Cat Bites Back

by Ric Carter

GAME RULES

Creating universes is fun and easy. Here's how:
  1. Think about the universe you're in, and any universes you'd like.
  2. Specify all the characteristics of such universes; write'em down.
  3. Following Feynmann rules, compress related stuff into dimensions.
  4. Plot that stuff (those dimensions) onto a nice 2-dimensional graph.
  5. Rotate the page with the graph, noting which dimension is where.
The blueprint for your new universe is now at hand. So build it.

BACKGROUND NOTES

Being transcribed and slightly edited journal notes (recorded into a cassette deck as I walked around)l said notes being thrown into what purports here to be an essay about reality and how to have fun with it.
Schrodinger's cat is both dead and alive, neither dead nor alive. In a Feynmann space-time diagram, the 3 dimensions of space are collapsed into one when charting space-time on a 2 dimensional page, so that space is back-and-forth, time is up-and-down - going forward in time is shown by moving up the page. Two implications of this:

One is that if you have a dimension in which movement is allowed only in one direction, as in time, only moving forward thru time, then you can move in other directions in time by rotating the diagram, so that, if time is represented as up-down, one is only allowed to move UP, then rotate the diagram by 90 degrees, now we can only move thru one direction of SPACE, and you you can move back-and-forth in time. And there is evidence that a sufficiently dense mass of the right size can twist time and space enough to allow this.

The other implication is that since we can collapse movement in the 3 dimensions of space into one dimension for the purpose of charting it, we can also collapse 4 dimensions of space-time into one dimension, and chart a further dimension in the other direction on the page - not just another direction, but another set of dimensions. So that dimensions 1-2-3-4 are charted as going across on the page, and dimensions 5-6-7-8-9 are charted as going up-and-down on the page. Again, the whole page can be rotated to allow different forms of motion. One could also flip the page in relation to your viewing of it. Also, considering a 'dimension' as something you wish to track, to record, to chart, we could take some aspect of 3-dimensional space or 4-dimensional space-time and break down any one dimension into further dimensions, do that you would need more than 4 dimensions of charting to track what's happening there. I already suggested this before in terms of tracking speeds and vectors. So just as we can simplify multi-dimensional representations by collapsing dimensions for charting, we can complexify'em by expanding them.

Other fun things you can do with space and time, or at least with a page that is charting Feynmann diagrams representing space and time: You can xerox the page; make copies of your reality. You can crumple it up; burn it; wipe your ass with it; fold, spindle and mutilate it; overprint it with pretty pictures, and/or spill stuff on it; cut out protions of it; yeah, make paper dolls out of it; crush a plant you think is poison oak or poison ivy against it and see if the paper turns black. Suppose when you chart your universe, your reality, your time-space interactions on that paper, you use invisible ink? Or disappearing ink? Does your reality then materialize and dematerialize? If reality is whatever bites your ass; and you can chart reality in a Feynmann diagram; can you chart your ass-biting? If in quantum theory, nothing is real until you observe it, does your diagram not exist when you're not looking at it? Is reality whatever we think it is at the moment? Do we carve reality out of possibilities, probabilities? Good question.

OK, time and date: it's now. My age: so many years. Or thereabouts. And that's my temporal location. My spatial location: uh, I could give coordinates, or I could just say, "I'm here." For that matter, for my temporal location, I'm here NOW. And that's constantly changing. And that's constantly changing. I've started playing guitar again. I'm not composing new words to sing with. Well I did, I thought of something in the last couple days, I can't remember it now, just a verse. It just gets verse and verse. The vest of times, the verst of times. Is there a point to logging recent events? (Triviliaties deleted) And that's how I spent my summer vacation, ha ha... Like I said, I wonder at the utility for logging all this, the reason. Why? Because if I don't record it, it never happened! To borrow a line from Tom Clancy, who may have borrowed it from someone else.

Anyway, that's one point. Another is in my reading here of IN SEARCH OF SCHRODINGER'S CAT, that of course time slows down as you go faster, and when you get to the speed of light, time stops. And all photons travel at the speed of light. Therefore, to photons there is no time. Right NOW is the same as the Big Bang, 15 billion years ago! Put those together, and I come up with the line that, If I were a photon, I'd never be late to a job interview again!

The author says that our everyday view of reality is based on three fundamental assumptions. First, that there ARE real things that exist, regardless of whether we observe them; second, that it is legitimate to draw general conclusions from consistent observations or experiments; and third, that no influence can propagate faster than the speed of light, which he calls 'locality'. Together, these fundamental assumptions are the basis of Local Realistic views of the world. But are those assumptions valid? Or meaningful? Experimental results clearly demonstrate that Local Realistic views of the world are false.

"The whole universe can be thought of as a delayed choice experiment in which the existence of observers who notice what is going on, is what imparts tangible reality to the origin of everything." --John Gribben

In the multiple-worlds interpretation, any possible universe can occur within the super-universe but not everything that's imaginable is possible. And universes that are less likely disappear when more likely universes appear. Or something like that, assuming that the super-universe is finite, which General Relativity seems to describe. In the many-worlds interpretation, there is no chance, there is no probability, as such, because every possible event HAPPENS. The ILLUSION of probability, chance, appears when our viewpoint, our awareness, only follows necessarily one train of events. There are many different paths; we can apparently only follow one of them.

Collapsing dimensions: How to get to Feynmann diagrams, and beyond. When we represent 3 dimensional space on a 2 dimensional plane, like when we draw a picture, or take a photograph even, a photograph represents 3 dimensions, we put it on a flat piece of paper, we are in essence collapsing 2 of the dimensions into one. Call the space dimension X Y & Z - X is back'n'forth, Y is up'n'down, and Z is front'n'back. When we collapse those 3 dimensions into 2 for projecting an image, we're collapsing the X and Z dimensions together -- we still have Y vertical, but X and Z now are horizontal. With a Feynmann space-time diagram, collapse X Y *and* Z together into the X dimension, horizontal -- the vertical now plots T, the time dimension. We can, if we wish, collapse T into the horizontal also.

So let me introduce a new dimension, the U dimension -- call that 'happiness'. Now the horizontal plots my location in space'n'time, and the vertical charts how happy I am at any point in space'n'time. Or I could be measuring the V dimension -- call that 'volubility' -- how loud am I speaking at any point that I'm at in space'n'time. Now that horizontal axis, my collapsed T-X-Y-Z dimension, let's call that R for 'reality'. Now I could be plotting MY reality (call it Reality1) horizontally, and plotting someone else's reality (R2) vertically. As we add these new dimensions, new factors that we're measuring, these new dimensions do not exist in parallel with the pre-existing dimensions -- they're always at right angles to them. EVERYTHING is at right angles.

And to work our way around different realities, all we have to do is rotate the page, flip it -- everything changes, yet everything stays the same. Everything happens, yet nothing is determined. Isn't that FUN?

Call that one: IF CREATING NEW UNIVERSES IS A GAME THEN HERE ARE THE RULES.

The Copenhagen Interpretation: nothing is real. The Many-Worlds Interpretation: everything is real. Take your pick, bubby. 

Supersymmetry... supergravity... super you'n'me...
The universe is a vacuum fluctuation... ooh...
And intelligence is about memory. Remember what you've done; change what you do, based on what you've done; and you're learning. If the entity doing the learning, the changing, is a machine, then with each change it becomes a different machine.

Deep, deep depth... Sorcery: the use of great power for base purposes. Hacking is sorcery. Sorcery is a two-edged sword - sooner or later it will cut you deep. Deep. To a deep, deep depth. Learning automata that do whatever you want, whether they should or not, are sorcerous.

If any realm of human activity can be judged objectively, with objective evaluations of merit, then rules about that endeavour can be constructed, that endeavour can be turned into a formal game, and a machine can master the game -- at which point it becomes of no interest to rational humans. Can new areas of endeavour be opened up as fast or faster than old ones are closed off? Can machines generate meta-game rules and invent new areas of endeavour? Can human consciousness become a Lullian toy? Can that even be avoided? SHOULD it be? How do we tell? Can human activities be formulate as games, as computer programs -- should they have multiple levels of UN-DO? How much of your life...

How much of life is susceptible to UN-DO? Does life have a reset button? Is it a trigger?


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Ric Carter, ric@sonic.net, www.sonic.net/~ric, copyright © by OTRSS