It’s a new year, and I feel very odd. Estranged from myself – not by some sort of sudden disconnect, but as though I’ve grown so far from the architecture that defines me that I no longer feel like I have contact with who I essentially am. I keep growing because I want to be more, and it’s all meat and no bone.
A thought experiment: The universe, everything that ever has been and ever will be, is a point in space. Every other possible universe exists as a point in that space. These points aren’t integral, though: Each blends slowly, continuously, into the next, the same as 0 goes to 0.5 goes to 0.75 goes to infinite other numbers before it ever reaches 1. Our everything that ever will be exists at that one point, and every other possible universe exists somewhere else in that space.
For each other possible universe mapped in that space, there is some sort of operation to transform universe A into universe B. Some everything’s are very close to each other, and require only small shifts to transform one into another. Some are very far away from one another. If it’s just an extremely high-dimensional space, you could even measure the distance between them with the good old-fashioned Pythagorean theorem.
There’s a few things that are interesting to think about from this perspective. For instance, what realities exist in this space? It might be tempting to believe that any possible configuration of matter could exist here, that any ideal world with any desired outcome could be in this space somewhere, but as long as there’s some form of causality at all points then I don’t see how that could be true. Some conceptual universes would be internally contradictory, so perhaps this would just be the space of all possible real universes, rather than all conceivable universes.
Say you wish you were rich: How far is the universe you live in now away from one in which you’ve acquired great wealth? Well, that depends a lot on who you are. It’s pretty unlikely you’d just stumble across a lottery ticket, and really much more likely that someone in your family tree got rich somewhere along the way and you inherited it – that is, unless there were barriers in place keeping your ancestors from earning or keeping money. Depending on how robust and ubiquitous these barriers were, it may be that in order for your ancestors to have been wealthy you’d have to start looking towards ever more distant universes, and the further away you looked the less the version of you who lived in that world would be you at all. After a certain point your entire family tree would shift, grow towards prosperity like a plant towards light, and whoever your great-great- grandfather’s great-great-grandchild would be, they wouldn’t be you in any meaningful sense.
People talk about butterfly effects, about how if you shift any one trivial thing then everything connected will drastically change – and I think that’s generally true, but in such a continuous meta-universe as we posit that doesn’t really matter. If the butterfly makes a hurricane, that will be a more distant point, where we’re looking for the nearest possible point where a person who is (more or less) you becomes (more or less) wealthy.
For some people that point would be close, for some it might be far, and for some… it might not exist at all, in this space of real universes. Which is why it’s odd that we talk at all about equality – so many of us never had a chance to have a chance.
Here’s another question: How far away are you from who you want to be? How far away are you from the life you want to live? Are these points which are navigable from where you stand right now? Is the person who exists there even, still, you in any meaningful sense?