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1.7

Post-Encounter Deposition

Archie Carter, PhD

School of Physics, University of Bristol


To describe my encounter with the Beings, I really have to ask you to imagine something a bit peculiar—a gingerbread man living on the two-dimensional world of a tabletop. Why that, specifically? Because this biscuit man is a living person much like you or me, and the tabletop is a very, very simplified model of our universe as seen by the Beings. We have three dimensions of space and one of time, and the biscuit universe simply removes one of the spatial dimensions so the rest is easier to understand. The Beings have many more dimensions than that, so to them we look quite flat and thin. To them, everything we know about is flat.

So, “time” in the biscuit universe can be defined as the up-down axis of our 3D universe. If we do that, then the gingerbread man’s past can be seen—actually seen—as a stack of human-shaped biscuits reaching upward to the ceiling, changing size and position as it goes, until there’s nothing but a tiny gingerbread zygote at the very top. That’s the start of the gingerbread man’s life.

The biscuit future extends below the table. Is our Mr. G about to take a step to his left? If so, then the biscuit immediately below the table will be a little farther left. And so on, plunging downward until the moment of the biscuit’s death. This ginger loaf, this worm of sweetened dough, traces out every moment of the biscuit’s life, and a three-dimensional Being can see all of it in one glance.

And it’s the same with every other object in the tabletop universe. Is there a letterbox? A dinner theater? A star about to go nova? Fine, they’re all worms, or (if you examine them under a powerful microscope) tight swarms of smaller worms orbiting around one another.

Extended this to three spatial dimensions, with a fourth one representing time, and you have Einstein’s block universe (actually first proposed by Augustine of Hippo back in 400 A.D.—smart guy). “Block” because the whole thing is a solid, invariant structure in 4D space. It might as well be carved in marble. This means, among other things, that free will is an illusion in the block universe. Or rather, that every choice ever made by human hearts, and every quantum uncertainty that ever collapsed into a definite motion, is resolved at the very moment of this universe’s creation. Think of the block as a fossil—the sum of all outcomes, preserved for eternity in a higher-dimensional hyperspace—of a sequence of events that may have perhaps, in a way, never happened at all. And so the passage of time is also an illusion, and the forces that direct objects to move or spin are simply boundary conditions at this sort of magical, let-there-be-light moment when the block is carved.

I like to imagine this moment: I see a true, rectangular block of material sitting there on a gallery floor somewhere, and suddenly in a flash of light there’s debris raining off it, leaving behind this quite complicated shape that is our universe. Of course, it could be anything. It could have different rules to our universe, or different objects in it, or different outcomes. If you think about it, there are an infinite number of universes that don’t exist at all. And one imagines the variables that make up our universe can’t be completely random. Do they instead fall along a bell-shaped distribution, with some values more probable than others?

Do we live in this particular block universe because it’s exceedingly probable? Are there other blocks beside it, marking out all the parallel ways it all might have transpired? That turns out to be actually a quite complicated question, because the block universe can’t be reconciled with quantum mechanics in the manner I’ve described above. Schrödinger tells us, rather harshly I’m afraid, that at any given moment—any 3D slice of the 4D block—the future can’t be predicted, even with perfect knowledge, and (to me, rather disturbingly) neither can the past. Not only is the passage of time an illusion, but so is the history we rely on to gauge what actually has happened.

I don’t think this means there geometrically can’t be a block universe, because all potential blocks can exist. It’s just that we just can’t ever predict which of the blocks our observation will be within. Since that lands us in the same predicament, I would call it a distinction without a difference; quantum mechanics still wrecks our ability to imagine the universe as a single 4D block.

It must be highly significant, then, that the Beings—who claim to be capable of perceiving the existence of a future and a past—describe them as two different things. They tell us time and space and mass are all illusions—that nothing but information exists, or can exist. So, why the division? What is this “information horizon” they’ve hinted at but not described?

I questioned them closely about this, or at least I thought I did. They reacted with an amusement that, I would say, bordered on awe, that a ridiculous creature such as myself could exist without perceiving what seemed so obvious to them.

And they did answer me, after a fashion. Their answer was a shape—something like the block universe carving we’ve been discussing, only vastly more complex. It seemed to move and change, its shapes sliding in and out of one another, but I understood this as an attempt on their part to show the effects of higher dimensions to my paper-thin gingerbread mind.

Was it a fractal? A topological mesh? A multidimensional Fibonacci spiral or space-filling curve? It was none of these, but it reminded me of all of them in certain ways. I suppose it belonged to the same general family of infinitely complex, non-Euclidian structures.

There are people who hear music when they’re listening to static, and I have to say I’m one of them. And the reason we hear that music is because it’s actually there in the white noise, along with a myriad other grainy but discernible patterns. Billions of them, perhaps more. Our brains are wired to find patterns, and so they do just that. But if you hear Euphemia Allen’s “Celebrated Chop Waltz,” or some entirely new song that never existed before, it doesn’t mean the static uniquely encodes that pattern. It’s just that an approximation of that pattern is extractable from the particular spectrum of that particular noise, by removing every click and pop that doesn’t fit it. And the static responds to thought! If you think about Beethoven, you’re more likely to hear him. If you think about sine waves, well, there you go. It’s not that you’re changing the noise spectrum, just finding one of the many patterns it contains.

I think our universe may exist in a similar way, pattern-matched from the hiss of quantum uncertainty, by conscious minds listening themselves into existence. I imagine it’s like the debris falling off our block universe onto the gallery floor, pulling something complex from an entropically simple medium.

And yet, the noise of Schrödinger isn’t precisely white. It obeys rules and constraints of its own, many more than we currently understand. I’m going to say, it did seem that one end of that fractal structure—the future—was of a different sort than the other end, and there was a middle section (the “nearly now”?) that was different from either.

I seem to recall I saw it for a moment. For just the merest flicker of time, I got the message the Beings were sending, and understood the structure of the universe as they perceive it. I remember it was beautiful and terrible and vast, and to say that it made me feel small is rather an understatement. It was like standing at the top of a ten-kilometer tower with my feet halfway over the edge, and looking down. Or perhaps like standing on a beach, looking up at a ten-kilometer wave about to sweep over everything. I could not have felt more certain that my presence in the universe is ephemeral.

It was that kind of shape.

And then it was gone, boiled away like liquid nitrogen, and no amount of sketching, no amount of time spent sitting in front of visualization software, has enabled me to recover it. I have only the sort of muddy, stompy bootprint it left behind on my brain.

I know, people who’ve taken psychedelics often say that type of thing. And perhaps it’s true for them, or perhaps it isn’t for me. Perhaps the whole experience was just wishful thinking, or a drug trip far from home. But if any of what I remember is even slightly representative of the truth, then I think our free will is definitely not an illusion, but perhaps the only reason our particular universe ever came into existence at all.


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