Bear with me, we’re going on a little thought experiment journey.
You may, at some points, feel disoriented or wish to get out. The exits are there, there and there.
Ready?
We start inside your head, at this very instant.
You are you, you are here, this is now.
If you’re like most people, you have a very strong sense that you have a self, and that instant is part of a flow that self is experiencing in time, with a past and a future.
Treat it as a discrete instant, though.
If you could experience the instants of your life separately, in any order, such as skipping from this instant to one ten years ago, then one next week … would they feel any different? Would you be able to even tell?
Logic says you wouldn’t. There would be no way of knowing that they were experienced any other way than in sequence, unless you’re carrying with you information in some other way as you time-travel.
That instant, in and of itself, has only the data and physical reality available to it, just as this one does. As experienced in your head, there are whatever makes memories and sensations, and those are strongest and most salient based on the instants immediately preceding it in sequence, regardless of you dropping in to experience any particular one. So in that instant you can recall what has happened and expect what comes next as though there’s a flow, even if you are sampling that one point at random.
Is there any way to be sure that our experience is not a wild random ride ping-ponging across time and space taking all these instants in any order? Not that I can think of, anyway.
This is not a novel idea. In fact I recall a novel based on this concept (I had to look it up, because it’s been a long time – Permutation City).
That being so, there’s no need any more for the idea that time flows, any more than space does. The experience of it simply depends on where you are in time, not that you move through it, which might as well be an illusion caused by the experience of each instant in itself.
Now let’s take a little diversion into quantum mechanics, which many serious thinkers seriously think implies that everything that can happen does happen. That every time quantum uncertainty could resolve to this or that, it does both, each in a separate version of reality. And because the reality we experience is built up from those quantum events, every micro or macro thing that happens to us goes both ways too.
If that’s so, and again I can’t think of a way to prove that it isn’t, it fits neatly with the idea that each discrete instant in our experience is self-contained. Because it means that there’s nothing special about this instant at all. It’s the one particular instant that’s created by all the things that lead to it and there are countless others, equally valid and equally real. The only thing that marks out the one as you read this sentence is that you, right now, are experiencing it.
Uncountably many other versions of you may have an almost identical instant of experience, and uncountably many more diverged enough to never experience it at all.
The sense of inevitability that we feel, and the singleness of self, would in that case be as much of an illusion as the flow of time. We have to feel as we do in each instant, because our physical reality at that instant has exactly the information available to it that led to the instant and not any other. The next set of possible instants haven’t yet happened, and we don’t think of that as a split into numerous new selves, simply uncertainty about what we’ll experience next.
The logical conclusion of viewing things this way is … that if we could somehow step not only from instant to instant, but outside reality entirely, we’d see that it consists of every possibility of every kind in one mass, so that what you think of as your life to this point is one thread among infinite others. You are not the singular thing you feel, but a sort of blur among multiple worlds, between all versions experiencing everything it’s possible for you to experience.
So not only could you ping-pong randomly between moments of your life as you know it, you could drop into any instant of any version, and it would feel equally real, equally inevitable, and indistinguishable from a point in one single flow.
When I think about this, I remain grounded for as long as I think only about the past, because only my particular past can lead me to this experienced instant right now, so all the other versions feel theoretical. But if this is so, I’m midway through more versions of my life than I can possibly count or imagine, because every possibility from now is still open. What does that imply for the being that I call “me”?
I am diffuse. I am granular. I am bigger and more comprehensive than I feel, but also almost undefined. I have the me that is me right now, but everything else is not as definitive as it feels. I am not a distinctive singular entity, as I see myself.
OK, but is this so at all? Who knows?
I’d be interested to know if anyone has solid grounds to support saying that this it not how reality works though. It seems to me logical, coherent and realistic, considering what we do know about the universe.
And if this is how things are … OK, it doesn’t always help, but I have found that musing on it keeps life in perspective.
I sometimes see my life as an object that exists from beginning to end regardless of my experience of it, and honestly feel that the prospect of it having limits is no more to be feared or regretted than the fact I’m not infinitely big is a problem. I am what I am, and that’s fine.
The blurred edges, the different events and different choices that must lead to versions of me I wouldn’t recognise …? Is it unsettling, uprooting my very identity, or is it a comfort that this isn’t all there is whatever happens?
I can never decide. Maybe another version of me can.