Exhalation

by Ted Chiang

I’ve told a story in order to make a case for the truth. I recognize the contradiction here.

The only way you can judge is by comparing my account against the recordings themselves, so I’m doing something I never thought I’d do: with Nicole’s permission, I am granting public access to my lifelog, such as it is. Take a look at the video, and decide for yourself. And if you think I’ve been less than honest, tell me. I want to know.

The Fermi Paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it is disconcertingly quiet.

There was an African gray parrot named Alex. He was famous for his cognitive abilities. Famous among humans, that is.

Alex the african gray parrot

A human researcher named Irene Pepperberg spent thirty years studying Alex. She found that not only did Alex know the words for shapes and colors, he actually understood the concepts of shape and color.

I follow the secular consensus that there has been exactly one verified miracle—the creation of the universe—and all of us are precisely equidistant from it.

Is it wrong of me to question whether the construction of cathedrals is, as we approach the twenty-first century, the best use of countless millions of dollars and the effort of generations of people?

I even understand the motivation for carving a cathedral out of the Earth’s substrate, to create a testament to both human and divine architecture.

for me, science is the true modern cathedral, an edifice of knowledge every bit as majestic as anything made of stone.

The life sciences are seemingly limitless; every year we discover new species of plants and animals and gain a deeper appreciation of your ingenuity in creating the Earth. By contrast, the night sky is just so finite. All five thousand eight hundred and seventy-two stars were cataloged in 1745, and not another has been found since then. Whenever astronomers peer at one more closely, they confirm that it’s identical in size and composition to every other, and to what end? It’s the essential nature of stars that they have so few characteristics; they’re the backdrop against which the Earth stands out, reminding us of how special we are. Choosing to study them has always felt a bit like choosing to taste the plate that food is served on.

;)

“I won’t apologize for bringing people closer to God. I know I’ve broken rules in doing so, but it’s the rules that need to be changed, not my behavior.”

I told her that people couldn’t simply disobey rules just because they disagreed with them, because society would cease to function if everyone did that.

true

the planet that 58 Eridani is orbiting is stationary relative to the luminiferous aether, meaning that it’s the sole object in the universe that is at absolute rest. On that planet, and only on that planet, would the speed of light be precisely the same no matter which direction it was traveling. And although there’s no way to detect life on that planet, Lawson suggests the planet is inhabited, and that its inhabitants are the reason God created the universe.”

aether -- absolute rest -- variable speeds of light -- pre-relativity physics

I realized he was correct. Why are the languages of the world so different? Philologists have struggled to reconcile their variety with the age of the Earth and the rate at which languages diverge. If you had imbued all the primordial humans with knowledge of a common tongue, Lord, we’d expect the world’s languages to all bear a family resemblance, like the Indo-European ones. But the vastly greater differences between languages of the world means there must have been more than a dozen completely unrelated languages spoken immediately after creation. We have long wondered why you would have done that, Lord. But if the disparate populations of primordial humans had each invented language independently, then there was no puzzle to be solved; the multiplicity of languages was accidental rather than by design.

rejects intelligent design

“I found wave oscillations within the Sun, the echoes of the initial compression God used to initiate the gravitational collapse responsible for its heat and light.” “It was like finding God’s fingerprints on our world,” said Mrs. McCullough. “At the time, it provided all the reassurance we could have asked for.” “But now I wonder if it proves anything,” he said. “All stars must have wave oscillations within them; there’s nothing that sets us apart. Nothing science has discovered carries any meaning.”

Archaeology may not be as exact a science as physics, but it relies on physics for its foundations. Physical law is what makes it possible to study the past; examine the state of the universe closely enough, and we can infer its state a moment earlier in time. Each moment follows inexorably from the previous one and is followed inexorably by the next, links forged in a causal chain.

physics is our most fundamental basic science -- first principles

Because I think there are events of another category that are likewise not fixed in a causal chain: acts of volition. Free will is a kind of miracle; when we make a genuine choice, we bring about a result that cannot be reduced to the workings of physical law. Every act of volition is, like the creation of the universe, a first cause.

does free will exist or is it an illusion in a super dterministic block universe?

our lives have often been difficult even when we believed there was a divine plan, and we’ve persevered. If we have only ever been on our own, then our successes in spite of that are proof of our capabilities.

Even if humanity is not the reason for which the universe was made, I still wish to understand the way it operates. We human beings may not be the answer to the question why, but I will keep looking for the answer to how. This search is my purpose; not because you chose it for me, Lord, but because I chose it for myself.

search for understanding/learning is a meaningful life purpose

paraself

your others in another world in a many worlds view of quantum interpretation

Information was exchanged using an array of ions, isolated in magnetic traps within the prism. When the prism was activated and the universal wave function split into two branches, these ions remained in a state of coherent superposition, balanced on a knife’s edge and accessible to either branch. Each ion could be used to send a single bit of information, a yes or a no, from one branch to the other. The act of reading that yes/no caused the ion to decohere, permanently knocking it off the knife’s edge and onto one side. To send another bit, you needed another ion. With an array of ions, you could transmit a string of bits that encoded text; with a long-enough array, you could send images, sound, even video.

entanglement portal for many worlds view of quantum interpretation

Once the notepad was exhausted, no more information could be exchanged and the two branches went on their separate ways, incommunicado forever after.

data limited portal connection between distinct branches in quantum many worlds

She looked at Dana curiously. “Don’t you ever wonder if you made the wrong choice?” I don’t have to wonder; I know. But aloud Dana said, “Of course. But I try to focus on the here and now.”

buddhism focus on the present

If a person has resolved to base a huge decision on the measurement—“If the blue LED lights up, I will detonate this bomb; otherwise, I will disarm it”—then the two branches will diverge in an obvious manner. But if no one takes any action as a result of the measurement, how much will the two branches diverge?

see universe splitter app

He’d bought a prism and used it as a coin flip: blue LED accepts the offer, red LED rejects it. The blue LED had lit up in this branch, so he took the new job while his paraself stayed at his existing job. For months they both felt happy with their situations. But after the initial novelty of the new job wore off, Lyle found himself disenchanted with his duties, while his paraself got a promotion. Lyle’s confidence was shaken. He pretended he was happy when communicating with his paraself, but he was struggling with feelings of envy and jealousy.

paraself envy ;)

Set up a rack of billiard balls and execute a flawless break. Imagine the table has no pockets and is frictionless, so the balls just keep rebounding, never coming to a stop; how accurately can you predict the path of any given ball as it collides against the others? In 1978, the physicist Michael Berry calculated that you could predict only nine collisions before you would need to account for the gravitational effect of a person standing in the room. If your initial measurement of a ball’s position is off by even a nanometer, your prediction becomes useless within a matter of seconds.

classical mechanics causality and gravitational effects

Without anyone intending it, the activation of the prism inevitably gives rise to a difference between the two branches generated. The difference is imperceptible at first, a discrepancy at the level of the thermal motion of molecules, but when air is turbulent, it takes roughly a minute for a perturbation at the microscopic level to become macroscopic, affecting eddies one centimeter in diameter.

perturbation quantum to macro scale effects

Silitonga confirmed this when he and his parallel self exchanged weather reports one month after activating a prism. The weather reports were all seasonally appropriate—there was no location that experienced winter in one branch and summer in the other—but beyond that they were essentially uncorrelated. Without anyone making an effort, the two branches had diverged visibly on a worldwide scale.

Morrow had started working at SelfTalk around the same time as Nat, so neither had been an employee back when the company was thriving. When prisms were something only corporations could afford, people were happy to go to a store to communicate with parallel versions of themselves. Now that it was possible for people to buy their own prisms, SelfTalk had only a few locations left, and their customers were mostly teenagers whose parents didn’t let them use prisms or senior citizens who were unsophisticated enough that they still found the idea of paraselves a novelty.

selftalk stores became like blockbuster video stores -- outmoded

No prism would ever allow communication to a branch that had split off prior to its moment of activation, so there’d be no reports from branches where Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated or where the Mongols had invaded western Europe. By the same token, there were no fortunes to be made by patenting inventions gleaned from branches where technological progress had taken a different route. If there were going to be any practical benefits gained from using a prism, they would have to derive from subsequent divergences, not earlier ones.

retrocausality restrictions of branched many worlds

the researchers had to comb through the news stories from the preceding weeks to try to identify the causes of the discrepancy, which usually led to scrutinizing the stochastic jitters of the stock market or social media.

“We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”

focus on the present & controlling the controllables

The hope was that cross-branch cooperation would enable every version of a company to get paying customers in their branch, and over time this would work to everyone’s advantage: a form of reciprocal altruism between all of the company’s parallel versions.

many worlds altruism

Nat used to be like Vinessa, always blaming someone else for her problems.

accept personal responsibility is freedom

A popular use of a prism was to enable collaboration with yourself, increasing your productivity by dividing the tasks on a project between your two versions; each of you did one half the job, and then you shared the results. Some individuals tried to buy multiple prisms so that they’d be part of a team consisting solely of versions of themselves, but not all the parallel selves were in direct contact with each other, which meant that information needed to be relayed from one to another, consuming the prisms’ pads faster. A number of projects came to an abrupt end because someone had underestimated their data usage, exhausting the prism before the work done in one branch could be transmitted, leaving it forever inaccessible.

prism uses

Some people experienced identity crises, feeling that their sense of self was undermined by the countless parallel versions of themselves. A few bought multiple prisms and tried to keep all their parallel selves in sync, forcing everyone to maintain the same course even as their respective branches diverged. This proved to be unworkable in the long term, but proponents of this practice simply bought more prisms and repeated their efforts with a new set of parallel selves, arguing that any attempt to reduce their dispersal was worthwhile.

paraself syncs

Experts tried to explain that human decision-making was a classical rather than quantum phenomenon, so the act of making a choice didn’t by itself cause new branches to split; it was quantum phenomena that generated new branches, and your choices in those branches were as meaningful as they ever were.

true ivo many worlds quantum interpretation as decoherence/wave function collApse = branching event, not triggered by a human choice/decision

“In general, I think your actions are consistent with your character. There might be more than one thing that would be in character for you to do, because your behavior is going to vary depending on your mood, but there are a lot more things that would be utterly out of character. If you’re someone who’s always loved animals, there isn’t a branch where you kick a puppy just because it barked at you. If you’re someone who’s always obeyed the law, there’s no branch where you suddenly rob a convenience store instead of going into work in the morning.”

actions = character

I definitely think that your choices matter. Every decision you make contributes to your character and shapes the kind of person you are. If you want to be someone who always gives the extra money back to the cashier, the actions you take now affect whether you’ll become that person.

choice mattwrs

The more often you make compassionate choices, the less likely it is that you’ll make selfish choices in the future, even in the branches where you’re having a bad day.”

Each time you do something generous, you’re shaping yourself into someone who’s more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.

recursive altruistic choices for character

If the same thing happens in branches where you acted differently, then you aren’t the cause.

root cause analysis using many worlds

STORY NOTES

explains physics motivation for each ahort story

Thorne had performed some mathematical analysis indicating that you couldn’t change the past with this time machine, and that only a single, self-consistent timeline was possible.

kip thorne caltech physicist nobel for livo detection of gravitational waves and helped make the interstellar movie

This story has two very different inspirations. The first was a short story by Philip K. Dick called “The Electric Ant,” which I read as a teenager.

The second was the chapter in Roger Penrose’s book The Emperor’s New Mind in which he discusses entropy. He points out that there’s a sense in which it’s incorrect to say we eat food because we need the energy it contains. The conservation of energy means that it is neither created nor destroyed; we are radiating energy constantly, at pretty much the same rate that we absorb it. The difference is that the heat energy we radiate is a high-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s disordered. The chemical energy we absorb is a low-entropy form of energy, meaning it’s ordered. In effect, we are consuming order and generating disorder; we live by increasing the disorder of the universe. It’s only because the universe started in a highly ordered state that we are able to exist at all.

purpose of life is to increase entropy from a physics perspecti e

Then I read Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, a book about the impact of the written word on oral cultures; while some of the stronger claims in the book have come under question, I still found it eye-opening. It suggested to me that there might be a parallel to be drawn between the last time a technology changed our cognition and the next time.

Then there’s the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is popularly understood to mean that our universe is constantly splitting into a near-infinite number of differing versions. I’m largely agnostic about the idea, but I think its proponents would encounter less resistance if they made more modest claims about its implications. For example, some people argue that it renders our decisions meaningless, because whatever you do there’s always another universe in which you make the opposite choice, negating the moral weight of your decision. I’m pretty confident that even if the many-worlds interpretation is correct, it doesn’t mean that all of our decisions are canceled out. If we say that an individual’s character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual’s character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds. If you could somehow examine a multitude of Martin Luthers across many worlds, I think you’d have to go far afield to find one that didn’t defy the church, and that would say something about the kind of person he was.