Shaking Hands with Our Future

Information theorist Seth Lloyd, an MIT expert in quantum computing, in a recent discussion at www.edge.org , stated that, "Many of the systems we regard as processing information, particularly sophisticated ones, have a notion of correspondence of a message with something else ... I regard those as emergent features that we can only ascribe to objects like living things, or perhaps to life itself. Those emergent features are very important. However, it is possible for a system to register information without that information having some kind of semantic meaning."

Over the last several years the information revolution has been complemented by an increase in data about the construction of the universe. As a result there is now a general consensus that what was traditionally called the universe is only a member of an infinite set of all possible worlds collectively known as the multiverse. Recently physicist and string theorist Leonard Susskind added the word megaverse to refer to those worlds in the multiverse which are actualized.

Given this enormous set of worlds as fertile ground for the imagination of mankind, the metaphysical and the physical once again have embraced, at least briefly, and have perhaps made a temporary truce. The ground of being is no longer terra firma, it shifts and sways to the beatnik strains of the meta-mega-physicalist.

Dr. George Ryazanov is a Russian physicist with a strong interest in unifying a vision of physics and metaphysics in a grand synthesis he calls the syncretic science of the future. Ryazanov's ideas are rooted in the concept of the opposition of coincident objects, in particular the symmetry of two signs of time. Two signs of time refer to advanced information processing from the future, and retarded information processing from the past. Many years ago Ryazanov experienced a metaphysical visitation and was inspired to recreate an old idea originally attributed to the renowned physicist Richard Feynman, but with a twist.

In Ryazanov's version, two worlds, one reaching backwards in time from the future, and the other reaching forwards from the past, shake hands together and co-evolve the present moment. Welcome to your future self. The past is no longer fixed, but mutable.

For Seth Lloyd, the physical universe is the ultimate computer, performing at the limit of all possible computations.

In Lloyd's worldview, the quantum universe works like an enormously powerful computer. We live in a quantum universe, under absolute quantum rule. There is a small problem, one that Lloyd is still considering in the new light of his information revolution. Einstein's legacy, of space and time bending and curving, of black holes and wormholes cutting through vastly separated regions and times, has yet to fully yield to the quantum kingdom. There appears to be room, at the end of the universe, for a menu that derives ultimate meaning from the final thought of our future self.

The problem that Einstein struggled with in the last years of his life, has been known to give modern superstring theorists headaches: What connects the ultimate shape and motion of the largest and smallest things in the universe? Lloyd expects that this difficult problem may ultimately yield to the power of quantum information theory.

When we consider the whole shebang; when we ask the ultimate question of "life, the universe, and everything," the answer is not likely to be 42 (the answer supplied by Adam's fictional 'deep thought' computer).

As soon as we move beyond the merely computational realms of matter and energy, we find our existence to be strongly affected by what are called emergent properties. Emergent properties evolve into semantics, and semantics form the basis of the metaphysical language of which magical properties are most fond. There is a semantic barrier that determining the demarcation line between physics built upon ideas of matter and energy, and the next level of a more powerful and exotic physics of the mind.

The closer one moves to this new physics, as in the future shaking hands with the past, the closer one comes to the idea that "life, the universe, and everything" are part of a vast living simulation: the ultimate computer game.

Welcome home, you live in "The Matrix."

Are we living in a simulated world? MIT Professor Set Lloyd argues that there is no difference between a simulated world in a quantum computer, and the real thing, given enough computational resources. This is simple enough to understand at the basic level given that bits are bits (or qu-bits, in their quantum version) and that a universal computer (such as the universe, or multiverse of universes) can perfectly recreate any computation possible in any other computer (or universe!)

Somewhere, it is thought, there must be an interface between these very different levels of the world. How do we reconcile the fundamental computational power of the universe, based as it is on the interaction of matter and energy in motion, with the power of emergent phenomena: emotion, thought, and the semantics of life as the language of being?

There are suggestions, at different ends of the theoretical world, purely speculative but worthy of exploration.

One is born of the language of superstring theory; the world is swept out in various dimensions, and writes in what physicists call membranes, or just branes. These branes form brane worlds, and they may be floating in a higher dimensional space, side by side, as parallel universes.

Another is born of the language of biology; there are structures in the brain, called microtubules, and that these form tiny living quantum computing circuits that are coupled to the shape-structure of space and time.

For the physicist, the parallel sheets of the theoretical world-branes are layers of realities, and should exist independently of one another, apart from gravitons, particles of gravity, that escape into the higher dimensional bulk in which the brane-worlds are thought to be embedded. One may construct a plausible theory of inter-brane communication (presumably via gravity waves passing through the brane layers) in order to predict strange interactions between conscious observers.

Even Dr. Brian Greene, the highly visible physics theorist featured a few years ago in a PBS series on superstring theory, was willing to speculate on the idea of inter-brane 'telephone' communications with other intelligent entities. These extra-dimensional denizens might exist invisible to our world, living within some of the other branes.