Arithmetic for a Multiverse


I don’t remember dreaming about CAPN, but instead I was dreaming about branching universes this morning. This is going to be hard to express. But here is the thought, our experience our awareness is a computation over all of the possibilities in the phase space of the branching multiverse. Therefore the experience of awareness is essentially singular, i.e. we have the experience there is essentially one universe; however there could easily be braches of that experience that sustain themselves. The computation of my next experience is a sum of some function of every point in the phase space of the universe. Experience can be smeared out at times when the universe is branching sustainably, but if most branches of the multiverse turn out to unsustainable or somehow merge in to the same place in the state space then the effect of branches that sustain on awareness is much greater than the affect on awareness of those that falter. When I talk about awareness here I am talking about a quality of the universe itself, humans think that we create the awareness but actually in this view it turns out to be a quality of the universe – a very Zen point of view. The nature of this computation must be that each point of experience, where experience is the thing happening on some wave front of computation, that is the computation that self generates the entire space-time universe, must be on either all other points or some relatively large number of points. Though as I consider this it might have to do with the dimensionality of the multiverse, that is the computation may be on the set of nearest neighbors in some N-Space and the speed of light would be related to the update rate of this computation. Time moves forward in this view because that is the direction of the computation, and the laws of physics are reversible not because time can move backwards but because they are built on a computation. The computation must also be dual in that an integral approach over all of space time and the nearest n-space neighbor computation should come up with the same to result to the limits of the universal quantization. The point here is that the computation is not happening in ordinary space and time, but is happening on the phase space of the universe. A big bang happens whenever the computation breaks out from nothingness but few of these “break outs” are sustainable and so that have no real affect on awareness, i.e. the shape of the universe, and once there was a major break out it dominates the computation. The quantized nature of this phase space might lead naturally to the “merging” of alternate universes making the one universe that we experience more likely than would otherwise be the case.


Some thoughts on what the fundamental computation might be. The discussion above about awareness as we experience it being a computation on phase spaces may be an epiphenomenon of these possibilities, however fundamentally connected to the idea that awareness arises out of self-reflection at the most fundamental level of the universe.

One computation that I can think of that fits both the requirement that computation be on nearest neighbors and be universal at the same time is dimension splitting (or maybe it is dimension doubling). That is the computation space starts out either nothing (zero) or a nothing that is something (one), the null set or the set of the null set. The computation can be said to be noticing, awareness, that there is another way of viewing itself. This process would then repeat but now in two dimensions, with the dimension increasing as the power set of the previous set. Each computational step is a noticing, a taking account of, all the neighboring dimensions. An important point is that nothing is actually created because the dimensional nature of the computation can occur with zero extent in the way we think of extent. In this view this universe-generator computation can be said to be a computation of truth as the universal dimension grows the awareness explores the structure of itself which is the nature of number. In this view, the universe that exists is not an accident at all but the only universe that can exist. The awareness we experience is a reflection at some dimensionality of the universe’s one principle that we might call self-reflection.

Another possibility for this self-reflection computation is that the self-reflection rate doubles each time the set of self doubles, here the set might be thought as self and not-self. In this view dimensionality might arise each time an infinite ordinal is breached. I like this view because I think there is another unrealized aspect to the way infinite ordinals grow. Namely, that we could say that going I_n to I_n+1 is hardly noticeable, but that there is a power relation in infinite sets that I at least have not heard anyone write about – though Rudy touches upon it Infinity and the Mind, that is noticeable. In this computation awareness would be as above an epi-exploration, but dimensionality would be an affect of the relationship of infinite sizes to each other. The universe manifests to awareness as primarily three dimensional because after the third order of infinitely the “relative” difference in infinite size is small, hence dimensions after three are small compared to the first three dimensions. In this view the manifest universe would have an infinite number of dimensions but there would be “natural” break points (based on the nature of number) to the size of each dimension.