Is There a Parallel Copy of You Out There in The Quantum Universe?

 As of today, I think I know the answer to this question better than anyone else on earth, but I don’t expect you to just take my word for it. So I will explain in detail.

Most of you have heard something about “Schrodinger’s Cat.” This was a story which Schrodinger put together, to explain why he could not believe Heisenberg’s version of quantum mechanics. In the first part of that story, a cat is put into a “mixed state,” a special kind of state in quantum mechanics, in which the cat is half dead and half alive, undecided. In the second part of that story, the cat “condenses” into a live cat or a dead cat, exactly when a human observer looks at the cat, just because the human looks at it. Who was right, Heisenberg or Schrodinger?

Here on this blog, and elsewhere, I have explained why Heisenberg was wrong about the second part of the story. But as for the first part – there is a whole lot of new experimental evidence proving that “macroscopic Schrodinger cats” do exist. More precisely, it has been proven that modern quantum electrodynamics (QED) continues to hold in the macroscopic world we live in, so that big objects CAN be puut into all kinds of mixed states, not just alive or dead, but here or there, open or shut, etc. And since human bodies are governed almost entirely by QED (and a little bit of Newtonian gravity), that means that you and I ARE OURSELVES Schrodinger cats, in principle.

This leads to a lot of follow-in questions important to us:

(    (1)  Under the normal rules of QED, how many copies of us are actually likely to be out there?

(     (2)  If we also try to explain QED as a kind of statistical approximation to a deep theory of the Einstein/Lagrange kind, in which there is only ONE universe, how could that be reconciled with (1) and what would it change?

     
     (3)  How does this connect to reports of spiritual or paranormal experience, which some of us take quite seriously?

Not until today did I feel I have a resolution of all three questions, in a consistent manner, which I am comfortable with. But since they are all tricky questions, let me take them in that order. Please forgive a bit of copy and paste.

       (1)  ****************** DOES QED PROMISE YOU A “TWIN”?

First, we can ask what the story would look like IF QED (KQED or MQED) were our only foundation for answering -- neglecting the possibility of a deeper Einstein/Lagrange model, and neglecting anything paranormal or spiritual.

My wife (who has two PhDs to my one, both in serious hard S&T) immediately doubts that there is a parallel version of her out there. Yes, lots of "quantum foam" (John Wheeler's image), but no real macroscopic separation. After all, all the known cases of macroscopic Schrodinger cats which I cited before were DESIGNED BY engineers working in Quantum Information Science and Technology (QuIST). Those folks constantly struggle with the tendency of nature to destroy such correlations or entanglements, through decoherence and disentanglement, very powerful forms of "entropy" they are only able to overcome for a short time by applying lots of free energy and focused, conscious design. In the absence of such deliberate application of free energy, shouldn't we expect nothing more than quantum foam?

Here, it does start to matter what TYPE of QED one believes in. In truth, MQED would ultimately allow both forward time and backward time free energy, and larger scale designs, in a way which might allow larger scale superposition, and in a way which raises the question of what splitting might be created by the deployment of free energy by minds in other times and places.

But even then, the story is not quite so simple (or so definite and clear) as that may sound. In effect, it assumes that "entropy" from nature, except when it offers free energy to us, is a force towards local disorder, decoherence and disentanglement. Many years ago, I revisited that issue of the shape of the entropy function (see a couple of papers reposted at arxiv, such as one in the cond-mat section of arxiv). Long-distance correlations DO exist in nature, at times. A nice example to think about is the simple iron magnet kind of thing, where energy is minimized (and probability of the state maximized) for the two extreme states of all little spins/magnets pointing in one direction, or in the opposite direction, something very much like a Schrodinger cat. Or even consider the presence of PLANETS in the cosmos, a kind of big correlation across space, very different from a disorderly gas. 

For humans, what matters is whether states of our entire planet might ALSO have that kind of complex energy landscape, with multiple basins of attraction, which would naturally lead to mixed states across such possibilities... but would it just be statistical entanglement and not quantum entanglement? 

Bottom line: I would tend to expect that large-scale correlations in nonliving nature, or in complex ecologies, would experience heavy decoherence, even though probabilities would still exist for many different states. Parallel people would exist in different wave functions in the density function of the cosmos, but they would simply be mixed states – classical statistical probabilities, in effect. There would be classical types of uncertainty about our past and future, but not Schrodinger cat types of mixed states, EXCEPT to whatever extent conscious folks like us deliberately exploit quantum technology to create such entanglements. MQED predicts it is easier to do that than the best mainstream QED (KQED) does.

Even so, we ourselves really are just “shadows,” patterns within classical statistical possibilities, as I described in www.werbos.com/Mind_in_Time.pdf. We already knew that “life is a game of probabilities” in the classical world; this just extends that a bit. There may well exist a parallel earth in which “Terminator 2” already happened, where intelligent robots and computers exploit MQED to try to dominate the entire timestream, exactly as described in the movie, or in the deep science fiction series by Dan Simmons, the Hyperion series.

        (2)  **************** BUT WHAT IF THERE ARE ONLY 3+1 DIMENSIONS?

Most mainstream physicists do not place much hope in the idea of explaining QED (any form) as a statistical approximation to something deeper, something without stochastic terms, defined over just 3+1 dimensions of spacetime, as Einstein sought until his dying day. I was one of very few people fully conversant in QED truly hoping for such a deeper explanation; others, better known, are Anthony Leggett and Gerard ‘tHooft. In 3+1 dimensions, how could there be multiple copies of any of us, at the same point in space-time? This question explains why Leggett was a leader of the skeptics who doubted the possibility of macroscopic Schrodinger cats… until experiments proved them to be real.

I do not believe it is scientific to just BELIEVE in Einstein’s picture, but more and more I have seen answers to questions which seemed unanswerable, and see more and more hope/possibility that Einstein will be proven right in the end on this key point. (Not on everything of course! No human is infallible.)

So how do we explain the cats?

The answer is basically simple. We live our lives at the level of QED, not at the level of physics below one femtometer. Yes, MQED can be derived as a good statistical description of something deeper, but we ourselves live “at the cybernetic level,” not at the level of things smaller than one femtometer. In a way, we are just classical statistical possibilities, vying for probability. We exist, such as we are, because QED predicts/determines our existence, and that means that we really are just Schrodinger cats, despite what exists at a deeper level.

Because the mixed states are mainly a matter of classical probabilities, there is no real conflict with underlying Einsteinian physics; what quantum entanglements exist are a key issue which any credible Einsteinian explanation must handle in any case to be credible. (See the link above. By the way, I have a family of new Lagrangians which are more promising,  but need to wait for the time when physics is more ready, when MQED is an established starting point.

            (3)  WHAT OF SPIRITUAL ASPECTS?

If there is more than one actual future in existence in front of us, what does this say about precognition and such?

Many people have experience of life limited enough that they are justified in not even reading the literature of parapsychology. They are justified in believing like Hebb (introduction to his seminal classic book The Organization of Behavior) that parapsychologists have proven their claims more than other psychologists have proven theirs, but that “physical impossibility” (as known to psychologists) rules out any real hope of it being true. If you are one of those, please do not waste your time by reading further.

On my own case, it was a precognitive kind of experience which forced me to be open-minded, at first, and then convinced as experience mounted.

From that viewpoint, weird entanglements and cross-time cross-“world” effects can be created (and managed to some degree) either by quantum technology (as in simple quantum computers which exploit entanglement) OR by the entities we call “souls” or “noosphere” which have evolved in the vast ocean of dark matter and energy in the cosmos, long enough to have developed a biological equivalent of that technology.

One of the folks on the Vedanta discussion group asked me today who could make another copy of me (Meow!), and what would happen then to the original.

My reply:

As a practical matter consider the example of a backwards time telegraph discussed in a recent NATO workshop, recounted at
www.werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf. Seeing a terrorist act unfold
before my eyes, I could send a signal back in time (if the device is
provided) to prevent the terrible loss of life... and THEREBY create another copy of me, a version who at this later time did NOT experience the terrorist act! As a matter of ethics, I WOULD send the signal back... but others might hesitate over that decision, and we all might wonder what REALLY happens. The device
would be a straightforward extension of the experiment proposed at
http://vixra.org/abs/1707.0343.

In that case, the new version of me would have the record of the
message from the future, but I would expect the brain not to remember
having sent it. However, I would tend to expect the soul would
remember, and for the soul information to reach the brain, if the
person is reasonably attuned to the soul side.