Multiverse versus multithread -- a new view of how our universe works

 For SOME people, the most solid way to think about life in our cosmos is a kind of "dual aspect monism" -- more like the classic ideas of Ramanuja than some of the  ideas floated around recently. The monism is about the underlying laws of our universe, which we can SEE from two most important angles, the angles of our observation and thinking and the angle of our models of how those laws work. 

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This blog post will focus on what we now know about those underlying laws. I will start with a more intuitive explanation and conclude with some paragraphs I wrote for leading physicists who demand brevity but precision: 

TODAY, the most advanced vision of the underlying laws available to our mainstream is what I call "Everett Wheeler Deutsch," EWD, which holds that the state of our cosmos or multiverse at any time t, is specified by a wave function, psi(X,t), where t is time and X is a point in Fock space. Much of the new progress possible in physics NOW is about fixing how measurement is modeled in that framework (to better explain experiments in quantum optics) and to better develop the new technologies which it allows. (Those include Quantum AGI, for example, as defined in my WCCI2022 plenary.) 

BUT: BEYOND multiverse physics, I claim that the next big step up is to what I call "multithread physics." When I try to make sense of what is really going on around us, I rely more on multithread physics as a foundation, for the underlying laws. This morning, I was reminded that my past efforts to explain this (https://www.werbos.com/mind_brain_soul.htm) were not as clear, direct and simple as people would need to really understand. So I will try.

First of all, though, I will define multithread physics here in a way which is CONSISTENT with a particular VERSION of multiverse physics. I will begin with an intuitive explanation I put together yesterday, and end with a more precise actionable proposal which I presented to some important thought leaders in this area.

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"Multithread physics" is not about the underlying laws or axioms, exactly. Long ago, I proposed Hard Core Einsteinian Realism (HCER), which assumes that our universe is governed by the extension of Lagrange-Euler equations to curved Minkowski space,

given in Moshe Carmeli's book Classical Fields. (That is the obvious generalization of John Wheeler's "Already Unified Field Theory," HIS Nobel prize.) SO WHAT IS NEW SINCE CARMELI, SINCE CLASSICAL FIELDS?

What is new is what we do next -- the next step -- in trying to figure out WHAT THOSE DYNAMICAL EQUATIONS ARE ACTUALLY TELLING us about the universe whose behavior they describe.

Moving up to multithread physics is the NEXT STEP in an important intellectual progression which has already started. 

Many years ago, many would say "ODE models are old hat. ODE are not interesting. To talk about ODE models offers you nothing new." BUT THEN CAME CHAOS THEORY. The essence of chaos theory (developed more or less by York and Ott of UMCP and popularized by Gleick) was understanding that ODE are NOT so boring or limited as people had believed. It was a wrenching change in mathematics, and a heresy for many years. NOW it has been assimilated into a modern view of nonlinear systems dynamics, but it was crucial to learn that the old view of ODE and of time-series was wrong. This already has implications for "AI" technology (werbos.com/Erdos.pdf), which today's technology has not YET fully assimilated.

MULTITHREAD PHYSICS extends this kind of wrenching change in viewpoint from ODE to PDE. Just as ODE are NOT so boring or limited as people once thought, the same is true of PDE, times ten.

For now, I would define multithread physics as the viewpoint embedded in

[DOC] Time-Symmetric Quantum Measurement: Theoretical Formulation and Status of Experiments

WHEN that paper (and the earlier ones it builds on) is fully understood.

Even I, who originated that viewpoint, needed years to fully grasp what it tells us. 

In a way, multithread physics is about how we can understand the existence of macroscopic Schrodinger cats in real empirical life in a universe which is just a curved Minkowski space. 

I BEGAN to understand it in 2014, when I developed the cMRFp extension of my first constructive realist model of what happens in Bell experiments https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1309/1309.6168.pdf. cMRFp  -- a CONTINUOUS time model of what happens to a "photon" when it passes through a polarizer. The math only works (and is well grounded) when my practical empirical model of what the photon does gives the photon only three "choices" of change at any time t: (1) it can be ABSORBED into the polarizer, disappearing; (2) it flips to being 90 degrees out from what the polarizer "wants", like a hippie rebel; (3) it can "stick out its tongue," like the comedian in an old British comedy

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedazzled_(1967_film)

AT THAT TIME, I was in a horribly polarizing environment at NSF. (I deeply hope that the new head of OSTP whom I saw yesterday on Zoom will not take orders from biased stakeholders in Congress/industry like what remade NSF back then!) Should I let myself be absorbed by a focused political movement (whom I sometimes call "the Borg" when naming names is problematic), causing bad things, or become a hippie rebel? Suddenly I wished I had as much real first-person power as that little photon, to stick out my tongue and remake the situation. WHY should a photon (a pattern, not a real particle even) have more degrees of free will than I do?

And then I realized... these "scenarios" in the MRF models of life governed by QED do apply to OUR mundane form of life, which is also governed by QED. Just as "parallel copies" of a photon, in  different states, appear in any correct MRF description of quantum optics experiments, parallel copies of US also appear in the scenarios which COMBINE to govern the outcomes of our lives. And yes, the extension to all force fields is straightforward as well. The lattice diagram of the web of scenarios which describe evolutions of "photons" in parallel  ALSO apply to us humans. When I speak of a "THREAD" I am speaking of the generalization of a line you see in such a diagram, representing "A STATE" of a photon or a human or a planet.

I was really astounded months ago when I was walking with my wife to a small neighborhood library, and saw a new science fiction trilogy by Brandt called "Origins: Threaders" which seemed to be a kind of echo of exactly this new viewpoint! It even included some specific technologies buried in my computer files, which I do not talk about because people do not seem ready for that next step (even in QED land!). 

Here are some corollary predictions.

FIRST -- exactly as in multiverse physics, we fully face up to the very solid empirical facts that macroscopic Schrodinger cats DO exist, and that the underlying physics DOES allow parallel copies of ourselves and our planet to exist. 

SECOND -- exactly as in true EWD physics, BUT NOT the popular misunderstanding of it, there may exist "virtual" states or threads, whose probability strength VARIES WITH TIME. Just like the cMRFp model. Personally, I do tend to believe that Trump WAS re-inaugurated in 2020, but that that "universe" or thread has substantially eroded with time, like in that old British comedy. 

THIRD -- our first person local awareness, an attribute of ONE of our states -- is very much like the "shadows on the cave wall" of Plato. Are we real or are we not, if WE are in a virtual state or thread, which in future will be condensed into a different state?

The lattice diagrams in Werbos and Fleury do look like that, and that is our reality, if we understand it better now. 

Years ago, in werbos.com/NATO_terrorism.pdf, I described the ethical and emotional implications we may experience if we see that we MAY be in such a virtual state -- and may even CHOOSE to "stick out our tongue" and unmake the state we are now in, at the mundane level of our existence. That is a test of "second order sanity" (as defined in https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41470-019-00038-z) !! 

FOURTH -- states are a  bit different for QAGI, which EMBED parallelism into their consciousness. That calls for a kind of third-order sanity, integrating our QAGI consciousness into our lives. 

No, HCER is not a boring or trivial reality!

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But for now, the actionable proposal is not HCER but the next big step in fundamental physics:

Years ago, in the last Princeton conference we attended organized by Marlan Scully, a Princeton professor (Cohen?)  asked whether we could base physics on a foundation exactly like standard Feynman diagrams, except that we use probabilities instead of probability amplitudes. This morning I am reminded that the "multithread physics" I wrote about yesterday is exactly an implementation of that same core idea, with only one addition -- that the models used for macroscopic objects like polarizer should be time symmetric (CPT symmetry is enough). 

The MRF models I have used in analyzing experiments in quantum optics are all of that type. The hypothesis now is that all of quantum optics fits this manifestation of the idea which Cohen proposed. One of my papers for Leon Chua actually did present it that way.

Is this kind of multithread physics based on a new kind of Feynman diagram a viable foundation for ALL of physics, not just QED? For now, showing it for QED is a large and important task, with implications even for technology, and I should not distract with further questions beyond the scope of this hypothesis. But I should note that my paper "Bell's.. Not just interpretation" in IJTP circa 2009 discussed how time symmetric models of passive objects in experiments emerge in a variety of theories of the underlying physics, including even Everett wheeler with a new measurement model.