How Many Lives Are You Leading Today?
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
We are living the beta of our lives, the untested, slightly buggy, first draft version. Or not. We might be living the perfect version of our lives, getting everything right, even though we might not know this until some time in the future. There’s an expression, “If my grandmother had balls she’d be my grandfather,” usually rendered in Yiddish and followed by a scornful bark of a laugh. You can’t grasp what might have been. Or can you?
Dr. J. Richard Gott is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton who likes to ask questions about time such as, “What if you could time-travel into the past?”
Say you did that and killed your grandmother and therefore were never born. Dr. Gott believes you would cause the universe “to branch off into a parallel universe with a time traveler and a dead grandmother.” Of course, there would also be a universe where your grandmother lived and you were born.
To use Dr. Gott’s analogy, it’s like a railway switching yard with lots of trains running on parallel tracks. This concept is called the Multiverse.
It’s the kind of concept that makes me want to gently close the door and listen to Bach until the concept goes away. But it’s not going to go away.
Not only are filmmakers exploring it in movies like “Sliding Doors” and “Run Lola Run” but scientists are exploring life as a set of coexisting pathways. A multiverse instead of a universe. Could be there’s a world where World War II never happened. A world where Tom Cruise admits he’s gay. A world where Madonna is a good singer.
Quantum theory has come up with some strange stuff: Protons and electrons act like both waves and particles. They can be teleported from one place to another without passing through space. A single particle seems capable of appearing in many places simultaneously.
Physicist David Deutsch says that “everyone agrees” that quantum theory is “outlandish.” That might be why many physicists only want to discuss quantum theory in reference to photons and electrons. But Deutsch takes a bigger risk, insisting that quantum theory must apply to something larger than subatomic particles – he says to be valid it has to apply to people. When you do that it generates some unsettling outcomes.
All possible variations of us must exist. Every possible option we’ve ever encountered is being acted out in some universe by at least one of our other selves.
Just when I thought life couldn’t become messier, with its moodiness and alternate side of the street parking regulations, now I have to consider that there could be other versions of us leading their own messy lives. What to make of that?
“Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard. He may have been gloomy but he was right. We’re all time travelers into the 
future. But it’s good to know there’s a parallel life train running somewhere, an on-time train that could be getting everything right. Does anybody know how to transfer at the next station?
“Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forward,” said Kierkegaard…I love this line. Is there a way to see what is our path based on how the pieces have come together in the past?
The cool thing about the multiverse is that you don’t have to wait for a station to change tracks. You can change tracks now — it fact, the only time you can change tracks is now. If you wait, it will be too late. It will always be too late, unless you change tracks now.
Another way to look at is that you can never change tracks. You are limited to the track you are on now. As far as you are concerned, there is only one track, and you have to decide, now, in every moment, what track that is.
I love this topic. Very interesting that another of my favorite writers is on this topic this week. Check out Mark Morford… http://www.sfgate.com/columnists/morford/archive/
Fourth Way Philosopher J.G. Bennett studied the idea of “possibilities.” A quote: “There are two worlds. One is the world of facts and the other the world of possibilities. In the world of facts, there are no possibilities; in the world of possibilities, there are no facts.” It was Bennett’s belief, thanks in part to Gurdjieff, that only when consciousness is brought into play that we can experience the “presence of possibilities.”
HI Lee,
It’s compelling to think there is another version of me in a parallel universe–one who hasn’t had the challenges I’ve had to face, who hasn’t made the grievous mistakes I’ve made. I’d love to see what I could have become if the path had been straighter.
Bob
A lot to think about.
I like that quote by Keirkegaard.
Thanks,
Tabby
I like that – a very optimistic way of expressing it. It would seem that some realities do need to be factual and driven by what is provable and others seem to need to be driven by belief and potential. Thanks for commenting.
Hey – I had a look at Mark’s column – really good, gritty writing. I’ll be checking him out in the future. Thanks for letting me know about him.
That’s a good way to put it – it is an act of personal choice and that’s what really shapes the world around us. Thanks for commenting!
Hi Ingrid. I think it is possible to see what the future holds based on how we have assembled life in the past. Unlike the stock fund prospectus that advises “past performance does not guarantee future results” I think the opposite is true with people and with life. The examined life is the one worth living and by observing patterns, reactions and behaviors that have driven us in one direction in the past we can choose to keep going in that direction or choose another.