Tails (Hyperfuture series)
“How to explain: For everything that exists, there is an unexisting. For everything that matters to me, there is the other matter, an un-story told in calculations regarding matter. Super symmetry of the Standard Model. These ringed fingers pursue individual tasks under the guise of hand.” — “God in the Particulate”, Emily Zuberec
Einstein once said, “God does not play dice”. So why is it that I find myself playing a sort of Russian Roulette with a parallel me letting chance decide which of me is real and which gets to live? My entire life as I’ve known it has lead up to this moment, living on a knife’s edge.
My favorite episode of People Watching is “The Museum of Alternate Realities” where the protagonist of the episode met improved versions of herself for all different possible futures she would have pursued. The protagonist having had enough of feeling like a failed version of herself asked the tour guide if this was some kind of joke on her. But her parallel versions made her realize that their common denominator was still her, meaning she had the potential and freedom all along to pursue she wanted. If anything, the museum was proof of that.
As inspiring as such a special encounter may be, if you haven’t figured out by now, there is also a problem in that episode. If she already met her future versions, does that mean she has no free will to begin with? The same inspiring encounter for People Watching is rather a cautionary tale for Nightvale podcast which warns us, “Please make note of your emergency exits. Please contemplate all possible futures”.
In reality, it’s not a good idea to let matter and anti-matter cross paths because then they would annihilate each other. But just like the stories I came across, I didn’t want to make it that simple. We’re talking hyperfuture here. What are the odds that another parallel version of me hijacks the probability of me continuing to exist in a future I can’t just easily slip into? I thought confronting another me who is unrecognizable despite undeniably sharing the same features and having my existence depend on a coin toss would make it more dramatic.
In reality, the probability is not reduced to betting your life on a 50/50 chance randomly decided by a coin toss in one event, potentially erasing your existence. Someone once described self-control in this way: in your mind is a cell. It’s either you put your brain in the cell or your brain puts you in the cell, but only one can be free.
Here is where I would oscillate to hypertime again. I imagine a hypothetical scenario where I am given two options. What would you rather choose? A) You will be given clairvoyance or the ability to see the future, but you will forget the past, or B) you will get to go back in time and fix the past but you won’t see in advance the future it will result in?
I’d think after all I’ve been through, I’d have nothing to lose. Hence the two versions of me in the painting, because nobody told me that the catch is if you choose A, your future would have no context, that is, you won’t learn to appreciate what your past has to do with your future, and as a result, once you’re in the future, you won’t learn to value where you are. If you choose B, you won’t get to see experience the Nova effect, where our inability to accurately interpret a present situation as good or bad actually turns out to be a blessing in disguise. Any way you fix the past may not guarantee to translate into an improvement in the future. In both cases, you won’t learn to value where you came from.
Mark Manson has this principle in which how we identify as dictates what we do and what we avoid. It helps to unlearn and detach ourselves from a version of ourselves that no longer serves us. In physics that’s: when you look in the mirror, you’re not actually looking at yourself. You’re looking at yourself from a tiny fraction of a second ago because it takes time for light to travel, specifically 299 792 458 meters per second.
If I’ve learned anything from oscillating between hypertime and the here and now, it’s that our best bet is to identify with what we can become.
About the series:
Hyperfuture is a philosophical dive into what physics tells us about time. Hyperfuture is defined as “a space-time block, distinct from ours, situated in an additional temporal dimension: hypertime”. Taking from the quote, “to be conscious at all is to be conscious of time”, it explores the theme of clairvoyance, free will, chronoception, and time dilation in relation to how we create meaning of our ephemeral existence on earth. The series features works in realism, referencing actual scenes from life, impressionism and futurism to signify movement in the passage of time, surrealism and suggestivism to depict the subconscious to explore whether time-a construct-works independently of consciousness. One symbol will be highlighted: the hypercube or tesseract which shows the fourth dimension, time.
