Suppose every choice you are confronted or every set of circumstances that happens to you by chance spawns different timelines of yourself depending on your decision and the decisions of others around you. Who do you think you are in a parallel universe if you had chosen a different path at some point in your life or if circumstances had been different? I think somewhere out there I had a 7th grade pre-algebra teacher who didn't make the subject of mathematics completely miserable, and therefore somewhere I am an aerospace engineer. In this timeline I'm just a little high.
Cool topic, many scientist and smart people are talking about it. What I find more interesting is- they say- that death isn't real, just an abstraction, like a comunication failure or something. Death would be an imaginary concept like negative numbers, they don't exist but still we use them in math.... when someone we know gets too far away from our perception we lost track of them, so we can be under the illusion of them (others) dying but we ourselves will never die. You can not be in the timeline where you are dead, obiously, it does not exist.
Yes, I've thought about this a fair bit. It was a bit of what I was thinking about in my thread about going back in time to your younger self. Definitely our lives are a result of what we were born with, our environment, and the supposedly chance occurrences. I dont think we'd take every path, but certainly many, in different circumstances. In other paths, I suspect I'd like to (or would aim to be) a footballer, boxer, muscian, film-maker/ full time artist, violent cocaine importer, professional martial artist, barrister (probably disbarred), prison inmate, dead/murdered(!), scientist, salaried banker. I think some of these paths cut off when I was very young (ie before I could control them). Other paths, I think the environment and the randomness side has an effect. One or two I even think of connecting up with in the future. You are right even a shit teacher can put a potential genius off something for life. Einstein is a good example of shit teachers suppressing talent. PS I also think about parallel lives away from career. Like if I'd have met certain people in them. Would I marry them etc
this is already a theory. A parallel universe is spawned for every possibility of everything that could possibly happen. it started with a singularity. then boom. universes are created for each possibility of the dispersion of matter. it goes all the way down to the sub-atomic level.. Say you have an atom just doing its thing.. It bounces left... at that moment another whole universe is created where everything is the same except that atom bounced right. I think this is the closest we can come to understanding true infinity.
But the thing I cant handle is that it supposes we dont have any free will. I mean, part of me is "innate" and part is a result of circumstances, IMO. In infinite universes, that would mean I'm doing absolutely everything and anything.. Like in one, I walk around dressed as an elephant, with cowboy chaps and a Nazi armband on, doing some weird impression of Celine Dion... NOT. But seriously, do u see the problem with "EVERYTHING" happening? So my idea is that there are infinite possibilities - like dreamworlds. But only certain dreamworlds "crystalise" into a reality.. ie the ones that have enough innate energy. An energy which is basically our base characters..
you have free will. every choice you make guides your "base character" into the appropriate universe where those are the things that happen. all of the other "yous" have different base characters and make different decisions
Looking back it seems I made mostly good choices. But there would be a lot of difference as in the past 5 years I've made some big decisions and changed a lot. There's a time line where I'd have 2 children. One where I'm an olympic swimmer. One where I am a professional boxer. One where I'm a university student studying fine art. One where I'm hooked on alsorts of drugs. It goes on... pretty cool to think about, freaky though.
I've thought about this before - I've met amazing people before but the timing wasn't right for them to be in my life on a significant level. If only I had met them a year earlier, my life would have taken a completely different course. Maybe we're hanging out in parallel universe. I've read a good bit about parallel universes - I like the idea that there are an infinite number of possibilities. Iamnotaman brings up a good point about free will too - maybe some possibilities stay possibilities while others come to fruition based on our choices. I got the idea from this thread from a community episode
According to the Multiple Time Lines Theory, with each decision you make you introduce another fork in the fabric of time, and a new you travels that fork. Until both you and your new you make another decision, at which time two new forks and two more new yous enter the grand equation. A example would be the "Wheat and Chessboard Problem". So at the end of 64 decisions there would 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 yous. Which would be over 18 quintillion yous. According to one study, we make an average of 254,800 decisions a year.......some of them are actually good. So we can see that by the time you have decided to keep reading this here post, you will have expanded yourself to include every possible occupation or personality ever possible. Which means that you will have become every possible person who has ever existed. Now, since the math works for each one of us, we all would have also become every possible person possible, which means that we would all become the same possible person in one or another timeline at the same time. This is what John Lennon was telling us when he wrote: "I am he as you are he as you are me And we are all together..." And then he continued: "Goo goo goo joob goo goo goo joob Goo gooooooooooo jooba jooba jooba jooba jooba jooba Jooba jooba Jooba jooba Jooba jooba" Which certainly makes it all clear.
So you're saying that only our decisions spawn parallels? If so, I can understand that. Because atoms would just follow the laws of physics and couldn't bounce whatever way they want. They have to be acted upon by a decision that was made. That being said, there would only be one universe until the spark of free will, and then that's when they started exponentiating.
Interesting to wonder where things diverged for me and what happen in the parallel universe where that person lives. The first thing that popped into my mind is being on the track team in high school. I had talent and was in training, butwas so scared to compete that I dropped off the team at the first meet. Once, years later my universe crossed over with that universe and a coach saw me on the track warming up for a workout and I was asked to consider running on a college team. Had I lived that timeline, I likely would have belonged, been confident, skipped men and drugs and alcohol. My life would not have had so much fear.
