The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.

We live in the most probable of all possible worlds.

What is particularly curious about quantum theory is that there can be actual physical effects arising from what philosophers refer to as counterfactuals-that is, things that might have happened, although they did not in fact happen.

Awareness, I take to be one aspect-the passive aspect-of the phenomenon of consciousness. Consciousness has an active aspect also, namely the feeling of free will.

The problem of conscious awareness is indeed a scientific one, even if the appropriate science may not yet be at hand. I strongly support this viewpoint; I believe that it must indeed be by the methods of science-albeit appropriately extended in ways that we can perhaps only barely glimpse at present-that we must seek our answers.

There seems to be something non-algorithmic about our conscious thinking. In particular, a conclusion from the argument in Chapter 4, particularly concerning Gödel’s theorem, was that, at least in mathematics, conscious contemplation can sometimes enable one to ascertain the truth of a statement in a way that no algorithm could.

The idea of dimension in pop culture is sometimes misunderstood like there’s a place you can go, a mystical dimension or something like that.  To a physicist or mathematician, a dimension is just a direction.

When you realize that quantum mechanics underlies all physical processes, from the fusing of atoms in the sun to the neural firings that constitutes the stuff of thought, the far-reaching implications of the proposal become apparent. It says that there’s no such thing as a road untraveled. Yet each such road—each reality—is hidden from all others.

Everett's approach, which he described as "objectively deterministic" with probability "reappearing at the subjective level," resonated with this strategy. And he was thrilled by the direction. As he noted in the 1956 draft of his dissertation, the framework offered to bridge the position of Einstein (who famously believed that a fundamental theory of physics should not involve probability) and the position of Bohr (who was perfectly happy with a fundamental theory that did). According to Everett, the Many Worlds approach accommodated both positions, the difference between them merely being one of perspective. Einstein's perspective is the mathematical one in which the grand probability wave of all particles relentlessly evolves by the Schrodinger equation, with chance playing absolutely no role. I like to picture Einstein soaring high above the many worlds of Many Worlds, watching as Schrodinger's equation fully dictates how the entire panorama unfolds, and happily concluding that even though quantum mechanics is correct, God doesn't play dice. Bohr's perspective is that of an inhabitant in one of the worlds, also happy, using probabilities to explain, with stupendous precision, those observations to which his limited perspective gives him access.

Remember ... that in the Many Worlds framework, every potential outcome embodied in a quantum wavefunction—a particle’s spinning this way or that, another particle’s being here or there—is realized in its own separate, parallel universe. The universe we’re aware of at any given moment is but one of an infinite number in which every possible evolution allowed by quantum physics is separately realized.

Whereas Bohr and the Copenhagen gang would argue that only one of these universes would exist (because the act of measurement, which they claim lies outside of Schrodinger's purview, would collapse away all the others), and whereas a first-pass attempt to go beyond Bohr and extend Schrodinger's math to all particles, including those constituting equipment and brains, yielded dizzying confusion (because a given machine or mind seemed to internalize all possible outcomes simultaneously), Everett found that a more careful reading of Schrodinger's math leads somewhere else: to a plentiful reality populated by an ever-growing collection of universes.

So, whereas Bohr argued away by fiat all but one outcome in a measurement, the Many Worlds approach, combined with decoherence, ensures that within each universe it appears as though the other outcomes have vanished. Within each universe, that is, it's as if the probability wave has collapsed. But, compared with the Copenhagen approach, the "as if" provides for a very different picture of the expanse of reality. In the Many Worlds view, all outcomes, not just one, are realized.

Somehow, though, the photons always get it right. Whenever the detector is on—again, even if the choice to turn it on is delayed until long after a given photon has passed through the beam splitter—the photon acts fully like a particle...   It’s as though the photons have a “premonition” of the experimental situation they will encounter farther downstream, and act accordingly. It’s as if a consistent and definite history becomes manifest only after the future to which it leads has been fully settled.

There's a difference between making predictions and understanding them. The beauty of physics, its raison d'etre, is that it offers insights into why things in the universe behave the way they do. The ability to predict behavior is a big part of physics' power, but the heart of physics would be lost if it didn't give us a deep understanding of the hidden reality underlying what we observe. And should the Many Worlds approach be right, what a spectacular reality our unwavering commitment to understanding predictions will have uncovered.

Consciocentrism posits that the Many Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics indicates another dimension perpendicular to the time dimension, which allows for the probabilistic nature of reality, plus branching and freewill -- and that consciousness exists in not just one of the many worlds at any given time, but in all of them -- the solid reality of the moment of now is a highly aligned, stacked composite image of the 5D manyverse of possibility.

When I say that consciousness is an illusion I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.

In quantum mechanics no object has a definite position, except when colliding headlong with something else.

The world, particles, light, energy, space, and time—all of this is nothing but the manifestation of a single type of entity: covariant quantum fields.

If I look at a forest from afar, I see a dark green velvet. As I move toward it, the velvet breaks up into trunks, branches and leaves: the bark of the trunks, the moss, the insects, the teeming complexity. In every eye of every ladybug, there is an extremely elaborate structure of cells connected to neurons that guide and enable them to live. Every cell is a city, every protein a castle of atoms; in each atomic nucleus an inferno of quantum dynamics is stirring, quarks and gluons swirl, excitations of quantum fields. This is only a small wood on a small planet that revolves around a little star, among one hundred billion stars in one of the thousand billion galaxies constellated with dazzling cosmic events. In every corner of the universe we find vertiginous wells of layers of reality.

For a hypothetically supersensible being, there would be no “flowing” of time: the universe would be a single block of past, present, and future.

Imagination illuminates the classes of things that can exist only because a conscious agent dreamed of them.

We are three-dimensional beings living in four-dimensional spacetime.   In a state of meditation or lucid sleep, one can consciously detach from the habitual focus of ones individual 3D vessel (our body), traveling forward on our 4D timeline -- and we can experience the wholeness of the 3D environment and 4D space-time block universe.  At this transcendent state, consciousness peers into the five-dimensional many-verse -- The "many worlds" indicated by Hugh Everett's Relative State Formulation of Quantum Mechanics.   The 5D Many Worlds is the canvas for quantum probability, freewill, and the alternate pathways that collective 4D reality may take.

We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time.

Niels Bohr's "Copenhagen Interpretation" tried to regard quantum theory as being nothing but a set of rules of thumb for predicting the observed outcomes of experiments, saying nothing else about reality.  This (flawed, dogmatic) interpretation is still popular today, and is known by many as the "shut-up-and-calculate interpretation of quantum theory".    The interpretation is vague and inconsistent -- and Bohr excused the various contradictions and gaps by using a combination of instrumentalism and studied ambiguity.

Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing.   It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years).  This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe.  It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse.

...retation of quantum foundations has come when considering the implication that every "choice" will branch into another of these "many worlds", and that there are an infinite amount of th...

...ry expert, and author.   He has written many books on string theory, cosmology and quantum mechanics.   He has appeared in various documentaries and films about physics and string theory.   He is one of the most well k...

...le="background-color:#ffeeaa;">Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics),  as many others have, due to interpreting the many

Jason Cooper
Information Systems Engineer, Data Scientist, Consciocentric Creator

...>).  Consciocentrism posits that a 5th Dimension is the medium for the "Many Worlds", and that we exist in not just one of these many