I promise (promise, for actual) that this is not borne out of drug use.  It’s possible at some point my thoughts were clarified by alcohol, but not now, and besides, when I drink I usually don’t spend time in contemplation. In other words, I am not writing some sort of drugged-out essay and hope you can see that.

The basis for me wanting to blog on this is kinda stupid.  It’s a thread on reddit I found called ‘describe your glitch in the matrix.’  Alot of crazy more-like ghost stories than reality gliches to be found there, but some of the connected dreaming and quantum ‘glitch’ stories had me thinking.  So lets talk (broadly) theories of reality for a moment.  More specifically, theories behind possible realities.  For example, there’s on some order of the infinite things that could happen as I’m writing this.  I could stop now and think this is all dumb.  The next key I press could shatter, could shoot off its hinges.  My fingers could pop out of joint, for no particular reason.  In other words, the reality where I sit here and type this thing up is a pretty narrow slice of all the possible worlds.  

And we take that for granted.  I do.  In most of the ‘possible worlds’ I can think of (speaking just in terms of the possible outcomes of my immediate surroundings, ie affecting only me and my time-immediate (right now) actions) there’s one that has me finishing this an an inifinte number that have me stopping or being stopped from finishing this essay.  And 99 times out of 100 I’ll actually set out and finish the thing I’m doing.  I’ll sucessfully drive home from work for 99/100 days in a row (in all likelihood 100/100, but who knows).  I won’t choke on my food 99/100 times that I take a bite.  Things like this.  Things which if you were to try and draw a combinatorics tree, the least likely outcome is the one we’ll experience 99/100 times.  

So think about that for a minute, and that maybe we’re taking reality for granted.  If you think that maybe those other infinite possibilities actually manifest themselves as some sort of alternate reality, but which actually exists in some sense, then you may also believe that there is some sort of ‘meta’ space (yes borrowing terms from my late college classes because that’s easy and stuff) in which all of those realities co-exist.  Perhaps not unlike the way a length of rope or yarn contains many threads.  

That spatial separation of threads idea also includes an assumption.  Like a length of rope is keyed to points along the length (inches, cm’s) the rope like meta structure is keyed to points in time.  The x-axis of this universe would be points in time.  Which I think you could safely reach the conclusion that this is a pretty rudimentary view of the structure of the meta universe that holds all possible universes.  For example, as I write this maybe I take a break to go do something (bathroom, eat, talk to someone) or maybe I don’t.  And in all those possible universes things won’t be keyed to each other along a x-axis of time.  And in that view, I’m not sure there is a way to conceptualize (in our minds) how this meta-universe might actually exist.  This is much in the way you can’t draw four dimensional equations on a blackboard, because you can synthesize the 3rd dimension on a 2-d graph, but on a static object you can’t draw a fourth axis, because at each point on the 4th axis, the rest of the graph would look different.  In other words, I’m saying our minds are blackboards and you need computer screens to properly visualize things.
All that being said, even in the rope example, you can imagine how complex the structures of reality must be that things continue to work in an ordinary fashion for each of the thread universes.  If the overriding structure that keeps the threads separate broke for even a second, all or a portion of all the existent universes would feel something.  And if you try to think of the meta-universe as being something more complicated than a rope, where individual instances of a universe were not necessarily time connected to parallel universes, the structure of control in the meta-universe grows to unimaginable complexity.

That whole line of thought just kind-of impresses me, that things then happen in an expected manner so often.  Reading some of the things in that glitch-in-the-matrix thread, there’s some crazy stuff people have to say.  I don’t know how much of that I buy.  I’m kind-of a rational, sober being, and I tend to expect and experience reality in a fairly normal way.  I really want to press that home here, I don’t use drugs and never have.  This isn’t a “I’m high and want to contemplate the universe” blog.  This is me imagining the potential complexity to the universe actual (meta-universe) and how crazy that is that our thread of the universe remains normal, or as expected.

I do experience de-ja-vu.  I’ve always thought of it as a very mild form of a memory storage problem in my brain.  Occasionally something will happen and for 30 seconds or so at a stretch I’ll be anticipating everything that happens just before I observe them happening.  I’ve always figured what was happening was my brain was storing observations in the wrong order of ‘memories’ for a brief moment, and I get confused.  But thinking of the universe as a complex set of individual universes, not bound by time, isn’t it possible that those are the small hiccups in a system so complex, it could never work flawlessly?