Engage in the thought experiment that you are/were/will be every human for a sec. Is self-harm morally ok? Many would say yes. So "the egg" already gives those people a pass to hurt everyone else in this world because it's a form of self-harm. Great. Now for those who explicitly don't want to self-harm. "The egg" implies that your rebirths happen serially in meta-time. You live this life, then the next, then another,... those lives may overlap on earth, but in egg-time, they don't. This means you can statistically expect you've already lived 50% of them. There's no guarantee of this, but the distribution is normal, not uniform [1] (similar reasoning found in doomsday argument [2]). 50%, give or take, humans out there you've already been. Everything you do to them, you do to your PAST self. You're not only absolved of moral accountability, but also of the physical consequences of treating them horribly. So while "the egg" tries to do the opposite, it really seems to justify psycho maxxing.
Everyone is hung up on the self-harm thing. This thought experiment is bigger than what most people give it credit for, in fact one could say this is the be all end all of thought experiments because the question factors in things like quantum physics, consciousness, determinism, etc. You could go up your own theoretical butthole with the kinds of philosophical extrapolations through this rabbit hole (so to speak).
Self-harm isn't moral or amoral, it just is. It's as moral or amoral as deciding if you should or shouldn't eat another animal (yes, this includes humans -- Donner party anyone?).
Life isn't black and white. Where I've landed with this thought experiment through my own meditations and readings is that the universe/reality is a recursive fractal of spectrums within spectrums.
And this is just scratching the surface of this stuff.
The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. So if you're complaining that the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality, my response is: Yes. That's part of what makes it an interesting story.
As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering.
2. Who says the living of lives does not repeat over time? Your/our "next" life may start in 300 B.C.
Two things science knows barely something about: consciousness and the arrow of time. The self is only an illusion. Physics has lots of symmetry. Therefore, it would make sense if the universe was fair in the end. So the egg theory actually makes sense, more sense than anything else I've heard actually.
It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
I'd go further and say this isn't just a hypothesis, it's the actual nature of reality. Any subjective experience is always mine and now for all observers, for all times. No subject has ever experienced or will experience reality any other way. The screen is the same no matter what movie is playing on it.
Arnold Zuboff makes a case for this in "One Self: The Logic of Experience" (Inquiry, 1990) [0]. He calls it universalism: there has only ever been one subject of experience.
One of his thought experiments: imagine a meteorite is about to wipe out all life around you right now, instantly. If this exact experience - being you, here, thinking this - is instantiated anywhere else in the universe, it will continue there without any gaps.
Hindu mystics were already exploring and articulating these non-dual concepts in great detail thousands of years ago, in the Upanishads. As Robert Jastrow would say:
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
If you subscribe the the many worlds interpretation, you can basically look at observers as existing within the space of eigenvalues of operators acting on the massively entangled wave function of their respective universe.
Wow, dammit! That syndrome of "something you always wondered or thought only you thought already having a name" strikes again!
My intuition for all sentience between "fragments" of a single consciousness from outside the universe was that, if Free Will™ is real, then true randomness can only come from outside a system..
I always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?
Even if there were as many positrons as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab spontaneously condense into a very low entropy concentrated configuration?
The answer is that they don’t literally go backwards in time showing reverse causality. They are representable in QFT by reversing the time component of their counterpart, which doesn’t impact how they interact with broader causality, just their internal configuration. Further - this does not play out in the lab as reversed causality even between anti particles. You can collide two positrons then detect them later at their destinations just fine in normal causality. It’s a shame because it would be really sweet to find some reversal of entropy and causality somewhere or somehow!
_We_ are still traveling forwards in time. If you followed a cloud of antiparticles backwards in time along its direction of travel, then you would see entropy decrease yes, though regular particles would do the same if we followed them back in time.
Gotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).
My thought is that if there's only one electron, then its probabilistic location at a place and a time, should be impacted by its own energy across all places and times. That quantum gravity comes from generalizing the Schrodinger's equation to include these energies in the phase of the wave function, causing the phase to skew and the probability to update towards the location of large mass/energies.
Space and time are illusions. So probably true in some sense...There is probably no electron at all...I mean, one would be quite arbitrary, why not two?
Human language is poorly-suited for describing a coherent universe because you can construct all sorts of incoherent propositions (e.g. "what existed before time"/"what exists outside of reality" etc etc); philosophies/faiths have struggled with this for millennia.
IANP, but Ive always thought you should be able to observe reverse causality in a positron if true. That’s the primary effect of going backwards in time - a reverse in entropy.
The other side of the theory is the positron hidden in the proton. I assume a particle collider should be able to falsify this.
But it turns out antimatter isn’t supposed to actually move backwards in time but follows the same causality as everything else. It’s just that they represent their matter pairs configuration mathematically by reversing the time orientation. This isn’t super obvious but it’s very much different than going backwards in time literally. Sad!
Maybe you could disprove it by observing a electron/positron pair being created and then annihilating each other, forming a closed loop that couldn't be part of the single path traced by a single particle.
This is yet another case where a layman-written wiki article about physics is highly confusing to other laypeople, because it only tells you half the story. Particularly because it seems to be based on a chapter of Feynman's popular science book. But the book actually goes on and points out how Feynman immediately dismissed Wheeler's hypothesis, because the universe contains a lot more electrons than positrons. You'd have to explain that imbalance first if you want to entertain this line of thought.
As a layperson myself - how can we tell that a distant celestial object is not made from antimatter? Afaik, it doesn't behave differently from matter, other than it annihilates on contact.
Also even if we could, that would only describe the practically and theoretically observable universe, which doesn't rule out other places looking very different (on its own)
Yea, it's really more about the fact that all electrons are exactly the same regardless of the level of precision we look at them. It would be like if we found another earth and that earth was the exact same earth. Not earth like, not very close to earth. The exact same earth down to the smallest fundamental level.
it's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idea
right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser)
but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it
Then wouldn't it be "one-photon"? I've heard (but don't fully understand) that massed particles are simply photons trapped in toroidal vortices, which gives them an outward charge field and lets them interact with the Higgs. Annihilation supposedly just being untangling the toroid.
Black hole, or singularity? Black hole describes the event horizon and singularity describes the point like object that would exist in a non-rotating black hole.
In the line, I recommend „The Egg” by Andy Weir https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
That's such a great read.
Asimov's 'The Last Question' is another good one that's in line: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~gamvrosi/thelastq.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
(animated version)
Engage in the thought experiment that you are/were/will be every human for a sec. Is self-harm morally ok? Many would say yes. So "the egg" already gives those people a pass to hurt everyone else in this world because it's a form of self-harm. Great. Now for those who explicitly don't want to self-harm. "The egg" implies that your rebirths happen serially in meta-time. You live this life, then the next, then another,... those lives may overlap on earth, but in egg-time, they don't. This means you can statistically expect you've already lived 50% of them. There's no guarantee of this, but the distribution is normal, not uniform [1] (similar reasoning found in doomsday argument [2]). 50%, give or take, humans out there you've already been. Everything you do to them, you do to your PAST self. You're not only absolved of moral accountability, but also of the physical consequences of treating them horribly. So while "the egg" tries to do the opposite, it really seems to justify psycho maxxing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Everyone is hung up on the self-harm thing. This thought experiment is bigger than what most people give it credit for, in fact one could say this is the be all end all of thought experiments because the question factors in things like quantum physics, consciousness, determinism, etc. You could go up your own theoretical butthole with the kinds of philosophical extrapolations through this rabbit hole (so to speak).
Self-harm isn't moral or amoral, it just is. It's as moral or amoral as deciding if you should or shouldn't eat another animal (yes, this includes humans -- Donner party anyone?).
Life isn't black and white. Where I've landed with this thought experiment through my own meditations and readings is that the universe/reality is a recursive fractal of spectrums within spectrums.
And this is just scratching the surface of this stuff.
The situation described in The Egg replaces morality with a direct reason not to harm others, because you are the person who will suffer because of it. So if you're complaining that the story's premise kinda eliminates our usual ideas about morality, my response is: Yes. That's part of what makes it an interesting story.
As for the meta-time thing, functional decision theory [1] solves this. The application is particularly clean because your memories are erased between lives. There's no factor of 2 free lunch from temporal ordering.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.05060
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1. No, self harm is not ok.
2. Who says the living of lives does not repeat over time? Your/our "next" life may start in 300 B.C.
Two things science knows barely something about: consciousness and the arrow of time. The self is only an illusion. Physics has lots of symmetry. Therefore, it would make sense if the universe was fair in the end. So the egg theory actually makes sense, more sense than anything else I've heard actually.
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I don't think you're "absolved" if you don't know you're harming, in fact, yourself. Guilt is all about intention.
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> Is self-harm morally ok?
Is self-harm ok? What could be considered good about it?
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Amazing. So, I am most of you commenting here, and the author of this incredible short story. Thank [myself] for sharing!
A twist on this theory: One-Observer Universe.
It is the hypothesis that all observers are actually manifestations of a single observer experiencing all of time, space, and every point of view. All world lines across spacetime are parts of one single line "like a huge tangled knot" traced out by the one observer.
I'd go further and say this isn't just a hypothesis, it's the actual nature of reality. Any subjective experience is always mine and now for all observers, for all times. No subject has ever experienced or will experience reality any other way. The screen is the same no matter what movie is playing on it.
Arnold Zuboff makes a case for this in "One Self: The Logic of Experience" (Inquiry, 1990) [0]. He calls it universalism: there has only ever been one subject of experience.
One of his thought experiments: imagine a meteorite is about to wipe out all life around you right now, instantly. If this exact experience - being you, here, thinking this - is instantiated anywhere else in the universe, it will continue there without any gaps.
Hindu mystics were already exploring and articulating these non-dual concepts in great detail thousands of years ago, in the Upanishads. As Robert Jastrow would say:
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."
[0] https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/mind/1990-zuboff.pdf
I experienced that after smoking salvia
If you subscribe the the many worlds interpretation, you can basically look at observers as existing within the space of eigenvalues of operators acting on the massively entangled wave function of their respective universe.
Wow, dammit! That syndrome of "something you always wondered or thought only you thought already having a name" strikes again!
My intuition for all sentience between "fragments" of a single consciousness from outside the universe was that, if Free Will™ is real, then true randomness can only come from outside a system..
I think some branches of Buddhism derived this too.
Originally derived from Hinduism thousands of years before Buddha (see Advaita for a modern view and Upanishads or Gita/Vedas for source)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahman
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Yep you can take this one pretty far
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https://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html
I always loved this as it seems to be a more modern way of interpreting the monad. Could it not be the case that all particles are actually just one thing that is not subject to time and that our reality is a snapshot of a matrix of its different potentials?
CP-violation would appear to rule this out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation
The main referenced wiki suggests that the missing positrons are inside protons, but recent a recent LHC experiment asserts CP-violation over baryons.
Wouldn’t this be a CPT exchange, though?
How meaningful is this actually? Is this a measurable distinction, or a conceptual one with the same semantics?
This theory adds more complications than it creates simplifications.
I’d note that occams razor is a probabilistic statement and not a law.
But who is applying it?
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Even if there were as many positrons as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab spontaneously condense into a very low entropy concentrated configuration?
The answer is that they don’t literally go backwards in time showing reverse causality. They are representable in QFT by reversing the time component of their counterpart, which doesn’t impact how they interact with broader causality, just their internal configuration. Further - this does not play out in the lab as reversed causality even between anti particles. You can collide two positrons then detect them later at their destinations just fine in normal causality. It’s a shame because it would be really sweet to find some reversal of entropy and causality somewhere or somehow!
May I introduce you to Maxwell’s Demon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon
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_We_ are still traveling forwards in time. If you followed a cloud of antiparticles backwards in time along its direction of travel, then you would see entropy decrease yes, though regular particles would do the same if we followed them back in time.
Gotta admit, that is probably my favorite Wikipedia article. It reads like a conversation between two stoned teenagers (which, admittedly, a lot of cosmology and quantum physics do, to non-physicists like myself).
My thought is that if there's only one electron, then its probabilistic location at a place and a time, should be impacted by its own energy across all places and times. That quantum gravity comes from generalizing the Schrodinger's equation to include these energies in the phase of the wave function, causing the phase to skew and the probability to update towards the location of large mass/energies.
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Space and time are illusions. So probably true in some sense...There is probably no electron at all...I mean, one would be quite arbitrary, why not two?
Where is the machine you used to type out this comment, and when did you type it?
Human language is poorly-suited for describing a coherent universe because you can construct all sorts of incoherent propositions (e.g. "what existed before time"/"what exists outside of reality" etc etc); philosophies/faiths have struggled with this for millennia.
It is good enough to get laid, though.
Put on a VR headset and tell me where the buttons you see are?
Space is felt and so is time. Both are sensations that consciousness feels.
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How does this work with QFT? If an electron is just an excitation in a field then it being “one electron” is meaningless.
Yeah an electron is not a 'thing'. It's like saying there's only one wave in the ocean.
This might be a result of me not understanding theoretical physics, but this seems "not even wrong." How could you even go about testing this?
IANP, but Ive always thought you should be able to observe reverse causality in a positron if true. That’s the primary effect of going backwards in time - a reverse in entropy.
The other side of the theory is the positron hidden in the proton. I assume a particle collider should be able to falsify this.
But it turns out antimatter isn’t supposed to actually move backwards in time but follows the same causality as everything else. It’s just that they represent their matter pairs configuration mathematically by reversing the time orientation. This isn’t super obvious but it’s very much different than going backwards in time literally. Sad!
Maybe you could disprove it by observing a electron/positron pair being created and then annihilating each other, forming a closed loop that couldn't be part of the single path traced by a single particle.
How would you observe that?
This is yet another case where a layman-written wiki article about physics is highly confusing to other laypeople, because it only tells you half the story. Particularly because it seems to be based on a chapter of Feynman's popular science book. But the book actually goes on and points out how Feynman immediately dismissed Wheeler's hypothesis, because the universe contains a lot more electrons than positrons. You'd have to explain that imbalance first if you want to entertain this line of thought.
As a layperson myself - how can we tell that a distant celestial object is not made from antimatter? Afaik, it doesn't behave differently from matter, other than it annihilates on contact.
Also even if we could, that would only describe the practically and theoretically observable universe, which doesn't rule out other places looking very different (on its own)
3 replies →
Yea, it's really more about the fact that all electrons are exactly the same regardless of the level of precision we look at them. It would be like if we found another earth and that earth was the exact same earth. Not earth like, not very close to earth. The exact same earth down to the smallest fundamental level.
We have something like a spinor network in 4D space, where some portions are opposite others in parameters.
Is this a diagram of particles interacting or a single thread weaving through time? Pick your metaphor.
It may not be one electron but it is one field.
I guess it's the age old question of what's a true, distinct particle/thing and what's just the disturbance of a vaster medium (wave)?
it's important to realize that very few physicists accept that idea
right up there with everything that will happen in the universe has already happened and it's just a matter of zooming out on the entire time dimension (some use that idea to explain "spooky action at a distance" quantum entanglement and the quantum eraser)
but I love how wikipedia even links the PBS Space Time about it
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk
Then wouldn't it be "one-photon"? I've heard (but don't fully understand) that massed particles are simply photons trapped in toroidal vortices, which gives them an outward charge field and lets them interact with the Higgs. Annihilation supposedly just being untangling the toroid.
Pretty sure that electrons are a fundamental particle coming from the electron field. They are pointlike objects with no other components.
If mass is proportionally equivalent to energy, then this can't be true. The photon is the fundamental energy unit. Right?
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“One electron ought to be enough for everyone.”
Even that is enough to get you downvoted by the anti-electron brigade.
Another interesting one is the black hole electron: the electron as a stable micro black hole, possibly super-extremal.
Probably not, but apparently some of the math does work.
There's been some attempts to model all particles as micro black holes or stable quantum scale gravitational objects of some kind.
Black hole, or singularity? Black hole describes the event horizon and singularity describes the point like object that would exist in a non-rotating black hole.
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