reality restriction

every thought you have creates its own reality, you know?
It's like every choice or decision you make...
the thing you choose not to do...
fractions off and becomes its own reality, you know...
and just goes on from there forever.
I mean, it's like...
uh, you know, in the Wizard of Oz...
when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow and they do that little dance at that
crossroads...
and they think about going all those directions...
then they end up going in that one direction.
I mean, all those other directions, just because they thought about it...
became separate realities.
They just went on from there and lived the rest of their life.
I mean, entirely different movies, but we'll never see it...
because, you know, we're kind of trapped in this one reality restriction
type of thing.

I have thought about the multiverse theory a lot. Some people say that every decision we make "splits" the universe in half. But if you start to think about what that "split" is, there are some pretty crazy implications.

Why would us making a decision actually have the power to split the entire universe? It seems pretty drastic that the actions of one human mind could split something so incomprehensibly large. It also seems strange that the universe is being duplicated constantly. That would create some major force and push, and I don't really feel like that is actually happening. It does seem kind of random and non-systematic that the universe only splits when someone makes a decision. If the universe does split, then I think it would split every single planck frame, with every single possible state the universe could be in (each possible universe one planck frame later) being brought into existence.

The universe tends to follow patterns that do not involve hand-picking, but are still meaningful. For example, it seems meaningless that most planets are completely uninhabitable, and that many are just gas giants with no use; but the life-to-barren ratio is meaningful because it makes intelligent civilizations far away enough from each other such that they have to think they're alone, and grow up without the aid of other civilizations growing up with them. I think that the universe splitting every time a person makes a decision is a little too much of a "hand-picking events" system for it to be realistic (not natural enough because some outside force would have to decide that the universe only splits when a mind makes a decision). So the alternative multiverse possibility in my view, being that the universe splits every single planck frame, is the only possibility that is a natural system.

Here are the implications of the planck frame splitting possibility: A planck frame - also called a planck time - is the shortest possible meaningful distance of time. It's the amount of time that it takes for light (the fastest thing in the universe) to travel one planck length, which is the shortest possible physical distance. If the universe was splitting every single planck frame, then the universe would take up so much space that no hard drive could possibly hold it. Even a hard drive or storage device that grows as the universe grows would not be able to grow fast enough to keep up. The universe splitting into infinite branches every planck frame would take up so much space that aliens would have a very hard time finding enough matter to build the impossible computer. So if the planck frame splitting possibility is true, then I don't think we live in a simulated universe.

So if the multiverse theory is real, then we either live in a non-natural awkward and nonsensical reality, or one that is real and not simulated. However, there is a third way that the multiverse theory could be real, and it doesn't have to do with consciousness - it would simply be that there are other universes that exist as other unreachable places, and black holes are the gateway to them.

Or, maybe there's only one miracle universe, and "other universes" are just groups of galaxies that are impossibly far away, with black holes or dimension manipulation being a shortcut. That's what I'm leaning towards right now. I'm open to all possibilities though.

"So if the multiverse theory is real, then we either live in a non-natural awkward and nonsensical reality, or one that is real and not simulated."
- The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

what is real any ways?
our eyeballs only process photons bouncing off objects, then are transformed into an electrical pulse that is then assembled with in your brain, so to with any sensory input.
the whole of the universe rests with in your ability to perceive it.
The amount of the light spectrum we are able to process is very very small in terms of the entirety of the spectrum of light as a whole, yet we consider what we can perceive to be the entirety of reality.

I think that when talking about "splitting" reality, what is really being discussed is the power of choice, and our choices define our circumstances and perception.
Math points to the strong likelyhood that all actions and their subsequent inactions do occur, but happen in a slightly skewed reality as so is every one else's reality coalescing at the same time.

Personally, I subscribe to the notion that this is all a hologram of sorts, and that the "data" storage that was being referred to previously is not the best model to view this with, as with holographic reality, your experience is localized, and so what youre not seeing quite possibly isnt there until you look at it.
it just exists as probability and potential.

GoblinWizard wrote:"So if the multiverse theory is real, then we either live in a non-natural awkward and nonsensical reality, or one that is real and not simulated."
- The universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.

what is real any ways?
our eyeballs only process photons bouncing off objects, then are transformed into an electrical pulse that is then assembled with in your brain, so to with any sensory input.
the whole of the universe rests with in your ability to perceive it.
The amount of the light spectrum we are able to process is very very small in terms of the entirety of the spectrum of light as a whole, yet we consider what we can perceive to be the entirety of reality.

I think that when talking about "splitting" reality, what is really being discussed is the power of choice, and our choices define our circumstances and perception.
Math points to the strong likelyhood that all actions and their subsequent inactions do occur, but happen in a slightly skewed reality as so is every one else's reality coalescing at the same time.

Personally, I subscribe to the notion that this is all a hologram of sorts, and that the "data" storage that was being referred to previously is not the best model to view this with, as with holographic reality, your experience is localized, and so what youre not seeing quite possibly isnt there until you look at it.
it just exists as probability and potential.

So you think that splitting reality is a representation of the power of choice, which made me think that you don't think the universe is really splitting. Then you said that all actions probably occur, but in parallel realities. It seems like you think that the universe isn't splitting, but that all realities already exist simultaneously. This is very interesting, and I've rarely thought about it quite like this. If the universe isn't splitting but has independent parallel realities though, wouldn't those parallel realities depend on each other, due to the related events they have in their timeline? And if the realities depend on each other, wouldn't they be splitting into each other? Whether or not a multiverse is constantly splitting is important to me, because my two possible truths in the case that the multiverse is real depends on multiverse splitting being real. I don't really buy into the multiverse theory in general though, and I don't think the universe is constantly splitting, for reasons I explained in my previous post.

Very cool that you brought up the idea that nothing is real until you look at it. That could completely change a lot of reality theories, on a fundamental level. That idea deserves its own topic.