“Okay. Here goes,” I said. “The premise, here, is that the brain is loaded up with a pretty accurate model of the cosmos that it lives in.”
“At least, the local part of it,” Orolo said. “It needn’t have a good model of other galaxies, for example.”
“Right. And to state it in the terminology of the old interpretation that fids are taught, the state of that model is a superposition of many possible present and future states of the cosmos—or at least of the model.” He held up a finger. “Not of the cosmos, but—?”
“But of hypothetical alternate cosmi differing slightly from the cosmos.”
“Very good. Now, this generalized cosmos-model that each person carries around in his or her brain—do you have any idea how it would work? What it would look like?”
“Not in the slightest!” I said. “I don’t know the first thing about the nerve cells and so on. How they could be rigged together to create such a model. How the model could be reconfigured, from moment to moment, to represent hypothetical scenarios.”
“Fair enough,” Orolo said, holding up his hands to placate me. “Let’s leave nerve cells out of the discussion, then. The important thing about the model, though, is what?”
“That it can exist in many states at once, and that its wavefunction collapses from time to time to give a useful result.”
“Yes. Now, in the polycosmic interpretation of how quantum theorics works, what does all of this look like?”
“There is no longer superposition. No wavefunction collapse. Just a lot of different copies of me—of my brain—each really existing in a different parallel cosmos. The cosmos model residing in each of those parallel brains is really, definitely in one state or another. And they interfere with one another.”
He let me stew on that for a few moments. And then it came to me. Just like those ideas we had spoken of earlier—suddenly there in my head. “You don’t even need the model any more, do you?”
Orolo just nodded, smiled, egged me on with little beckoning gestures.
I went on—seeing it as I was saying it. “It is so much simpler this way! My brain doesn’t have to support this hugely detailed, accurate, configurable, quantum-superposition-supporting model of the cosmos any more! All it needs to do is to perceive—to reflect—the cosmos that it’s really in, as it really is.”
“The variations—the myriad possible alternative scenarios—have been moved out of your brain,” Orolo said, rapping on his skull with his knuckles, “and out into the polycosm, which is where they all exist anyway!” He opened his hand and extended it to the sky, as if releasing a bird. “All you have to do is perceive them.”
“But each variant of me doesn’t exist in perfect isolation from the others,” I said, “or else it wouldn’t work.”
Orolo nodded. “Quantum interference—the crosstalk among similar quantum states—knits the different versions of your brain together.”
“You’re saying that my consciousness extends across multiple cosmi,” I said. “That’s a pretty wild statement.”
“I’m saying all things do,” Orolo said. “That comes with the polycosmic interpretation. The only thing exceptional about the brain is that it has found a way to use this.”
Stephenson, Neal. Anathem . Atlantic Books. Kindle Edition.
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