The Legendary Physicist Approach to Life — The Many-Worlds Interpretation
Your decision to enter the human condition is that you deliberately blind yourself to the truth of this world. Today we’ll embark on an adventure that will hasten your own self-improvement and give you a fresh perspective on life.
This will go against most people’s current view of the world but it will provide a way to access a better version of yourself. Keep an open mind and you will be greatly rewarded.
“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
I’ll focus primarily on activating and enhancing the power of your subconscious mind, which as you may know, is vastly more powerful than your conscious mind. I won’t go into deep detail on the subconscious mind but it accounts for roughly 95–99% of your total mental activity.
Your conscious mind might process a few chunks of information at a time while your subconscious mind processes more than 2000x more information than your conscious mind. It’s all mental activity that’s occurring below the point of awareness.
“Whatever the mind of a man can conceive and feel as real, the subconscious can and must objectify.” -Neville Goddard
To re-frame, your brain processes enough information in a matter of seconds to crash a supercomputer. How are you using it to your advantage?
The key here is to strengthen the link between your conscious and subconscious mind. To achieve whatever you set out for in life is a skill.
One of the unfortunate things about our education system is that we do not teach students how to avail themselves of their subconscious capabilities. -Bill Lear
The Illusion of Choice
What if I told you that you already knew the answer to an internal question before you even answered it? This is our reality. We tend to think that our decisions are made consciously even though they’re already decided well in advance.
Think about a professional athlete, they react with their subconscious in the matter of 0.2 seconds to make a shot or a decision.
The Mechanism of Choice
When you make decisions in life your brain presents you with a set of options. Would you like to do option A, B, C, or D? We think (in our conscious mind) that we have a fair shot at each option.
In reality, if you pick option A you get a great burst of dopamine (responsible for reward-motivated behavior), B will give you less dopamine, C and D will cut levels low and make you feel less good.
We think these are our ‘options’ when in reality this is the extent of our ‘free will’. Options C and D are likely in your best interest and make sense logically but they take willpower, a limited resource.
Let’s say you drag yourself to the gym and once you get to working out, you feel fantastic. Your brain takes note of this information and next time you’re presented your ‘options’, going to the gym ranks higher than it did before. After you do this so many times, going to the gym becomes option A or B, your brain will prefer this option to other low-quality options.
Do you understand? You’re literally programming your brain with every decision and thought that you make. You’re punching in the GPS coordinates of your destination every day.
Someone who goes to the gym all month long will find it much easier to continue doing so. Your new behavior becomes a habit when you’ve convinced your brain that option C or D is now option A or B.
The Many Worlds Approach
Right now you have an array of worlds to choose from. A selection of alternate realities that you can choose from in life. In one world you may be a physician, in another you may be an entrepreneur. You now have the access and the control to program and set your mind to achieve anything.
Your subconscious mind has the responsibility to access many branching possibilities and to narrow our focus onto just one or even a handful of these possibilities.
The subconscious is always maneuvering in the background to select the probability that will move you to the reality most consistent with your deeper self-concept. It’s actively shielding or showing you numerous potential paths on what it determines would represent a consistent reality for you.
If you’re looking for a new job and believe you can excel in any circumstance, it will show you a path to obtain that role. It will show you how to improve your skills to get that role.
Conversely, it will also support your doubts and hesitations. If you believe you cannot adapt to a new role it will narrow your focus to less ambitious options.
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — you’re right.” -Henry Ford
The Dream We Live In
The same part of the subconscious mind that creates our dreams and dream world, when you are awake, is using 95% of your brains processing power. The same part of your mind that creates dreams is the busiest part of your brain while you’re awake.
What is it doing? Is the subconscious mind building the world our conscious mind is perceiving? Is our waking reality an illusion? It’s a valid question.
The key to cracking the code to life is mastering the art of planting ideas in our subconscious. To deceive the subconscious with your altered view of reality much like it has been deceiving you your entire life. It’s a cycle and you should take advantage of it no matter what capacity you believe of it to be true.
Conscious mind influences the subconscious mind, then later the subconscious mind influences the conscious mind. It’s a feedback loop of how your mind operates.
The Trifecta
It’s important to note that the subconscious mind will alter not only your view of the present and your potential future, but even your past gets reshaped by your subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind manipulates your memory of all past events. Every time you access these prior events in your mind, your subconscious mind has edited and altered these thoughts. It will align your memories with your view of the world.
This is called the misinformation effect in psychology. This is the reason in eye-witness testimonies in court, the information is considered highly unreliable unless corroborated by multiple, disparate eye-witnesses (or physical evidence).
“Quantum theory means that a physical system does not have a single history, but rather has many histories, each associated with a different probability.” -Stephen Hawking
Do you see how important your view of the world is and the beliefs that you hold? Do you actively challenge your beliefs and views of the world or do you assume they’re correct?
Your beliefs and views in life drastically alter your perception or reality. We are literally wired to ‘play ourselves’ in life but you can alter your reality and outcome in life when you plant the right seeds in your subconscious.
Pay particular attention to the words you utter. Avoid nonsense such as “I can’t do it”, “I’m afraid”, or “It hurts”. Under no circumstances should such aberrations of speech reinforce a worse reality for you.
Parallel Worlds — The Many Worlds Approach
“Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word.” -Niels Bohr
This section will test the limits of your mind. We will go into the Many Worlds Approach in quantum physics (a 50,000 ft. simplified overview). In this interpretation, the trajectory of your life is no longer just one straight path to an eventuality, but an ever-branching tree of possibilities.
In quantum physics, there’s a concept called superposition. This is the existence of a single particle/object/world in more than one location simultaneously. It could also mean the existence of a single particle/object/world in more than one state simultaneously. It may sound farfetched, but challenge your mind by playing with this concept.
For example, if you’re reading this from your bedroom, while at that exact moment, you are also sitting in your dream house miles away reading this. Superposition is being in two or more places at once.
There’s another concept called the collapse of the wave function. This is the process where a particle/object/world shifts from a wave of possible locations to just one location. This is called ‘decoherence’.
It could also be defined as the shift of one’s reality from an infinite number of possibilities and potentialities to a single observed reality.
We’ll touch the surface of quantum physics here so don’t worry, just take the high level points.
The Double-slit Experiment
In the 1800’s Thomas Young (a British polymath and physician) performed an experiment.
He shined a constant beam of light through a thin double slit opening in a frame.
He then setup a strip of light sensitive film a small distance behind the double slit.
The result of his experiment was an alternating dark-light band, which is called an interference pattern.
It’s different than you would expect right? The light moves like waves interfering with each other after it’s shined through the double-slit.
Simple stuff so far.
Scientists saw this experiment and decided to test his experiment with particles instead of light. They shot electrons directly through the dual slits. Electrons, protons, and neutrons in fact. The building blocks of all physical matter.
Here is the setup and result of the experiment:
It’s not what you expected again is it? We would expect a solid double line on the screen. Scientists were stunned at first. This means that the electrons they were firing behave like waves. It works the same way with all subatomic particles.
They concluded that each particle, fired separately, must be somehow going through both slits and interfering with itself — the single particle is going through both of the double-slits.
This baffled scientists. This weird behavior encouraged them to test this same experiment with a measuring device at each slit (like a camera). Guess what they saw when they observed the test this way?
We would expect an interference pattern again but they observed two solid impact strips in line with the double slits.
Somehow, electrons altered their behavior because of observation and they acted ‘normally’.
This experiment has been repeated thousands of times and no one has been able to escape the strange conclusion. When a particle is in many places at once the only information that can be accessed is the probability of where the particle might be in the wave of possibilities. This whole thing is called the measurement problem.
To quote a Nobel Prize winning physicist, Werner Heisenburg:
“The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”
This should be boggling your mind right now. The very building blocks of our world are in all places and exist as a wave of possibilities until we observe them. This defies our understanding of the world as a ‘fixed’ object, not a wave of potentialities.
To look around is to observe, to observe is to measure, and to measure is to shift all particles from a wave-state into fixed positions. To look around is to ‘collapse the wave function’. To observe is to ‘collapse the wave function’. To act is to form a tree of branching possibilities.
We can push this idea forward to propose that all reality is just undetermined potentialities behind us.
“There is compelling evidence that the only time quanta [electrons] ever manifest as particles is when we are looking at them. When an electron isn’t being looked at, it’s always a wave.” -Michael Talbot, The Holographic Universe
The Poll
So how many leading quantum field theorists and cosmologists believe in the Many-Worlds Interpretation in quantum physics? In a poll of 72 of them here are the results:
The Main Takeaway
There’s the potential for a particle of matter to be located where we expect it to be or to be located anywhere in the physical world.
So it is with our lives — our very next moment can occur along the most probable path or it can occur on a path entirely discontinuous with the expectations that others have for us, but more likely in line with the expectations that we have for ourselves.
When you give up hope, you collapse the wave function. When you believe, you expand your future and reality to an infinite number of possibilities. Choose wisely, because you are in control of your everything.
A Legendary Physicist
Erwin Schrödinger, a legendary Austrian physicist, led an experiment where he describes the fate of a cat in a box as being dependent on whether a quantum particle is in one locations that ‘triggers the bomb’ that kills the cat, or if the particle is in another location that disables the bomb.
Schrodinger suggesting that with the quantum particle being in both trigger and non-trigger states until we observe the quantum particle, then the cat must also be in a state where it’s both alive and dead until observed.
The takeaway here is that quantum physics suggests that two or more contradictory events can be occurring simultaneously.
So in one world Schrodinger’s cat is alive and in another world Schrodinger’s cat is dead.
In one world you gain the courage to approach the guy/girl of your dreams and live happily ever after and in another world you do not.
Both metaphorically and literally, our consciousness and awareness, which includes our choices on what to place our focus on, alters the paths of our lives and creates a split in reality leading to creation of two or more worlds at any moment in time.
We must be comfortable having our view of the world itself existing in superposition.
“The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
What world will you choose? Or perhaps I should ask, what world has your subconscious chosen for you? And will you allow yourself to become what your mind has already planned for you? It’s more powerful than you think.
I can only borrow, I heavily credit Kevin L. Michel and his book Moving Through Parallel Worlds To Achieve Your Dreams. I highly recommend this book for a more in-depth version of this article and related ideas.
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