The Quantum Metaverse: What Is Reality?
“I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
― Jorge Luis Borges
Growing up, my bedtime stories were the magic realists: Borges and Cortazar, Márquez and Allende.
Even today, I remember the first time my mother read me Cortázar, about the brother and sister who shared a home together and how it was slowly taken over by some unnamed ‘other’, leaving them with only a single room.
I recall the moment in the story when I experienced a cognitive shift and understood that something deep and strange was going on.
For my mother, these were the giants of literature and she often spoke of how they informed her view of physics: how science, at the deepest levels, can shift your perception of how the world works and, momentarily at least, allow you to feel a sort of magic.
Later, I experienced similar epiphanies in code. Bugs often became doorways to understanding the “code beneath the code”. They activated the creative parts of the mind and the generation of deep pattern-finding.
They helped me understood that cognitive shifts and solutions weren’t always built on the rock of logic, but arose from intuition and a breaking-free from past paradigms.
It felt like magic: the ability for the machine to do something unexpected, as if a new realm of possibility was suddenly available.
But the magic, of course, wasn’t in the code. The magic was the mind giving a little nudge that said: “remember that there is always some new way to perceive reality”.
Quantum Pathways to Perception
At SCI we have explored two inter-related fields: quantum computing and neurology.
Both offer a nearly continuous opportunity for moments of ‘magic realism’: sudden shifts in perception.
In more scientific terms, both fields challenge us to constantly revise our models in order to arrive at testable theories. And in both cases, it often seems like there is no model too strange for us to propose.
Quantum Entanglement
Think for a minute about quantum entanglement: it’s counter-intuitive that two quantum particles separated by theoretically vast distances can “know” each other.
And yet loophole-free Bell tests demonstrate that particles can communicate with each other at speeds faster than light.
In theory, a particle on Mars could respond to an entangled particle on Earth.
For quantum physicists (or even for people with only a modest interest in the topic) this challenges our notions of how communication occurs and the idea that the speed of light is a set constraint to ‘travel’.
At SCI, and for all of us working in quantum computing, this is a force multiplier.
In popular culture, quantum computers are often painted as nothing more than super fast computers that will be able to break your passwords in the blink of an eye.
But look deeper into quantum computing and you will understand that concepts like distance, information, and even “travel” cease to follow the same reality we’ve come to know.
The Speed of a Neuron
The Borges quote above may have been written by someone more versed in fiction than science and yet it touches on observations by the leading neuroscientists of our time: that the mind itself isn’t confined to the space taken up by our brain.
Similar to quantum entanglement, this is a testable hypothesis and one which is counter-intuitive to the western notion of the brain as a machine.
At SCI, we came to realize that neurology held a potential second “pairing” to the concept of quantum entanglement.
At first, we were simply exploring the hypothesis that quantum entanglement might be the missing link in understanding how the ‘mind’ extends beyond our physical self.
But we then arrived at an experimental proposal: what would happen if quantum entanglement could be extended to go beyond machine-to-machine, and went from machine-to-mind instead?
The nucleus of the Echocore was formed.
What if “Unreal” Is The True Reality?
I’ve written previously about the potential of the Quantum Metaverse. I proposed that it offers an opportunity to simulate a reality that will allow us to “bring back” lessons to the real world.
But you deserve to know a deeper truth: that the foundation of the Echocore Device (and the Fotia Chip in particular) is based on paradigms that challenge our notions of reality:
- Distance is not a limit for instant communication, and we can thus synchronize vast arrays of data and experiences without latency.
- The mind is not constrained to our physical selves, and can thus be safely extended into quantum space. (The Echocore includes special safety features that ‘lock’ your neurosignature to the device so that it can’t be read by others).
- Truth is still truth. However, the experiences we have using the Echocore will remind us that the human concept of reality has undergone constant revision — and will do so again.
From Science to Story
And so I’m reminded again of the stories my mother would read to me at night.
It was only at night that she spoke to me in Spanish. Perhaps those words imprinted on my mind in a different way because of it.
And in those stories I would experience again those moments when the story would require me to question not just what was real in the story itself, but whether the world was also somehow not what it seemed.
Humanity is a species of discovery. Our breakthroughs are facts. They are provable. They are based on models and math, physics and neurology.
But what happens next is always up to the rest of us: to understand these shifts in science, to adopt these new technologies, and to explain them to each other through the stories that we tell.
“Before going back to sleep I imagined (I saw) a plastic universe, changeable, full of wondrous chance, an elastic sky, a sun that suddenly is missing or remains fixed or changes its shape.”
— Julio Cortazar
