Regenerative Design in the Many Worlds
A Cosmic Case for Distributed Autonomous Technologies
The universe described by Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation of QM is one profuse with realities, and beings through which those realities proliferate. The existential abundance MWI implies can be the philosophical ground for a post-extractive design ethics adequate to the problems of the twenty first century. Through Distributed Autonomous Technologies, we can build bioregional machines of life and difference production, where novelty and commonness are fused in a regenerative feedback loop.
Cosmologist Max Tegmark poses four levels of physically plausible configurations of the multiverse, I-IV. The levels stack, amplifying each other into ever deepening quantities of infinity. As it turns out, our attempts at dominating the world under the microscope of empirical inquiry has only made its vastness more great, its breadth of possibility ever wider. Imagine these universes of manifold voluptuousnes, dizzy with exotic structures, alien chemistries and dead zones.
The fullness of this monstrous stack will not be the subject of this piece, but should accent it with a gravity of context, like a conspiracy of whispers just audible behind the wall. Our concern is just one of the panoply, Tegmark’s level III multiverse, known technically as the Everett Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (in shorthand, MWI).
By now, the average person with even a brief history of cannabis use likely has a passing familiarity with Schrödinger’s cat. The thought experiment was meant as a reductio ad absurdum to convey the upsetting macroscopic implications of the superposition described by the Schrödinger equation. (Superposition refers to the ability of quantum phenomena to exist in two states simultaneously). A cat is placed inside a box and tied, by way of a trigger mechanism, to the decay state of a radioactive atom. If the atom emits radiation, the trigger will activate and poison gas will be released, killing the cat. Schrödinger’s equation predicts a superposition of states of the atom, and hence a superposition of his cat — a real physical scenario in which the cat is both dead and alive at once. The whole psychedelic koan notwithstanding, the observer or instrument will still find the cat in one or another condition.
How or why we find the cat in one particular state expression is an (or more appropriately, the) enigma. The probability distribution of Schrödinger’s equation is among the most successful devices for modeling reality ever created. Its efficacy is beyond question. Yet, the physical process it describes is absurd. What actually happens when you open the box — how do you describe the reality of quantum superposition next to our perceived experience of consistent simple locality? Major contemporary solutions include hidden variable theories (Pilot-wave Theory), spontaneous collapse theories (GRW model, Diosi-Penrose), and Everett’s MWI. Problems abound with each — for Many Worlds they include arguments about the experimental falsifiability of the model — but my non-specialist sense is that Hugh Everett’s wild vision holds the definitive crown in the mainstream physics community (if by a relatively slim margin).¹
Part of the reason for this is it fits scientific norms of theoretical parsimony: the Many Worlds Interpretation preserves the elegance and efficacy of the Schrödinger equation without making any additional claims. From the perspective of the equation, this austere reading has it, the superposition persists — the experience of collapse is a sort of perspectival illusion. As Everett wrote in a 1957 letter, to a dismayed Bryce De Witt, “I do not see this “branching process” as the “vast contradiction” that you do. The theory is in full accord with our experience (at least insofar as ordinary quantum mechanics is) … All elements of a superposition (all “branches”) are “actual,” none any more “real” than another. The whole issue of the “transition from the possible to the actual” is taken care of in a very simple way — there is no such transition, nor is such a transition necessary for the theory to be in accord with our experience.”
Popular renderings of the Many Worlds Interpretation visualizes this “branching out” of possibilities (wherein the state of decay of the atom engenders a new universe to express each state) as two spatially distinct worlds bubbling out into a void, like a tree whose branches will not bother each other. But this isn’t quite right. The nuance becomes clear when you consider the problem of conservation of energy.
Mathematics is a language in and of itself — to be clear, one I hold zero fluency in. Describing the Schrödinger equation to a non-specialist is akin (I am told) to translating a poetic, region-specific Italian idiom to an non-Italian speaker: yes, it’s as if to say “the rain falls hardest when you’re close to the mountain,” but it might be equally be translated to mean “when one is bound to a fate, but accepts it elegantly.” While the notion of quantum many worlds as a spatial expanse of physically distinct universes certainly serves a purpose in presenting the idea intuitively to a layman, it leaves out some of the most important, and useful, attributes of MWI.²
When one poses the question to a specialist, “what about conservation of energy? This manic creation of new worlds doesn’t seem like a very efficient allocation of resources,” you’ll get an answer like the one given by Sean Carroll here: “A preexisting universe splitting into two skinnier universes is the better way to think about it,” and elsewhere: “The potential for multiple worlds is always there in the quantum state, whether you like it or not.. The part of reality we experience is an indescribably thin slice of the entire picture.” Imagine a stack of printer paper; at first all white, then “splitting” into new pigments (250 red/250 white, and so on). In one sense, something new is being created in each iteration, but not in another (no new sheets). Eventually, you have 500 different colors, but what they stain remains only one mathematical object, the selfsame stack in which perfect energy equilibrium is maintained.³
The picture describes a neat, objective process, but as the physics iconoclast and pioneer computer scientist Steven Wolfram points out, things are a bit more chaotic in rulial space (his term for the stack of paper as a whole, the theoretical “universal-object” which perspective stains). First, to unsettle the image, the worlds may recombine or merge. More importantly, the distinction of these worlds in the first place need not be an objective condition so long as the physical system can accommodate observer paths which perceive them as distinct. Unlike the sovereign pocket of consistent reality described by the naive branch account, there is no requirement that a consistent reality maintains beyond a quantum observer’s perceptual line of sight.⁴
Imagine the printer paper stack now as a machine of multicolor cellulose threads swarming over and into each other, cohering and decohering, flowering out into rare worlds and recohering into common ones. There is no need that our sheet of paper remain a discrete object, only that it maintains the fluid experience of a discrete subject (its discreteness, its objectness, is inseparable from the panoply of the ruliad, the big stack, in which we are immersed participants). Our embeddedness implies a multivalent upheaval right here — behind the wall, beneath the floorboards.
In the superposition, the observed contingency of a world is like an optical illusion, a perspectival bias upon the utter carnival of complexity, the rulial multiplicity in which we abide. This universe is like a great, living, hyper dimensional labyrinth capable of containing an arbitrarily large number of observer paths while being beholden in consistency and breadth to none of them. Those paths — yours, mine, ‘others’ — are distinct only by aspect, merging and departing at will as they swim through the ever growing pandemonium of actuals (structures, organisms, intelligences).
What are the stakes? Should we find hard evidence of MWI (despite claims to the contrary, experiments have been proposed), we’d have to reconcile both the abundance of actual things and the fractured, machinic nature of our world-object with our culture’s default vision of existential scarcity and global coherence. We could no longer take the supremacy of the perceived real over the imaginal for granted. Our creative visions would be lent a new gravity. And yet we’d still be left with the collapsed object, the “naive real” where our conscious experience necessarily dwells.⁵
The particularity of our observer path is inescapable, but the poverty of our epistemology is not. Given the evidence, the creative act would have to be reframed from an anethical work of a sovereign genius to an embedded negotiation with an other, a transplant or even a gift from a materially real elsewhere. Invocation and possession would become an empirical matter. The arts would become charged with an alchemical conspiracy of communication and accompaniment.
I’ve unfolded this all not to make any claim in a field I have no business commenting on, but only to give some plausible contours of what an enchanted materialism might look like, and the ethics it might imply. Just as we as humans have no ground for holding the mantle of Being above the rest of nature, it seems clear from our most advanced empirical resources that we have no ground for holding the mantle of reality over and above the world of virtual things and beings. They are, at last, as real as anything else can be said to be — and our relationship to them is of profound ethical importance. Worldpaths collide into mutual coherence, but that commonness opens up a possibility horizon of new difference — new joys, new investigations, new encounters. This kaleidoscopic flywheel is ethics unleashed.
The bridging of complexity and newness from this wellspring of the actual isn’t just a process of poiesis; it’s also — perhaps more so — technē. That is to say, it’s a design problem. This problem takes on two basic forms: first, addressing the foundation of material security and thriving which allow a profusion of organisms the autonomy to envision and experiment, adequate tools and adequate concepts for the production of difference. The second is the task of that experimentation itself.
One doesn’t conjure novelty out of thin air; it must be retrieved with attention and patience — against reactionary tendencies of tension, supremacy, boredom — as a fragile material process. This is the empirical labor and work of care needed to forge a common path. That care is innate to the artist — their traditional place may be the second problem, but the ethics of MWI require that we bring that same care to the first problem. That inversion — poiesis as mechanics and art as technē — is the role of regenerative design. And it’s what our world(s) demand.
With its attentiveness to the embedded reality of material processes, its privileging of distributed autonomy and interdependence (rather than exploitation, learned complacency and centralization), and its respect for life in all forms, regenerative design expresses an ethics adequate to the living pandemonium of the universe. How might observer paths cohere and expand their mutual potential for novelty? How might we secure and enhance the world-building capacity of the observer-organisms around us? Systems thinking equipped with rigorous life-ethics sets our eyes on the greater web of the actual, both as a means (to the material security to creatively thrive) and an end in itself.
At the risk of an unnecessary neologism, I’d like to talk about the products of regenerative material design as Distributed Autonomous Technologies (DATs). DATs share this fused means-ends relationship: resilient to systemic shock and resistant to ideological or cultural homogenization, they engender autonomous creations that express plural worlds, eccentric innovations. This is the virtue of their autonomy. Their entangled distribution keeps this positive feedback loop from falling into disequilibrium, as the fruits of creative flights are reintegrated back into the base to strengthen the foundation on which further innovations can stand.
This base can take the form of open source information commons as well as Ostromian material commons management on the local scale. Take, for example, CNC machine technology, highlighted in Kevin A. Carson’s excellent work, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. These are code directed manufacturing machines (different types include milling machines, lathes and 3d printers) that are cheap and energy efficient enough to be used on a neighborhood or home basis. Designs can be tweaked by a layman, to the point of adding additional manufacturing capability to the machine itself, in a self-propelling process of material imagination — what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze would call a line of flight. Design solutions, cheap as they are to produce beyond the fixed cost of the machines, can be easily integrated into a neighborhood commons for increased material security. The successful projects can be uploaded to a global open source database, to be used and further tweaked by different minds, in different locales and bioregions, to different ends.
The goal of this superposition ethics through regenerative design is to weave together a kind of federation of worlds that can help each other explore and engage the material metaweb, and autonomous local enterprises combined with iteratively scaled commons are the best means of doing so. They occasion, in their variety and material/bioregional contingency, the most robust strategic contributions to the wider federation of worlds, even in the act of actualizing the pocket worldbuilding that is its goal.
The network of localist designers and the Distributed Autonomous Technologies that enable them constitute a machine of novelty: isolated projects that can be reenfolded into common foundation networks that can flower back out into autonomous divisions. The community of worlds gives meaning and substance to the sovereign permission that Distributed Autonomous Technologies occasion (as the physicist John Wheeler wrote, “Nobody can be anybody without somebodies around”). This process is recursive, as the experimentation in worldbuilding contributes to DATs, fortifying the ground upon which new sovereign mechanical dreams can stand.
All life is sacred. The tree flowers behind our backs, and falls back to our eyes in a storied return from the wild rulial real, a messenger of the robust and enchanted universe we live in, the clamor behind the wall. Today we’re surrounded by technologies of extraction and death, technologies that were bred from an ideology of thrift and despair — irrealism, unfreedom, and a dislocation of creative power to a god elsewhere. The perspective we achieve when we take this power into our own hands and assume the task of investigating infinity is the perspective of freedom: it’s a glimpse, behind the wall, out to the open universe. This openness is the rightful inheritance of every organism. It’s our task to design our way out of the world-traps that try to conceal and enclose it. Let’s get building.
Dedicated to Alex T. Deutsch, inventor and philosopher.
Notes
[1] Hawking stated that MWI is “self-evidently correct,” though with reservations about any substantial natural-language interpretations beyond the simple fact that quantum superposition necessarily describes the macro scale. More recently, Sean Carroll insisted that many worlds is the only serious candidate when one considers a century of experimental evidence.
[2] A specialist will no doubt roll their eyes at this practical flourish, but I’m of the opinion that concepts should be used and exploited at utter interdisciplinary will.
[3] This may be a problematic example, as pigments and pigmented sheets of paper have physical characteristics and energy values (and maybe this immediate willingness to think of things as immaterial is part of our problem), but its Carroll’s, not mine, so I’ll just defer to the expert.
[4] Ignorance note: I am not clear as to whether Carroll or other important MWI proponents agree with Wolfram’s models w/r/t recombining branches, but the limiting of world consistency to the quantum observer and not to a larger objective branch appear to be uncontroversial.
[5] Whether the brain’s plasticity can withstand real variations to these perceptual schemas is an open question, though I want to say the answer is yes.
