The mind: An introduction to the metaverse
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Allow me to begin with some nomenclature, I use the term “metaverse” here to indicate the world that is within us, our mind, bordered by the extent of our awareness and experiences and not the virtual reality world. Nonetheless, I do acknowledge that some, probably most of you who read Ready Player One or are science fiction enthusiasts, might believe that the two will eventually merge.
We are living in a multiverse. First, there is the physical universe, where observations take place, and then there is the multimetaverse, where each metaverse constitutes one person’s mind. Yes, I do specifically say multimetaverse because our metaverses don’t overlap, but do interact, in the meta realm and so collectively they would constitute a multimetaverse.
The Metaverse
Space. Let’s talk about the birth of a metaverse, and I’ll call this one William, a stochastic name choice. This birth, just like the birth of any other newborn, is that of a metaverse. In the physical world, this metaverse is confined to a vessel made of a complex cellular network built for the purpose of expanding that metaverse. A metaverse is quite complex and constitutes several dimensions, think of an n-dimensional Hilbert space where each dimension indicates a meta-representation of the senses (gustatory, visual, auditory, olfactory, and somatosensory), the product of those, and the product of the product of those. This metaverse is not empty at birth, and so one can surely argue that the metaverse, or at least the scaffold of it, exists before physical birth. As the fetus hears the mother’s voice in the womb, the meta-auditory representation starts building, sort of like putting primer on a canvas or even some colors on there too. At birth, William’s metaverse is already one of about 100 billion metaverses that have already been formed since the dawn of time, nonetheless a unique one. This uniqueness is going to be of great importance for how much weight this metaverse has despite it being one of a billion.
Time. In the metaverse, unlike that of the physical world, time has its own rules. Chronoception, time warp, and dynamical systems are all good ways of describing this. If I would consider the metaverse as a snowball rolling down a slope, the center of the snowball represents the center of its dimensions, the growing size of the snowball represents the gain of information and physical world representation, and the speed of that snowball would correspond to time, nonlinearly, as the time in the metaverse is non-linear where each of the information building blocks of the metaverse has a time tag. We can manipulate time, the metaverse time warp, by recalling past memories or thinking about the future, or by taking a 5-minute nap (physical world time) and dreaming of the entire The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Sleep. Now that we mentioned dreaming, it is good to highlight that sleep is essential for consolidating the building blocks of the metaverse, a delicate process of making sure that these blocks are sewed together appropriately to account for any error made during the hustle and bustle of making those building blocks during awake hours. Sleep also helps make these blocks more defined.
Development. Imagine that you are in a dark space where you can’t see, hear, smell, feel or taste anything, a quantum vacuum state, empty, but not really empty. In about a few weeks, physical world time scale, you start feeling the environment around you, and after some time, you can taste, smell, hear and see. Through this, a bit by bit, the metaverse starts forming and continues to develop with more vivid colors, a greater number of dimensions, and becomes relatively more defined. By the time a metaverse’s vessel, in this case, William, is born the main dimensions defining the five senses have all been established. It is now up to the vessel i.e., brain and body, to help make the metaverse as big and rich as it can be. The scope of the representation of the physical universe in the metaverse is how much you are aware of it, consciously or subconsciously. As soon as William is born his metaverse is mostly a fuzzy meta representation of the hospital, noises coming from the machines, his parents, the feeling of cozy cloth, the taste of milk, artificial light, sunlight, the interior of a car, his house, etc. As William grows and ventures from one place to another and develops more experiences and knowledge his metaverse grows accordingly.
The duality. Here it is good to mention that even though I talk about William “the metaverse” and William “the vessel” interchangeably, they are two different things. Though I try to provide as much context as possible to what I am referring to. A better alternative to William^m and William^b.
How the metaverse and the physical universe interact. Let’s take an apple as an example. You might think that when you and I look at an apple, we are seeing the same thing, but we are not. We are indeed looking at the same object but not necessarily seeing it in the same way, I’ll explain. Even though an apple in the physical world is what it is, an apple, its representation in the meta realm is affected by the contents of one’s metaverse. Let’s suppose two people are looking at an apple for the first time, then the meta representation of the apple will most likely be the same for both of them or at least quite similar. Now let’s say one observer is an apple farmer, who spent most of his life with apples and they mean more than just a fruit to him, then compared to someone who sees an apple for the first time, the apple meta representation is different, not entirely since the vision dimension has a strong weight on the metaverse architecture, but more different than if both observers had no prior exposure to apples entirely. This takes us to another layer of complexity which is the weight each dimension has on the building blocks of the metaverse, where the visual dimension followed by the auditory dimension have the highest weights. It also hints at the theory that building the metaverse is not precisely universal but is affected by a personal “Prior”, part of the predictive coding theory, which we will touch on lightly.
Social interaction. As our metaverse has object representation it also has a representation of individuals. William became a teenager, and by now he has many individuals represented in his metaverse, including his family, friends, and acquaintances. However, those whom he interacts with the most take up more space than let’s say his local coffee shop cashier. Here we discuss another dimension in this n-dimensional space, the social interaction dimension. Typically, family fills the core of this dimension, followed by friends, and then acquaintances, but this is not a rule. The core can be widened, for example, when William gets married to include his partner and children in addition to his parents and siblings in the core representation. Think graph theory, with directed and weighted edges, where people are the nodes and your relationship with them is represented by those edges, where a thicker edge represents a stronger relationship.
Love. Is often a very thick edge.
When things go awry. A categorical approach. Some, those who are born blind or deaf, do not have all the sensory gates necessary to build their metaverse dimensions as those with typical development and so they lose the representation related directly or indirectly to the dimension they lack. For those who lost one of their dimensional input resources, its representation grows much slower, if at all. Thus, the representation of the dimensional loss in such a state is not simply n -1 dimensions, because as mentioned that dimensions typically multiply with time, but n -x, where x is the potential number of dimensions that would have been created by multiplying that missing dimension with all the other dimensions given the vessels’ experiences. A continuous approach. Others, those with neurodevelopmental or neuropsychiatric disorders might have a different challenge when it comes to how their metaverse forms, and there are several hypotheses describing their perturbations. Bayesian inference and predictive coding is a good place to start. As we mentioned previously, the senses are the gates toward building the metaverse, so it’s important that these are functioning properly. Aside from having complete loss of a particular dimensional gate, i.e. a sense, for example as in blindness or deafness mentioned above, the translation system that transmutes the information coming from the physical world to become building blocks of the metaverse, or the system that weaves those incoming blocks with existing blocks might be impaired. Building on shaky ground or improperly woven blocks leads to a mosaic metaverse where incoming information can be misrepresented. On the other hand, importing information with low precision also leads to conflict as it becomes uncertain if the construction is being done properly.
Death of a metaverse. Does it? We don’t really know, but let’s entertain evidence from near-death experiences stating that “more consciousness and alertness than normal” is perceived. It might be that once the vessel stops working, i.e., in case of death, all the resources are now allocated to further define the metaverse instead of also acquiring new information from the physical world, transforming them into building blocks, and integrating them into the metaverse as typically happens. It could also be the case that death forces some form of dimensionality reduction where newly formed components create a more vivid experience. The simplest, least ATP-consuming, assumption would be that the metaverse merely vanishes upon the death of its vessel. If so, what’s the point? William passed away on August 26, 1910, but his metaverse, probably, lives on.
We are each an entire universe, one in a 100 billion unique. No one existed since the dawn of time having the same metaverse signature as you. The death of a human is not the death of the flesh, it is the death of an entire universe.
And so, when a tree falls in the forest it does make a sound in the universe, but if there was no one there to hear it, then it did not exist, or make a sound, in the multimetaverse.
End.
