Choice, freedom, and deja vu

Three years ago to the day, I was in Landmark Education's "four days and an evening" Advanced Course, and one of the key concepts that I walked away with was a new understanding of our power to choose: to choose between our automatic, learned reactions and a possibility we create in the moment; to choose between being stopped by failure and forging onward; to choose our lives and everything in them just as they are and just as they aren't.

In college I had witnessed friends agonize over certain decisions, and I can't deny that I didn't as well on occasion. But over time I developed the idea that maybe all of those individual decisions don't really matter, that it was instead the pattern of choices that we make which end up defining us. For example, my decision to attend Stanford rather than USC had me living in the Bay Area, not Los Angeles, interacting with a different set of people than I would have down south. Yet perhaps what made more of a difference in whether I was happy or not was the the pattern of my choices, or thought of another way, the manner in which I went about choosing.

But still, there was the inescapable fact that if I were flying home for the holidays, my flight from SFO might crash while all of the flights from LAX landed safely. That would make a big difference!

In the midst of pondering choice and the meaning of it all, I read "Parallel Universes" by Max Tegmark in the May 2003 issue of Scientific American. The article explained that parallel universes are no longer simply "a staple of science fiction" but rather now "a direct implication of cosmological observations."

Tegmark described four different levels of parallel universes that follow from current scientific theory and evidence, and I was most fascinated by the first which implies that we each have an infinite number of alter egos out in the cosmos. The explanation proceeds as follows: the amount of the universe we can observe--a so-called "Hubble volume," the volume of space bounded by the distance light has traveled since the big bang--can hold only a fixed amount of matter, and the matter can exist in an extremely large but finite number of states. So if we imagine an infinite universe divided into an infinite number of bubbles, each the size of our own Hubble volume, eventually we will find other bubbles that started out with exactly the same conditions as our own, and in those bubbles we would find our alter egos.

And given random quantum effects since the formation of the universe, it's possible that each of our alter egos are taking slightly different paths than the ones we are taking. Perhaps this morning one of my alter egos decided to have eggs rather than the cereal that I ate; perhaps another sat down in the Oval Office (hopefully that instance of me isn't ignoring the Constitution!).

(This reminds me of an early episode of Weekend Update on SNL: scientists were reporting that a second Earth had been found orbiting the sun 180 degrees away from us, which explained why the planet hadn't been discovered earlier. Apparently everything on this other Earth was exactly like our own, except that over there people held their corn on the cob vertically instead of horizontally. :-)

The implications of all of those Me's out there were breathtaking... and profoundly liberating. What I saw in this was that I no longer had to worry about making the right decision, I only had to make the choice that I made. The other Me's would try out the other paths, and together we would collectively experience all possible outcomes.

In 2004 I saw What the Bleep Do We Know!? and made another connection. The movie explores the interconnectedness of people and the universe and our ability to affect reality. In one scene a woman sees herself leaving a theater as she enters it. What is the explanation? Is this one of her alter egos from some other parallel universe?

I was immediately reminded of a mid-1990s winter night in Reno, Nevada. I was spending the weekend with friends in Tahoe, and we had driven to Reno to have some drinks at a bar. As I walked across the room, I saw a man approaching me, and the closer he came the more I realized that he was my doppelganger. You might think that in such a situation I would have said "wow" and "hello!" but instead I turned and fled. The experience completely unnerved me, and that odd feeling of seeing someone who looked exactly like me has never gone away.

Now, I had another explanation: perhaps I had somehow had experienced a momentary connection with one of my alter egos in some far away corner of this infinite universe. And then this thought: perhaps deja vu has nothing to do with some quirk in the storage of a short term memory, nothing to do with past lives we've led. Perhaps deja vu is some fleetingly short window into the existence--right now--of one of our other Me's.

There's no way to know, of course. But I love the idea.