one electron

sorry @ my physics friends i have written about fake physics

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I.

before we invented the concept of an electron quantum field that all electrons are manifestations of, john wheeler proposed to feynman that there might only be one electron in the world. the electron could relocate between different locations instantaneously, or it could travel forwards or backwards in time so as to exist as multiple avatars within the same moment, and by doing so it would provide the illusion that the universe contained many distinct electrons

of course, we know now that this theory is almost certainly incorrect. but it probably feels familiar to you anyway, because the idea of reversing time to create simultaneous images of yourself has become a common trope in sci-fi stories such as tenet, or maybe because you’ve read andy weir’s short story the egg, in which every human being is the same person dying and being reincarnated repeatedly at different locations and different times (if you haven’t seen it before, my favorite rendition is the kurzgesagt animation)

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II.

one of my less serious aspirations is to only own belongings that fit into a single suitcase, to be able to pack my life and move anywhere at a moment’s notice like the mathematician erdos, who would essentially take turns collaborating with friends while crashing at their homes 

i’m aware of the implicit privilege that enables this, but i hope you can bear with me anyway when i say that i rarely feel attachment to anything i have. i’ve never really been able to get around the feeling that there are way too many things where i’m from. many of us own dozens of clothes and only wear one outfit at a time, while the rest waste away in closets. everyone generally wants the same furniture and sets of appliances in their home but only uses each item for maybe a couple hours a day at most, meaning we have something like ten percent utilization rates. western households build centralized nest eggs to service as many personal needs as we possibly can; we stockpile ever-growing silos behind the walls of homes, and for the most part they just gather dust, but we continue anyway for some notion of independence or self-sufficiency. i’m not really sure why people (including myself) buy things, but whenever i travel or look at pictures of landfills i’m reminded that materialism is just exhausting for the soul, you know?

can you imagine if couches were communal and on-demand, if you could somehow request a couch and sit on it and then return it to the global pool of couches when you were done? if you can solve the couch transportation and cleaning problems efficiently and add in some kind of accountability system for damages and abuse, you have the blueprint for serving everyone’s couch needs while reducing the amount of couch manufacturing necessary by an order of magnitude

not that i have anything against personal couches specifically, or that they’re even a particularly good demonstration of this idea, but couches are just one of countless forms of ownership that simply don’t interest me. i don’t expect couch-sharing to be implemented anytime soon because of its sheer impracticality and unpopularity, but there is moderate evidence that our views towards ownership are strongly culture-dependent and i believe in our case they’re largely derived from mass advertising, so i’m optimistic that we will eventually change

although, if you’re not convinced, there are many relevant analogies suggesting this kind of couch delocalization is possible: every bike-sharing service everywhere; uber and airbnb to some extent, which are a step towards rethinking ownership of cars and homes; even banks, which share peoples’ money in a way that creates the illusion of more dollars than there really are. 

but this post is not about startups or business models or profit. i am just trying to write about my pursuit of lightness

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III.

the replacing guilt series proposes an interesting method of responding to catastrophe. essentially, when an event with randomness occurs eg. a sports bet and you land on the bad side, you can frame the loss as a negative outcome inflicted on yourself, as we typically do, or you can frame it as yourself cloning into two humans in parallel timelines, associated with the good outcome and the bad outcome, and you just happen to be in the version in the bad timeline. by doing so you can minimize a lot of unnecessary frustration and resentment about bad luck or how unfair the universe is or whatever and just accept and focus on the reality you’re in

there are a lot of similarities with the egg here – for example, if you consider your birth to be one of these random events and imagine parallel universes where you’re born into every human being ever then you’re just a reincarnation mechanism away from the premise of the egg

one of the things that’s often repeated about the egg is that it teaches compassion and being nicer towards other people, but i don’t think that’s true, in the sense that it seems rare to me for people to actually be kinder after reading. the entire point of the story’s setup is that it doesn’t matter whatsoever whether we are all the same person and the world is our egg, and so when you read the story you comprehend exactly what you already wanted to believe beforehand, most of the time at least. if you’re not predisposed to caring about interconnection with others you’ll likely read the story and rationalize that it doesn’t matter if we’re all the same person since we forget our memories after each rebirth anyway

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IV.

probably my least favorite thing about people isn’t when they’re mean or stupid, it’s when they’re exclusive. while it is impossible and not very useful to be equally inclusive towards everyone, you can at least treat strangers and non-friends with basic decency and respect and openmindedness. friend cliques and clubs and organizations that are unreasonably unfriendly or unaccommodating towards outsiders are among my least favorite social groups, and unfortunately they often perform these behaviors unintentionally. not that i’m under any illusions about my own role in perpetrating exclusivity; it happens all the time, especially because for the most part i’m still blind to the effects of my actions until i witness similar actions from someone else

i think the most common justification for social exclusivity is something along the lines of quality control and preservation. that is, one of the simpler methods for maintaining healthy communities is just to heavily gatekeep by being unwelcoming towards anyone who seems like they wouldn’t fit in on first glance. even if there are alternative ways to do community-building, few people care enough to put in the work to make them happen. i think it is common to drift your entire life and commiserate with people who feel like they don’t belong anywhere, only to stop thinking about those people the moment you find a place for yourself; vonnegut wrote that “the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured” and exclusivity cures the disease for yourself while making it somewhat worse for the outgroup

objectively speaking it doesn’t make very much sense for me to be more upset about exclusivity than meanness or stupidity, but it happens regardless, probably because i feel some kind of inequity or jealousy. like, if you’re a typically mean person who does harmful things every time someone interacts with you, at least i can be pretty confident i’m not really missing out on anything, whereas if you’re great to half the people in the world but unpleasant to the half that includes me then i think this person has so much genuine goodness and i will never experience it for no real reason, and for me that thought stings more deeply

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V.

i am in love with the world, so i want to go everywhere; i am in love with people, so i want to understand everyone. but i can’t go everywhere, even if all my belongings fit in one suitcase, even if i could travel at supersonic speeds, and so i tell myself that maybe we’re made from the same electron, and therefore part of me is everywhere. and i can’t understand everyone, even if nobody ever behaved exclusively, even if we all laid ourselves out for the world to read, and so i tell myself that maybe we’re all the same person reborn over and over, and therefore part of me is in everyone