Now, take away all notions of position, arrangement, order, and what’s left? A cloud of random numbers.īut if the pattern that is me could pick itself out from all the other events taking place on this planet, why shouldn’t the pattern we think of as ‘the universe’ assemble itself, find itself, in exactly the same way? If I can piece together my own coherent space and time from data scattered so widely that it might as well be part of some giant cloud of random numbers, then what makes you think that you’re not doing the very same thing?” What characterizes one point in space, for one instant? Just the values of the fundamental particle fields, just a handful of numbers. A cloud of microscopic events, like fragments of space-time … except that there is no space or time. Imagine a universe entirely without structure, without shape, without connections. Somehow - on their own terms - the pieces remained connected. He’d been taken apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but his dissection and shuffling were transparent to him. Yet the pattern of his awareness remained perfectly intact: somehow he found himself, “assembled himself” from these scrambled fragments. To an outside observer, these ten seconds had been ground up into ten thousand uncorrelated moments and scattered throughout real time - and in model time, the outside world had suffered an equivalent fate.
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