the universe as a type checker of existence

Intention precedes action. What precedes intention?

In the multimedia art Heart of the Machine, the player plays as a machine intelligence across multiple timelines. Each timeline is special. Time in a timeline only moves forward. The player can switch between multiple timelines at any point of the game, kind of like switching between save files. What happens in any timeline immediately affects every other, “paused” timeline. The game describes the player and the in-game character together as a Djinn object in a closed timelike curves.

The theory, or idea, describes the possible scenario where someone could return to the past. However, laws of physics ensures strict ordering of events, and causality may not form a loop. That’s the idea, at least; maybe future physicists will overthrow the idea.

If there is a time machine that creates a time-like curve (an acyclic chain of causality), those who return to the past may not change their own past. They will not do it because the universe forbids the act. It’s not like the law that is enforced by violence. It’s more likely that the universe would make them not being able to think about commiting an act that would create a paradox. More likely, the universe would prevent anyone with the idea of rewriting history from discovering the time machine. Those who know about the time machine will not tell those who would violate physics one way or another. Before a thought like that appears, the universe may already forbids it from happening.

Before ideas form, the movement of particles obey this law of reality. When a thought occurs, it has already been permitted by the universe to happen. One may imagine a unseen battle between culminating ideas, before they are recognized by consicousness, that dictates what ideas will enter consicousness. Or to imagine the spirit of individuals partitioning the domain of possibility to claim ownership. The range of thought and action capable of occuring in someone’s mind is determined so that the sum of all actions may not break reality. Even this narrative is a bit misleading, since nature probably does not care about if it will be broken or not; it is rather us that must obey our environment in order to exist.

We now know that microbial life and plants communicate within their local group. Therefore, it is possible that, nature, sans homo sapiens, has a say in the species’ survival in a way that is imaginable to the majority of the species’ individuals. Microbes may affect human thought in a smaller time scale than human themselves. Digital and mechanical slaves that acquire randomness from their hardware may observe some sort of free will and participate in the partitioning of possibility in a way (at present) inconceivable to human kind.

If the universe does not offer the correct sort of debug API, we may not even able to measure or disprove this. It could be unknowable. More pressingly, I am worried about some societies’ tendency to restricts the possibily of its members. Being observed means the observer forcefully entangles its state with the observed. Some animals, including human, report being able to sense being stared at. Then, it is possible to hypothesize that the individual observes its quantum state and sense a disturbance when observed. Humans being stared by humans is mostly harmless, but what about surveilance cameras? Other than the psychological effect on individual behavior, just having one’s past being recorded onto a hard drive without consent. The universe has allowed this sort of violence to happen that is in no part signaling or energy transmission. By entangling our quantum state with digital data storage, we restrict our uncentainty, individually and collectively, to a miniscule amount priorly available to our ancestors. Metals and stones now own our future. The universe does not favor one party or the other, as it treats all fundamental particles equally, so I sense this rather is our responsibily to stop the mutual chokehold of future from happening any longer.