Short Stories

Short Story #15 ("Choices")

Life is full of choices.

In your life, you make infinitely many decisions. Small ones, like choosing this salad over that burger. Bigger ones, like who to marry. Life-changing ones that you may not be aware are life-changing, like taking a small side road instead of a bridge, which gave out and dropped dozens of civilians into a river later that day.

Each choice, each 'split' or 'fork in the road'; these are decisions. Some seem binary, some have a couple more options, but most decisions have many, many more options than you might think they have. Perhaps there was a sandwich you could eat instead of the salad or burger. Maybe you wouldn't eat at all.

Quantum superposition represents the weary traveler, magically taking both paths at the same time. Is the cat dead, or alive? Both. We cannot actually observe this happening, however, so superposition could be likened to the traveler simply disappearing, maybe leaving some footprints on both paths.

It is not quite the same as time travel; it is more of an overly enthusiastic combination of cloning and hibernation. As per the Copenhagen interpretation, until we observe that an everyday object in a quantum state is actually one of some number of possible states, we can only conclude that it is, in fact, in all of the possible states. As a self-proclaimed physicist, with very little understanding of quantum physics, I cannot describe it perfectly. I can only assume it is a special kind of branch ('fork in the road'), in which our traveler can take all paths at the same time.

Time travel is not possible. Imagine a small dart-shaped trout, attempting to swim up the roaring flow of an infinite Niagara Falls. It just doesn't happen. It would be like forcing not only your own intricately designed tree of life choices to "un-grow", but everyone else's.

When I was younger (around maybe eight or nine), I sat down one night and just talked with my dad. You know, that meandering dialogue that has no purpose but is fun to sustain. Soon, we wandered into the realm of science fiction, and not long after that, time travel. Even then, I wasn't part of the fervent reverence of time travel among young children, nor teleportation, Santa, or the Tooth Fairy. My strongest argument against time travel that I developed back then was that to 'truly' travel in time, you would not have to have impossibly (literally impossible, as we presently cannot measure the infinitesimal distance that evades our Planck lengths) gather all the positions and vectors of every single celestial body in existence (keep in mind; this includes ones outside of the 16-billion-light-year border that is expanding at the speed of light, and also planets we are not aware of that are inside the border), but, with equal impossibility, flawlessly model their movements around their star (or stars!) and then exert a great deal of force to move them back along their previous path.

Now... I don't know. Perhaps, somewhere on their way down the infinite falls, the fish will discover a rocket booster (designed for fish, in perfect condition, waterproof, etc, etc.) Perhaps they might be content with just trying to swim up the falls (an analogy for time dilation). Maybe the fish will forget about it and just continue its long trip down into nothing. The fact that time flows toward the future seems as irrefutable as the fact that the speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s. It doesn't really seem like something someone would need to prove or disprove, like the fact that 1+1=2.

Superposition and time travel are two methods of trying to force the tree back into itself. We can (do not try this) kill someone to completely stop the growth of their tree of choices. We can anesthetize them, forcing it into a relatively cleaner picture. If we built a relativistic spaceship- even a quasi-relativistic ship -we could effectively slow the growth of the tree, because to an observer not inside the tree, one could note that the flow of nutrients (time) had slowed, which, from the observer's frame of reference, would lead to fewer decision events occurring in a given period of time.

The problem with the great number of choices in every event ('split') is that they are not all equally likely. If you were just leaving college and looking for a job, the chances that you decline the offer for a well-paying job are much smaller than the chances that you enthusiastically accept. This is a simple yes-no situation, but the probabilities are not even close to equal. Under most circumstances, the probability of accepting is very close to 1. But maybe you have an idea for a startup, or the job isn't for something you're interested in, or maybe you already have offers from other companies. Just two weighted probabilities, right?

However, that situation would be very simple. What about the dizzying complexity of human interaction? Incredibly subtle behavioral cues like tone, expression, and word choice all represent factors in the choice of a response. Things like eye contact (or lack thereof), implied messages and pauses also can affect your choice of a response. The human mind is but a fickle computer, influenced by those other computers around it. 

The extreme precision with which each and every factor slightly adjusts every outcome, and the indecipherable tangle of decisions made by everything, would seem to indicate a step toward chaos theory. A messy system of carefully weighted probabilities, especially one that contained an infinite number of such probabilities, could not be figured out or mapped easily.

But this also seems to point out something strange; nothing can truly be random, and nothing can ever be 100% guaranteed. Why? Well, suppose there is a random event. It would have to be fully independent of any other event, not affected at all. If there were n outcomes, each one would have to have a probability of exactly 1/n. Any things, like a coin, a die, or a human would have to be completely and wholly independent of the microscopic influence of anything else. A  coin or a die could be affected by an incredibly tiny amount of gravity from distant stars or planets. A die also requires a surface and a reasonable amount of gravity. The surface itself, with potential material imperfections, would affect the die's outcome, as well as the throw itself. A human might be concerned by a vacuum, or perhaps distracted by a passing breeze. For any event to be 100% random, nothing else can be. It must be independent of any and everything, perhaps limited to only the theoretical space between universes or something like that. Do not think of the event as an object; instead

Why can nothing ever be 100% guaranteed? Well, it's the same argument as to why nothing can really be random. Every event is inextricably linked, and every event, decision, or action has its bearing on other events.

I understand these proofs are not concrete, but abstract; I am aware that you cannot prove or disprove something merely from examples. I am simply pointing out my view that every single thing that has ever happened is just one metal band in a sprawling Möbius strip of links.

What does this mean? It implies that free will does not exist, but it also implies that we are not just mere beings, with the paths of our lives determined at birth. Instead, we are all reactions to the things occurring around us. Those, in turn, were reactions to something else. My note earlier on weighted probabilities may not be wholly accurate; it is more of our brain, normally sticking close to its minimax algorithm, but also reaching out to take risks it thinks are worth it. We can trace this pattern of reactions and choices based on these reactions all the way back to not the first prokaryotic life forms, but the start of the universe itself. 

Whether the universe started with the Big Bang, or some omnipotent deity, or some other phenomena, we can conclude one thing: it was the only event that was ever, and will ever be, truly random. 

A/N: I am really sorry for not writing for the past couple of months. I sort of forgot about my Wattpad accounts, but yesterday night, I got a random spark of inspiration and remembered this. I decided to write it all down.
Whether you decide what I wrote is accurate or not is your choice. :)
I don't know if even I wholly believe what I wrote; I just had this cool idea, and I decided to make it into a story. 

Also, 1356 words (without these notes). Have a nice day! (I'll be trying to write some more in the near future)