All narratives are ripples on the surface of eternity where they get stuck indefinitely. There's more than a bunch of unended short stories there and I would love to sketch a big picture and fuck the details but that would take too long. Life is a verb, not a noun. What this ultimately means is that all life is local. There is nothing mysterious going on. No collective rules from above or from below. Just emergent interactions, some of which I remember as the story of me. My first memories are from the 50's. Mom was a housewife and disliked that Dad worked night shifts at the Husqvarna weapons factory. At the kitchen table, stories were told of him standing as a border guard at night against occupied Norway during the Second World War. Many of them were drinking on their post during the nights. Some fell asleep. I thought I hope to miss the next war. Our lives are full of near misses from the beginning to the end. That's what gives them content, what could have been. Memory is a sketch of all kinds of memories a life can hold.
To reveal the presence of Schrรถdinger's cat as simultaneously alive and dead is not totally impossible but the difficulty of performing such a feat would render bringing the dead back to life trivial by comparison. There are no commandments demanding we toss out the other states of a cat in a superposition just because we cannot see them. We are allowed to dream of experiments that are sensitive enough. We can even dream that we are able to pick out where we are in Hilbert space among the plethora of universes depicted by the universal wave function. Such a dream would be a vector describing all our personal memories and all recorded history. But there is nothing in that dream forbidding another googolplex of universes with histories of their own. Many of them having precisely the properties expected for your perceived evolution through your particular universe. So where the hell are you? I will just have to make up something! Every way I could have lived is separated from all the ways I couldn't. That is the first piece of information. I was born in Jรถnkรถping in the 40s but could just as well have lived in the Stone Age or as a conscious AI program in the future. It has been estimated that the universe contains about 10 ^ {10 ^ {82}} different stories. Freedom is limited. There is a half-life of free choices. Living is a choice involving counterfactuals. The chronicle of life doesn't. Memories are stories that got stuck, whether they are true in some sense or memories from dreams or just made up, they are all fictitious. I remember that early on, I wanted elbow space free from compelling expectations, God's will, laws of nature, or chance. My narrative is the story of a caveman. My parents were convinced that one of our relatives was lucky. They said that he always managed to draw a winning lottery ticket. There's no such thing as luck! I screamed. But I didn't know how to explain it yet. Statistics I studied at university as an adult
couldn't cope with it either. An entire multiverse is required, it turns out. My universe was for a long time a large grain field that took off just where the new apartment buildings in northern Huskvarna ended before they built townhouses where almost all the teachers in the local primary school moved. Students could hide on trampled circles in the middle of the field. The girls then experimented with letting other people put their fingers in. Those were innocent times. My first transistor radio was the most expensive that could be found at a radio dealer in Jรถnkรถping and which I could persuade my dad to buy. It was so powerful that I could get radio broadcasts intended for US bases in West Germany. I sat in the evenings listening to them commentating American football and fantasizing about what the games might look like. God what a fantasy he has, Mom used to say. Be quiet! Do not disturb me when I think! I used to say. I was looking for a gold coin at the bottom of the well that was my thinking. Logic is the money of thought I read far later in Marx. When I moved to Stockholm, I got stuck on the new French film wave that broke with old film logic. And now I have finally discovered a new wave in continental philosophy that fits me, speculative realism, where thought is not a prison that prevents us from seeing the reality as it is beyond the senses. During the twenty years I worked in offices, as my mother put it, I never thought I was doing anything particularly important. But I got so good at playing the roleplay in public administrations that the director general in his huge corner office once confided to me that he chose it for the view down towards Eriksdalsbadet where with small binoculars he could watch the women sunbathing topless. I have spent much of my time unimportantly. I do not regret anything. If you repent, you have to believe you know the reason
why you did or did not do what you did or did not do. Anyone who knows how to do that can create the world's first conscious AI. Backpropagation is used by deep learning models. It's an old algorithm I ran a whole vacation on my laptop together with evolutionary algorithms to trade index options. Evolution is blind. That's why it works. But my algorithms never understood why. We were with children and parents in a six-bed cottage in Klitterbyn outside Ängelholm. Nobody understood what I was doing. I didn't get rich. All algorithms can be represented as computational graphs. When these become unmanageable, it is as if they disappeared into a "black box" that controls the algorithm's behavior. We are unable to see into our own black box. But with AI, there is a real opportunity to eventually find rules that confront us with ourselves. One of my most fun toys as a kid was a battery-powered car that you put on the table where it drove without ever falling over the edge of the table. A fifth wheel crosswise under the car only came into contact with the table surface as the front wheels dipped over the edge and spun the car onto the table again. Our consciousness tries to save us from falling in basically the same way. You always have to return home sooner or later and think about where the intended ended and what rules exist if you remove all thoughts from the playing field. A few thousand people have already pasted a open source code into the IBM Quantum Experience website through IBM’s cloud interface and use IBM’s five-qubit quantum processing unit to actually perform a physical teleportation of a qubit currently at IBM’s research center in Yorktown Heights immediately, faster than a thought, across a distance of 3.1 millimeters. And it would work over interstellar distances, given the right equipment.
Many summers ago, when me and my parents boarded the ferry from Malmรถ over to Copenhagen, I always went to the toilet. I had discovered how pleasing it was to sit there out of sight for everyone and just hear the boat's engines pounding on. The boats were not that fast, I had plenty of time to think and had no rush to arrive. Nowadays, as a closet amateur quantum mechanic, I look at the boat floating on the ocean's waves and reacting to changes in the wind like turbulent fields. I imagine that everything we experience is like bumps formed in quantum fields. A genetic and cultural mutation bumped into each other 70000 years ago and started making bumps in eternity! The time of the huge cruise ships is over. Huge dance parties or live concerts as well. It suits me well. I have always searched for the new wave and it is not found there but in my own cabin. I thought for a long time that I could compare myself with others. I was like the standard metre in Paris. It turned out to be wrong. I'm starting over. How to shape yourself never ends. I selfconsciously choose stories with sufficient reasons for where I am in my life. It's easy to get misunderstood. It happened that the girls I met in Stockholm's nightlife as a young man thought I was circumcised because the foreskin was hidden behind the glans due to my almost continuous jerking off in my early teens. I think of life as a deck of cards. The cards that are closest to your own have a great chance of staying there even after a shuffle of the deck of cards. With self-awareness comes every violation of your own perception of what you are to look like free will. It is important to avoid being too predictable. It pays to be irrational at times. Determinism means sufficient conditions for something to happen, not necessarily necessary! If you call every shuffle of the all-thatcan-happen deck of cards a story, then it's obvious that the mix that contains the story you are experiencing is sufficient for you to
actually do it, but it's not the only mix where you available. In other words, it is not necessary. The question of whether we have free will depends on how small we make the individual who is supposed to possess free will. Where is the identity that has free will? The information in the answer may come as an avatar embodiment! We make copies of the self-image in our short-term memory, but they fit images of the outside world with widely differing stories and expectations. The important thing is which we choose to communicate. In the 70's, the group Art Ensemble of Chicago chose to call their music Great Black Music instead of jazz. My black American wife tried to get Swedes to stop to calling some sweets they liked Negro balls or Negro kisses. If we fully digitalise ourselves every rule will have to change. We could start from scratch. With no rules there's a superposition of possibilities. If our lives will turn out better is an open question even if we had a God to ask, which we do not have. Despite Gรถdel, we act as if we had an oracle that can see that we possess an inherent behavior right for every occasion. With each dance step, we leave footprints in time that are different from all the steps we could have taken. We move on, like Minerva's owl flying at dusk, with memories from where we have never been. Memories are what are missing in what is there. Definite non-beings, Hegel might have said. I once planned to design our garden according to all the rules of landscape-gardening, then my mother said I should let my wife plant as she wanted too. It's like sailing. The wind also determines what determination can be followed. According to the anthropic principle, one can assume that the universe can somehow be determined based on the fact that we are here as observers. The first time I heard about the anthropic principle was when I was in Akademibokhandeln which at that time was on Gamla Brogatan between Drottninggatan and Klara
Norra, Stockholm's most sinful street at the time, sneak reading in a popular science book by Frank Tipler about a physics theory for immortality. The equations physicists have found to describe reality with are not that special. They always fit some reality and the physicists are like the clothing salesman who finds the right garment for the right customer, or like the client-focused therapist who helps one find a suitable perception of reality. Being born in the late forties in Sweden, I was thrown into the world like from a historical slingshot. We had then had the highest growth rate in the world for six decades and everything would just continue in the same way. By the time I came to Stockholm, a daily newspaper wrote that the graffiti board at Sergels torg in the middle of the city was the birthplace of freedom on earth. It is strange that you feel more free when you only follow the wind with full sails rather than when your own engine simmers. I was eighteen. Summer, city, RĂĽlambshovsparken. Girls who commented on each other. "She's got it together with the sun, do you understand?" I had so much to learn and my brain cells struggled to reduce entropy according to the second theorem of learning which simplifies everything. One fine day. I did civilian service at SIDA where an incredibly beautiful Ethiopian woman always wanted to take me to the cinema, but it was in a seven-room apartment on Ă–stermalm where an aupair girl arranged a party I got a hickey that was never going away. I talk loudly to myself all the time and make noises. "Dad is a soundtrack," my daughter used to say. It gets a little embarrassing when you rehearse dialogues from memory aloud or if you reproduce in a cinema what has just been said in the film. I learned to stop doing it, at least in a sober state. It's about as important as when I learned not to sneak fart in public. When I learn something, I stick to it. As an eleven-year-old, I learned from
watching the TV news that the military and religion were stupid things. I learned late in life that reality does not consist of a lot of elementary particles but of a few all-encompassing quantum fields, like an infinite pousse cafÊ that has been shaken or stirred here and there locally by the universal wave function. It was a definite turning point in my view of life when I finally let go of my resistance to the concept of fields the moment I fully realized that gravity is a field. Now I'm looking for where this, my latest writing project, will land. I think in seven years. You can run aground. But where does it start? It is not possible to answer exactly, but that does not mean that we doubt the reality of what you hit. How do you know when you reach a goal? It's more like searching for the length of a coastline. How long it is depends on the length of the yardstick you use. You can always get it a little longer if you change to a shorter yardstick, indefinitely. It's a bit like Zeno's paradoxes. What then is the real distance? No coastal road is infinitely long. It takes a certain amount of time to drive. I see consciousness as the water's edge on a shallow sandy beach. Which thoughts end up below or above the water surface change a little all the time. Some constantly end up under water and rule in the subconscious. Others become grains of memory from which we can build sand castles. The problem is not that sand castles weather. The problem is when the avatars playing in the sand do. Expressions in literature, art, philosophy or music that my brain's jinnee get to know in short-term working memory, I barely have time to wish immortality before I realize that they do not mean shit if I do not get to keep an avatar that can follow them. I was going to turn five shortly after Dad turned forty and I told Mom I wanted to have as big a party as he had. But then grandma died and we went to her townhouse in VäxjÜ where I scared the neighbor boy by saying that his parents would die before him. And back home in Huskvarna again when a hubby in the stairwell next
to ours had a fiftieth birthday party, the only thing I could think of was what a horror it must be to know that you only have at most half of your life left. I got an awkward attitude to big family reunions just at that moment. How closely one's ideas are related to others should be given far greater importance than with whom one happens to have a genetically close relationship. During sexual reproduction, your child leaves exactly half of its genes to your grandchild, but that half could by chance be the half it received from its other parent and not a single gene from you. After four generations, there is almost a greater chance that you are related to a person you meet by chance. To research family trees is completely pointless! At the same time the Covid 19 pandemic started spreading mindlessly around the world a major breakthrough in quantum computing spread even faster, though it took 165 pages to prove, that the class of entangled multiple interactive proofs is equivalent to the set of recursively enumerable languages and contains uncomputable problems which involves reducing the Halting Problem to the problem of approximating the entangled value of nonlocal games. Now that's a real showstopper! Life begins with Turing-compatible general computing power, simple RNA manages that, and the Halting Problem is the driving force behind our existential anxiety, that we feel we are alive. With consciousness we demand immortality. When I became a widower at the turn of the century, I sold the house and moved out to a printer's shed south of town. I processed the grief by writing the trilogy The Draw from Infinity, The Pattern of Diversity and Without Me in Heaven. Where each one from different perspectives, big to small, was based on an insight I took from quantum physics that all moments are forever in their own worlds and that all possible worlds exist. I thought I had come up with something when I thought about collecting as many good moments as possible to add the pile of moments in all worlds, but when I said that to one of the first avatars I met in
Second Life, she became angry and said it was like blaming people for shit happening. Physicists agree that according to quantum mechanics, any possibility that is not forbidden will actually happen, but also that information, according to the same quantum mechanics, is forbidden to ever be destroyed. Everything that happened one can in principle find again. Reproducible patterns are easy to find. They exist in all possible contexts. Outbreaks of mass silliness happen from time to time, and eventually get corrected. Not all patterns are interesting, only those that carry digital information. It is the prerequisite for reproduction in all life and not just, as one might think, life in virtual worlds. A woman from Gothenburg once said that I spent my whole life being different. For a long time I thought I wanted to break patterns and therefore sought anonymity in the big city. At the same time, I was the first among my Stockholm friends to get a family and a terraced house. A friend once said: Everything is logic. Of course, evolutionarily stable patterns all follow their own logic. I believe that the solution to the mysteries of the human mind lies hidden in an evolutionary scheme that has been internalized, otherwise consciousness would not have the immense external influence it has. There is a difference between imitating and understanding, imitating the cause, the causal invariance. The one that is far away, where so much concrete has been opted out, has been abstracted. In art, for example, other art is copied, not reality, so many times that it ends up so far from reality that it is perceived as creativity. As a Dutch artist I got to know expressed the matter, all artists copy, but the really skilled steal! How do you become famous without being famous? It is far from simple, but you simply have to steal fame. I played Texas Hold'em long before the time of internet poker, both tipsy for fun with friends and sober and serious with coworkers. No one managed to copy my methodology which made me win three nights out of four. You can not imitate invisible
rules, just try to guess at them. It was difficult because I had rules for how and when I would let chance rule over how I invested my money. Besides, I'm not sure anyone else would do as well with them either. When my co-workers found out that I kept statistics on how the winnings from our poker nights turned out, they did not want to continue and I stopped playing serious poker altogether. So no harm is done if I now reveal the rules I played by. They are no more complicated than they fit on a handwritten sheet of paper. In poker, as everywhere else, luck is not a property, it is an effect. The effect is like an echo in a local place and it diminishes over time. Not even I can decipher my old game codes anymore, even though I know what they were meant to do, be exposed as bluffing often enough to make it profitable in the long run. Reality is bluffing. No matter how much we call it, we only see the echo of it in memory. Consciousness is not a property, it is an effect. All echoes die out. If my thoughts are like echoes in the brain, I only exist while I die. If all sensory impressions come as drum beats with different frequencies, which give echoes in the brain, one can ask oneself whether one can hear on the echo what shape the drum has. You have to try it out by hitting it. We play as long as we live. Things happen all the time. Remembering is events in the brain. But we should call them actions. Certainly not all events are actions, but all actions are events. The boundary between events and actions is like looking into a fractal. When I had just become a widower and sat alone in the large villa, I constructed from memory a perception of my wife's face behind a plant. But there you are! I had time to say out loud before the illusion disappeared. It did not stop me from seeing her for several days in the same place behind tears. If you tap on level water, you get ripples that move outwards. But that the water move outwards is an illusion. A leaf floating on the water moves up and down when the waves pass by. Effects have
effects even if they do not exist more than as just effects. Take a water vortex in a river. It's just a statistical phenomenon. If you look at the water molecules individually, the vast majority float straight ahead in the riverbed. Sometimes I think we have a fractal in our head that is the same as the fractal on which all the many worlds of quantum mechanics lie and that everything constantly falls as if in a black hole. After the financial crisis of the 90's, which cost me my job, I threw myself into theories about everything. I found the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics which in a way says that everything that is physically possible happens in some world. I had just turned 60 when I found another variant ten years later that everything that happens is everything that can happen and also happens on a non-computable fractal invariant attractor. These two theories can be combined with the help of difficult mathematics with p-adic numbers and topological geometrodynamics. When I first came to Stockholm, there was so much new to take in that I almost forgot to sleep. I especially remember a performance at the Pistol Theater in the Old Town that I saw after three days without sleep, when suddenly the actors seemed to have their throats cut off. I got up and went home to sleep then and did not even have to try to read difficult math to succeed. A Finnish theoretical physicist, Matti Pitkänen, has for over forty years tried to construct a theory of everything that also includes consciousness, but the mathematics in it transcends my understanding. There are other ways to understand reality. Right now I am reading a Finnish fiction writer possessed by the devil's interval in music. We live on the bounce. In thought, the bounce comes from infinity. It makes the logic easier. Easier than nothing. I used to say that I would choose a job that was fun when I grew up. It seemed obvious. Working life takes up so much space in life that it would be stupid to do something you did not like. Many years later, when I was studying at Stockholm University, I tried
during a long walk along Valhallavägen, from Östra station to Gärdet, to imagine in detail what different career choices meant. I came to the gloomy conclusion that I could not imagine a job I would enjoy in the long run no matter how hard I tried. I decided that there must be more than a narrow path between dull details and blows that need to be corrected. As a schoolboy, I read that if the universe had a sound, a background sound that was always there, we would not hear it. On the other hand, one could imagine that situations could arise where this background noise created resonant sounds in parts of the universe. These sounds would in principle be possible to hear. The next time I had ringing in my ear, I ran in to Dad shouting: Dad, I hear the universe! If you were to ask me today why I was interested in whether it was possible to hear the universe, the answer would be: Why be interested in anything else? It is not really what the universe in its multiversity can tell us that is the most interesting. What is most interesting is what it can not tell us. For example can no God speak to us. Every time you lie, you get a dot in the soul, my mother said. As a child, I needed something concrete to put my soul in, something that could get dots, otherwise my mother's words became far too confusing. I decided that the soul was in the heart. My organs move at about a million kilometers per hour through the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang. If the soul did not follow, it simply would not be able to keep in touch with me. My conscience must come from within myself, must move in step with my brain and heart. The simplest argument against having an ultimate judge is that no steadfast being would have a chance in the hellish evolution since the Big Bang to find the culprit on Judgment Day! The closest we come to a tangible absolute, and for our personal life completely indifferent, reality is the cosmic background radiation. Every even
more absolute power would have even less opportunity to influence us on a personal level. With quantum physics, we can not only eliminate a God with the ability to communicate with us, but any form of omniscient God. In the double-slit experiment the result is dependent on if the information about which slit the photon went through failed to get recorded anywhere else in the universe, other than the photon location itself. If God, unbeknownst to us mortals, took divine note of which slit the photon went through that would destroy the interference pattern. Every time we do the experiment, are we collecting still more data about the nonexistence of an all-knowing God. I am aware that there seems to be a loophole that says that there is a creator who designed everything and then leaned back and watched how everything goes according to plan without requiring further intervention in the natural laws he created. But that won't wash, either. A relatively new discovery is that already the set of symmetries that are established within mainstream physics is enough to take the wind out of all thoughts about a planned or conceived universe. The laws of nature can be traced to the underlying symmetries and structurelessness. Our laws of nature are nothing but the expression of reality's total lack of design. Total lack of design can be defined with them! The obvious symmetries of the coherent void do not prevent quantum physical decoherence. Unlike the laws of nature, all forces of nature, all structure and all living things, are the result of symmetry breaks and the subsequent evolution, and all symmetry breaks are spontaneous in the sense that they do not prefer any particular direction, other than not being reversible as long as they sweep away traces of the breaking. We remember our experiences and thoughts and constantly find new ways to register and share them, even though the self itself does not want to be found but escapes from memories, flees as stubbornly as possible from the
grave. When you stop doing that, you have either died or become religious. It is all the same.
