A Koan

This essay is intended as a koan: a (perhaps metaphorical) connection between modern physics and contemplation: a reflection on the existence of alternative universes and the sense that every possibility, conceivable and inconceivable, exists in some spacetime or other. How to conceive of such a thing? A koan is used in Zen Buddhism to bypass logical thinking and perhaps a doorway into the nature of reality inaccessible to ordinary logic. What would it be like to look at problems, questions, issues with no preconceptions whatsoever? Another koan in itself.

Not a single thread between beginning or end, or from somewhere here to an unknown future, but tangled paths, criss-crossing, and momentarily being dimly aware that a host of alternative paths exist in superposition, and at every instant stumbling onto a lone path (perhaps involuntarily), quitting other paths.

We seem to travels from A to B along a single path. In quantum mechanics, a particle takes all possible paths. What seems is the result of interference. Single paths emerge because alternative paths are averaged out by my interference: my way of being: our way of being. Does quantum mechanics offer up koans? Most would say no: they are apparent paradoxes to be resolved or short-circuited. How can multiple paths conceivable coexist? Can they return from there to here? My present is your future, and your present mine.