The Magical Floorboard

Zac blinked a few times. “Fuck. That hurts my head.”

“No, Zachary! This is such a magical proposition! Here, come with me.”

I ran out of my bedroom, down the hallway, through the living area, and into the study. I crouched down on the floor as Zac caught up to me.

“I noticed this loose floorboard the other day.” I wobbled the piece of wood. “What do you think is beneath it? I haven’t looked yet.”

Zac’s eyes lit up. “Treasure! No — vintage Playboy magazines! No — a key to a hidden safe that’s tucked away somewhere in this city, and a trail of clues to find it!”

“Well, see, neither of us has made a measurement yet. We have no information about what is down there. So, right now, all of those things are down there, and none of those things are down there, and everything else is down there too. Underneath this floorboard, anything is possible.”

“Cooooool,” Zac cooed, his imagination on fire with endless ideas.

“But!” I warned, “that doesn’t mean anything is probable. Actually, I’ll explain that later. In the meantime, here’s where it ties into that quantum eraser experiment. We could feed a camera down there through this little hole and capture information on what is beneath this magical floorboard.” I tapped on a narrow gap in the wood where the corner had chipped and splintered. “Let’s say we were to capture footage of what’s beneath the floorboard. Then we were to erase that information before we looked at it. Would the contents underneath the floorboard still be in a superposition, where anything is possible?”

“If reality is functioning like your Minecraft game, then yeah,” Zac said.

“Right! And that’s exactly what happens in the quantum eraser experiment. If they measure which slit an electron goes through, but then they erase that information, it will appear as if the electron always traveled through the slits as a wave of probability.”

“Okay, okay,” Zac said, his brow scrunched up in thought. “What about this scenario: we feed a camera down there and capture information on what’s beneath the floorboard. Then you go into another room and look at the footage while I stay here. What happens then?”

I thought about it for a second. “Do I tell you what the camera says? Or do you see any of my facial expressions or anything that would give it away?”

“No. I wouldn’t even know you’d looked at it. You’d just promptly exit my life, never to return. Oh, and the information would be destroyed so no one else would ever see it.”

“Well then,” I said, “I guess for me, whatever is beneath the floorboard is no longer in a superposition. It is something in particular. But for you, it is in a superposition. Until you rip that floorboard open, anything and everything is down there.”

“What?! Are you serious?”

“Yeah,” I nodded. “That seems logical. My consciousness may have entangled with information describing what’s beneath the floorboard, but yours hasn’t.”

“This is so trippy.” Zac held his head again. “Does that mean you’re kinda in another universe to me?”

I thought about it for a second. “In a way, I guess. I haven’t thought too deeply about it, so take this with a grain of salt. It’s almost as if every observer is in their own subjective universe, but the universes are so similar that we can have a shared experience of objective reality. When information entangles with an observer’s consciousness, it ‘hardens’ reality into place for them — which is precisely what happens in a game. If I look around in Minecraft and see a tree, I can’t then do a 360-degree rotation and see a giant lollipop where the tree used to be.”

“Why not?” Zac asked.

“Because it wouldn’t be consistent! Imagine if I were an AI bot in Minecraft, observing a reality that was objective and stable and material. Then I turn around, and a tree morphs into a lollipop. The prediction error on that would be massive! I’d freak out. If the whole Minecraft world were changing drastically every second, then I wouldn’t be able to have a consistent life experience with any continuity or learning or growth, because everything would just be an unpredictable soup of information. It would be a terrible, chaotic game with no point to it.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if trees did turn into lollipops?” Zac imagined out loud. “I would install a mini garden on my balcony. Kind of like a DIY pot farm, but for lollipops.”

“I don’t really like lollipops,” I cringed.

“What did lollipops ever do to you?”

“Ugh, they’re just too sweet. I like the apple or grape-flavored Chupa Chups, but that’s about it.”

“Lame.”

“Actually, there was this one time back when I was in grade two, and Pokemon trading cards were all the rage. I really, really, really wanted a Charizard card so bad. I met this girl in the grade above me at the bus stop, and she said, ‘I’ll trade you my Charizard for a ginormous lollipop.’ The ginormous lollipops were pretty expensive for an eight-year-old, but I got to work earning the money.

Our parents used to set us loose on the little farm they’d just bought. We’d run around the fields with grass up to our elbows, ripping yellow fireweed out of the ground and getting paid five cents for a full garbage bag of it. The place was probably wriggling with snakes, but they had four children, so there were plenty of spares in case one of us died in a quintessentially Australian way.”

“You know,” Zac interjected, “I’ve always been suspicious of your perfect happy family. It’s like you stepped out of a Disney movie full of rainbows and bunny rabbits and butterflies where familial dysfunction is a foreign, esoteric concept. It’s nice to know your parents exploited you for child labor, though. It’s humanizing.”

“Naw, thanks Zac. So, anyway, I earned the money, bought the ginormous lollipop, and then met the girl at the drop point by the bus stop. I handed over the lollipop, eyes wide in anticipation of the beautiful shiny Charizard that would be joining the ranks of my collection. She took the lollipop and told me she’d bring the card tomorrow. Then she turned around and wandered off into the wind, fading away into oblivion. She was like a mirage, an enigma. I never saw her again.”

“That shady biatch!” Zac growled.

“I know! But I learned a valuable lesson from that experience.”

“And what was that?”

“People lie.”

Zac raised his eyebrows. “That’s it?”

“They lie to themselves, to each other, to the institutions they belong to. Life is an illusion, and if you can’t see the truth of things, you get your lollipop stolen.”

“Now that’s pretty profound for an eight-year-old.”