Negative Twenty Questions

“Thank you, Zachary,” I smiled sweetly. “Now let’s return to the subject of time. So, John Archibald Wheeler-”

“The black hole guy?”

“Yes, the black hole guy. He is the physicist who came up with the delayed-choice quantum eraser experiment we watched earlier. He compared time to a game of negative twenty questions.”

“What’s that?”

“Let’s play it. It’s your job to guess the number I am thinking of. It’s a number between 1 and 50. You can only ask yes/no questions. Go!”

Zac paused briefly and then asked, “Is it more than 40?”

“Wow. That was a terrible search algorithm. Google would never hire you as a software engineer. But yes — it’s more than 40.”

“Good thing I don’t make my money as a goddamn software engineer, eh? Is it more than 45?”

“No.”

“Less than 42?”

“No.”

“More than 42?”

“No.”

“Oh! Is it 42?”

“Yes!”

“I am amazing. I am incredible. I am so smart.”

“That wasn’t a game of chess,” I laughed. “Now, from your perspective, it appears as if I picked the answer — 42 — and led you to it.”

“Isn’t that what you did?”

“No. You just asked yes/no questions, and I maintained consistent logic. For example, when you ask ‘Is it more than 40?’ and I say yes, I can’t also answer yes to a question like ‘Is it less than 10?’ That would be logically inconsistent.”

“So, the number you were thinking of was not 42?”

“What I’m trying to say is that there was no number decided upon ahead of time. You asked binary yes/no questions, and I answered them using consistent logic. According to the answers I gave, the number ended up being 42. From your perspective, it appears as if the answer always was 42 — but it wasn’t. Your questions didn’t lead you to a predetermined answer. Your questions created the answer in the present moment.”

“Oh…” Zac trailed off. “So when your Minecraft player observed the measuring device in the Schrödinger’s cat experiment, she was asking a question. When the measuring device told her the cat was alive, it would be inconsistent to look inside the box and see a dead cat. Is that what you’re saying?”

I nodded. “If you ask ‘Is it more than 40?’ and I answer yes, the answer has to be more than 40. If you ask ‘What is the state of the cat’ and the measuring device answers ‘alive,’ the cat must be alive to maintain consistent logic. It’s the same principle. Measurements are questions, and questions create answers — not the other way around.”

“And you’re saying our physical reality functions like this?”

“Yes, exactly.” I tapped on the loose floorboard again. “We haven’t yet asked the question, ‘What is beneath the floorboard?’ We haven’t looked.

Let’s say we look, and we find a time capsule that someone hid there fifty years ago. To us, it appears as if there had always been a time capsule there, buried fifty years ago. But really, up until the moment we asked the question, anything could have been down there. A back-history was loaded when we made the measurement. This back-history gave the appearance that someone planted a time capsule there fifty years ago. Because if reality and consciousness are the same thing, then time does not exist. There was no ‘fifty years ago’. To quote John Wheeler — ‘The past has no meaning or existence unless it exists as a record in the present.’

This is exactly how time works in a computer game, by the way — it’s all an illusion. In a game, the ‘past’ is created in the present moment. It exists in a malleable state until you measure it.”

“Holy shit!” Zac exclaimed. “This is so exciting! So right now, this very moment, we are creating the past?”

“If reality and consciousness are the same thing, then logic says yes.”

“So you’re saying, the questions I ask — where I look, the information I’m receiving — right now, in the present moment, is affecting what happened fifty years ago?”

“Correct,” I said. “It’s affecting what happened fifty seconds ago, fifty minutes ago, fifty days ago, fifty months ago, fifty years ago, fifty centuries ago. Time is an illusion. It’s all perceptual.”

“Ehmagawd, this is incredible!” Zac yelled. “But is there a way for me to control the game? Like, if everything beneath this floorboard is possible right now, is there a way to choose which possibility manifests? Do I have any control over it? Or is it all just random?”

“Here’s where it gets interesting.” I paused for dramatic effect. “Close your eyes.”

Zac closed his eyes.

“Imagine you’re in a coffee shop with me. We’re chatting. You’re telling me all about something rare and esoteric that you saw recently, like-”

“Like that handmade skull-shaped Aztec death whistle I found in that little Mexican village?” Zac suggested.

“Yes! Perfect. Imagine you are telling me about your trip to that Mexican village, and the whistles, and your conversations with the lovely people there. You’re describing that horrible shrill sound that the whistle makes. Then you leave the coffee shop and wander down the street right here in Sydney, Australia. You peak into the window of a secondhand shop and do a double-take. Right there, nestled in amongst the bric-a-brac and old teapots, is an Aztec death whistle — an identical twin to the one you found in the village on the other side of the world.

And you say ‘Oh my God! What an incredible coincidence! I was just talking about this whistle, and now here it is, right in front of me. What are the chances of that?’ So you go and rave about it to your skeptical friend, who says ‘Zac, it’s just confirmation bias. Stop looking for patterns where there are none. Everything is random. You only noticed that whistle because you were talking about it.’ And now, wake up.”

Zac opened his eyes.

“So tell me… was it a coincidence that the whistle was there?”

He scrunched up his brow in thought. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Well, I guess there was no separation between my ‘inner world’ of thoughts and words and my ‘outer world’ of physical reality. All of it was contained within my own consciousness.”

“Yes!” I cheered. “When you are in a dream, there is no boundary between everything inside of you — ‘the observer’ —  and everything outside of you — ‘the observed’. They’re the same thing. So of course your thoughts and words and imagination can leak into your physical reality. Separation is an illusion.

That’s why you can talk about an Aztec death whistle and then see it in a secondhand shop two minutes later. From your perspective in the dream, you call this ‘coincidence’ because it looks like the death whistle had been there for months. But we know from our higher perspective that your consciousness constructed that entire illusion. The whistle manifested in the shop the moment you observed it, not days or months ago.”

“So are you saying that my imagination can spill out into reality, right here in this see-it-smell-it-taste-it-touch-it-hear-it world?” Zac spread his arms out in the air, gesturing towards all the objects and furniture and knick-knacks in the room.

“Logic says yes. When we get to the end of this riddle, I’ll tell you what is causing reality to manifest as something in particular, from a field of possibilities. There is nothing random happening. It all appears to be a very elegant, recursive algorithm. It’s quite a clever setup, actually. Breathtakingly simple and genius in its design.”

“Tell me now!” Zac pleaded.

“No. If I tell you now, you won’t understand it.”

“Fine.” He pouted like a thirty-one-year-old child.