Being There

Athens, GA, April 21, 2006

I left home for the last time yesterday, and am spending three days in Athens for my girlfriend's sister's wedding. On the long drive I wondered, what makes me be here? In this car, heading up to the trailhead via a wedding? Why am I not, say, in the star-realm of Kosmexx, where macrointelligences manipulate superclusters of galaxies into big-bang- defying shapes? The reason I am here and not there can be summed up in one word: bandwidth.

An entity's location (defined in any number of dimensions; spatial, temporal, or probabilistic) may be practically defined by where the majority of its information comes from. I am pretty sure that I am an entity (forgive me Gautama Buddha), and, as it turns out, the fattest pipe for this me-entity comes through my body's senses. My body exists in a pretty narrow range of probability: you can't change much about the world without changing yourself beyond all recognition. So my mind tends to like these senses because it's the best data provider.

Nothing is actually tied down to one possible universe, however. Time is not a line. I actually can be in Kosmexx, or, with the help of a computer, wander off to be a superhero, or an Orc, or what-have you. Our minds are not as limited as our bodies in this sense. But our data rates to and from these alternate universes is an inestimably small fraction of the data rates we get from our senses in this world. We creative types need to remind ourselves of this occasionally. Focusing too much on the possible cuts you off from the real. And there ain't nothing like the real thing.

As technology advances, however, and the bandwidth of the senses is matched by our artifice, we may find ourselves living in a different kind of universe. Just as the aircraft opened up the third spatial dimension, and written language opened up the temporal fourth dimension, hacking the senses may open the gates to parallel universes. It's not that farfetched. You're reading this. You're already there.