Storytelling is key to human experience. It sits at the very core of our identity as both individuals (“what is your personal narrative?”) and as a civilization (“the American Dream”) and a species (“Creation, Manifest Destiny, Evolution, the Civilized Ape, Masters of the Universe”). Traditional narrative has always been linear, perhaps due to the nature of the media it has been encapsulated within. What happens when those linear stories become quantum narratives?
Our current narrative: Since the dawn of time, storytelling has taken several forms. It originated with a tribe around the fire. Stories were shared. Some were about the days events: the hunt, the season. Some were about the Story of the Tribe: the oral history that was kept by the Shaman, and handed down from generation to generation.
These stories were eventually preserved and codified; first with pictures on cave walls, then later with the invention of writing (tablets, scrolls), later with the mass production of dead-tree books (Gutenberg), and finally with digitization (ASCII, Internet, Kindle).
During that entire time, stories have essentially maintained their linear arc: They follow a person or a people across time, generally from past to present (or present to future), and they have a well defined arc of exposition, ascending action, climax, descending action, that we all (most of us) learned in grammar school.
We sit today at a precipice… the dawn of a new age. The AI has eaten and digested all of our narratives, mythologies, origin stories, archetypes and tropes. Physics long ago transcended Newton with Relativity and the dawn of the Atomic Age. We now have satellites that have proven that gravity is malleable, and particle accelerators that, via quantum entanglement, break the ultimate limitation: the speed of light.
With new technologies come new forms of awareness.
Humanity is now coming to understand that Time is not necessarily linear, and that Space is not necessarily concrete. Both are malleable constructs.
Humans are becoming aware of other higher, parallel dimensions. Entire quantum multiverses where every possible branch has been explored, every choice has been made, and every outcome has occurred. Quantum computers, with qubits, embody & manifest this very principle; instead of calculating all possibilities one at a time in a near-infinite series of binary branches — zeroes and ones — they hold within each qubit both the zero and the one simultaneously. A qubit embraces and embodies the contraction. A qubit breaks the chains of Duality.
This begs the question:
If Time is non-linear, and Space is malleable… is it possible to hop, skip and jump in-betwixt quantum dimensions? To essentially “hop the rails” of our common, consensus-based idea of “reality,” — our present day TimeSpace continuum — and to visit those alternate past/future/present timespace dimensions? A spirit, soul, consciousness or body exploring other parallel universes… just as a traveller might hop on a flight and arrive in a distant land.
And if that would be possible, how would that change our way of telling stories? And how might modern technologies: genAI, xR, vR, BCIs… how might they play a role in both the visualization and manifestation of these quantum narratives… this new multiversed reality?
…to be continued…
Key Concepts:
- Quantum Shards
- Multiverse
- Interdimensional Travel
- Parallel TimeSpace Continuums
- Quantum Entanglement
- Relativity
- String Theory
- Nonlinear Storytelling
- the Illusion of Time
- dSky ACE : the Alchemy Creation Engine
Quantum Narratives in Movies:
- Everything Everywhere All At Once
- Travelers (Netflix)
- Doctor Strange
- …and the Multiverse of Madness
- Sliding Doors
- Run Lola Run
Donny Darko / DMT trip
(tertiary) Cloud Atlas
in Books:
Accelerando (Stross)
the Diamond Age (Stephenson)