Forking Paths, the Multiverse and Mushrooms

. . . how we keep being confronted by the same old choices

Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash

Here is something to consider.

I keep returning to the same idea. It is not especially original, and might be summarised as follows: in our everyday lives we are frequently presented with a choice of whether to choose course A or course B.

The argument was famously addressed by Robert Frost in his poem The Road Not Taken:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

This idea became something of an obsession for me, so much so, that years ago, I wrote a kind of riposte to Frost, in my prose poetry collection Sad Giraffe Café:

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

There was a fork in the track. I chose one of them, assuming the other to be the road not taken. After a few minutes I returned to the fork, chose the other one. It looked much the same as the first, though I knew that by taking it I was messing with fate. Within an hour or so, the road originally taken had become the road not taken, and I had to invent some kind of alternative destination for it. I decided that all outcomes are, to a large extent, the result of will. It was then that I realised I had lost my shadow.

Two more, and so on ad infinitum

So it was that a couple of months ago, reading Silvia Iparraguirre masterful novel Tierra del Fuego, I came upon the following sentence:

I understand that there are always two roads and then two more, and so on ad infinitum, but in the beginning only two.

Which in turn reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges’ famous story, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, in which we find this:

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one of them at the expense of the others. T’sui Pên . . . chooses —simultaneously— all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times that start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times.

As it happens, a few months back I wrote an essay on this theme for PN Review (paywall alert) from which the following is adapted:

Hugh Everett, a Princeton PhD student, published a thesis in 1957 in which he claimed that we are living in a multiverse in which exist countless copies of each world’s contents, including ourselves. As Everett’s biographer, Peter Byrne, explains: ‘the wave function of an observer would, in effect, bifurcate at each interaction of the observer with a superposed object.’ Thus every choice or decision in the course of a life precipitates the splitting of the universe, which then continues to split, infinitely, with each decisive turn that follows. ‘Each branch has its own copy of the observer, a copy that perceived one of those alternatives as the outcome . . . each branch embarks on a different future, independently of the others.’

At the time, Everett’s theory was rejected by the then reigning authority in quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, and Everett, disgusted by academia, gave up theoretical physics and went to work for the Pentagon as a probability analyst, in which his work included the prediction of various scenarios of nuclear Armageddon. However, among a small group of followers, his hypothesis lived on, grew in momentum, and is now regarded by many of today’s leading quantum theorists as foundational. According to one of the most eminent of those physicists, Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Everett’s discovery — known as the Many-Worlds Interpretation, or MWI — is ‘as important as Einstein’s work on relativity.’

The idea that our world is one of many parallel worlds that branch off from each other, moment by moment, without intersecting or communicating, with the result that each permutation of every event has the potential to occur somewhere, is both appealing and terrifying. On a personal level, there is some comfort, to me at least, in imagining that all the bad decisions I ever took have — in some distant world — been counteracted by better ones. On the other hand, there is the moral dilemma of knowing that by making certain choices in this world, one runs the risk, almost by definition, of setting off a chain of events that will have negative ramifications elsewhere in the multiverse. After some consideration, however, one might come to the conclusion that the best way to live in a multiverse of many worlds is to be mindful of the way you live your life in this one.

The passage in Borges that has drawn comparisons with Everett’s hypothesis occurs in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’. In this story, which takes place in England during World War One, the protagonist, Yu Tsun, is working for the Germans as a spy. Yu Tsun, who is Chinese (and who despises Germany as a ‘barbarous country’) is being pursued by a British agent named Richard Madden, who is in fact Irish, a detail — reflecting those that besiege Yu Tsun himself — that already suggests divided loyalties. Yu Tsun has information of great importance to the German war effort, but with Madden closing in on him, is unable to pass this on to his masters in Berlin (nor do we, the readers, learn what this information consists of until the final paragraph).

Yu Tsun goes, inexplicably, as it seems at first, to the house of Dr Stephen Albert, a renowned Sinologist with a special research interest in Ts’ui Pên, Yu Tsun’s grandfather, a respected sage, who retired as Governor of Yunnan Province in order to write a vast novel and to create a maze ‘in which all men would lose themselves.’ He spent thirteen years absorbed in these tasks before he was assassinated by a stranger. His novel had no sense to it and nobody ever found his labyrinth. It turns out, this being Borges, that the book and the labyrinth were one and the same thing, and the title of this infinite and chaotic novel is, of course, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’

Albert tells Yu Tsun that Ts’ui Pên’s novel is modelled on a labyrinth in the sense that it constantly bifurcates in time, but not in space. ‘In all fiction,’ he explains, ‘when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others.’ However, in this novel, whenever a course of action has to be decided upon, rather than choosing one and pursuing its linear development, each course taken divides in two, with each of these being the point of departure for other, further, bifurcations, and so on. As others have remarked, the ‘pullulation of possibilities’ that Yu Tsun senses, anticipates the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Hugh Everett by fifteen years.

The similarities between Everett’s hypothesis and Borges’s story can be encapsulated in corresponding passages from each work. In the fifth section of Everett’s original article, in Reviews of Modern Physics, Vol 29, No 3, (1957), we find:

The ‘trajectory’ of the memory configuration of an observer performing a sequence of measurements is . . . not a linear sequence of memory configurations, but a branching tree, with all possible outcomes existing simultaneously.

And in Borges’ story:

In all fiction, when a man is faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of the others. In the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of them. He thus creates various futures, various times that start others that will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times.

Fungi . . .

Reading Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life recently (one of those books in which I found myself reading the same paragraph over and over again while trudging through the peat bog of my insomnia, inching snail-like towards understanding) I discover that for fungi, things are a little different. Fungal hyphae [the long, thread-like filaments that form the body of a fungus] not only manage to take both of two available routes, they do so with a difference:

When faced with a forked path, fungal hyphae don’t have to choose one or the other. They can branch and take both routes.

One can confront hyphae with microscopic labyrinths and watch how they nose their way around. If obstructed, they branch . . . One tip becomes two, becomes four, becomes eight — yet all remain connected in one mycelial network. Is this organism singular or plural, I find myself wondering, before I’m forced to admit that it is somehow, improbably, both.

So, while standard thinking suggests we take either route A or route B, and the Many-Worlds Interpretation presents us with the option of taking two self-bifurcating routes that lead into separate, discrete futures for the participants, fungi manage to take multiple routes and yet remain connected and communicating within one overarching network.

Unless I misunderstand, if this same concept were to be applied to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, we might imagine the different versions of oneself being in some kind of an ongoing relationship with one other, while inhabiting distinct iterations (or physical bodies) across the multiverse.

Unless, of course, that is what already happens, but we’re too dumb to cotton on; that is, we don’t have the perceptual faculties in place to detect our own others.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. His books include The Color of a Dog Running Away, The Vagabond’s Breakfast, The Blue Tent and Ambassador of Nowhere. For many years he led the graduate programmes in Creative & Critical Writing at Cardiff University. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.