George Legba

The similarity between Old George in Cloud Atlas and this rendition of Papa Legba is not a coincidence.

Old George appears to Zachary when he comes to certain forks in the road.

Note the tats on the hand

OpenWorm

from an article in The Atlantic

But in between the cell-on-silicon and the brain-on-silicon simulators lies a fascinating and strange new project to create a life-like simulation ofCaenohabditis elegans, a roundworm. OpenWorm isn't like these other initiatives; it's a scrappy, open-source project that began with a tweet and that's coordinated on Google Hangouts by scientists spread from San Diego to Russia. If it succeeds, it will have created a first in executable biology: a simulated animal using the principles of life to exist on a computer.

"I suspect that we'll recognize that living systems are far-from-equilibrium molecular systems that are carrying out very specific sophisticated physical patterns and have some ability to sustain themselves over time," OpenWorm's organizer Stephen Larson wrote to me. "Thinking about it that way makes me go beyond a black and white notion of 'alive' to a more functional perspective -- living systems are those which self sustain. Our goal is to aggregate more of the biological processes we know that help the worm to self-sustain than have ever been aggregated before, and to measure how close our predictions of behavior match real living behavior, more than it is to shoot for some pre-conceived notion of how much 'aliveness' we need."

Free Won't

What if each entangled ensemble of sub-selves have varied experiences between break-point events? A way out of the confusion caused by a slip? Self-deception offers the best hope for a contiguous and uninterrupted narrative flow. Your office is in a different location after the slip? You now remember discussing the relocation and approving the new location. Combining Triver's self-deception as an evolutionary good trick with Kahnemann's S1 and S2 (fast, slow) mental construction it seems plausible that we simply rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic of mental life.

Dr. Legba will see you now

The fly in the ointment is ingrained S1 habits which may be different before and after the slip. For these difficult transitions, S2 fires up the pre-frontal cortex to edits response like Brietbart/O'Keefe. Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia. Now, the will of the ensemble of dispositions gets over-written not by independent volition or free will but by a resistance to results from hard to fathom S1 habit. We exercise free won't and pass by the desert cart and the open bar. The plural 'I am' is now (post-slip) joined by a second voting coalition in rising pandemonium. The pre-frontal machinery engages, deceives and lands on an open square on the chess board. A smooth narrative wallpapers over our confusion and we press onward through the fog.

The Library of the Adjacent Possible

The writer Jorges Luis Borges describes The Library of Babel, a vast collection of books 410 pages in length which contain every possible permutation and combination of letters, numbers and punctuation. In this library is every book ever written and every book that will be written. In addition, all volumes which differ by one character, one word, one paragraph or one chapter from legitimate works. Some volumes contain a single character followed by blank pages and some have no vowels.

The Library of Babel.

My personal favorites are "Gravity's Rainbow" by Ernest Hemmingway, "A Farewell to Arms" by Mark Twain and "Huckleberry Finn" by Thomas Pynchon. The same narrative in a different style occurs for every book ever written and all books not yet written.

Several other such libraries are described by Dan Dennett among others. The Library of Mendel has every possible combination of DNA base pairs (and therefore every gene). The Library of Boltzmann has a description of every neuron and neuronal connection in every brain imaginable in addition to many brains that cannot exist. The Library of Hubble contains a description of every galaxy and star.

In the prevailing model of the Multiverse, all these libraries exist in every possible combination and permutation. There is a star like our sun with a third planet devoid of life in one instance and another with 7 billion dinosauroid sapiens with the same names and habits of our own. By Bell's Theorem, I am entangled with the fermions and bosons of all near possible variants of this present phenotypes. I am multitudes.

Freedom Evolves

Re-reading Dennett with especial attention to determinism in the multiverse. The collapse of the universal wave function seems to over-ride choice since significant choices take both the road less taken and the road more taken. And that makes all the difference.