A garden of forking paths
In Jorge Luis Borges short story “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Borges narrates (through a story in the story) of a man named Ts’ui Pên who set forth to write an infinite novel, an intricate labyrinth. When Ts’ui Pên died, his heirs found no labyrinth, only chaotic manuscripts. An Englishman named Stephen Albert was able to draw meaning out of Ts’ui Pên’s confusing works upon discovering a fragment of a letter. In that letter, Ts’ui Pên wrote “I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.” Albert realized that the garden of forking paths” meant Ts’ui Pên’s disordered novel, and the “various futures” meant a forking in time. According to Albert, Ts’ui Pên did not believe in a “uniform, absolute time” but rather in “an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.”
Borges short story was an early exploration of the many-worlds hypothesis in quantum mechanics, in which the universe forks into parallel copies, with each copy corresponding to a different outcome of quantum measurement. In Borges short story, reality forks at every decision, with each branch corresponding to a particular outcome of that decision. Much like those Choose Your Own Adventure books except that all possible outcomes occur in parallel with each other.
As of this moment of writing, I am at an internet cafe. There is then a reality where I am doing overtime work at the office. There is also a reality where I am at home watching Heroes and a reality where I am watching Toshokan Sensou instead. These realities are all centered on my decisions but what if your decisions were taken into consideration? There is thus a reality where I am writing this entry and you are surfing the Internet. There is also reality where I am watching Heroes and you are working overtime. If all factors, of which there is an infinity of them, are to be taken into account, then the combination of these factors would also be infinite! A garden of forking paths indeed!
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