Spacetime is a Human Headset

The difference between the Multiverse and the Pluriverse

You already know that there is more to reality than meets the eye. The question is, how much more?

Not all flowers have ultraviolet landing strips, but many do. Invisible to the human eye, ultraviolet patterns on flower petals help pollinators find pollen and nectar.

According to Don Hoffman, one of the scientists behind Conscious Agents Theory, reality is billions of times more complex than humans can perceive.

In his book, “The Case Against Reality,” he explains that our visual processing centers can only compute less than one billionth of the information around us.

There is near infinite information “out there.” We just can’t see it because we don’t need to see it in order to stay alive.

Our human brains only take in a tiny fraction of what’s out there, because taking in any more information would to lead to overwhelm. There so much more to reality than meets the eye, but we perceive only what we need to perceive to survive.

What we do perceive is based entirely on our fitness needs. Our fitness needs are things like food, shelter, and procreation. (You may not think of procreation as a fitness need, but nature herself would disagree. She only has one directive: to reproduce!)

Over the course of human evolution, we adapted to perceive only what was useful. This defined and limited view is spacetime, a human-specific interface—a matrix shaped by human needs.

We do not perceive what we do not need to perceive.

Ultraviolet patterns on flower petals? Not for us. Those are for the pollinators. Magentic fields? Leave that to the birds for navigation. Infrared heat waves? Ultrasonic sounds? Colors beyond our wildest imagation? Those perceptions are for snakes, moths, and maybe the mantis shrimp—the mantis shrimp has 12 cones for color, in constrast to humans’ 3 to 4 cones for color, but scientists argue over how much it actually perceives.

Even through our limited perception, we know that animals see and hear a world entirely different from our own. Imagine how much we do not know—especially when it comes to the living things who perceive the world without eyes, as humans dominantly do.

Read: What is Whiteness?

Of course not all humans perceive the world the same way. Indigenous cultures less scathed by colonialism hold a different perception of reality—a worldview less married to the assumptions of spacetime.

Bayo Akomolafe writes about this in his essay Dear White People,

A shaman once told me he was going to turn me into a goat. He seemed serious about it, because I had dared question an aspect of his practice. I later came to understand how his ways of knowing might accommodate the preposterous idea of shapeshifting into something else. For Yoruba people, the world isn’t populated by independent ‘things’, moving by their own internal logic or dynamism. The world is a web and, as such, boundaries are porous and ever-changing. In the place of a world of things, we have many worlds of relationships.

For many Indigenous cultures—and for some people within the dominant culture—the world shifts in and out of spacetime. Though this may be difficult to believe, this shiftiness is supported by science.

Perhaps you have heard of the Multiverse?

Multiverse theories are the outcome of spacetime shiftiness at the ground level. When scientists dig all the way down to the bottom of reality, they find that the rules of spacetime no longer apply. When they break spacetime into its smallest components, they find that spacetime is not made of ‘known’ things, but instead made of shapeshifting unknowns.

When we break spacetime down to its smallest component, it starts to glitch. The known rules of physics end and the unknown rules of the quantum begin.

We don’t like unknowns in spacetime.

When scientists discovered that all matter exists in a state of probability, they decided that those ‘unknowns’ must be known somewhere and so they conceived of the theory of many worlds—or the Multiverse.

While the Multiverse may be the natural outcome of trying to understand the true nature of reality through limited human perception (aka our spacetime headset), the theory of a Pluriverse offers something much simpler.

The Pluriverse is the interconnected web of all things.

The Pluriverse is the place from where spacetime emerges. It is the billions and billions and billions of bits of information that we cannot perceive. It is the all-pervading pure experience beyond space and time.

Spacetime is real insofar as we are experiencing it, but it is not the foundation of reality. There are many other realities at play all around us that are just outside of our perception.

While spacetime is not a fundamental reality, it is the reality we perceive and it is changing rapidly before our eyes. Witnessing and experiencing these changes can come with a lot of fear. Even if we understand that there are deeper realities, we are still pretty darn married to this reality!

That said, perhaps a collective perceptive shift is on its way when we accept that the boundaries of spacetime aren’t quite as set as we have been led to believe.

Might something shift for us if we embrace the Pluriverse by acknowledging that there is more to reality than meets the eye?

Could we learn to see beyond the boundaries of spacetime? Would we want to?

And what have we taken for granted by assuming that spacetime is the truth?

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