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What Actually Happens at the End of Greg Egan’s Quarantine?
This post continues from yesterday's post, which looked at the interpretation of quantum mechanics assumed in Greg Egan's novel. Warning: it contains spoilers and really only makes sense if you have recently read the novel.
Greg Egan’s 1992 novel Quarantine begins as a cyberpunk detective story and ends ends with the deeper mystery of what it means for anything to happen at all.
In the late twenty-first century, the Solar System has been enclosed within an opaque Bubble, apparently erected by aliens to prevent human observers from collapsing the quantum state of the external universe.
Nick Stavrianos, a private investigator equipped with neural modifications, acquires an 'eigenstate mod' which allows his consciousness to remain distributed across alternative quantum outcomes - to 'smear'. This, it becomes apparent, is connected with the existence of the Bubble.
At the end of the book the capacity to 'smear' spreads through humanity. Reality erupts into miracles, nightmares and grotesque transformations. Then the disturbance apparently ends. Nick finds himself an anonymous refugee detained in a camp, wondering whether smeared humanity recoiled from what lay beyond the Bubble and collapsed itself back into a single world.
That is his first attempt at an explanation, but it is not the novel’s final one. In the closing pages Nick considers a more disturbing possibility: humanity never collapsed at all. The planet remains smeared, “one consciousness per eigenstate, branching out endlessly”. Blood still rains between the skyscrapers in some branches; children still conjure dancing flowers in others; every physically possible Heaven and Hell continues somewhere. The dreary camp in which Nick lies on his bunk is not the sole surviving reality. It is merely one component of an indefinitely branching superposition.
Egan does not quite confirm this in the text because the point is that the local Nick cannot know. A consciousness inside one eigenstate experiences a perfectly definite world. Nothing looks translucent, probabilistic or multiple. From Nick’s perspective there is one bunk, one darkness and one miserable future. The continued existence of innumerable other Nicks would leave no visible trace within his branch. This resembles the familiar Many-Worlds picture, in which every observer experiences one definite branch, although Egan’s mechanism is very far from the standard interpretation.
In this apparently anticlimactic ending, Nick has not returned from quantum chaos to ordinary reality. He has discovered that quantum chaos, viewed from inside one of its components, looks ordinary. Nick's final reflection, “It all adds up to normality,” is not just a consoling or resigned slogan; it states the novel’s final principle: however extravagant the underlying ontology, experience remains local and definite.
What about the Bubble? Is it there or not for Nick - can he see the stars? Surely this is evidence for the actual outcome of the novel - collapse or no collapse?
Just before the final apocalyptic climax, smeared humanity reaches beyond the Bubble, contacts the 'aliens' and the stars appear again: Nick sees them.
Nick initially assumes that the entity which was smeared-humanity then recoiled, or was driven back, and committed a kind of collective suicide by collapsing to one stable reality.
But later he reconsiders: if humanity remains smeared, there need be no single fact about whether the Bubble is removed or remains. Some eigenstates may contain visible stars; others may remain quarantined. The Bubble Makers themselves may be entangled with different versions of humanity. Asking whether “the Bubble has gone” may already impose a classical question upon a non-classical situation.
Nor is camp-Nick the uniquely authentic Nick. Every successor consciousness descends equally from the man who became smeared. The 'alien representative entity' Laura has already pointed out that each branch-Nick is a component of a higher smeared-consciousness which none of them individually comprehends, any more than a single neuron comprehends the entire mind.
The detective who narrated the story has ceased to be the privileged centre of it.
Egan has therefore not hidden one conventional ending behind the ambiguity. The ambiguity is the ending. Humanity most likely survives as a branching totality, while each human consciousness inhabits one apparently singular history. Nick cannot in general recover his dead wife in any way that would undo bereavement; infinity contains reunion, but does not make reunion uniquely real. Nick lies in darkness and cannot decide whether he is contemplating infinity or merely looking at the backs of his eyelids.
Well, this does bare some similarity to the Many Worlds Interpretation ( although this is likely a QM extension in the MWI direction, rather than just an Interpretation).
ReplyDeleteJust shows how fundamentally important sorting out these QM fundamentals could actually be!