Time, complexity, entropy, and the multiverse

FQXi, the Foundational Questions Institute, held a multidisciplinary meeting investigating the Nature of Time in Scandinavia August 27 – September 1, 2011 (Figure 1). FQXi promulgates original thinking and research on fundamental questions in physics and cosmology through research grants and essay-writing contests on topics such as “The Nature of Time,” and “Is Reality Digital or Analog?”

Figure 1. Multidisciplinary topics covered at the FQXi Time Conference

Time is familiar in the sense of the three space dimensions and the one time dimension around which human affairs in the physical world are organized. Additionally, each person has a subjective and identifiable relationship to time, even though this may be little more than a convenient construct. In science, time has been developed to the greatest degree in physics and cosmology, and in the philosophy of science. Other fields too are starting to consider time more robustly, including complexity, biology, and computation.

The conference addressed the issue of the arrow of time from many perspectives. While most fundamental laws of nature are time-symmetric, some areas have a time arrow flowing in one direction such as thermodynamics, quantum theory, radiation, and gravity. This can be problematic to explain. A suggested analysis structure involving the trade-offs between complexity and entropy as systems evolve over time served as a useful model for analyzing different aspects of time throughout the meeting.

Life after Second Life

Why be content with Second Life when you can join ...the Multiverse Network... and access and interact in hundreds of virtual worlds all via one portal? Multiverse Network sees itself as the browser of metaverse worlds as users gatewaying through their site will have a universal sign-in, unified billing and centralized marketplace commerce. Interworld communication and travel is planned, as well as social mechanisms for world discovery and collection with personalized "world playlists,” user rankings and contests.

The few hundred development teams in the Multiverse Network's closed beta are finding the virtual world platform to be a unique, fun and high-functionality way to create MMOG worlds. The platform, soon to be in public beta, is being used for traditional game development (Force of Arms) as well as non-gaming work and learning applications (Project Mars which includes Mars-like gravity) and is described in more depth here.

The Multiverse Network's push in releasing worlds to end-user consumers in 2008 will likely trigger a further explosion in synthetic world commerce. One implication is that vendors making avatars, objects, textures, animation scripts, etc. for use in on-line worlds would no longer have to be tied to just one world, as the Electric Sheep Company, SLBoutique and Aimee Weber are to Second Life. Network content developers would have a panoply of potential customers and leveragable products and services.

Interworld connection will allow massive cross-world collaboration networks based on affinities to evolve; what would it be like to be with 1000 avatars online in the same space? While virtual space allows for smaller avatar form factors, communications challenges will likely abound with multi-channel chat streams erupting with some predictable asymptote of crowd participants.

Identity (that temporary and anachronistic human construct) will be different in a multiverse network with larger identity and avatar portfolios to manage (this theme is already occurring in Second Life whose nearly 1 million "residents" correspond to far fewer biological equivalents). Identity experimentation will be fun in multiverse worlds too, such as by being able to be multiple avatars in multiple worlds simultaneously and by permissioning avatars for independent tasks and activities with low-level AI methods.