Rizwan Virk

And that's even weirder because what it's saying is not only are you deciding whether the cat is alive or dead, but when you render it,

you are also deciding the history of the cat.

Like, did it come in from the backyard or the front yard?

Before it came from the front yard, was it across the street or was it in the backyard?

So you're basically choosing from one of these historical paths.

Okay, now this is like even more confusing.

And I talk about this in this book.

I talk about a little more in my book, The Simulated Multiverse.

Right.

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, basically.

And a good way to think about it is what's called the cosmic delay choice experiment.

And,

That is when, let's suppose we have light from a quasar that's a billion light years away.

So it's pretty far away.

It's going to take the light a long time to get here, a billion years, because that's how far it is.

But suppose in the middle there's a black hole or a galaxy, something that's a gravitationally large object.

And so the light has to go to the left or to the right of that object to get here.

And we have telescopes here on Earth that can measure whether it went left or right.

So this is a thought experiment that was proposed by my favorite physicist of the 20th century, a guy named John Wheeler.