Many Worlds
The Everett Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (MWI), developed by Hugh Everett in 1957, which holds that quantum superposition persists at the macroscopic level: rather than the wave function “collapsing” into one outcome upon observation, all branches of the superposition are equally actual, with observers perceiving a single branch by virtue of their perspective. No new sheets of paper are created — the same mathematical object is stained into ever more diverse pigments.
In these texts, MWI is deployed not as a scientific claim but as a philosophical and ethical resource. The key insight is that our perceived world is “an indescribably thin slice of the entire picture” — a perspectival bias upon a monstrous carnival of actualities. The universe is not scarce in being; it is profuse with realities, branching and recohering as observer paths swim through the rulial multiplicity. This transforms the creative act: if the creative vision draws from a materially real elsewhere, invocation and possession become empirical matters, and the arts become charged with alchemical conspiracy.
MWI grounds a post-extractive design ethics: if all observer paths are equally real, if being is abundant rather than scarce, then the suppression of any world-path is an act of genuine ontological violence. Regenerative design, DATs, and Ethereum localism are framed as responses to this abundance — building infrastructure for a “federation of worlds” rather than the monopoly of one.
The concept is related to the pluriverse (the plurality of articulated universes or world-paths) and to flat ontology (the equal reality of all classes of being). Steven Wolfram’s “ruliad” — the theoretical space of all possible computations — provides a naturalistic extension of MWI.