Everything Everywhere All at Once is an explosive new science-fiction action comedy that takes place in a multiverse. To celebrate the release of this film, Pioneer Works Broadcast shares this exclusive conversation between its directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively knows as Daniels), and neuroscientist David Eagleman, excerpted from the film's book A Vast, Pointless Gyration of Radioactive Rocks and Gas in Which You Happen to Occur: A trip through the multiverse.

We’ve been avidly reading work by neuroscientist, professor, writer, extrasensory technology inventor, and frequent Radiolab guest David Eagleman for years now. In the summer of 2021, we had the opportunity to let our brains pick his brain and discuss the themes of the multi-verse with him. Though Eagleman’s work has rarely, if ever, touched upon the subject of the multiverse, we knew that, much like us, he is interested in the gap between what is known and what is unknowable, and the ways that art and science attempt to bridge that gap. We also thought that a conversation about the multiverse with him would be fascinating and fun.

— Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

One thing we’re always thinking about is the stories we tell and what that says about the times that we’re living in. Right now, it feels like the multiverse is everywhere in pop culture—Marvel, Star Trek, Rick and Morty. Why do you think that is happening, and what do you think that says about this cultural moment?

Literature usually follows science. Once something hits the table in science as a strong hypothesis, authors, sci-fi writers, writers of literary fiction, they all want to use it. The same thing has happened with quantum mechanics. It serves as such a powerful literary mechanism to explore possibilities in parallel and imagine that these all exist at once. It’s a really powerful way to imagine and illustrate what could be, and this is a big part of what human brains do—we’re constantly thinking “what if?”

As a scientist, do you find that exciting or frustrating? Do you feel like storytellers often misrepresent the science, or do they help bring it to more people?

There’s a sense in which the storyteller’s job is to get things mostly right, but I don’t think it’s their job to bring science to the people. It’s their job to use whatever mechanism that allows them to tell a story that’s new and fresh and important. And by the way, the idea of the multiverse might not be correct—I mean, it might be a good explanation for certain things, but it might not be. Nonetheless, it’s a useful way to structure a story. I’m both a writer of literature and a scientist, so I guess I would defend both roles and say neither one is subservient to the other.

I think that’s what makes your science writing so accessible—it will just become a story about the brain, and then suddenly I understand the science. I feel like you do use stories to get science out into the world.

Story is the only way to get information in there. We’re really wired for story.

That sort of speaks to the idea spawned by your book of fiction Sum, that an infinite number of afterlives could be true, so maybe all possibilities are useful thought experiments. Can you talk about what you’re proposing with that idea?

I’m proposing that, in the possibility space, all of the religions are one point to that space. The idea that we die, and there’s nothing else, that’s another possibility in that space. There are lots of possibilities. My interest has always been in exploring the structure of that space. That’s why I wrote to shine a flashlight around the possibility space. None of the stories were meant to be taken seriously—they’re all funny stories—but it’s meant to demonstrate that there’s a lot of things that we don’t talk about.

In one of your talks, you talk about the problem of this false dichotomy: this belief system is right, and this belief system is wrong. Rather, they’re all potential data points in this bigger picture that’s alluding to something we may not possibly ever understand. It makes me wonder—in your eyes, how do we actually move beyond this false dichotomy and get to that next stage in our higher perspective or collective understanding?

That’s a good question. The point of science is to understand. We present a set of hypotheses, then we do experiments on them. With experiments, you can rule out whole parts of the possibility space. You can open up new parts of the possibility space, too, and that’s the idea, but you’ve got to get the whole table set right first.

What generally happens [with belief systems] is that you’ve got the religions, and you’ve got atheism, and those are the only two positions people take. It’s also what goes on with the political parties, where people entrench themselves in a position that’s very limited. The question is, if we’re going to apply science [to belief systems], how can we actually really look around and get somewhere? You know, [the answers] might be ten thousand years past our lifetimes, but that’s the goal of science: to say, all right, here’s what we’re exploring. Let’s go look for evidence and find things that might point us in the right direction.

I feel like we’re inching toward why we thought of you when we thought about the multiverse and why it’s in so many stories right now. As a society, we’re now staring at the internet and finding just how many different belief systems there are and just how unhelpful a black-and-white story is for understanding the world. Now you can just log on and see a torrential amount of opinions and possibilities out there.

Yeah, that’s a cool analogy. This is actually the topic of my next book, which is about how the brain makes an internal model, and we all come to believe that our internal models are correct. Like, “I’ve clearly got the right view of the world, and everyone who disagrees with me on social media is malicious or ill-intentioned or not bright enough to understand.” This is what we all have in our heads. But it’s because we’re stuck with our own models and we’re not particularly good at extrapolating and trying to get out of them.

You talk about the importance of the ability for humans to train ourselves to be able to hold opposing or even contradictory ideas in our head at the same time. It’s not—at least from my experience and the way I look at the world—an easy thing. It’s not the default. As a neuroscientist, do you think there is a way that we can train ourselves as a society to do this? What does that look like?

I generally think this is part of the passage into maturity, and it’s somehow not taught. It’s certainly not taught to our young people now. Instead, it’s that whatever political opinion you have is true and it’s right. I think the only way for us to get closer along that path is just making this part of our education as opposed to, “if you feel that way, that must be the truth of the matter.”

So we’re capable of it, but it’s maybe not intuitive.

And it’s not the priority.

It was a mind-blowing concept when I found out, embarrassingly late in life, that history is up for debate. That there are people out there arguing about what went down. That was so much more interesting to me than “here’s the date that this happened,” you know? I wish the concept of opposing viewpoints had been introduced into every discipline earlier. Science is so much more interesting when it’s a conversation.

You know what’s so interesting about that? Science is always driven by debate and by people saying, “Wait, I don’t believe your results. I’m going to do some experiments.” That’s how everything moves forward—it’s two steps forward, one step back, sometimes even as things progress. It’s been a very interesting year and a half with the coronavirus [COVID-19], because debate has gotten squelched from the get-go, rather than seeing all the opposing viewpoints and how those work.

To play devil’s advocate, I feel like part of the reason why we evolved to try to find black-and-white, concrete things is because it’s the fastest way to navigate the confusion and chaos, where we have to make decisions. Otherwise, as an organism, you would just flounder and get confused and die. I do think maybe it is about finding that balance. Right now, with the coronavirus, even though it feels wrong for, say, the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] to make decisions and say, “This is what is actually happening in the world, and this is what we know based on science,” it’s just so that decisions can be made. Otherwise, we get stuck in this vortex of everyone talking about the same thing, but coming from completely different points of view.

You are absolutely right. That’s exactly the conflict—always. Do you want a clear answer? Or do you want to debate and get to the truth, which takes a longer time?

One of the things that you introduced to us early on that really changed the way that we thought about how we tell stories and how we looked at the world was through the concepts of the Umwelt versus the

...Umwelt being what we can observe, the observable universe, and Umgebung being what we don’t know, which could be immeasurably immense.

As someone who thinks about this all the time, we wanted to ask you, what is your wildest conception of the Umgebung? What are some of the crazier things that you have considered might actually be possible?

Well, it’s funny because to some degree, I published 40 such ideas in Sum. But to give you just one example of something that I’m thinking about now—I’m writing a new book of fiction and it’s sort of like Sum in its mischievous spirit, but one of the ideas I’m exploring is [that] there are many spatial dimensions, and we live in three of them. So could there be whole civilizations in other spatial dimensions? Like, in dimensions four through six, there are some other civilizations living there. I use this for comedic effect in the book, but you know, who the heck knows? Of course, we wonder if there is life on other planets, but what if there’s life all around us in other dimensions that we just can’t see? So that’s a wacky idea that I’ve been enjoying for a while.

I can’t wait to read that book.

I loved reading about some of the stranger things you’ve been exploring with sensing, like your sensory for trying to train the body to just understand the stock market by vibrating.

We shrunk the Neosensory vest down into a wristband with four tiny motors on the band (called the Neosensory Buzz) and this is now on wrists around the world. I’m working on many experiments now, such as passing information from infrared and ultraviolet light around me. I’m interested in the fact that most of the light which surrounds us is totally invisible to us. At least, until now.

I’m also exploring the idea of detecting other people’s physiology. So imagine you’re wearing a smartwatch, and I can feel what’s happening with your heart rate and galvanic skin response and heart rate variability. Over the internet, I’m feeling that, and so if, after we’re off this Zoom call, I’m thinking, “Oh man, Daniel feels a little stressed out,” I can check back and see if everything is okay.

Anyway, there’s all kinds of things we’re trying. Electromagnetic fields. Picking up the social context of someone else’s speech, so that if you’re autistic, for example, you can read someone’s social cues.

That’s wild. You’re turning a smartwatch into a sensory hive mind experience.

So one day, your doctor might just wear 50 watches for all his patients and be able to feel, “There’s something wrong with Daniel?”

[Laughter]

That’s right.

That’s fantastic. In your eyes, what’s the end game of this technology? What does society look like once it’s everywhere?

This is a general platform for passing on any data stream you want. We’ve had to inherit all these other sensory devices through a long road of evolution, but now this can serve as [an additional sensor for] anything you want to pick up on. I think where this might play out in society is, for example, if I’m picking up on infrared information, and you’re picking up on stock market information or whatever, we might end up having a slightly tougher time communicating. I can’t understand what you’re feeling, and you can’t understand what I’m feeling. Nonetheless, it becomes like one of those superhero movies where everyone’s got their own superpower, which is, by the way, not that different from how it is now. I mean, people pick up on different kinds of things now. If you’re already a dermatologist or an architect or a lawyer, everyone’s hearing different things out of the conversation because of their expertise, right?

That was one of the wilder concepts I took away from Incognito that when we say that two people have a different point of view, it can be literally true brain-wise, because our brain is fabricating so much of what we think we’re observing. I have a different past, so I have a different brain, which makes different assumptions. So Dan and I, for example, we’re observing literally different worlds. That’s pretty scary, but also makes a lot of sense.

But you also talk about how we’re not only processing our own worldview, but we’re sharing it with others. It’s like taking a picture: I take a picture, and I share it with someone else. Now we have a shared experience. But on a more meta level, right now, one of the biggest problems I think we’re facing is the problem of processing information. The difference between a future where we succeed and the future where humans just kind of completely collapse is whether or not we find a solution to the problem of the amount of information we have and how to process it properly and effectively among all of us, as the network grows and the complexity of ideas grows. There are so many more moments where breakdown can happen. And that’s where we’re at right now. Do you believe that this gadget that you’re creating can also help us to understand each other? Get to this better, deeper, physiological version of empathy?

Here’s what I would say. I think that the advent of the printing press was the first important step that gave people an opportunity to step into each other’s shoes in a way that had never been done before. And literature has just gotten better and better at that. You can absorb literature from around the world and from different perspectives. Of course, movies also do that all the time in ways that are very easy to absorb in two hours. You get to step into other people’s universes, or multiple universes, as the case may be.

As far as how to consume the information—I mean, today we have the opportunity to absorb all these different viewpoints. It feels like kids have better internet literacy than people our age did growing up, in terms of understanding that one person’s opinion isn’t the truth. And so as long as we train our kids how to “read the internet,” well, I’m not too worried about that.

Let me just explain why. One of my other books is called The Safety Net, and it examines what the internet means for civilizations on a 10,000 year timescale. I make the argument that the internet makes government censorship impossible now. It takes away that power from authoritarian governments, because now citizens can just click around for other points of view. Governments can’t control the news as they did last century—say in the Soviet Union, communist China, or Nazi Germany. That’s great news for us. We get the opportunity to dine on a broad diet of opinions, and we simply need to properly educate our children to understand the difference between points of view and truths. This opening of the gates is the perhaps the biggest benefit of the internet.

That’s hopeful. I like that.

We have this forever-going debate about internet pessimism and internet optimism, and you have written some of the more internet-optimistic stuff that I’ve read. Do you get a lot of pushback on that?

I don’t think so. Whenever I’ve been asked this question at a public talk and I give my answer, I find that a lot of people feel relieved, because there’s been this story from the beginning of, “the internet’s making us dumber.” And I think it’s just the opposite. I’m so enthusiastic. I mean, my nine-year-old kid is so fucking smart precisely because he constantly watches TED videos and BrainPOP videos. He just knows so much stuff that I had no clue about when I was nine years old.

It’s tough sometimes to know if the terrifying misinformation stories we’re reading about are worse than ever, or we can just see them better than ever.

There’s absolutely nothing new about misinformation. It used to be so much worse, because there was one authority that told you what was up: the Nazi government, or Pol Pot in Cambodia, or whoever. Now it’s easy to circumvent that; it’s easy to find other points of view.

One thing that we’ve been obsessed with lately is how the attention economy makes it impossible for smart people’s ideas to make it into the mainstream and break through the surface to become part of the lexicon. So as a smart person, if you were given $300 million to make a movie right now, knowing that you would have the attention of a lot of people, what story would you want to tell? What is the David Eagleman blockbuster?

I can answer that because I’ve already written a few screenplays [laughs]. One of them is based off a story in Sum. The idea is that we can feel so certain about things, but that, fundamentally, there are things you don’t know, and we constantly find our internal models breaking. For example, in any movie you have some sort of plot, and it’s super easy, as you guys well know, for the storyteller to lead the reader down a garden path, even if the storyteller is intending to have a surprise, the twist, whatever. The reason it’s so easy is because you just need to give a few facts and clues, and then the audience’s internal models are like, “Oh yeah, I got it. I know the truth. I know exactly where this is going.” Then you can surprise them by going the other way. That’s why it’s shockingly easy to write a mystery novel.

[Laughter]

Shots fired!

Only because it’s terrifically easy to make assumptions about [how people will fill in the blanks]. Anyway, my blockbuster is a movie about that—about thinking at all moments that you know what’s going on, but there are deepening mysteries that illustrate how much we don’t know.

So you’re saying these narrative itches are already inside the human brain and that the storyteller then manipulates them. We hijack it—that’s what storytelling is. I think movies that acknowledge and actually play with that are really interesting, especially now, because I think everyone should be very much aware of [that manipulation].

Thinking about how huge the unknown aspects of the world are and how this universe might just be a bit of a neurological illusion—whether it’s the measly three dimensions we can observe, the crazy assumptions our brains are making, or the endless number of universes we’re not observing—we wanted to ask what theories and beliefs that we hold dearly today do you think future generations might laugh at us for having? Any hot takes?

What is our generation going to get damned for by future generations that we have no idea about? Maybe something like eating animals—many of us eat animals now and we don’t think twice about it, but almost certainly in a hundred years, we’re gonna all be crucified for that. Certainly, all of the energy consumption will be demonized by future generations.

Yeah. Maybe in the future, hyper-intelligent cattle will laugh at this naive interview that some cruel monkeys conducted and decided to print in a

What a confusing last thing to say in the interview. Well, thanks for talking about the unknown with us David. We’re sorry in advance for future generations’ inevitable backlash. ♦