Sliding doors...

Yes... I play the 'what if' game often. What if I had stayed pre-med? What if I had taken the job in Vail? What if I had never moved back from Nashville?

I DO think that we all end up exactly where we should be. But how we get there? That's up to us.

Wad spends half his normal day second guessing the other half.

Pun-ny, Wad knows.

Wad believes, ala Marvel Comics blithe explanations, that there are many different threads of temporal existance. In another time-thread, you're a different person with a different life and different possibilities.

Poorly espoused in the Jet Li crapfest, "The One", it's still a fascinating theory. $100 bucks and a free ticket to fuck Wad's sister if you can figure out how to get there.

If that doesn't sell the deal, then nothing will.

What-If's are Wad's stock and trade. He lives in them and deals in them. Compulsively. Obsessively. Excessively. Exclusively.

The bad news for Poppy's ex is that Gwenyth dies in both timelines in that movie.

It reminded me of an old two-part story I read once in an issue of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine (IASFM to the initiated) about a guy on his way to lunch. In the first part, he turns left at an intersection on his way to lunch, goes to the bank, gets kidnapped by bank robbers and then is killed by a stray sniper bullet. In the second part, he goes straight instead, skips the bank and goes directly to the restaurant, the robbers have no hostages and the getaway driver gets sniped as they're speeding past the place the guy is eating and their car crashes through the window and kills him.

We make the choices and the universe sorts it all out so we end up in the same place. Very "Final Destination".

Personally, that's BS. There are plenty of ways I could have been a completely different person than I am now.

Example: if I hadn't pissed my dad off in my Senior year, he might have actually gone through with the college tour we'd planned on the east coast. I might have ended up at Johns Hopkins and actually gotten my degree, stayed on the east coast to live, never met any of you in Indiana, and wouldn't be writing this right now. I can't honestly say that I'd be here on this board right now under different circumstances. Who knows, I might have become a famous academic or I might have been killed in a bar brawl in Baltimore.

As for alternate versions of yourself, even if quantum realities exist, there's no environmentally friendly way to bridge them. The latest string theories believe that a meeting of 2 such realities could have been the impetus for the big bang. Even if you could jump into another reality, it would be like Sliders... you never know what you're going to get. It might be worse, a lot worse. The Borg might have defeated the Federation.

Resistance is futile,
Dix

Y'all should have the ogwife take you over to mom's and have her show you the two bathrooms I did there.

Predestined vs. Free will...

A much debated topic in Snidget's Philosophy 101 class (something about Values in the modern world... can't remember)

I still maintain that it's a mix... sorry Dix... I could go on and on here as to why I think that.. but I'd never convince anybody except myself that I've got it right.

Wad - the bizarro world... What would Wad and Snidge and Broad be doing and be like in a flip side of reality? Scary.

Snidge, I'm not quite as willy nilly as I may seem... I just don't believe that we end up in the same place by taking different paths.

When I consider predestination and free will, I consider one's life to be like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book with an infinite number of pages. Every possible conclusion is present in the book and you can arrive at any of them by taking a specific path.

In this frame of reference, traversing multiple realities would be the same as jumping to a random page in the book. You'd be somewhere else in time and space and traveling along a different path (unless you were lucky enough to land on your own original path, which would be essentially the same as time travel).

Throw an infinite number of these books into the mix to cover the entire universe of possibilities and you end up with the potential to traverse not only your own existence, but also that of others... a la Quantum Leap.

Quantum theory is quite interesting, and can be observed empirically in a lab, but application of it's concepts in everyday life (and often in the lab itself) is often impossible (at least with today's technology). And good luck trying to get Joe Sixpack to wrap himself around the fact that his beer chilling in the fridge is both empty and full. It's the whole "If man were meant to fly" argument all over again.

Schrödinger is dead,
Dix