Digimon. It was a Saturday morning cartoon a few years back that was my motivator for getting up at 5 in the morning. I don’t know about Brian, but Kit knows of this show and was also a fan. It was based on the EXTREMELY Japanese premise of a parallel universe home to many colorful and exotic plants and animals, the animals of course, being called Digimon. This “Digital World,” often shortened to the much lamer sounding “Digiworld,” was the spawn of the culmination of Earth’s communications and computing networks.

In the show, a group of kids were chosen by fate to journey to the digital world and, with the help of digimon partners, rid the Digital World of its darkness and evil as the “Digidestined.” Along their journeys, the Digidestined had encounters where it was necessary for their digimon partners to digivolve, or move up a level in power. To do this, the digidestined had to find crests pertaining to one of their most notable traits, for instance, the computer wiz-kid, Izzy (who I suspect was a Linux user, by the way,) had the crest of knowledge. Tai, the de-facto leader of the group, had the crest of courage. Other crests included love, friendship, reliability and hope.

This is where I run into an error with the digital world: If this dimension is based solidly off of Earth’s computer networks, and is in fact, a digital world, then it would be built completely out of binary code.

Binary code is a style of encoding information using ones and zeros. A code consisting of only two digits being rearranged in varying numbers can quickly become complicated. For instance, if you type the word “cat,” the code representing each of those letters is 01100011, 01100001, and 01110100.

Now, I’m not saying that the combined computational power of ALL the world’s computers isn’t pretty hefty, but I just can’t see it being enough to generate an entire alternate world as the result of anomaly and chance, and then having that world subject to providence run by such emotionally abstract ideas as courage, friendship, and love. The binary code for love would be so complex that no form of technology known today would be able to decode it, even if given billions of years to do it in. In my opinion, a world based on binary, would be constricted to a far simpler, and much more rigid metaphysical state.

This is where I believe Quantum Mechanical reasoning comes in. The very idea of a digital world existing lends support to the “Many Worlds” Interpretation of quantum mechanics. In order to better understand, here’s a brief bit of information about a rival interpretation to “Many Worlds.” The “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics states that all particles can be described by a wavefunction, which is a mathematical representation of the probability of a particle to be found in a location or state of motion. Wavefunction is very delicate, as just the act of measuring a particle causes the mathematical probabilities of that particle to collapse into a “real” state. This is called wavefunction collapse.

Many-Worlds denies the objective reasoning of wavefunction, and believes that every possible outcome of every event exists in its own history or universe. Put simply, every event that can occur in our universe (but doesn’t) occurs in an alternate dimension alongside an infinite number of other universes. This realm is aptly dubbed the “Multiverse.”

Getting back to Digimon, using the “Many Worlds” Interpretation as explanation, I don’t believe that the digital world is derived from our world’s computing power, because we do not have the technology available. The digital world is instead fueled by the immense power of another dimension’s (or group of dimensions’) quantum computers.

Quantum Computers do not use binary code. The ones and zeros of binary code represent the two standard states of electrons, negative and positive. Alternations of electrical current in the patterns described by binary code is what runs our computers today. Quantum computers, however, use the thirty-two quantum states of electrons. Although it’d still be a monumental task, I believe that quantum code could have the potential for facilitating providence based on emotions in another dimension.

The reason people think that the digital world is the result of our computing power is because the digital universe only intersects our world at specific points: our communications network. That provides us with a way in. The multiverse provides all else. I may come back and revise this essay later, but right now I must go to bed.