All Realities Already Exist

I have a Mandelbrot set tattooed on my shoulder. I'm proud of it. I've been sitting with what it means to me, and how it represents a working model of reality. Look at the full view, the whole iconic shape. Zoom in. It's interactive. {{MandelbrotFractal}} As you explore the Mandelbrot Set, there's a very good chance you'll find views that have never been seen by anyone. Keep in mind, however, that every fold, every spiral, every infinitesimal tendril, no matter how deep you zoom is already in there. Nothing gets added when you zoom in. The math doesn't generate new structure on demand. It's all present from the first frame, complete, all at once. But in order to experience its fractal beauty you have to encounter it sequentially, zooming in moment by moment. And what you see depends on where you choose to look. And the universe works somewhat the same way. We experience time in a linear fashion, and our choices along the way reveal the reality we experience. I think this is what people are reaching for when they talk about manifestation, or parallel universes, or attention as the thing that shapes experience. We're all traversing the same reality, but from different angles. All possibilities exist concurrently. The linear story we tell ourselves about cause leading to effect is something our minds do to reality so we can live inside it. Reality itself isn't sequential. It's all at once. And each person's path through it is equally real, no matter how different one screen looks from another. And then there's the observer effect. The Mandelbrot set is mathematically complete, but only the part on the screen at the moment actually gets rendered. The rest stays latent until your attention turns toward it. This is what physicists describe with Schrödinger's cat: a system holds all possibilities at once, and observation is the act that resolves them. The wave function doesn't collapse until someone looks. The fractal doesn't render until you point your attention there. This also touches on something I've never been able to settle: free will versus determinism. Do we have free will? If not, then every decision is pre-determined and you had no choice but to read this article today. But in the the Mandelbrot set, even though every possible pathway is deterministic, the pathway you experience is entirely of your choosing. That means it contains deterministism and free will. Every possible view was already calculated the moment the math existed. Nothing you do creates anything new. And yet what you experience is entirely a matter of where you choose to put your focus. Both are true at once. The structure is fixed. The path through it is yours. What makes the fractal beautiful, and maybe what makes any of this beautiful, is that the only way to experience what's already there is to direct attention into it. Pick your focus. Watch it unfold. You'll never see the same view twice. Not because it changes, but because you do.