On “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”

This post is about a short story by Ted Chiang entitled Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom. It is found in his collection Exhalation which has several other short stories, all worth reading. In case you don’t know, Ted Chiang is a Chinese-American writer and his short story Story of Your Life is possibly his most well-known work since it was adapted into the movie Arrival by the visionary Denis Villeneuve. Though Chiang doesn’t write science fiction exclusively, many of his stories can be considered science fiction though I’d argue that his focus is often not so much on the science side of things; I’ll try to convey what I mean in this post. A fun fact (for me anyways) is that he was born in Port Jefferson, NY where I lived for a year. His father is a professor at Stony Brook University in mechanical engineering though we never crossed paths while I was at SBU.

There will be spoilers ahead.

As with many of Chiang’s works of science fiction, this story has one particular “science-y” element and Chiang chases the many implications of it, not so much from a scientific, economic, or militaristic perspective (to name a few that are common in science fiction). Rather, his approach is more on the level of the individual’s emotions and psyche and also on the collective sociological level. So what is the particular science component?

In this story, a technology is developed where the device makes a quantum measurement and then either a blue LED or a red one lights up, depending on the results of the measurement (say, whether an electron’s spin is up or down). Suppose in our world, call it World Alpha, we do this on January 1, 2000, and the blue LED lights up. Simultaneously, a diverging universe World Beta branches off in which the red LED lights up instead. For the near term, the two universes are exactly the same other than the difference in which LED lit up when the measurement was made. Moreover, this device, which is called a prism, has a certain number of bits of data to transmit to the other branch. Thus, you’re able to communicate with the copy of the prism in the other universe and in particular, communicate your alternate self. Since it’s a parallel universe, the term for your other self is paraself. The channel for communication can be accessed as long as the prism still has bits of data to transmit but the prism has a limited amount of transmittable data and cannot be replenished. Here’s an analogy. Suppose you have a pad of paper where you can write your messages on the sheets and then mail them out to only one recipient. But the rule is that once the pad runs out of paper, you have nothing left to write on and that’s it. You can buy a new pad of paper but the recipient will be different. Because of this analogy, the characters do refer to the bits in the prism as the pad. So once the bits in the pad are used up, the channel closes forever. If you were to start up another channel using a prism, it would be an entirely new branching universe. For example, if you use the prism in 2010, then World Gamma branches off from our World Alpha. After 10 years, the historians in Alpha and Gamma will agree about history up till 2010 while the two worlds’ historians will only agree up till 2000 with Beta’s historians. After 2010, Alpha and Gamma will also have diverging histories. By the time we enter the story, the prisms are relatively cheap to make and they are able to maintain channels with pads of a few gigabytes. This would be enough to last a lifetime if the users only wanted to communicate by text but if it’s by video call, then the channels only last a few hours before closing.

If you’re familiar with quantum mechanics, you’ll recognize this idea of the story as inspired by the many-worlds interpretation. Of course, to make an interesting story, the diverging branch doesn’t run in exactly the same way. Though initially, the only difference is in the LED light, after 5 years, the outcomes can be vastly different because of chaos. This is the second important component: the colloquially named butterfly effect. The idea is that small differences, such as an LED light, can lead to vastly different outcomes in the long term.

What are some implications of such a device? For one, many people use prisms to communicate with their paraselves, to just talk with someone who understands them or to ask for advice (though if you don’t consider yourself wise, then why talk to your equally unwise paraself?). As such, some prism “cafes” are set up where a patron can pay to use a prism. They open the channel and so their paraself is also sitting in such a cafe in the parallel universe. They can then talk for a while and then schedule a time to meet up again in the future. Other people can also use the prism but there’s no way to call your paraself and tell them to head to the cafe; the only way to communicate is through the prism and whoever happens to be on the receiving end is who you can talk to. For the reason, many people purchase their own prisms.

So you don’t have to talk to your paraself though that is the easiest type of communication to set up. Sometimes, the paraselves lead better lives in the eyes of the people in World Alpha and jealousy builds though other times, a healthy relationship forms. Or people often wish to find out what could have happened if they had just done x, y, z. For example, one character wants to know if there’s a parallel universe where her paraself had said yes to a marriage proposal. The character says she secretly hopes that her paraself’s marriage falls apart so that she may feel justified for declining the proposal. A different character wants to know if his sudden angry vandalism of his boss’ car is an exceptional event or if he truly has a vindictive streak. He finds out that several of his paraselves do not vandalize the car and so he interprets this as saying that it was a one-off event, that he isn’t actually a bad person. Another character, Dana, once claimed that all the drugs they were caught with was Vinessa’s, her best friend, causing Vinessa to be expelled from school and had her life spiral into addiction and poverty. Feeling responsible for how Vinessa’s life turned out all because of that blurt which pinned the guilt, Dana, tried to atone for it by paying for rehabilitation and financially supporting whatever life trajectory Vinessa wanted to go down. In the story, Vinessa clearly knows this and manipulates Dana for money via guilt trips. However, she eventually learns that in other universes, though Dana sometimes confessed that they were both to blame or even took the blame herself, Vinessa still went down the path that she did.

There are even darker implications explored. One of the characters, a scammer, gives an elderly woman with a terminal illness access to a prism in order to talk with her own paraself. It turns out that she herself has a few months to live while the doctors in the parallel universe estimate her paraself has a few years. I don’t remember if it’s explained why there’s this difference but it may just be that some medical treatment has a 50% of being successful and it was successful in the parallel universe but not in Alpha. At any rate, the scammer, with the help of his scamming paraself, eventually convinces the woman that since she is near death, she should transfer all her money to her paraself and to first transfer it into a holding account. This is a lie; it’s actually not possible to transfer money (even digitally). In this way, the scammer was able to obtain the woman’s remaining fortune. In order to concoct such a plan, a person only has to think it up and then use the prism to open a channel. Then their paraself will know exactly the same things as the person in Alpha, including the plan. Of course, your paraself might betray you and not go along with the plan since there really isn’t any benefit for them. So you have to, quite literally, ask whether you trust “yourself” before making such plans.

Though I’ve said that individual prisms become quite inexpensive to make, prisms that have had their channels open for a long time but with most of their pad unused are more valued. This is because if you wish to talk to your alternative self, you probably are interested in seeing what kind of life they live after several years, not only after a few weeks. In particular, in the story, there is a famous musician couple that got into a tragic car accident. In Alpha, Roderick dies and Scott survives. So Scott began looking for prisms to talk to himself about his grief. But he also looked for prisms that were activated just a few weeks before the accident in the hope that there is a universe in which he died but Roderick survived. But many of the universes were such that the accident didn’t even happen and Scott and Roderick were both happily alive. The Alpha Scott did not wish to intrude or burden the happy couple of these universes with his own grief. The scammer hears of the accident and also starts looking for prisms connected to parallel universes in which Roderick survives but Scott dies. He’s able to find one and plans to sell that particular prism at an exorbitant price to the surviving Scott and Roderick in their respective universes, taking advantage of their grief and desire to see their dead spouses.

Now, though the climax of the story revolves around this heinous scam (you’ll have to read the story to find out what happens), I think Chiang is more interested in exploring freedom of choice and the weight of imagining all that might have happened. And he does this masterfully. The title, Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom is an idea from 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kirekegaard. The crux of the idea doesn’t go much beyond this condensed title. When faced with the wide horizon of the future in which many scenarios seem possible, it can be dizzying, anxiety-inducing in fact, to make choices. The characters in the story struggle with their actions, those they deliberated over and those they did in the heat of the moment. Many want to know if the future was really as wide as it seemed or if many of their paraselves behaved similarly. If so, then it feels to them that such outcomes were inevitable. But for some others, particular life-defining moments turned out to stem from much the edge of a knife, precariously balanced, able to tip either way. There have been a few times in my life where I felt this acutely. For example, before starting grad school, it appeared as a 6 year academic cage. But all the other options seemed wildly uncertain, with myriads of questions regarding geography, jobs, relationships constantly forcing themselves. Freedom looked both enchanting but also overwhelming and overrated. Indeed, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.

This theme is picked up by many others such as Martin Heidegger, Albert Camus, or Jean-Paul Sarte. For Heidegger, there is a particular Angst (this is the German word; he doesn’t mean it in the English sense) we experience by the sheer fact that we are creatures that understand their own Being in temporal terms. That is, we understand that we bear with us our whole pasts (and often, much more, the histories of our families, nation, culture, etc.), that we live in a fleeting instance which we call the present, and that the wide future is constantly unfolding before us. The future unfolds whether we make decisions or not since others are making decisions, and the earth keeps turning. We’re often thrown into the future which then becomes present for a moment before it is past. But, though the past is behind us, as Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” For the characters in the story who wonder what their lives might have looked like if some past event had been different, the past hasn’t really passed them by; it’s still there. Many of the choices they make are still about the past, not about the future.