The undoing project

03/17/2026

Yeah, infinite isn’t good. Just like rice on a chessboard, you run out of space and everything else pretty fucking quickly.

So my guess is that you have to semantically compress those infinite universes into the vibe of the thing.

And then magically they cease to exist, for all intents and purposes.

Doesn’t stop the fairies dreaming about them, but.

Maths is just a weak arse attempt by humans to get around semantic compression. And when the maths runs out, we’re back to words.

And when you think about it, so is the past. We can even remember our own past without semantically compressing it.

Which means what we perceive as time might just be the dissonance we feel about that semantic compression.

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You know how you can’t remember every single walk you’ve ever been on, every smell, but you still sort of “know” what a good walk is? That’s because your brain doesn’t store everything in full detail. It keeps a simplified version, just enough to get the idea.

The world is very big, with far more detail than any brain can hold. So instead of keeping everything, we compress it. We store the gist. When we remember something, we’re not replaying it, we’re rebuilding it from that compressed version. That means details get lost, changed, or quietly invented.

Maths is what humans use when they want to be more precise about all this. It’s still compression, just stricter and less fuzzy.

Because memories are compressed, some periods feel long and detailed, others feel like they disappeared. That’s why a busy day feels long, and a boring week vanishes. The sense of time passing is partly tied to how much detail got stored and how it gets reconstructed later.

The universe contains infinitely more possibilities than any mind can hold. No human can carry all that detail around in full.

So what happens instead? It gets compressed. Not into the exact thing, but into the vibe of the thing. The gist. The usable shape. The emotional and conceptual summary.

That is where the multiple-universe part comes in. If there are endless possible worlds, branches, histories, or quantum alternatives, then no finite mind can represent them one by one. So for practical purposes they get squashed into a simplified internal sense of reality. They do not necessarily vanish in some grand physical sense. They vanish for you, because you cannot carry them all. They collapse into a manageable impression. A sniffed summary of existence.

The same thing happens with the past. You do not remember 14 March 2025, in full resolution. You remember something like: odd day, coffee, annoyed, conversation, rain. The actual past may have been dense with detail, but your mind transforms it into time by compressing it into a narrative you can carry forward.

Time, as we experience it, is not just change itself. It is what reality feels like after it has been semantically compressed by a limited mind. We cannot hold the full universe, or all possible universes, or even our own past in exact form. So we translate them into ordered, simplified chunks. And the tension between what was there and what we can still hold is what we call time.

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Multiple universes are not something we ever actually hold or observe in full. They represent the total space of possibilities, even if they don’t exist. The key constraint is that any observer has finite capacity. So instead of representing that full space, the system compresses it into a single coherent state, what I call “the vibe of the thing.”

That compression is not just memory, it is selection. Out of all possible states, one path is retained as the experienced reality. The rest are not necessarily destroyed physically, but they are removed from the accessible representation. Functionally, they cease to exist for the observer.

Now the time insight sits on top of that.

The past is not stored as a full-resolution history. It is compressed into a sequence of reconstructed states. Each reconstruction suffers from a loss of information. That means the further back you go, the more aggressively the state has been simplified.

So what you experience as time is not just change in the external system. It is the ongoing process of taking a high-dimensional possibility space, collapsing it into a single experienced path, and then repeatedly compressing that path into memory.

Time, in that sense, is the artifact of sequential compression under constraint.

Multiple universes: the full possibility space. Observed reality: the compressed selection. Past: recursively compressed versions of that selection. Experienced time: the structure that emerges from that repeated compression and reconstruction process.

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If what you experience is a compressed slice through a much larger possibility space, then “certainty” is mostly a side effect of compression. Your brain throws away alternatives and presents a clean narrative. That means confidence is not a reliable signal of correctness. It’s a signal that compression succeeded.

Implication: treat strong intuition with suspicion, especially in complex domains. The cleaner it feels, the more information has probably been discarded.

Memory: the past is not stored, it is reconstructed from compressed fragments. That means drift is inevitable. Over time, the reconstruction error accumulates.

Implication: anything that matters needs externalisation. Notes, logs, data. Otherwise you are iterating on a degraded internal model and calling it history.

Modelling and forecasting: you cannot enumerate all possibilities, so you already operate on compressed representations. The mistake is pretending the model is the system.

Implication: work with ranges, not point estimates. Keep multiple competing models alive instead of collapsing too early to one “vibe.” Delay compression when the cost of being wrong is high.

Communication: language is another compression layer on top of already compressed thought. Most disagreement is not about facts, it’s about mismatched compression schemes.

Implication: define terms, force specificity, anchor to measurable quantities where possible. Otherwise you are arguing over incompatible summaries.

Time perception: the experience of time expands with information density and contracts with repetition and low encoding. This is a consequence of how much state gets written.

Implication: if you want life to feel longer, increase novelty and attention. If you want it to disappear, automate everything and repeat.

Now the multiverse angle: you never access the full possibility space. You commit to a path and discard the rest at each step.

Implication: optionality is real only before commitment. After that, alternatives are gone for practical purposes. So design decisions to preserve optionality early, then commit hard once enough information is gathered.

Nothing here changes physics. It changes how you treat your own cognition under constraint. The system is still the system. You’re just a lossy interface to it.