There’s a version of you who took that highly risky, but rewarding, job.
There's a version who stayed close to family and built something amazing.
There’s a version of you that’s an astronaut, a president, an actor and so on…

There’s even a version who threw it all in to travel the world, paint a masterpiece, surf the islands of Hawaii, or write that best-selling book you still think about on a Sunday night.

But you never became those bolder, braver versions of YOU…

And here’s the interesting part…

When you consciously decided to take a different path, those other versions of you didn't simply vanish into the depths of history. Instead, they split apart to act out their own version of your path; but in another universe.

In a world much like this one.

At the same time a micro-fragment of those infinite versions still live as shadows of what could have been…

…at the edges of your mind.

And every time you're stuck on a big decision, or you’re about to make a life-changing choice, you catch yourself asking the same old question: what would that version of me do right now?

Far fetched I know.

But would it surprise you to know that this isn't a wild fantasy or a late-night thought experiment. There's a real theory in physics that says other versions of you could possibly exist in other universes.

Physicists call it the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and it proposes that every time a decision point occurs, reality doesn't pick one path and discard the rest, instead it splits into an infinite number of realities that live out those paths.

Many YOUs.
Multiple worlds.
In the multiverse.

And every version plays out that path; just not in the same world as yours.

Think of it this way.

If you place two mirrors parallel or angled toward each other, each image will bounce endlessly, making a long line or a deep tunnel of repeated reflections that reach towards the infinite distance.

Try it.

The many worlds theory is the same.

If you could visually see your other selves in this multiverse, it would seem as if you’re looking into a universal mirror and seeing an infinite number of reflections of yourself that move in a long line forever—ad-infinitum!

It’s a fascinating idea and we'll come back to it shortly, because the science is stranger than the metaphor.

But for now, keep in mind that you don't need a physics degree to harness this idea, you just need ten minutes and a prompt to ask multiple versions of you to help you with a choice or a decision you’ve been wrestling with.

Not with a Time Machine or a Dark Matter box, but with AI.

And when you do, a decision you've been circling for weeks can come unstuck rapidly. Because by using AI to simulate other versions of you, you’ll stop asking your tired, weary brain and start asking three bolder, braver, brilliant ones.

All YOU.
But not you.
Simulations.

It's a little after midnight and my son has finally gone back down after his second awakening. The house is dark and silent except for the dull blue light of my Macbook screen.

And out of nowhere, there he is.

The wiser version of me who never left that Zen monastery in Korea.

Still in grey robes, beads and a shaved head.
Still waking up at 4am to sit in meditation.
No mortgage, no nappies, no newsletter deadline.

Only.

Stillness.
Peace.
Presence.

For a second I envy him so much it aches.
At the same time, I see the ego trap I’ve fallen into.

Then another door opens.

The me who stayed in the safe salaried job, who had a beautiful boy, who never gambled on any of this.

Super ticking over.
Weekends with the family.
Mounting bills to pay.

I've spent more hours than I'd admit standing in that infinite corridor, looking through the many, many doors; at all the men I didn't become.

And it costs me dearly every time.

Because while I'm busy mourning the lives I didn't pick, I'm unconscious to the present and amazing life I'm living right now.

Ever found yourself in that loop?

Stuck in the “What if’s”

Like most of us, you probably handle a big decision the same way. You lie awake and run it round and round in your brain on an endless loop, trying to solve it from different angles.

Round and round in your head.

The same head that's scared of the same things it was scared of last year and the year before that, and so on.

Or maybe…

You ask AI to help you make a choice and you ask it badly.

"Give me the pros and cons of quitting my job."

And it gives you back a neat, tidy, sensible list, tied up in a bow, that sounds great at first, but then leaves you just as stuck as you were before.

Sometimes even more…

I was in a similar loop on this night while watching the hit Blake Crouch sci-fi show Dark Matter staring Joel Edgerton.

In the series, a physicist, Jason Dessen (Jason two), stumbles onto a technological way to make better choices.

He designs a quantum entanglement box, along with a specific chemical compound, that allows him to achieve quantum superposition and physically travel to parallel universes.

The idea at its heart: a man steps into a large black box, opens a door, and walks into a different version of his own life where he chose another path. He gets to meet that ‘other’ self, borrow what they know and see what he traded away.

In the case of the protagonist of the story, after spending 15 years sacrificing his personal life to build the box, Jason two realises that his fame, money, and scientific achievement leave him feeling totally empty.

Most of all, he deeply regrets abandoning Daniela, the love of his life.

Using the box, he scans the multiverse to find an alternate reality where he chose love instead of a career. He locates Jason one, who is living a modest but happy life with Daniela and their son, Charlie.

Jason two travels to Jason ones world, kidnaps him at gunpoint, drugs him, and shoves him into the box, leaving him stranded in the infinite multiverse. Jason two then steps into Jason ones life, pretending to be him.

What we discover from the series is that it's not only the sensible forks in the road that Jason discovers.

It’s the strange and scary ones too.

If, like Jason, you were to travel the multiverse in search of your other selves somewhere out there would be the version of you who made it big and also another version who failed miserably.

The version sleeping rough.
The world famous one.
The cult leader version who started a fringe religion.
The version who never left their childhood bedroom.

Every yes, every no, every near-miss, spun off into a life of its own.

Imagine you could knock on any of those infinite doors; not to envy those versions, but to ask them, to tap into their wisdom and experience.

Imagine what three of them, pulled from three wildly different lives, could tell you about the choice sitting in front of you right now.

What would you ask them?
What wonders would you discover?
Where would that take you?

The good news is that:

You don't need the box.
You don’t need the drugs.
You don't need the physics.

In fact, you can build the whole thing inside ChatGPT or Claude today.

You prime AI, then ask it to become three other versions of you, the ones who made the brave or the steady or the bizarre choices, and then you let them argue your problem out in front of you.

AI experts have a grandiose name for this trick; they call it…

Strip the jargon and it simply means sending your problem down several versions of yourself, and letting each one bring back a different answer.

You’re not using AI as a question and answer bot, you’re harnessing AI as a room full of different versions of you that can help you make a decision or choice from multiple vantage points.

And it’s something you can test right now…

The hardest decisions you’ll ever make are not hard because you have too few answers, they’re hard because you’re trapped inside one narrow point of view.

You can’t seen the forest for the trees.

And that’s because your current self is carrying the same fears, assumptions, habits and blind spots that created the loop in the first place.

So you keep turning the same decision over and over again hoping one more hour of thinking will somehow reveal something new.

It usually doesn’t.

The method I’m about to share with you changes the frame.

Now instead of asking AI:

“What should I do?”

You ask it to build three plausible versions of you who made different choices, let each one expose what the others are missing, and then bring those perspectives back to the life you’re living right now.

In this Universe.

The goal isn’t to predict your future, it’s to break the monopoly your current perspective has on the decision.

One version may show you the cost of playing too safe, while another may show you the cost of chasing freedom without enough support beneath you. A third version may spot the option you never saw because you had framed the whole problem as either/or.

By enacting this prompt and synthesising different versions of yourself, you’ll have:

less circling;
fewer invisible assumptions;
clearer trade-offs;
and one real next move.

And you’ll stop asking:

Because no serious choice can promise that.

Now instead you’ll start asking:

That’s a much wiser question.

Because clarity doesn’t come from finding the perfect future, it reveals itself from seeing your options well enough that you can finally move forward with courage and confidence.

So this week, we won’t ask AI to choose your life for you, we’ll use it to show you the lives hidden inside the choice you’re about to make and then uncover and expand the paths you could take.

Then you’ll choose just one, this one, but with the added perspective of three viewpoints.

But this isn't just a gimmick or a nice story.

What I’m about to share with you blends science with silicone to design a smart AI you can use right now to help you with your life choices and it is rooted in actual research.

In May 2023, a team of researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), led by Yilun Du (along with colleagues including Google DeepMind researcher Igor Mordatch), published a foundational paper titled “Improving Factuality and Reasoning in Language Models through Multiagent Debate”.

During their research they discovered something simple.

They demonstrated that multi-agent debate significantly improves the reasoning, mathematical, and factual accuracy of Large Language Models compared to a single model answering alone.

By establishing a collaborative process where multiple AI agents iteratively critique each other’s responses over several rounds, the researchers found that the models could effectively identify inconsistencies and correct errors.

Crucially, the framework proved that a "society of minds" can successfully converge on a correct answer even when every individual agent initially starts with an incorrect or flawed response, showcasing that collective AI deliberation outperforms single-shot outputs.

In layman’s terms, what this means is that if you let several AI agents debate a problem instead of one answering on its own, the thinking gets clearer, better-focused and more mistakes get caught.

They called it multi-agent debate.

More heads, even inside one machine, beat one every time.

And there's a human side to the equation too.

Psychologists who study regret, the "what if I'd gone the other way" feeling, have a name for it: counterfactual thinking. Left alone it just hurts, but pointed at a real decision, those imagined other lives turn into something psychologically useful.

Advice, instead of ache.

Tie the two together, multi-agent debate and counterfactual thinking, and you get a whole new way of understanding your choices. Three versions of you, arguing like the MIT agents, each one carrying a life you only imagined.

A Danish philosopher said it best:

In other words, you can't re-walk the paths you didn't take, but you can send three 'self scouts’ down those paths and ask them what they discovered when they get back.

And the show ‘Dark Matter’ that inspired this concept, didn't invent any of this.

The real science behind the idea goes back to 1957 with a physicist called Hugh Everett. His theory later earned the name the Many-Worlds Interpretation.

What he said was this.

Every time a choice can go more than one way, it goes every way. The universe splits, over and over, into branches that never touch. You turn left in one, right in another, go straight in yet another.

All of them real.
Each one carrying a version of you.

So with every choice there are now countless YOUs out there, in branches, in infinite splits, that you can never visit.

The one who made it.
The one who lost it all.
All of them real.
All of them sealed off.

The TV show gives two of these ideas its own names.

The selves meeting up to compare notes, it calls Quantum Convergence and the moment it all narrows back to one outcome, it calls Wave Function Collapse.

The former theory can be found in orthodox quantum mechanics; like the Copenhagen interpretation.

However, Everett would raise an eyebrow at that second one. He said the collapse never really happens. Out there, nothing snaps down to a single result because every branch just keeps going.

But you only get to live one of those branches; so the collapsing is the one job left to you.

But before we continue, let me frank.

I’m not suggesting that AI can't crack open those other universes, that’s impossible (for now).

But what it can do is to reimagine the versions of you inside them, like a simulation, then carry their advice back, and leave you to do the thing physics can’t.

The choosing.
For this life.

But with the added bonus that you can now carry into this life what the other versions of you learned and then apply it to your decision.

Like I said earlier, the whole concept of asking your multidimensional selves to help you with a vital decision didn't come to me from a social feed or a clever AI manual.

I came to it late one night, everyone asleep, watching that Dark Matter TV show with a cold cup of tea and even colder thoughts.

The parallel universe Box got to me.

All those versions of the same man, each one living a life the others had to let go off, countless upon countless times.

That old ache of the paths not taken.

And now hitting middle-age, with my son asleep down the hall, these cold thoughts tipped into something bigger than "which life should I have picked.

Those thoughts transformed into; how little time there is for any of those lives to be lived, let alone a full one.

Which reminds me of a famous book, Proust's Swann's Way, where one bite of a small cake dipped in tea drags a whole lost childhood back into the room. Underneath the story sits a heavy truth: time slips through us all, and most of the life we've already lived we can't even hold onto; let alone remember.

That's what this multiverse series left me with that night.

Not "I chose the wrong path." Just that "it all goes so fast, and I only get the one pass."

So I stopped wanting to mourn the lives I'll never live.
I wanted to put them to work instead.

While there's still time, and a real, concrete decision in front of me.

And that’s when the idea for this prompt hit me….

A while ago we took one lunch and tuned it to your body, instead of following an abstract rule you found on Instagram or off the internet.

This week we take one decision and tune it to your other selves, instead of grinding it alone in the one harried head that's already tired of mulling it over endlessly.

Same move both times.
Smallest possible input.
Aimed at multiple YOU’s, not at a stranger.

Last week it was a meal.
This week it's a crossroads.

The method is identical…

Let AI build something around the real you, and then give you one small step you can take right now into the real world. But this time you’re not alone, you now have your other selves to help you.

Each version of you (The Risk-Taker, The Builder, The Creative) will sit in their own three metaphorical, multidimensional chairs, and answer the same question for you, this you, right here, from multiple perspectives.

And you won’t even need the drug or the box drive from Dark Matter…

OK enough theory, here’s the practice.

However, there’s one important twist before you step inside the Dimensional decision box. Like I said earlier, the three versions of you that you’re about to meet are not real versions of you from parallel universes.

They can’t tell you what would have happened if you had taken the other job, stayed with the other person or boarded that other plane.

They’re simulations of you, and that’s exactly what makes them so useful.

Research into multi-persona prompting has found that an AI can sometimes solve complex problems better when it’s forced to approach the same task through several relevant perspectives, let those perspectives challenge one another, and then revise what comes back.

And the most interesting part is that the strongest personas are not necessarily the same three every time. A career decision may need the version of you who optimised for ambition, the one who protected family life and the one who found a reversible middle path.

A creative decision might need completely different selves.

So rather than always summoning The Bold One, The Steady One and The Creative One, the prompt below builds the three versions of you that this particular crossroads needs right now.

Then it makes them disagree.

Not so AI can choose your life for you, but so you can clearly see the trade-offs your own tired brain has been circling for months, but now from three totally different directions.

You bring the crossroads.
The Box opens three doors.
Your selves argue.
You choose which life gets the next step.

Because the final collapse of your decision into this reality, the subconscious splash into consciousness, still belongs to you. The ocean is your decision, but this is your shore, your island, your world.

Here’s the prompt.

Paste this into ChatGPT or Claude and wait for the magic to happen.

[ Start of Prompt ]

[ End of Prompt ]

That's it.

Four steps, three selves, one real next move.

The aim is not to look for three votes and a winner; what you’re looking for is something more useful: the trade-off you can’t see while you’re standing knee-deep inside the decision.

By the end, The Dimensional Decision Box will give you:

The last part matters because although the three selves get a voice, but the real you gets the final vote.

Here’s a real-life example of a couple (I’ve redacted their names) who are deciding wether they should stay together or not; despite fighting constantly, raising children and still being in love with each other.

This is what happened when the husband, let’s call him Adam, opened The Dimensional Decision Box. He was first asked six very specific questions and then presented with six different steps based on three of his multidimensional selves…

Example ChatGPT chat image 3 of 3

For the sake of space, I haven’t listed all the steps.

Step five moves into what survives all three worlds and then step six ends with the smallest door i.e. is there a small, reversible experiment that could give you real information before you commit to the full choice?

You don’t have to know which alternate version of you ends up happiest.

That’s impossible.

If I were running this prompt on myself…

The monk may have found peace and missed fatherhood.
The salaried version may have found security and wondered what he never built
The reckless one may have found freedom, failure, or both.

Every door contains something you gain and something you leave behind.

That’s what makes a real decision difficult.

The point of The Dimensional Decision Box is not to find the universe where you get everything. It’s to see the trade-offs clearly enough so that you can stop haunting the corridor.

Open the doors.
Hear your selves out.
Borrow what they learned.

Then..
Integrate and infuse.
And apply it to your life.

Then shut the Box.

There’s only one version who gets to take the next step.

For years I thought those other versions of me were ghosts to be mourned.

The conscious, wise and silent monk.
The safe one who never risked anything.
The reckless travelling nomad.
The start-up power-broker.

But a ghost just haunts you.
Whereas a council works for you.

Stop standing in that dark corridor, staring through the doors at the lives you didn't pick and instead call those selves into a room, let them fight it out and walk away with one concrete thing you can do today.

And remember this…

You'll never live all those lives at once.

Nobody does, because the trying is what keeps you frozen.

You want to be the bold one and the steady one and the free one all at once…

…so you can become none of them.

Pick one real life.

This one.

Then borrow everything the others learned.

And if you know someone standing at their own crossroads, running it round and round alone, forward this to them.

Lend them the three chairs.

Hit reply and tell me.

I read every one.

The goal is to listen, observe and then integrate those many selves into the one true version of you so that you can then create clarity and silence around your decisions.

Let the other versions of you speak, so that you don't have to solve the big things alone. Build the Box, pull up three chairs, and let them argue while you listen. Just one decision, three selves, and one small step for the you who's here right now.

Then re-centre, realign and rewire yourself for greatness.

And if this reached you at your own crossroads, forward it to someone standing at theirs.

Ps. I think out loud between issues over on @cedricchenefront or @wellwireddaily, where we talk everything AI + wellbeing and self growth.

Talk soon,
Cedric the AI Monk; stay well, stay wired! 🧠⚡

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