Russian Doll: Time, Many Worlds, and Computer Simulations

For the first episodes, the Netflix series Russian Doll seems to be a darker reworking of Groundhog Day. Fatal accidents on the night of or day after Nadia’s 36^th birthday party keep bringing her back to the bathroom sink in the party apartment during the festivities. Nadia retains her memory of all the repeats, and the memories cumulate in an orderly fashion, e.g. she does not on loop 2 have memories of loop 1 and on loop one have memories of loop 2. So it is possible to regard each loop as having its own local time, embedded in order in a super-time experienced only by Nadia. This far we are within the Groundhog temporal metaphysics.

(For the metaphysics of time, free will, and personal identity in that movie, please see https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2014/06/groundhog-day-movie-as-metaphysics.html.)

It does not much change things when Alan turns up, whose deaths, on Nadia’s birthday or the day after, bring him back to his own bathroom. So far as Nadia and Alan are able to determine, their deaths are always simultaneous. This suggests that, even though shared, each stretch of local time is of  determinate, although varying, length. 

The varying length part is only a slight deviation from Groundhog Day, but the differences start to multiply when Nadia finds at the beginning of a loop that the mirror in the bathroom has disappeared. Other mirrors are gone as well from Nadia’s apartment and Alan’s. Alan’s fish, always fed shortly after he came out of the bathroom, are dead.

It is no longer possible to take each repeat as a local loop in time, returning the universe to its earlier state excepting only the memories of the protagonists. Instead, Nadia seizes upon an alternate worlds explanation. The bathroom of her current loop she finds has a mirror-less history going back well into the past. The owner of the party apartment denies that there ever was a mirror. She is anti-mirror on principle. So it cannot be in the same world as that of the bathroom of the first episode. Nadia fears that, instead of being loop-resurrected from each of her deaths, she does a world transit at death. Each of her deaths is mourned by her friends in the world she has left.

She should wonder at this point whether she has only inherited the memories of the Nadias of earlier “loops,” and will soon herself be dead. Apparently she is not too sensitive to philosophical issues of personal identity.

Things gets worse as she reappears into worlds of fewer and fewer people, finally there being only the party’s hostess.  Nadia and Alan speculate that these depressing changes, as well as the loops themselves, are somehow their own fault.  With time they come to believe that the key was that neither of them did anything for the other when their paths crossed, as strangers, on the night of their first deaths.

In the last episode, both are apparently back in the original world – replete with mirrors, fish, and party-goers. As things unfold, however, we realize that we are actually seeing two worlds. In one Nadia has memory of all the past loops, but Alan has none. In the other, it is reversed. So each of them has a chance to intervene to save a version of the other innocent of their loop-comradeship, and, initially, inclined to repel the intervention of a busybody stranger. Cognizant Nadia and cognizant Alan, however, ultimately succeed in saving, in their respective worlds, Alan and Nadia as they were on that first night. So the moral failures of that night have been “corrected.”

In the final scene we have a split screen of both couples: cognizant Nadia with naïve Alan; naïve Nadia with cognizant Alan, each couple in its own window walking towards an oncoming parade. Then the split screen unifies. Soon there are only cognizant Nadia and cognizant Alan walking together.

My first reaction was that there had been a merger of the two worlds. World merger is conceptually a good deal more challenging than world branching. How are differences resolved? Here, what is the nature of the metaphysical filter that trashed naïve Nadia and Alan in favor of cognizant Nadia and Alan? What an odd way for the worlds to behave. If anything, it would be simpler to have let those with knowledge of other worlds disappear into nothingness, thus erasing weird memories explainable only by weirder metaphysics. Then too, why would the physics of many worlds care about morally improving two unremarkable New Yorkers?

Struggling to make sense of world merger, I took a closer look. The final split screen shows mirror image worlds, both of which have naïve Nadia walking into the parade. (Presumably one of them is right handed, and the other left.) In the first single screen, both naïve Nadias, still exact mirror images, pass on either side of cognizant Nadia, who seems not to notice this odd circumstance.

The alternate worlds of Everett’s physics and of possible world metaphysics just don’t behave this way. For cybernetics, however, this is child’s play.  Simulation space is highly malleable. A mirror image parade?  Nothing to it. Certainly, loops, intended and unintended, have been a feature of programs as long as there have been general purpose computers.

I concluded that Nadia and Alan are characters in a simulation. The algorithms apparently were sensitive to their moral successes and failures. Did their behavior on the first fatal night trigger a looping bug in the program? Perhaps. One of the few “next day” scenes has computer game designer Nadia showing up for a work conference in which she corrects a bug in a game program.

That bug, however, Nadia exterminated in less than a minute. It took her and Alan together movie-long to solve their day-and-die problem. In a scene at Alan’s apartment, she plays a game she designed, which Alan had shelved as too hard. Nadia finds it harder than she expected. I am inclined to think that the whole purpose of the simulation was to see how quickly the two characters could use the loops to correct their behavioral failures.

Why didn’t Nadia come up with the explanation that she was in a simulation instead of thinking she was a real person transiting multiple actually existing worlds? Perhaps this was programmed beyond her reach, as was the knowledge of good and evil for Adam and Eve. Possibly Nadia couldn’t feel bad that she didn’t recognize she was in a simulation, because “she” was only an artifact of many different lines of code, having no feelings in particular, and no consciousness in general.

If, however, among the properties the code gave this character were the ability to call on a human sized set of memories, to have complex and partially inconsistent positive and negative goals in the game, to deliberate and make decisions, then perhaps that would amount to consciousness. She might then, simulation creator as she is, have realized that she is a simulation creature. Nadia’s consciousness might not be exactly like ours, but where is it written that all consciousness must be alike? See “Her” Computer Consciousness: Can an Artificial Intelligence Be In Love? https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2018/10/her-computer-consciousness-can.html. The Netflix miniseries "The I-Land" is a brains in a vat simulation story of dubious coherence and less aesthetic merit.

For a discussion, among other things, of whether Pottersville is a simulation see,  “It’s a Wonderful Life:The Metaphysics,” http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2016/12/its-wonderful-life-metaphysics.html.

Other posts on movies and metaphysics"Groundhog Day: The Movie as Metaphysics": http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2014/06/groundhog-day-movie-as-metaphysics.html.  "'Her' Computer Consciousness: Can an Artificial Intelligence Be in Love?":http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2018/10/her-computer-consciousness-can.html.. "The Many Worlds Metaphysics of The Man in the High Castle," https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-many-world-metaphysics-of-man-in.html.