Cloudscape

Conceive of all reality as impossible, and it will stand out in all the clearer reality. Say to yourself at everything you perceive that for all the mysteries of its wonders, it simply cannot possibly exist — when this thought then collides with the undeniable fact of its existence, it will stare you in the face and defiantly stand out in all the sharper contrast.

Everything strives for its own survival, for it would otherwise not have come to exist.

If the universe is infinitely complex, it must involve infinitely many levels both below the quantum level as above the astronomical level. All of these would have varying degrees of complexity, some of them as high as our own level. Some levels, like our own, would be able to support life. Such level could be called a "habitable level." In habitable levels below the quantum level, time would go much faster from our perspective, while in habitable levels above the cosmic level, time would go much slower from our perspective.
There is no reason why such levels would be impossible; however, if these levels exist at all, it may not be possible to connect with them. In fact, perhaps it is natural to assume that there are habitable levels beside our own just as it is natural to assume that there are habitable planets beside our own. Science has already shown us that we are far from unique; why should our level, then, be unique? Would it not be too much of a coincidence if there were only one level at which life is possible, that of chemistry? In no way we appear to live in the center of the universe; why should this aspect be an exception? Such chauvinism has betrayed us too often before to be closed to this possibility altogether.

Infinite levels of complexity below the quantum level ("subquantum levels") would mean that there are also infinitely diverse systems below it, some of which would be able to sustain higher degrees of complexity than others. Each level below the quantum level would affect the higher levels, but would do so in such chaotic ways that their effect would appear to be random.
We might never be able to observe those worlds, but although the Planck length may be the smallest size that we can observe, and therefore the smallest size that matters to us, that does not mean that there could not exist anything smaller; we simply can never connect to whatever exists at such level, at least so it seems for now.
Infinite levels of complexity above the cosmic level ("supercosmic levels") would mean the same thing. In an infinitely complex Universe (with capital U, referring to all of existence) there could be forces of infinite speed, although they might not occur except at an infinitesimal frequency; this could, for instance, bridge the distances between separate universes (which would in turn be but particles!) so that they could interact at faster-than-light speed. This would not have to be necessary for there to other levels above the cosmic level, however; suppose that nothing goes faster than light (which would, however, be very unlikely if the universe is indeed infinite in complexity), then this would merely make the interactions in supercosmic levels much slower; they could still, in effect, take place, even if there are no other forces than the ones we know already.
Since our universe expands so rapidly, it could not take part in any interactions because it would dissolve before it could do so. However, if again we assume that the Universe (with capital U) is infinite, there must be infinitely other universes (small u), and some would have density parameters which would make them stable for a long term. Most subatomic particles are very unstable, lasting only a fraction of a second; but the few that are stable are enough to form a viable level.
There are two ways in which stable universes might interact with one another: one is through forces which to us are still unknown. In that case, it is possible that our own universe has a charge we are not aware of; after all, since it does not manifest to ourselves, we cannot detect it. Indeed, if there are habitable subquantum levels, then the hypothetical inhabitants of an electron who have come to discover that they live on an electron might think it to be neutral, not seeing that there are particles beyond their own and calling their particle "the universe."
The other possibility is that stable universes interact with one another through the same forces present in our own universe. Some universes might be electromagnetically charged; even if none have a very great charge, then still, either how every universe is likely charged to some extent, even if that charge comprises only a few elementary charges. Though this is small on our level, this may have an entirely different meaning at supercosmic level. Given enough time, even the slightest force, no matter how small, will have an affect. The only thing that can prevent this is that it would be countered by another force, but those would not or barely occur in the space between universes.
Just how long this would take does not matter at all, as time is relative; on supercosmic levels, a billion years might be a very short time, just like a femtosecond is a very short time to us. In contrast, on quantum level a femtosecond is a very long time, and most subatomic particles do not survive that long.
The effects of a force depend on time as well as space. This is testified by the gravity that keeps superclusters together; certainly that force is not relevant to us, that is to say, not on our level. Time and space are relative, and what to us is a very long time may be but a very brief instant on supercosmic levels, while what to us are very vast distances may be but very short intervals on those levels.
Thus, regardless in what way or at what speed, if there are universes beyond our own then they will interact. Very slowly to us, they will move to form greater structures which in a higher level might be similar, for instance, to stars on the astronomical level — which will then again form greater levels and so on. If the speed of light is an absolute limit, the only difference this makes is that the greater levels will move slower, but even so, in that frame of reference it is not slow in itself. It must also be noted that, should there be an inhabitable supercosmic level, this slowness would also affect consciousness, so that it would not perceive its world as slow at all.

After another look at the showcase, I came in. Glancing at the pale golden words "Life Shop" painted on the door, I reminisced on when I first saw them - I was too little then to know what they meant, let alone what secrets I'd find beyond that door. I dared to come in, and since then I'd come back every day for more. I got addicted to its merchandise, so much so that I felt it'd kill me if I didn't get any more for even a single day. There were all sorts of things, and I'm quite sure that even if I'd live to be a hundred years I could never try everything there was.
The shopkeeper was a little strange, though. I'd never actually seen him. And since he never showed himself in the shop, and everything was for free anyway, I do wonder if one could call him the shopkeeper at all. It's just what I call him since, well, I wouldn't know what else I should call him.
"Ah, Eligio!" said a voice from nowhere. "Same as always, El, you know the drill."
"Right. Self-service." I looked around. My eyes skimmed over the thousands of potions in the room. Every potion had another effect. There was joy and hope and fear and love and sadness… I looked longingly at happiness, a potion which was tantalizingly outside my reach on one of the higher shelves: it was too high. Every time I made this objection Eligio laughed and said: "Why, there's ladders!"
I then replied that I was afraid of heights. This made his laugh even more merrily, and he said, "Well, you can remain down here all your life if you want to, but that's not going to get you anywhere. You've been in here often enough to know all the more interesting things are up there."
He pointed and looked up, and I followed suit. It was, indeed, a long, long way up. The strange shop was actually so high that he could not see the roof, and he wondered if there actually was any at all, even though at the outside the shop seemed small. An endless series of ledges and ledges and stairs led up.
Oh, he'd been up there, and actually far higher than most people here cared to go. Every level actually had the same potions, but they were somehow different. At least, they were given the same name. But the "happiness" you could drink at level five was nothing compared to the happiness down at the ground level: richer, warmer, and strangely more complicated. In fact, once I'd drunk the happiness in the higher levels I was quite tired of the happiness at the ground level: it tasted cloying in comparison.
Yes, it's true that I've often fallen down when I climbed higher, and it did make me more cautious about how high I'd go. When he'd find I'd broken nothing, Theo, the shopkeeper, would merely laugh and say that if I fell, it was my own doing. This would make me so angry that I'd fly into a rage. My doing? Couldn't the bastard at least build a safer shop for his customers? To my irritation, as usual he would just laugh at this, and say that this was just a quicker way down for people who wanted it. He'd then ask me how it happened that I'd fallen, and with extreme vexation I'd admit that as usual I'd looked down. He'd told me not to look down, but it wasn't easy when you knew there the only thing that kept you from falling down hundreds of feet were a few inches of floor at your side. Yet I'd found that I would fall only when I did look down. I'd feel my body being sucked into those vertiginous depths as soon as the fear of falling down came over me.
I'd be convinced I'd broken every bone in my body even when I'd go home, but to my surprise, I'd never broken anything at all, at least, except for some vials and potions in the shop.
Strange to say it often felt safer in the dark cellar, and when I'd fall from the higher levels the first thing I'd do would be too rush down into them. There, at least there were safe balusters, and if you'd go down at least you knew you could get up again, at least if you wouldn't get lost in the dark.
And when his accursed shop had just been responsible for another of my falls, there was no way I wanted to hear or see that freak Theo then - or that's how I thought of him then, even though he could be a nice guy, at least, in his own ways. Strange to say, I had never even actually seen him, which had made me make the joke to ask if he wasn't just some kind of cassette player - it was meant as a joke then, but I'd actually wondered for some time if it wasn't close to the truth.
Either how, when he'd just been responsible for another of my frequent falls I liked not to see him for a while, and besides, well, if I may whisper something in your ear, there are actually many, well, noteworthy potions in the cellar, too. But don't tell that to anyone, because most people will think we a psycho to say that. And yet, people keep coming down here and drinking the potions in the racks here. I wonder why. But when I ask why they do it, they just say that they are meant to be here.
But somehow, I find the potions here have something strangely, and perhaps deceptively addictive - like the songs of the Lorelei. Once you'd get down here, you were almost sure to come back someday. Strangely, the potions here were almost always bitter or acrid, or ice-cold or very hot. Sometimes, they would burn in your throat or in your stomach, and more than once I've actually vomited from them. I'd then try to get back up as fast as possible, but then I sometimes realized that wasn't always easy, finding your way back. And there were always those horribly tempting smells of those strange potions. Why ever the shopkeeper held these potions here, I don't know. I asked him, but all he'd say was that there were very many tastes, and he wanted to satisfy everyone's.
It was very dreary here. But above, when you'd look straight up in the shop you'd look into a blinding light like that of the sun. Some supposed there just had to be a very bright lamp there, and others thought it was a window to the sun, and wondered what it would be like on the roof. But I thought there was no roof, and there was no window up there either: I believe the shop was so high that it went all the way up to the sun.
Indeed, once when I'd gone up to the nine-hundred seventy-sixth floor, when I came down, panting all the way, I asked Theo: "Where is the roof of this thing?"
"You know there is no roof, El," he'd say with his usual laugh, "What do you take me for, an ordinary junk shopper? This is a real place, y'know: it goes up into infinity."

Something you should surely have read if you've visited my blog at all - probably my most shocking idea.

In an infinite universe, everything is real. Probabilities depend on time and space, thus is both time and space are infinite, all probabilities in the universe are equal to one. This is the basic idea of ergodicity.
This infinity has highly bizarre consequences. Think of the most absurd things you can think of - monkeys raining from a clear sky, trees sprouting from nuclear waste in seconds, atoms arranging themselves to a microscopic epic, molecules across a solar system falling into place to form a hi-tech civilization, a live alien popping into existence in space -- these are all configurations of energy which are theoretically possible, and as Feynman said, anything which can happen will happen. It's all happening, right now and every moment, an infinite number of times. How surreal!
The punchline: the very fact that you can think of something happening means that it IS happening. This principle is known as modal realism: all imaginary worlds are as real as our own, "real" world. Remember that when you're reading a book, or slip into a reverie -- you're having a vision of something which is actually happening.
But it's not over yet -- there's something even more amazing about modal realism…
If everything is real, that means everything is true. After all, it would mean that there is a causal association between all things, and in fact all things are connected. This would actually make all delusions true, as anything that would happen would not only have several causes, but all causes one could think of. For instance, if a paper one looks at suddenly floats away, this would be both because the wind blew it away and because one has telekinetic abilities. There obviously appears to be something wrong here.
In principle, according to chaos theory it may actually be possible to cause a paper to float away by looking at it. But this is not necessarily so, and moreover, it can not be caused both by one's thoughts and the wind.
But because of the ergodic nature of an infinite universe, there would simultaneously be a world where it is caused by the wind and a world where it is caused by one's thoughts, quite simply because if the universe is infinite, everything is. These worlds could otherwise be identical, except in the cause of the paper floating away. Because the universes would be perceived in the same way, they would per definition have the same essence, so that there would be no telling in which of these universes one is. In fact, one could well say one is in both universes at once.
As long as you don't know if something is true or false, it is both true and false, because your own perception matches both the universe where it is true and the universe where it is false. Of course, the only condition for something to be true is that you perceive it to be, that is, that your qualia makes it a possibility (for instance, that you discern something is either true or false, not both). Then, there is always a chance that you'll be in the universe where it is true.
Of course, this chance may be very low, as only in a small percentage of the universes which the many identical "yous" would perceive as identical, it would really be true. Still, however, as long as you have no definitive "proof" whether it is or isn't, it is true, because you have all the perceptions of the you who lives in the universe where it is true, and therefore you are essentially that you. To clarify, nothing really exists if it can't be perceived, thus if the difference between the universe where the idea in question is true and the universe where it is false cannot be perceived, it does not really exist as such, either.
And of course, things are even further complicated because the so-called "proof" that it is or isn't true, which would necessarily be part of one's sensorial input, could be hallucinatory, it'd be essentially worthless: you could still be in a universe where the sensorial input of the proof is an illusion and the idea in question is still either true or false. There is no separation between what we know and what we imagine.
This means that everything is in a dual state, from quantum to universe. This explains the principle of Heisenberg, because we can't (yet) know the state of an individual quantum. This version of this principle is known as the many worlds principle, though the latter was perhaps not founded upon modal realism.
Any possibility one can conceive has a 100% probability of happening somewhere in the multiverse. Thus, any story you can think of is true. Somewhere in the infinite numbers of universes in the multiverse, it happens just like you imagined. If the universe is infinite, space and time are all that separate us from that which we imagine. Imagination, therefore, is a discovery.