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Izanami, a solution to the quantum conundrum posed by Izanagi (which has little to do with the myth of CoH)

Before I delve into this mini meta, I’d like to advance a couple of considerations, the first being that this is just a series of ramblings on quantum physics and how in my opinion it relates to Izanagi and Izanami - it's nothing special.

Secondly, the arc that depicted Naori Uchiha’s plight with her companion Naka and the consequent contrivance of Izanami to save him from his collapse into madness.

The reason why I’m mentioning her is I’ve often seen people cite her when writing criticism, especially where the Curse of Hatred (CoH) is concerned, but she never existed within Kishimoto’s story line; that portion of the anime is just barely a notch above fanfiction - it’s filler and certainly not paradigmatic in any way (there’s nothing wrong with fanfiction but it’s not something I’d recommend quoting in order to defend an opinion).

Speaking of which, while I’d also like to place the CoH under hard scrutiny, I won’t be debating its existence in this specific ask (I’m working on a separate one), rather I’ll be exploiting this post as a reference for future perusal of the myth of CoH. Because, and I’ll be candid about this, I’m entirely skeptical of its authenticity as a physiologically based phenomenon in weilders and of the reliability of the myth that surrounds it.

Going back to the figure of Naori, there’s a very obvious detail that allows to dismantle any discourse that revolves around her, Naka and CoH : she’s touted as the inventor of the Izanami technique, yet she’s obviously already an extension of Konoha as she dons the Hitai-ate of Leaf’s symbol; this entirely clashes with Itachi’s retrospective reconstruction of this echo from the past.

Let's begin with Izanami's debut (volume 61)

All things considered, I'd be dubious of Itachi's perspective as he never embodied the unbiased narrator within the Narutoverse - even Kabuto called him the greatest deceiver of them all, something that Itachi himself never denied. On the contrary, he notoriously scorned his own kin and refuted his clan, so it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if this psychedelic vision of his own ancestors were to be affected by his own cognitive bias, which was most certainly further polluted by Leaf's propaganda - he quite probably subscribed to the promulgation that revolved around CoH.

Despite this limitation in objective reasoning, Itachi does state something that caught my attention so I thought I might elaborate a little on that.

So what is Izanami?

It’s a forbidden Kinjutsu technique pertaining to the Uchiha Clan that goes beyond normal-vision genjutsu as it’s a superior ocular technique.

The idea behind it is that it strikes the target through physical sensations shared between the wielder and the target. As with its counterpart Izanagi, in exchange for the power that the technique offers, the Sharingan with which Izanami is cast is subsequently sealed and sight is lost forever. According to Itachi, Izanami forms a duality with Izanagi but, unlike the latter which alters the caster’s fate, Izanami has the ability to force the unwitting Izanagi-user into a loop from which they can exit only upon some epiphany of sorts.

How does the counterpart Izanagi work?

It’s a genjutsu that acts upon the user rather than upon others and once activated, the technique unties the caster from the shackles of an unfavourable collapsed wave-function in order to rewrite their own fate; we could say it severs the tie between reality and illusion by giving the wielder the possibility of controlling their own “state of existence” for a brief moment in order to deviate tangible reality towards the most propitious outcome possible.

Let's take a peak at Itachi's wording and attempt to connect our quantum dots:

"If there was only one Izanagi user, it was no problem — but when there were two or more, there could be endless reworkings of any given situation."

Here arises the first paradox: if the Izanagi is only cast upon the one's self and not upon others, why is Izanami necessary to override the effects of Izanagi?

I want to offer a different interpretation other than the CoH, which has honestly exhausted me as it only offers a cheap justification to every dilemma we're face with when it comes to the Uchiha; Sasuke taking the path of the avenger? CoH. Fugaku's coup d'etat? CoH. Madara's defection? CoH. Itachi annihilating his clan? Co—Oh wait, that was patriotism, my mistake.

The thing is, CoH depletes the reader's imagination and deprives them of exploring any other worthy explanations.

So going back to Itachi's psychotomimetic mental image of his own people, he perhaps inadvertently inserts a crucial hint - it's not about CoH (nor presumed psychic instability and subsequent mental malfunction that the Uchiha cannot possibly avoid unless they convert to the Will of Fire), never was: it's about the superposition and overlap of individual multiple realities that distorts the primarily sought after outcome (for example an Uchiha victory) and negates that very conjuncture. He says it himself.

Because while he claims that most users were unable to handle that power, he also states that there was no problem if the user is but one. Additionally, he speaks of the ramification of myriads of scenarios, so it's obvious he's referring to a indeterministic quantum conundrum.

Izanagi and Izanami both are forbidden techniques, or, at the very least, during a battle Izanagi must be cast only by one specific user to avoid a causal sequence of inconsistencies - and even then, it's a technique that can only logically be utilised in very specific situations because it can only be cast upon the wielder and in virtue of such it's pointless to utilise it without any former strategic coordination - after all, it comes at such a precariously high price and there's only so many times it can be cast (and that number is 2), so if you blow it, you're fucked and so is your eyesight which is irrecoverable.

Izanami emerges precisely because the reckless and impulsive use of Izanagi risked compromising the outcome of a critical clash - Izanagi serves as a strategy of ensuring a victory, but if too many contributors alter the wave-function, that certainty falters and is diminished : the more the users, the more unstable the ripple-effect.

He says it so candidly right here (and the panel on the right is figuratively quite evocative to me as it almost seems to depict the propagation of a wave associated to photons used diffractive experiments to prove the dual nature of quantum particles as both corpuscular entities and waves, but that's just me going off on a tangent) :

"That's what the Izanami was designed to stop".

So not the CoH and its mind-altering, insanity-inducing delirium (if that even exists in the form its been handed down to us through a very colourful chronicon of events, each one narrated by fearful, prejudiced or resentful observers - and let's not forget that history has always been written by the winners, never by the losers and especially not by those who were ethnically cleansed out of existence) - it wasn't a measure of containment of lunatic Uchiha gone awry.

No, Izanami was deliberately conceived to control the unbridled spawning of unforeseen offshoot universes and have them converge onto one, singular subsistence out of the many, so that it materialises: a collapse of the wave-function, a delta-spike of reality.

Because here's the thing, and I cannot stress this enough: before the unification of minor countries into the five great nations, all clans were mercenary clans hired to execute the contractor's interests (I'd argue that not much changed afterwards, it's just all a macroscopic version that encompasses those microcosmic realities - Konoha still depends on contracts with the Land of Fire, it still carries out missions, however questionable, for economic gain and stability - but this is a discourse for another post). Uchiha clan fought Senju clan who fought Hagoromo clan who fought whatever clan they were pitted against and so on and so forth in an unending repeat of chaos and bloodshed - war and violence altered everyone, from the child soldiers whose innocence was stripped away from them to the seasoned veterans who had witnessed unfathomable human tragedy - Senju and Uchiha or whatever clan were essentially the same, there was never a faction more "predisposed" to evil than the other and there's plenty a character that could easily fall into the category of someone who suffers from a curse of hatred, yet they derive from other clans.

The point of this being that each an every mercenary clan had to develop its own unique array of jutsu to overcome their opponents - in the case of the Uchiha, survival depended largely on their ocular abilities and how they were brandished - as they became more and more sophisticated, it evidently became a necessity to develop a technique capable of quenching competing multiple realities (Occam's razor) that threatened the success probability of a battle - it has to do with survival of the clan by ensuring victory through damage control.

So going back to the initial paradox, let's take a look at how it's possible to give a physical QM interpretation of Izanagi...

Quantum Mechanics (skip if you couldn't care less)

To give a brief introduction to quantum mechanics, I want to cite the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM. This kind of interpretation subscribes to the basic idea that QM is intrinsically indeterministic and that each outcome of an experiment is weighted by a certain probability.

It’s postulated that the act of measurement is intrinsically related to what is known as the wave-function collapse; basically, the WF of a system will change brusquely and in a discontinuous manner — here’s the fascinating thing though: prior to the act of measurement, the WF is neither here nor there; it’s not localised, it’s not determined: it’s spread out (like butter scraped over too much bread) and it’s the observation that causes a “reduction” of the WF to a new state.

Elementary particles (electrons for example) are indistinguishable: they’re all identical between themselves and as matter on the nano-scale is composed of elementary particles, we can state the following: the essence of an object — any object — resides in the entangled quantum state of its particles and not the particles themselves.

When we construct the a representation of an object, we define its energetic state and position in space.

Let’s take Schordineger’s experiment, a well known thought-investigation: the cat is in a specific, definite state. It’s either dead or its alive, there’s no other option.

Right?

Not quite. Until we’ve made a concise measurement we do not and cannot know if the cat is alive or not, therefor it’s in a superposition of both states: the cat is basically simultaneously dead and alive (hence the joke "Schrodinger's cat: wanted dead and alive") - the experiment with the Schrodinger's cat leads to a splitting of worlds before we’ve even opened the box!

To extend the concept further and transcend beyond mere objects, we can theoretically imagine a quantum state of the Universe through a UWV (universal wave function) which must be able to be decomposed into a superposition of terms corresponding to different worlds.

THE MEASUREMENT OF EXISTENCE

While there are many worlds existing in parallel to the Universe, they each have to have the same physical size (this is up for debate if we consider early Universe in the immediate post “big bang”, but that's irrelevant to the sake of this discourse). In every world, sentient beings would be as authentic as in any other of the simultaneously plausible ones.

Here’s were it gets intricate and I can see the connection with the concept of Izanagi: there are two aspects to the so-called "measure of existence "of a world:

It has to quantify the ability of one world to interfere with other worlds (this is explained through a “gedanken” experiment).

The measure of existence is needed for introducing the illusion of probability in the MWI theory.

Applying this to the Narutoverse is quite fun because it’s implied that Izanagi, through Itachi’s brief explanation, satisfies the first requirement because the technique quite obviously alters all possible universe, regardless of the fact that it’s cast only upon the user - to state an example: there is no reality in which Madara doesn’t return to the realm of the living; out of all the possible outcomes, the Universe he chooses is the one that manifests and everyone has to deal with that, because through his technique he manipulated every parallel reality and caused the wave-function to collapse onto a delta-spike of his preference. There’s no accessible alternative reality, but once his technique is spent, the wave-function(s) begin to loosen they become once more distributed without a defined localisation, meaning that the spawning of multiple branches is once again a thing; it's just that through Izanagi, everything, the world, all parallel worlds etc, they all collapsed for one instantaneous pin-point moment and that's the moment in which Madara returns to life.

The second requirement is also satisfied within the Narutoverse and I’ll elaborate (bear with me).

The problem with MWI theory is that probability in a determinist theory paradoxical by definition.

Let’s say I conduct an an experiment with a magical quantum die with only three sides - when I throw my quantum die, I can only get 3 possible outcomes: 1, 2 and 3 and they each have a probability of 1/3. Now, in MWI theory, when I throw that quantum die and get a 2, then automatically there have to exist two parallel universe in which in one universe I got a three and and in the other I got a 1. And this is deterministic because these three parallel universes are indistinguishable except for the outcome of the roll of die.

The proposed solution to this was proposed in 1988 with what is known as the Many Minds interpretation (Roger Penrose wrote some excellent notes on this) - the idea is that not only is there a quantum wave of the Universe, but every single sentient being also possesses a continuum of minds that evolve stochastically and independently event after event and in correspondence to different states of perception with probabilities equal the quantum probabilities of such states.

I don’t want to digress any further, so let’s fast-forward a tad — A common criticism of the MWI stems from the fact that the formalism in quantum theory allows infinitely many ways to decompose the quantum state of the Universe into a superposition of states. So the question inevitably arises: “Why choose the particular decomposition and not any other?”

Since other decompositions might lead to a very different picture, the whole construction seems to lack predictive power.

IZANAGI AND THE CONNECTION TO DECISION THEORY

In terms of quantum mechanics, it’s like a rewinding of the events that have occurred and then actuating a “measurement” or “observation” of the variables at play in order to manipulate the wave-function that regulates their existence; in a sense, Izanagi is a wonderfully effective mechanism of shifting between the infinite plethora of possible universes and this ties in neatly with Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI).

On this thread, I’d like to combine the the idea behind the Izanagi technique with quantum decision theory - From the the moment in which an Uchiha casts Izanagi, we can consider the wielder as an agent who partakes in a sort of "quantum gamble".

By making a measurement of the quantum state, what occurs is that this act of measurement branches a consequence (or better yet, multiplicity of possibilities) and every one of the user’s future selves is given a “reward” (for lack of a better word) as an outcome that depends on the measurement result - the reward can be viewed as a weight, a percentage of efficacy. Obviously, what anyone would want to do, is opt for the heftiest of realities, the one that yields the most convenient of results.

By using quantum decision theory to evaluate the "price" they would pay in such a gamble, the caster is able to decide that the price is given by the utility of the outcome as a reward, which is, like I stated, weighted (all according to Born’s rule).

The problem with multiple Izanagi users simultaneously utilising that that technique is that you've got an overshoot in MWI splitting. How do you even determine which reality overrides another? What criterion is used to give greater weight to one desired outcome over someone else's? Is it temporal? Does is depend on who cast if first? What if one collapsed world erases someone else's rendering their sacrifice entirely futile?

Let's look at a possible scenario to further underline my point:

Uchiha_1 loses an arm in battle; when the battle is over U1 goes back along the initial branch so that they don't lose it - Let's imagine that if he doesn't lose it because of this manipulation, Uchiha_2 in turn rewinds reality so that U1 does in fact lose it; here we're faced with an oxymoron because in going back, both technically regain the eye and then we enter a time loop that swings back and forth between these two timelines, one with and one without an arm.

So at this point it's necessary to understand if the new timeline keeps memory of the previous ones, i.e. that time has already been wrapped once and in this way casters are prevented from using more than two izanagi / izanami in all the timelines, i.e. by counting the sum of all windings - the only thing is, if memory is retained, it would seemingly contradict the entire point of the technique, invalidating it.

A scenario of this kind isn't just a Schoedinger's cat experiment, it's as if you have infinite cats placed in infinite boxes each nested one inside the other like little matryoshki, only each Uchiha cat influences the reality of those around it.

It's absolute mayhem.

IZANAMI'S ROLE AS A REINFORCEMENT OF THE RULE TO OCCAM'S RAZOR

Occam’s Razor which states as follows:

“Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”

Izanami basically is a stratagem to rectify our gambler's fallacy that engenders too many realities that cannot be controlled by so many independent consciouses.

It's exemplified here:

Izanami restricts the domain of Izanagi to a specific region by using an illusion based on physical and perceptive sensations - using this seemingly infinite loop, it's possible to hinder the germination of unwanted branches. Only unless the caster finally accepts their initial "world" or "fate", the loop will never cease.

Obviously jutsu of such level are considered as forbidden because the random manipulation of so many worlds, each subject to aleatory mental processes pertaining to sentient beings, would equate to complete entropic anarchy and I can't see it as ever being beneficial to the clan's survival - had this truly all been about CoH, Tobirama needn't have worried about a thing as the Uchiha would have auto-destructed before the Senju even had the chance to vanquish them. I mean, imagine a scenario in which every other day "sane" Uchiha utilise Izanami to purify "insane" Uchiha who abuse Izanagi - it would be absolutely nonsensical, in prìmis because of the heavy price placed upon the caster: loss of eyesight for an Uchiha is a severe malus and there's only so many times you can rely on an eye-transplant, for a number of reasons I won't go into as of now. But needless to say, actions such as these would have severely weakened the clan much like what occurred to Kaguya clan did - from both a sociological and evolutionary stand point, it would in fact be entirely counter productive - they're so volatile and unpredictable as technique since they're rooted in quantum mechanics and decision theory, that none of the Uchiha are ever shown to utilise except for Madara, Obito (Izanagi) and Itachi (Izanami) and Itachi did so while in Edo Tensei form so it hardly counted.

TL;DR

Izanagi was used in critical battles that the Uchiha couldn't afford to lose, it was a last resort when no other options were viable - and even then, it was just one wielder that would cast the technique, thus avoiding quantum paradoxes.

Izanami simply served as a fail-safe should more than one caster actualise Izanagi simultaneously.

Disclaimer : it's 3.30 AM as I finally finish writing this and I have no idea idea why the fuck I put myself through it. I may or may not edit when I'm not in a state of complete exhaustion.

Errata Corrige: I ended up adding content.

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