By A. B. Neilly
A few important movies about the multiverse have hit the screens in the last few years. The one that opened Pandora’s box was Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, in 2018, and this year we had two important releases, Dr Strange, in the Multiverse of Madness, and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
If you haven’t seen any of this, I highly recommend them, especially the last one.
Everything… has been described by critics as the only movie that really explores the complexities of the multiverse. It depicts an Asian-American character, Evelyn Wang, trying to prepare her taxes while managing difficult family relationships, when the multiverse asks for her help, and how the multiverse shapes who she is and how she relates to her family. It is hilarious, weird, and strangely deep and touching.
In all these movies, there is a vision of the multiverse that is common: all the possible worlds are out there. Everything exists at the same time. And any change in our decisions creates a new change that originates a new multiverse. The different versions of a story are all there, at the same time, developing in time, in the different layers of the universe. All manifested at the same time.
Where does this concept come from?
To understand the origin of the Multiverse, we have to go back to Thomas Aquinas, an Italian medieval philosophy from the thirteenth century. He developed 5 proofs of the existence of God that demonstrated, with no doubts for the moment, that God existed.
First one was about motion. Movement is caused by something, and what caused that movement was caused by something else, and if we don’t want this motion to go back infinitely, we need a first cause that makes movement possible. That is God.
The other four proofs were “efficient cause”, “possibility and necessity”, “perfection” and “design”. They all follow the rule of considering that without God, the things we observe wouldn’t be possible, therefore, God must exist.
This pure intellectual approach, that tries to make sense of things that don’t have it with our actual knowledge, and that we wouldn’t take as face value as of today, is the one that gave birth to the multiverse.
David Lewis was an influential philosopher of the 20th century. He died in 2001. One of his lines of philosophical research was what he called the Pluriverse. He argued that many of the philosophical inconsistencies in modal logic could be fixed if we accepted the possibilities as concrete worlds. Then, we didn’t have to worry about paradoxes.
“I believe, and so do you, that things could have been different in countless ways. But what does this mean? Ordinary language permits the paraphrase: there are many ways things could have been besides the way they actually are. I believe that things could have been different in countless ways; I believe permissible paraphrases of what I believe; taking the paraphrase at its face value, I therefore believe in the existence of entities that might be called ‘ways things could have been.”
David Lewis.
Basically, the same argument as Thomas Aquinas. If things doesn’t make sense, let’s accept something we cannot see as the way to fix this intellectual mess.
And that is how the idea of possible worlds, that became concrete worlds, because of the materialist’s ideas of David Lewis, came to life.
Another argument that supports the multiverse, also intellectual, is the idea that this world is, with our actual knowledge, statistically improbable. So, we basically don’t know why the world exists. What if all the possible worlds existed? Then, we just happen to be in one of them, and it all makes sense.
Just like the existence of God, or does it?
These two versions of the multiverse, combined with the existence of 10 dimensions on the Physics string theories, and different layers of reality, gave birth to our actual version of the multiverse.
My take on this:
I will not argue with David Lewis about his logic theory. I would need a lot of study to get deep into his arguments and unless you have studied modal logic yourself, I couldn’t share with you my arguments. His modal logic works, and they have a lot of applications in game theory, for example, guessing which the cards of an opponent are in a poker game. Every one set of cards is a possible world, and with a lot of logic formulas, you can guess what is real in every possible world.
But its application to a real, concrete, multiverse, with many worlds who are the same but with slight differences, is just a mental game. Maybe it is real, maybe it is not, but I wouldn’t bet my life on it.
Another aspect of the multiverse that Robert Adams has criticized, and it is really well depicted in the movie Everything… is that morality doesn’t apply anymore. If everything is there at once, then it doesn’t matter what you did. If you kill somebody in another universe, your counterpart will decide not to kill, and vice versa. Lewis argued we still should be virtuous, avoiding the problem that by being virtuous here, you are making your counterpart to be the bad guy.
I can argue against the idea that this universe shouldn’t be. It comes from a materialistic point of view that sees matter as inert, and follows the third law of thermodynamics, entropy. From this point of view, everything is gonna die. Why has it not died yet?
That is a reductionist way of looking at the universe, and by extension, matter.
Buddhist tradition says that one of the fundamental characteristics of the world, what they call the mind, is luminosity. The word in Tibetan that they use for luminosity can also be understood as “reasonable” or “able to know”. For a take on how the Mind and Magic are related, you can take a look at my article.
This version of matter is the same Fritjof Capra explained in his book The web of life. He made a great job going through different disciplines and explaining groundbreaking experiments that show matter is not inert. Life is not a mistake, a random thing that happened by hazard. Life is the fundamental property of matter, and the moment you put energy into an inert system, it becomes organized in a way that wants to keep its organization as far as it can. The emergence of this universe wouldn’t be a mistake, it would be the inevitable conclusion of a process that is still evolving. We are not the exception. We are the norm.
Still, there is hope. There are other theories of the multiverse that can be helpful for a magician, and I will tell you about them in another article.
What is your own take on the multiverse? Do you believe there are infinite versions of you out there?
A. B. Neilly is a magician, writer, philosopher, astrologer and founder of Heka-ICRE.