about the multiverse...
The ‘multiverse’ concept is wrapped around whole bunch of my novels.
Directly:
Continuity Slip
Tomorrow’s Yesterdays
Seeking Emily
Seladiënna (a parallel world story, without real multiverse complications)
Tangentially:
Body Leggers (yet to be explicitly revealed)
Their Golden Blood (yet to be explicitly revealed)
Emortal’s Quest (yet to be explicitly revealed)
Today’s Tomorrows (implicit)
Why this apparent fascination with the multiverse?
Well, it’s been with me since I was a teenager. Never left me, even though my views and understanding of it have changed over the years. Where I landed now… Well, I think this may be the best match to quantum physics and relativity; ranging from the subatomic to the cosmic question about whether Dark Matter is real and what its function might be in the great scheme of existence.
My current thinking has been very much influenced by the physicist David Deutsch, whose two books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity are probably the most important works popularizing a multiverse explanation of just about everything.
Note that I have—brazenly, as befits an author of fiction—taken a lot of liberties in extending Deutsch’s ideas to a point where he surely would cringe, even though he just might respect the way in which I’ve toyed with them shamelessly.
What kind of multiverse are we talking about here?
Fair question, because there are several competing ones. I’ll not go into the whole gamut of the different models and variations and tweaks. The multiverse I’m talking about is a kind of ‘block multiverse’, consisting of an infinity of parallel universes, already existing and unchanging. As for ‘time’, as David Deutsch explains it in this interview:
“Physics doesn’t distinguish between the present and any other time. The present is, a perspective on the multiverse and the different times are just different universes. They just happen to be the ones that physics allows us to know more about by direct observation. There are countless other ones that are much harder to see that we see only by their indirect effects through interference phenomena. The ‘past’ and the ‘’future’ are just the names we give to parallel universe that we have much more direct evidence of and interaction with. The difference between different ‘nows’ different ‘present times’ is the same thing as the difference between different perspectives in space.”
I can’t really put it much better than Deutsch.
Schrödinger’s Cat in the infinitely dimensioned block multiverse…
If you don’t know about Schrödinger’s Cat, check it out here and then return to this page.
If you’re confused after having clicked on the linked being confronted with the differing single-universe ‘interpretations’ of this thought experiment—collapsing wave functions, superimposed live and dead cats, wave-particle dualism, observer-influenced reality—or if you already heard or read about this and have remained confused after years of exposure and sage philosophical yak-speak…
Take heart. Just ditch the single-universe nonsense and welcome the infinitely dimensioned block multiverse—henceforth abbreviated to ‘IDBM’—reality. And, yes, that’s an anagram of IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base). Which is kind of fitting, since there are a lot of similarities between multiverse reality and an infinite number of parallel infinitely long film strips, each of which is in effect a different history. Together all of these make bundles of histories, some of which barely differ from each other, while others differ a lot. The less they differ at any given frame, the more likely are to interfere with each other, if only at a local quantum level.
The effects of that interference will be visible in the following frames in both film strips. This is not a cause-effect kind of thing, because cause-effect thinking requires time. But there’s no such thing; just different frames in the histories of multiverse film strips.
There are some vexatious metaphysical issues here, most of which— if we accept the IDBM—have to do with the elimination of ‘time’ from our thinking. People usually balk at anything that conflicts with our intuitive, deep-down assumption, underlying every thought process, that time is real; far more than just what Deutsch described in his quote above. The resistance to a timeless IDBM is deep-seated, and maybe it’s not possible to get rid of it. But, as I tried to explain in Tomorrow’s Yesterdays, while maybe we much accept our cognitive limitations, we need not deny IDBM as constituting the basic fabric of reality.
Who Am I? Who are you? Who are we?
In a time where ‘identity’ has become an explicit obsession—personally and politically alike—here is the real metaphysical killer though…
So, we live in a timeless IDBM. A gazillion of histories contain physical instances of persons—let’s call one of them ‘Jill’—who, if she accepts that some physical instance of herself exists in all this histories, quire rightfully will ask herself the question: “Are there really a gazillion mes?” Think of the Sliding Doors scenario. Which of the Helen characters (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) is Helen? Or are they all Helen? Can one Helen know about the other Helen? Of course, that movie used a slightly different multiverse version, namely that of two new universes being created through splits of an existing one. Here everybody instinctively assumes that time does come into it.
Helen’s philosophical problem is bad enough; if she even thinks about it. After all, for her, the two Helens are just derivatives of one. But consider what happens when it’s not a matter of splitting universes—like Sean Carroll’s conceived Universe Splitter App claims to do; and, yes, I have that on my iPhone!—but of, like Jill, flipping from one IDBM history frame to another on a different IDBM history frame. Because splitting is a temporal thing—there’s ‘before’ and ‘after’—which just doesn’t happen in the IDBM where everything already is and Jill does is flip from a frame on one film strip to another frame on another filmstrip a jillion times every nanosecond.
So, who an I?
What do I mean when I refer to ‘my brain’?
Is that question even meaningful?
Can it be meaningful?
You wouldn’t believe how many sleepless nights I had during the writing of Continuity Slip, Tomorrow’s Yesterdays, and Seeking Emily. Not because of the human storyline, but because I struggled to find a way to make sense of what I think may be ‘reality’. Out of the struggles and sleepless nights and my admittedly continuing confusion came the IDBM novels in the Broken Infinities trilogy. The novels are not connected, except by theme.
Continuity Slip… a very old novel, from a time when I still believed that world-splitting is what the multiverse is all about. The current version however, recently completely revised, is firmly placed in an IDBM. It’s still the same love story, with more depth and focus on the protagonists and their human limitations, but in many ways it has become even more complicated.
Tomorrow’s Yesterdays… written not long after I reread The Fabric of Reality and first-time read The Beginning of Infinity, which led me to make liberal use of David Deutsch’s application of the concept of fungibility in the latter book.
Seeking Emily… A ‘deep’ love story, set in a confusing reality, ultimately conquered by the lovers through a leap of faith—not of the religious kind; I do not believe in the existence deities of any kind—and a preparedness to sacrifice oneself if necessary, understanding what commitment truly means; if only because one does not want to continue following the film strips of IDBM histories in which the other is not.
For those of the necessary disposition, treat yourself to Many Minds Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics by David Deutsch., originally from the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47 222-8 (1996). It is a philosophical treatise, comparatively easy reading for anyone willing to do some thinking. It also is completely devoid of equations. 😉
Continuity Slip, Tomorrow’s Yesterdays, and Seeking Emily make liberal use of the basic premises outlined in that article. Liberally abused with artistic liberty of course.
And speaking of ‘artistic’… David Deutsch also has lent at least a degree of respectability to Robert Heinlein’s cosmology as outlined in The Number of the Beast and The Pursuit of the Pankera, when he (Deutsch) stated: “All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.”
Now, you can choose to believe that; or no. But if it is true, then it casts a completely new light on—at least as far as authors of fiction are concerned—what it means to be ‘creative’. Personally, I’m not troubled by this. But I suspect the vast majority of folks will be, with fiction writers the most scared and resistant to the idea. But maybe… If we could return to the heady days of SF&F being in the advance guard of future thinking. Sadly that’s a position most contemporary—by which I mean starting sometime in the late 1990s, still at it—SF&F writers have surrendered to a Zeitgeist of hopelessness, possibly because right now the world is in deep shit, what with climate change and other upheavals upon us, in the Western world partially as a result of not enough people paying much attention to the SF&F writers of last century. I mean, who of you has read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (also see here and here), Philip Wylie’s The Disappearance, Norman Spinrad’s Greenhouse Summer and Bug Jack Barron, Terry England’s Rewind (eBook should still be available on Apple Books, where I got it from).
Any hands coming up? I didn’t think so. Looks like the multiverse history I’m in right now doesn’t have most of those books readily available, and unless you’re happy to pay exorbitant prices for grubby copies on eBay… 🤷🏻♂️😏
Ooops! Mentioned the multiverse again, didn’t I?
Thing is, when you accept that the likes of Deutsch may have just touched on the implications of an IDBM—and why not just try it as a thought exercise; just for the heck of it, but without becoming religious about it?—new deeply challenging vistas open up, starting with the world of fundamental physics, the vast majority of which is still stuck in non-IDBM ways of thinking, possibly because its practitioners find it easier to cope with the implications of what they have and don’t have to readjust their minds to a very scary new world view, which goes against just about everything they’ve been brought up with and consider as given truths. If they’re even latently religious it makes things worse.
Like, what does it mean that there isn’t a beginning of time, mainly because there is no time?
Like is the whole Dark Matter thing just misunderstood multiverse histories interfering on a cosmic scale?
Is the Higgs field just a multiverse phantasmagoria? And what really happened when the LHC revealed the existence of a Higgs particle?
Or, closer to the personal… Is the true nature of consciousness nothing but something analogous—I’m being careful here, because this definitely is a rabbit hole!—to what happens when one stands between two mirrors that mirror not just you but each other as well, creating endless mirror images whose range is limited only by the lost of light reflected by of the reflections? There’s an interesting article, A theory of my own mind, in Aeon magazine, which makes some observations—quite without any reference to the multiverse—that could be read as actually being about what I just suggested. For what else but ourselves are we actually looking at when we think of being ‘conscious’ of something, especially being ‘conscious’ of of ourselves? After all, brains are physical objects in multiverse histories, with physical processes and constantly subject to jillions of quantum processes, each of which represents interference from who-knows-which-history?
And it gets worse.
Continuity Slip addresses another issue: what’s sometimes called ‘multiple personalities’ and related topics. Of course, it always was a theme, even in the novel’s embryonic versions—written in the late 1990s—but in its current incarnation it becomes more explicit than ever. Rather too obvious not to take a closer look at that area of psychology from a fictional angle.
Anyway, to finish with another David Deutsch quote, this one closely relating to one of his pet themes: Artificial Intelligence. A theme also pervading several of my novels, but with a focus on the possibility of bringing into existence non-human creatures that may be the only ones we’ll ever be able to call ‘kin’. (Hint: That won’t be accomplished while walking the paths AI development is taking right now; which are antithetical to what I personally hope will become real one day.)
“If something is permitted by the laws of physics, then the only thing that can prevent it from being technologically possible is not knowing how.”