Till Noever — author & polymath

about the multiverse...

last updated 21Dec24

The ‘multiverse’ is wrapped around a lot of my novels

Explicity:

Continuity Slip
Tomorrow’s Yesterdays
Seeking Emily
Seladiënna (a parallel world story, though without philosophical multiverse complications)

At least tangentially:

Body Leggers (hinted at)
Their Golden Blood (hinted at)
Emortal’s Quest (yet to be explicitly revealed)
Today’s Tomorrows (implicit in the story, though not explicitly mentioned)

Why my fascination with the multiverse?

It’s been with me since I was a teenager. Blame it on me reading too much SF. The fascination continued, expanded and continues to have become part of my philosophical fabric. However, my views of what the ‘multiverse’ may or may not be have changed over the years. I landed on what—at least for the time being—to me at least appears as the best and most coherent and least contrived explanation of how quantum and relativity physics hang together and what—in the broadest possible sense, as well as the minutiae of our lives—that says about, and means for, us.

My current thinking has been influenced by the physicist David Deutsch, whose books The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity are probably the most important works popularizing inter alia a multiverse explanation of just about everything.

‘Everything?’ Truly?

Well, yes. Unless one is an adherent of one or more of the plethora of religious/spiritual/mystic/whatever fictions extant in the world, or is committed to philosophies that replace such fictions by others equally suspect narratives, it has to be clear that we are physical entities, beings, or whatever labels word- and philosophy-mongers want to pin on us. The explanations we create for what is or how what is works—how and why reality appears to us as it does—must begin with an unconditional acceptance that we are physical beings in a physical reality. That every thought we have must either be grounded in explanations compatible with physical reality—whatever that is—or we have no explanations at all. None that aren’t just imaginative fiction. Nothing wrong with imaginative fiction, or any fiction for that matter. But every credible explanatory this-is-reality narrative must align with what our experience tells us is! And, yes, one could argue that there are mental, emotional, ‘mystical, however-you-want-to-label-it, experiences that appear to suggest the opposite: physical explanations of at least some experiences are neither sufficient nor complete and this constitutes at least strong evidence, if not necessarily unassailable proof, that there is ‘more’. True enough, but like any Taoist will tell you, that ‘more’ is really just a version of Wittgenstein’s”Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. Especially philosophers, who would do well to be silent instead of trying to fill the scary darkness of not actually knowing what truly is with vapid narratives, fobbed off as ‘true’ and valid explanations. By the way, like Kierkegaard I have looked into unexplainable void. It’s scary. But I found that it can also be exhilarating, if only one surrenders to what is instead of what one wants to be. Seeking comfort in patently false pretend-explanations may be comforting, but for someone who has looked into the darkness of the void, it is also cowardly; at least if one claim to be seeking for ‘truth’.

So, what kind of multiverse are we talking about anyway?

The infinitely-dimensioned block-multiverse—henceforth abbreviated to ‘IDBM’—at least for me, appears to be the explanation of physical reality that makes most sense and hangs together. I must admit that I have—brazenly, as is to be expected from an author of, often highly speculative, fiction—taken a lot of liberties and extended Deutsch’s explications to a point where he probably will cringe. Still, I continue to harbor a faint hope that he just might respect the way in which I’ve shamelessly toyed with respectable physics; mainly for the purpose of exploring what IDBM reality might imply for all existence in general and us in particular.

The IDBM consists of an infinity of parallel, four-dimensional Einstein-type block universes; already existing, unchanging and determinsitic. Time is just another coordinate, marking something like the physical position of a frame in a film strip with an infinite number of frames, separated I suspect by Planck-time like intervals. As far as our perceptions go, we have to be aware that we are never confined to just one of these film-strip ‘histories’. Because we are physical beings, we move across multiverse histories by torrents of quantum events affecting our bodies. No present, no future, just inter-dimensional translations of…something. No idea what is being translated of course; that being one of the scary, and to almost all of those who contemplate this in depth sleeplessness-inducing, aspects of IDBM reality.

David Deutsch hints at some of the consequences of this view in this interview:

“Physics doesn’t distinguish between the present and any other time. So what the present is, 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, which we see only by their indirect effects through interference phenomena. And the “past” and the “future” are just the names we give to parallel universes 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. So if you imagine the different copies of you at different times, they’re rather like different people standing around a monument looking at it from different angles and in space we can see them all at once so we’re not tempted to say that one of them is real and the other one isn’t. But in fact in time they are all real in exactly the same sense that all the parallel universes of quantum theory are real. The past, the present and the future are all real. When we say that, one’s mind immediately jumps to the mistake of thinking “Oh well, if they’re real, they’re all real at the same time”. That isn’t true. They’re not all real at the same time because they’re all different times so that would be rather like saying that all those observers of the monument are all real at the same angle. No, they’re not. They’re all real at different angles. All the different angles are real. All the different perspectives on the monument are real perspectives but none of them is the monument. The monument contain all perspectives. The actual three dimensional object determines all the perspectives and all the different perceptions of it. The same with time.”

About ‘time’ he says in another place; much more clearly and accessibly…

“We do not experience time flowing, or passing. What we experience are differences between our present perceptions and our present memories of past perceptions. We interpret those differences, correctly, as evidence that the universe changes with time. We also interpret them, incorrectly, as evidence that our consciousness, or the present, or something, moves through time.”

Schrödinger’s Cat in the infinitely dimensioned block multiverse…

If you don’t know about Schrödinger’s Cat, check it out here or wherever pleases you; then return to this page.

If you’re confused after having been confronted with the mess of single-universe and passing-time ‘interpretations’ of the poor cat’s ‘real’ fate—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, wannabe-sage academic and the plethora of other philosophy mumpitz…

Take heart, muster up your philosophical courage and ditch the single-universe or splitting-universe nonsense at least for a while. Allow yourself to at least consider the possibility that things aren’t what you always thought they were/are and welcome IDMB reality. And, yes, IDMB an anagram of IMDB (Internet Movie Data Base). Which seems fitting, given that there is merit in viewing IDMB reality as an infinite number of separated parallel infinitely long film strips, each of them a different history. I suspect that nearly-fungible histories may actually form bundles, while others are, as Deutsch might put it too different to let “physics [let] us to know more about by direct observation” . Also—again, purely my speculation here—the less they differ at any given frame, the more likely they are to interfere with each other, if only at a local quantum level. Still, the imaginist in me has wondered—and inevitably written novels about it—if this is confined to the quantum level. It may appear that it is, but what if we’re not looking at it in the right way?

The interference in one given frame will determine—already has, because everything is!—what is in the frames following the ‘interference’ frame. Note that this is not a cause-effect kind of thing; for ‘causation’ requires passing time. But there is no ‘passing time’; just different frames in the histories of, necessarily discrete, multiverse film strips and their individual frames.

There are vexatious metaphysical issues here, most of which, if we accept the IDBM, arise as the consequence of eliminating ‘passing time’ from our thinking. People—including philosophers, who also happen to be ‘people’ who, if one looks deep enough, are subject to the same deep psychological aversion to letting go of the illusion of passing time—and maybe even more so of being willing to just ditch accepted philosophical and scientific concepts, especially about the human ‘mind’—boohoo anything that conflicts with our intuitive, deep-down assumption, underlying literally every thought process, that time is something real; not just what one might think of as a number indexing an already existing frame in an infinite collection of multiverse histories. (Check out the chapter on the ‘Infinity Motel’ in the ‘Window On Infinity’ chapter of David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity). The resistance to a timeless IDBM is deep-seated, and it may not be possible to get rid of it. But, as I tried to fictionalize in my multiverse-inspired novels, while maybe we must 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 the ‘identity’ Zeitgeist rules…

So, let’s suppose we live/exist/are in a timeless IDBM with a gazillion of histories containing physical instances of persons. Let’s call one of them ‘Helen’, who, if she accepts that some physical instance of herself exists in all this histories, quite rightfully may ask herself the question: “Are there really a gazillion mes?” Think of the Sliding Doors scenario. Which of the Helens is Helen? Or are they all? Can one Helen know about the other Helen? Of course, the movie was based on a multiverse relying on splitting an existing single universe.

Helen’s philosophical problem is bad enough; if she even thinks about it, which she’s unlikely to do. 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 UniverseSplitter App claims to do; and, yes, I have that on my iPhone!—but of, like Helen, 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’. In the IDBM there is as well. But those labels now merely denote positions on an axis of discrete history film frames; where everything already is; and Helen 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 the structure of ‘reality’. Out of the struggles and sleepless nights and my admittedly continuing confusion came the IDBM novels in the Broken Infinities trilogy. These novels are not connected, except by theme.

• Continuity Slip… A very old story, from a time, back in the mid 1990s, when I still thought that the multiverse is all about world-splitting. The recently completely revised version however 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 love story set in a confusing reality, ultimately conquered by the lovers through a leap of faith—not of a religious or in any way mystical kind, but into complete darkness—a preparedness to end one’s existence merely one does not want to continue to live in the IDBM history bundles in which the other is not; thereby revealing a deep understanding of what commitment truly means.

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, but 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. Ruthlessly abused with artistic liberty of course; purely for the purpose of exploring an unknown and scary ocean.

Speaking of ‘artistic’ liberties… David Deutsch also has lent at least a degree of respectability to the multiverse cosmology outlined in Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast and The Pursuit of the Pankera, when he (Deutsch) is quoted as stating that “All fiction that does not violate the laws of physics is fact.”

You can choose to believe that or not. But, just supposing it is true… That would cast 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, most contemporary—that meaning starting sometime in the late 1990s and still at it—SF&F writers have surrendered to a Zeitgeist focused on other matters. Understandably so maybe, given the situation of the planet, but sometimes they’re just doing it to look trendy and modern to a neophiliac audience, which doesn’t realize that it’s not paying attention to the SF&F writers of last century, whom in their foolish arrogance, said audience probably considers outdated and not sufficiently contemporary. 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). Issues of today, tomorrow and beyond, treated far more thoughtfully and lucidly than most of today’s Zeitgeist-ruled authors.

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 try and find them in eBook format or are willing to pay exorbitant prices for grubby copies on eBay… 🤷🏻‍♂️ Still, there are a gazillion multiverse histories where this is not the case. No idea how I ended up in this one on my journey. 😏

That’s the way to look at this. For if one accepts 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 fanatical 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 whatever truth they think they have; and therefore don’t have to readjust their minds to a very scary new world view that goes against just about everything they’ve been brought up with.

When it comes to the personal, there are so many questions about the ‘real’ and ‘how’ and maybe even ‘why’ it just could drive one crazy. Like what about this?

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 anything and especially of ourselves? 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. I spent significant time during my Cognitive Science degree with units directly or tangentially related to Theory of Mind. If the IDBM if ‘true’ then almost none of what is thought and taught there makes any sense and would have to be discarded ruthlessly, starting from a completely clean philosophical and scientific slate.

Yeah, like that’s going to happen. No academic philosopher would muster up the courage to issue such a quixotic. I did once, when I gave a talk at a conference on reverse supervenience, which challenged everything about mental supervenience on the physical. At that time I wasn’t into IDBM, but I felt a need to challenge the glib assumptions of the flavor of philosophizing fashionable in New Zealand and other parts of the world. The audience Q&A criticism was predictable, so it didn’t bother me a lot. What I did not expect was that one middle-aged philosopher, whose name I have forgotten, later took me aside and admitted that my talk had almost convinced him that the physical might actually supervene on the mental. While then I found that bit of positive response encouraging, I abandoned further forays into cognitive philosophy. Just as well, because today I realize that the very subject my talk addressed actually isn’t anything worthy talking about either. If the IDBM represents the fabric of reality, then my talk was just a bit os the usual philosophical mumpitz; looked like it actually was something that should be discussed, but was about just as useless and time-wasting as wasting mind-space on wondering about the reality of religious fictions. It’s much safer to write fiction and call it ‘fiction’. That seems to be the only way to present serious philosophy and even matters like psychology. For example Continuity Slip addresses the question of 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.

And then there is Artificial Intelligence of course. Here’s David Deutsch and one of his pet interests: Artificial Intelligence.
“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.”

AI features prominetly in several of my novels, focusing on the possibility of bringing into existence non-human-substrate entities/creatures, who may be the only ones we’ll ever be able to call ‘kin’. AI—AGI—and what it is and can be is of course closely linked to the IDMB through the broad theme of ‘conscious existence’. Why not just call it ‘consciousness’? Because like so many other things, using the noun is inherently restrictive to understanding the connection, or maybe the non-connection between ‘conscious existence’ and the physical substrate that enables it to…’be’, I guess.

Finally…

Here’s my imaginist take on what all this actually means for us and our delusions of choice and cause-and-effect and morality and whatever else we’ve dreamt up to explain who and what we are is this.

In Body Leggers the group at the center of the story has a motto pinned up on every wall of their living space:

“What was is What is is What will be is. We are where we are. That is all we know”

The message in there is that we have to act as if there actually is something like ‘action’; cause-and-effect; choices that somehow are more than delusions of choice. But behind all this lurks a mystery that goes far deeper than any philosophy or religion could ever systematize.

Which kind of brings me to an argument against the IDBM from, unsurprisingly, religion. It’s not so much an argument, but the kind of time-wasting mumpitz that’s bedeviled—pun intended—the world of human pondering about what’s what and why. And that’s the whole complex of questions, especially in the unholy western trinity monotheisms, relating to whether there is a God and if there is, what role God plays/played/will ply in existence. Central to this is, of course, whether there is a God of if that’s just fiction. Theists and atheists arguing it out and obsessing over it, with agnostics pretending they’re sitting on the fence, while really just wishing they’d have some proof that there is.

Not going to add to that discussion, for I’m the guy who, when during my primary school upbringing in Germany being obliged to pray every day with the class, which included a request for God to lay his hand on every child, went home, counted the number of kids in my class on a recent class photo (22) and, as my late mother documented in a photo album chronicling my early life, asked her if God had 22 hands. Not that child-me didn’t continue to follow that train of thought and maybe consider if God might also have just one but humongously large hand. However, I do recall that from that day on the whole God mumpitz made such little sense that I dismissed it from my thought-space and have ever since. There were far more interesting things to explore.

I mean, why even ask a daft question like ‘is there a God’? The only excuse to believe in this kind of fiction or even consider wasting time wondering about it is social/cultural conditioning from the cradle onward. There are other reasons, too, but ultimately they can all be traced back to individual and social psychology. This in turn, if the IDBM is really at the heart of the fabric of reality, means that one needs to construct explanations grounded in that. We’ll never even come close to sensible explanations if we continue to ask leading questions, like “Where is God in the IDBM?” with all its inevitable additional even more distracting and mind-time wasting baggage. For those coming from the religious angle it might instead be immensely productive to ask “What psychological and chronological/historical factors gave rise to religions in their many incarnations?”

Not going to make it as simple a Gore Vidal, when he said in an interview that religion at its root—especially in the case of the Judaeo-Christianity-Islam trinity—is really just about “what happens to precious little me when I die.” It’s true, of course, and never mind all the mummery that’s grown up to assuage the deep human fear of dying and creating coping mechanisms. But it isn’t quite as simple; certainly not in the case of what’s often considered by monotheist philosophers and apologists as at best curious, but unsophisticated, ways of dealing with a reality that people simply don’t understand, but which they worship—give names and associate with rituals—because they have found more psychologically effective ways to deal with death and the scary darkness of not even being able to conceive of what ‘nothing’ is—nobody can!—to help them avoid surrendering to everybody’s abject fear.

But…

From the first stanzas of the Tao Te Ching (from the Stephen Mitchell translation, MacMillan 1988):

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin if all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

As for what influence we may have over the path we tread through the IDBM histories…

During those nights when I woke up after a day thinking too much about the IDBM, I often asked myself questions like:
What if the the IDBM is indeed reality?
How can we be human and yet live without going crazy, if we are aware that time as we think of it, and therefore also all ‘choice’, are illusions?
What does it mean that there’s an infinity of ‘me’, but that even as I think of ‘me’ I only think of…me?

Plus lots of others keeping me awake; though I at least found a way to create entirely hypothetical answers that might at least see me through the infinitely complex IDBM maze.

Through fiction of course… Stories that allow exploration of the unknown by peering into the darkness and my other friend, fog, beckoning me to take a peek.

And then, one day I came across Antonio Machado, who—if only implicitly, for he, too, was a prisoner of the same delusion binding us all with its spell—wrapped up the ineffable truth in the best way I know of, to maybe lead us to at least getting a little closer to an inkling of our place in, and our limited understanding of, the fabric of IDBM reality and how we as humans may navigate its maelstroms.

Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake on the sea.

We are where we are. That is all we know…