Okay, first up, I think you either mean ‘in a universe’ or ‘in a part of a multiverse’. A multiverse would have to cover the totality of options available, made up of separate universe for everything that happened.
I’ll let it slide though. Although possible I’ll spend the rest of the five hundred words talking about parallel universes and the implications thereof. Mostly because in fact, due to a system of confusions, I’ve ended up with two sets of questions for this week. So nothing would’ve happened, I’d have just been answering different questions.
Of course, who knows how the questions I answer affect the outcomes of my life and the rest of everything. That’s one of the things with causality. It doesn’t always wrap up all too cosily. It’s nigh on impossible to comprehend. This question could leave me discovering a fundamental truth about the nature of the multiverse, or it could lead nowhere.
And another question could take me anywhere;it’s even more impossible to tell.
So we don’t know.
That’s how the future develops, and it could be taken to make the whole thing rather pointless. Without an ability to predict the meaningfulness and outcome of our actions, it’s fairly pointless to act in any particular way, right?
Well. Possibly. And if there is a multiverse, it doesn’t really matter too much, as every option we could take at every infinitesimal moment would be played out in one of the universes within.
I’m taking a narrow (but huge) definition of the multiverse, assuming its infinity. Somehow the concept of a small multiverse seems absurd. Anything that’s not the infinite exploration of every possible reaction to every probability seems to require an even greater amount of absurdity.
I mean, how could you choose which universes should exist. Which routes were ‘important’ enough to be explored.
Of course, there’s another possibility (many others, if I had more time and space and universes). There could be as many universes as there are potential laws of physics. Every variant of every constant is played out to see what happens. The outcomes of each set of rules being played out, like some grand experiment.
Most would collapse in an instant. Non-functional.
And some would expand and contract (or expand forever) or even hit stability. Some of those would sustain life, and some of those would eventually sustain life capable of answering questions (awkwardly) in five hundred word essays.
And some of them might be a lot better than me. Sorry about that, but you’ve got your ticket and it’s only valid for this particular path.
Free will is probably just a form of arrogance. The notion that each choice we make creates an infinite number of universes, while collapsing the actuality of free will (depending how you look at it) is probably more arrogant. Unless you notice how meaningless life in infinity is.
But it’s okay. We don’t have power, we have perspective. We can each see something nobody else can.
So choose that. Unfinity.
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Illustration by Luke.
