LISTEN. Happy Carl Sagan Day. He did something important, he got many of us (including Neil deGrasse Tyson) to internalize a cosmic sense of scale and possibility that puts things in proper perspective. “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us-a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
(PBD... Tyson's tribute to Sagan... Cosmic Connection)
Whenever we forget that we live in a pluralistic, open, unfinished universe of possibilities we lose that sense of perspective.
It was always possible there wouldn't be a sweeping midterm red wave, even though some pundits suggested otherwise. William James would have said so. That's what he meant by "multiverse" when he introduced the term in Dilemma of Determinism: "Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference,—a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe."
Betti gave us a nice report on that essay in CoPhi yesterday, and then I came home and decided not to spend the evening watching the pundits pontificate and prognosticate about inconclusive electoral results. Instead I picked up The New Yorker and read The Never-Ending Story: Can the multiverse keep expanding forever? by Stephanie Burt.
It's mostly about how Hollywood and Marvel Studios have appropriated the concept. She says "the term' multiverse' seems to have assumed its modern meaning in the sixties," though (she acknowledges) James used it much earlier, "but in a different way." I'm not sure it was so different.
Burt's essay begins with a discussion of Jorge Luis Borges's 1941 "Garden of the Forking Paths," which "invites the reader to imagine what else, other than the world we know, might be possible. But... ultimately wonders whether, if everything that can happen does happen, any choice is really worth making." That's precisely what we were talking about in class.
James's multiverse, as I understand it, is a singular universe possessed of a teeming multiplicity of possibilities, branch points, or "forking paths" which describe alternative possible worlds. Each of us contributes our bit to the determination of which possibilities get actualized. We each have an opportunity to influence what does happen. A multiverse is a universe of possibility, what James also called a pluralistic universe or (following his weird friend B.P. Blood) a pluriverse. The point: it's an open, unfinished universe. We're making and remaking it, to an indeterminate extent, as we go.
James would agree with the core implication of Burt's conclusion, I think:
The garden of forking paths cannot continue to fork forever, if we are to find meaning there. Multiverses speak to the part of us that wants every option to be open, that wants the journey to go on and on. Of course, no journey really does—and at the end of many multiversal stories the tangle of time lines resolves into one, or a traveller finally arrives at the right version of history and decides to stay. Such endings seem to invite us to return to our one life, on our one planet, with some added spark of hope or curiosity or resolve.
As I said in class: whatever the physicists, the comics, and the sci-fi writers say, we have to--get to-- live in one universe. One at a time, anyway. That's what lends weight and import and meaning to the choices we make and the choices we shirk.
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