Writing Prompt: Mining Your Multiverse
I wrote this for my writing group. It is only vaguely on the topic of Scientific Animism, but it's fun, and I want to refer to it later, so. Enjoy!
Ted Chiang wrote a fantastic multiverse-fic short story called “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom.” Here’s what he had to say about it, in the notes at the end of the book:
In discussions about free will, a lot of people say that for an action of yours to be freely chosen—for you to bear moral responsibility for that action—you must have had the ability to do something else under exactly the same circumstances. Philosophers have argued endlessly about what exactly this means. Some have pointed out that when Martin Luther defended his actions to the church in 1521, he reportedly said, “Here I stand, I can do no other,” i.e., he couldn’t have done anything else. But does that mean we shouldn’t give Luther credit for his actions? Surely we don’t think he would be worthier of praise if he had said, “I could have gone either way.”
Then there’s the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is popularly understood to mean that our universe is constantly splitting into a near-infinite number of differing versions. I’m largely agnostic about the idea, but I think it’s proponents would encounter less resistance if they made more modest claims about its implications. For example, some people argue that it renders our decisions meaningless, because whatever you do there’s always another universe in which you make the opposite choice, negating the moral weight of your decision.
I’m pretty confident that even if the many-worlds interpretation is correct, it doesn’t mean that all of our decisions are canceled out. If we say that an individual’s character is revealed by the choices they make over time, then, in a similar fashion, an individual’s character would also be revealed by the choices they make across many worlds. If you could somehow examine a multitude of Martin Luthers across many worlds, I think you’d have to go far afield to find one that didn’t defy the church, and that would say something about the kind of person he was.
Let’s imagine our own paraselves in other branches of the multiverse. If you go back to multiverses that split before your birth, then a bunch of the other universes don’t feature you at all, but you can go back as far as you want in your own personal history. Or, sure, contemplate the branches without you. You can make this as weighty or as silly as you want. Some examples:
Go back to a decision you made about which school to attend, degree to pursue, or job opportunity to take, and think about the paraselves that split off at that point.
Imagine paraselves that made different relationship decisions. Got married to someone different, or got married at all, or never did, or got divorced somewhere along the way.
Have you changed your political or religious opinions over time? If not, can you imagine paraselves that did? Can you imagine paraselves that changed in some different way? If you had taken a different job that landed you in a different city—or if you’d never moved to a large city, say—how would that have impacted your politics and religious views? If you were able to take stock of the political views of all your paraselves, would most of them agree with your current views? If not, how does it make you feel, that most manifestations of “you,” out across the multiverse, have shitty political views?
You could imagine some recent, seemingly-trivial splitting off point. An event that got rained out in this multiverse was sunny and spectacular in another. Or vice versa. You went to a different place to eat, and serendipity played out a different way.
Have you already died, in some multiverses? In what percentage of them? From what?
In Chiang’s story, people can communicate with other multiverse branches using a machine called a “prism.” Each prism allows a limited amount of data transfer between two specific branches, and once that data runs out, the branches can never communicate again. Older prisms that still have data left fetch a high price, as do prisms that link to multiverses in which something sensational occurred.
But take this any direction you want. You don’t need to explain it somewhat-scientifically, as Chiang did. You can have a magical meeting, between yourself and a bunch of your paraselves (is it in one of y’all’s branches, or some neutral other-place? Does that matter, for your story?). Or you have a magical meeting with one specific paraself. Maybe your wardrobe contains a portal to one specific multiverse branch, and you and your paraself get into some kind of mischief. Maybe an NGO is giving out multiverse-branch-wardrobe-portals to all children in [location] as a way to [some policy goal]. Maybe you want to write a poem inspired by this idea, after you take stock of the net impact all those “yous” are having, out across the multiverse. Maybe you want to write a letter to a paraself that made a different decision, to tell them how it’s going here. Maybe you want to ask them how it’s going there.
