The Monstrous Multiverse

Why is the multiverse such a popular notion ? Scientifically it's bollocks. It replaces physics with statistics and utterly lacks explanatory power.

But psychologically... maybe it's just true ? We live in different mental worlds as a matter of course, inhabiting different umwelts to each other. When I first encountered this concept of our perceived sensory reality, I thought it might be applicable to politics as well as biological sensors. But the more I think about it the more I think I've underestimated its almost infinite scope.

We have different politics, yes, but also different cultures in all aspects, which – often enough, though certainly not always – never interact with each other. Even walking past outside diners at a restaurant, pedestrians don't enter the customer's umwelt, not really, even though they may pass within inches of each other.

Politically... it's partly about morals to be sure, probably even the dominant part. But it's also simply perception. What's relevant to one is of absolutely no concern to others. If you don't actually experience or witness the effects of a policy on a person or a group, it's likely of no concern to you. Awareness is just not the same as experience, like being told the plot of a TV show rather than watching it unfold. So essentially some events are literally not happening in our individual mental worlds.

Of course hard external reality does sometimes collide with these mental realms. It's not that reality isn't real or such. It's just that most of the time, or enough of the time at least, most of reality simply doesn't matter.

And this goes far beyond politics. Large tracts of reality simply don't exist for each of us. There's a whole world of the ins and outs of football shenanigans that don't exist for me. Details of celebrity lifestyles and the finer points of violin techniques alike hold no reality for me whatever. A myriad of mental worlds we'll never have the chance (or misfortune) to explore ! And of course for most people, poor unfortunate wretches that they are, astronomy too just isn't a thing.

To hammer home the point : the same event can be experienced by different people in radically different ways, e.g. an amazing emotional movie to one might be a pile of crap to another. A delicious cake to you might be disgusting to me. The substance, the sensory input, is the same but the output experience is not.

Why does this arise ? Probably from a huge number of causes. We grow up with different experiences, acquire different biases and perspectives, experience different teachings and have natural, pre-determined inclinations. A plethora of tiny differences gradually accumulate and develop. Most children, presumably, are more similar to each other than in the case of most adults.

The multiverse of science fiction is thus appealing because psychologically it captures what we anyway experience. It takes something we experience mentally, something we feel emotionally, and gives it a physical incarnation, just as monsters are our fears made flesh. It's the same basic principle at work, just manifested very differently.

Whether this has any bearing on actual scientists advocating the existence of a real multiverse, I don't know. I suspect not, that this is only a coincidence. I don't think our everyday experiences have much shaped the development of many-worlds theory : this is just a natural interpretation of the quantum mathematics. But maybe it's made people more receptive to it.