Annotated 49-36
FB: The so-called “Higgs boson doomsday” involves the universe being disrupted by a giant wave from the “god particle.” The so-called “HR bossin’ doomsday” involves the world being disrupted by a giant middle finger from the “particle god.”
This is probably our most dramatically justified splash page. I love what John did with the clouds, the form of HR, the sort of “robes” on him and the way those three things kind of run together.
In Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, the main villain posits that destroying the multiverse is the only meaningful choice one can make, because any smaller-scale choice creates another world in the multiverse where you didn’t make that choice. This strikes me as narcissism taken to an ultimate extreme, the inability to cope with how much of the world is beyond your control, the desire to burn it all down rather than let others run on beyond you. HR is too focused on the Five to be quite that nihilistic yet, but he’s definitely getting there.
Huh. Wouldn’t that rule imply the heroes basically have to do nothing because there’s another multiverse where the villain decided to preserve all worlds or something?
That’s a darned reasonable question that somehow never gets asked in these big imperiled-multiverse stories!
Well, kind of. In that JLA story, Owlman was trying to resolve his massive existential crisis by annihilating all existence by himself. That’s the only certainty you can have: When you personally make sure the job gets done. If your plan for saving existence consists of crossing your fingers and hoping for an external agency to pull your bacon out ot the frying pan, then you’re putting a lot of faith on your understanding of how the multiverse works. I think that’s a different kind of hubris. Not the kind of narcissistic hubris that makes you a villain like Owlman, but it doesn’t make you much of a hero, either.
I think that kind of story mostly shows how the authors are way less smart about weighty questions of philosophy than they’d like to be.
Which is a good prompt to congratulate the GA crew for not falling into that trap, despite writing plenty of opportunities to do so! Yes, HR likes to philosophize but whatever he comes up is either not controversial or is recognizable as his own hubris bending his reason.
If deciding the destroy the multiverse negates the ability to make other choices (such as not to destroy the multiverse or only destroying the multiverse a little bit), does that mean there’s no free will? Otherwise it’d just create another multiverse where that choice was made differently. #CheckmateAtheists
I think that argument about destroying the multiverse is just one of many logical dead-ends that people can spiral into if they think sufficiently superficially about something that’s actually pretty hard to get.
If destroying it all is the only choice you can make, … nope. that’s not a choice. It’s only a choice if you can decide whether or not to do something, for whatever reason you deem important enough. So why choose not stick around and enjoy the show? If you really don’t want to see the rest of the multiverse, why not just kill yourself? That’s be much easier, wouldn’t it?
The thing with free will is: It doesn’t matter whether my next decision is predetermined. *I* don’t know what it will be or whether something/-one is pulling the strings. So I, and everyone else, should act *as if* everyone had free will. Because if I assumed that I did not, I’d stop caring. And if the society etc. assumed that nobody had free will, you could not justify law enforcement, or even just enforcing basic social norms (like: please don’t kill people). It makes no sense. If something is pulling our collective strings, but we can’t notice it, that’s the same to us as if they weren’t. Now, if we *could* notice the strings, then we could direct some of the consequences for people’s behaviour at whoever pulls them, or try to modify the mechanism by which those strings are pulled (that’s what psychotherapy does, by the way).
Ultimately, there’s no reason to think multiverses exist.
The Many Worlds Interpretation is just that: An interpretation of QM.
It’s not a theory, just prose to make sense of a probability distribution.
As such, it’s probably not correct.
Yeah, but in comic universes, you can actually meet your evil twin.
I don’t see any flaw in the logic that from a multiversal perspective the only meaningful choice is the choice of whether to destroy the multiverse, but the existence of a choice itself is certainly not an implication about which way that choice should be made. If one has the potential to destroy the multiverse, then choosing to do so is no more or less meaningful than choosing not to do so.
Fair point!
I think the faulty logic comes in when people think of multiverse as meaning “every choice/event we can think of will have a universe where it happened”.
If that were true then sure, each “small scale” choice seems meaningless, because somewhere there are identical yous who chose differently.
But I don’t think the premise holds. Infinite universes doesn’t mean that everything has happened or will happen. Without being an expert on infinities, I’m still pretty sure that you can have infinite variations without having everything happen. Like how in the remainder of my life I still have an infinity of options on how to live, but none of those options will include becoming an Olympic fencer (just to have an example).
Or to express it mathematically: There is an infinity of possible numbers between 1 and 2, but none of them will ever be 3.
So multiverse doesn’t mean everything has happened, and thus the premise for why destroying the multiverse becomes the only meaningful choice is false.
Yeah, but what flavor of the multiverse are they in? The “everything happens somewhere” might be the right interpretation, for them.
My understanding of the Nasuverse, OTOH, is that, while parallel worlds exist, there’s only so much that can happen, and timeline that underperform under some arcane metric are pruned and cease to exist.
I think it’s even easier: If every (real) choice I make creates a universe where I made it differently, then by making the choice my way, I decide to exist in the universe where I made the choice that I prefer, instead of the stupid version of the choice which only some idiot like my stupid twin would have made. Serves him well!
If I believed in this “choices split the universe” thing, then *not* making the choices I like best would be making my own life worse in an attempt to help someone who I can never meet, whose existence I cannot verify, without even being sure that it will actually help them. If *I* think that a certain choice is wise, then I should be the one taking the risk, not someone else.
And also you’re right of course: The really stupid choices are made by (virtually) nobody. Unless I get the whole multiverse stuff wrong and make the stupidest choices because I think that will somehow make the other universes better? Then I’d be the stupid twin, I guess :)
There’s one of the Discworld books where Terry Pratchett makes the argument that, essentially, if the whole “every choice you make spawns a bunch of universes where you made all possible other choices” is true, then there are universes where you, as you are now, choose murder as your option. And the vast majority of people just …aren’t gonna do that. Not without working up to it in some way or having a lot of other stuff happen first.
Relevant:
https://i.imgur.com/DrY63IUh.jpg