Man, it's been a really long time since I played (well, watched a Let's Play of) Bioshock Infinite, so I don't remember what the Constants are.
I agree, though, that a limited multiverse doesn't necessarily run into the determinism problems I've sketched above. For example, in Star Trek, for a long time, there was only one parallel universe: the Mirror Universe where Spock had a goatee and everyone was evil... except, as it turned out over the course of the episode, the people there weren't uniformly evil, and were still capable of making free choices. The circumstances of that universe were brutal, but it appears that they were made by free choices and could still be changed by free choices. (Of course, the conceit that this other universe coincidentally had exactly the same crew on exactly the same ship in exactly the same positions was pretty outrageous, but, if you accept the conceit, the episode's pretty good.) Multiverses that contain only a few universes aren't a big problem for libertarian free will, and they only become really dangerous when they are infinite.
Of course, Bioshock Infinite's multiverse WAS infinite -- it's right there in the title -- so that's not an escape hatch for Bioshock.
I think it's arguable that, in an infinite multiverse, entities that act across universes (without creating new ones through their actions) could, in theory, have free will. For example, in Everything Everywhere All At Once, there is only one Jobu Tupaki, and Jobu Tupaki has the capacity to destroy the *entire* multiverse. If she does this, there's no "branch" multiverse where the multiverse continues intact; the conceit of the story is that the *entire* everything-bagel could be consumed. This means that, for the first and only time in the movie, there's an actual alternate possibility open to one of the characters. This is one of the essential preconditions for free action: A person's act is free if and only if that person could have done otherwise. Arguably, destroying the multiverse (or refraining from doing so) is the only free act Jobu Tupaki is capable of. One could, perhaps, construct a similar defense of libertarian free will in Bioshock based on Constants which are (as I understand it from Google) events that always occur in every universe.
But I think this would be very tricky. Another precondition for free will is that the choice between alternate possibilities be genuinely under the control of the agent. It is unclear to me how the sorts of agents that act across universes in multiverse-based fictions -- Lutece siblings or Jobu Tupakis or Anti-Monitors, as you please -- could have this kind of agency, when absolutely nothing else in their cosmos does.
I should probably think about this comment more before I post it, but I'm typing from one of those "30 minute computer stations" and my time is just about up.
Anyway, welcome to De Civitate, TDS! Glad to see you in the comments and hope to see more of you!
Not sure how that happened. I've tried for a long time to not register with this site. I think the previous post was a guest account, but I'm not sure.
Also, we've talked when you were still on Blogger(?) and in e-mail.
Such a joy to read your excoriation of this movie that so many people loved. And look at how much has gone on in the world that I didn't comment for all this time.
Spider-Man: No Way Home deserves everything you throw at it, as does most of the multiversal MCU. But I question the multiverse trope as the culprit.
Instead of a multiverse, let's imagine we live in just one universe, but infinite in size. If it's genuinely infinite, as you're no doubt familiar, there's another you out there somewhere who wrote this same essay with an opposite conclusion. Not only that, there are infinite yous who wrote roughly the same essay, and it's just a question of how frequent certain iterations are over others. Unlike the multiverse, for which we have no evidence, an infinite universe is fairly probable given what we know. Uh oh. Which version of yourself you perceive is mere chance, not choice.
The final statement in that paragraph is false. Those other Jameses are not you. If we hop through space so that you could visit these other selves, which is all a multiverse amounts to, they still are not you.
The multiverse, even an infinite multiverse, is merely a sci fi trope that can serve a variety of stories. Spider-Man: No Way Home's rot does not lie in using this trope. It lies in mistaking the mechanics of metaphors for their meanings. Your recap of past Spider-Man movies leaves out how each movie featured some physical mechanic for the evil of its villains. In a purely literal take on Spider-Man 2, Doc Ock didn't just choose wrong: he had an inhibitor chip that took a blow at the same time that his wife died and his experiment failed, and then when he's confronted with the consequences of his actions, the tentacles visibly spark and fritz in the water, which lets him reassert control. If you're the writers of No Way Home, you don't recognize how the mechanics of the supervillain are metaphors for obsession, loss of grounding in humanity, and moral choice, and you make the story about fixing the chip. The multiverse trope didn't do that. Storytelling illiteracy did.
Incidentally, this is the same error that we on the left see scriptural literalists as committing. (Not implying you're in that camp.)
Meanwhile, for a multiversal story that isn't a moral black hole, we don't even need to look far. There's one multiversal story in the MCU that had something to say, namely Loki season 1. (Let's please ignore season 2.) What if you kept making the same mistakes over and over? What if every version of yourself you try to be kept failing in the same way? What if you had no concept of any possible version of yourself you could love, or deem worthy of love, or be capable of loving someone else? Okay, now what would it take, and what would it mean, for someone like that to see, and then start to become, someone more than they have been? That's Loki season 1, and as the polar opposite of No Way Home, it uses a multiverse trope specifically to call a character to greater accountability.
Now, about the multiverse killing God.
I've never heard an atheist raise the multiverse idea to argue against intelligent design, mainly because atheists regard intelligent design as silly to begin with. (I won't get into why here because it would divert the discussion.) Needing to invent a multiverse to argue against intelligent design would require granting that intelligent design arguments have validity, which atheists generally don't. Besides, the multiverse as proposed within quantum physics has universes split when particles could go either way, not whole universes with completely different physical laws. So it doesn't even work for this argument anyway. While I'm sure Dawkins used it, because he's a kitchen sink kind of guy and also a jerk, I don't think it figures prominently among atheists, and isn't particularly about killing God.
It's mainly just a lazy way to bring in multiple Spider-Man actors. It's been done to death enough lately that I'd rather not see more of it. But I'm not convinced it kills free will any more than our single universe, and all the deterministic arguments you can make about how it works. It's a sci fi device, no better or worse than faster than light travel, transporter clones, or cybernetic collective consciousness.
Would adding hard boundaries to the Multiverse, like the Constants in Bioshock Infinite, save the concept from determinism?
Man, it's been a really long time since I played (well, watched a Let's Play of) Bioshock Infinite, so I don't remember what the Constants are.
I agree, though, that a limited multiverse doesn't necessarily run into the determinism problems I've sketched above. For example, in Star Trek, for a long time, there was only one parallel universe: the Mirror Universe where Spock had a goatee and everyone was evil... except, as it turned out over the course of the episode, the people there weren't uniformly evil, and were still capable of making free choices. The circumstances of that universe were brutal, but it appears that they were made by free choices and could still be changed by free choices. (Of course, the conceit that this other universe coincidentally had exactly the same crew on exactly the same ship in exactly the same positions was pretty outrageous, but, if you accept the conceit, the episode's pretty good.) Multiverses that contain only a few universes aren't a big problem for libertarian free will, and they only become really dangerous when they are infinite.
Of course, Bioshock Infinite's multiverse WAS infinite -- it's right there in the title -- so that's not an escape hatch for Bioshock.
I think it's arguable that, in an infinite multiverse, entities that act across universes (without creating new ones through their actions) could, in theory, have free will. For example, in Everything Everywhere All At Once, there is only one Jobu Tupaki, and Jobu Tupaki has the capacity to destroy the *entire* multiverse. If she does this, there's no "branch" multiverse where the multiverse continues intact; the conceit of the story is that the *entire* everything-bagel could be consumed. This means that, for the first and only time in the movie, there's an actual alternate possibility open to one of the characters. This is one of the essential preconditions for free action: A person's act is free if and only if that person could have done otherwise. Arguably, destroying the multiverse (or refraining from doing so) is the only free act Jobu Tupaki is capable of. One could, perhaps, construct a similar defense of libertarian free will in Bioshock based on Constants which are (as I understand it from Google) events that always occur in every universe.
But I think this would be very tricky. Another precondition for free will is that the choice between alternate possibilities be genuinely under the control of the agent. It is unclear to me how the sorts of agents that act across universes in multiverse-based fictions -- Lutece siblings or Jobu Tupakis or Anti-Monitors, as you please -- could have this kind of agency, when absolutely nothing else in their cosmos does.
I should probably think about this comment more before I post it, but I'm typing from one of those "30 minute computer stations" and my time is just about up.
Anyway, welcome to De Civitate, TDS! Glad to see you in the comments and hope to see more of you!
Thank you for the welcome, though I should point out that we've talked before. I'll keep an eye out for your future, revised (?) statement.
You have two accounts! *surprised pikachu*
Not sure how that happened. I've tried for a long time to not register with this site. I think the previous post was a guest account, but I'm not sure.
Also, we've talked when you were still on Blogger(?) and in e-mail.
Yeah, now that I see your name, I recognize ya. I don't see emails, though, so was baffled by the appearance of TDS.
Well, at any rate, I withdraw my welcome and instead extend you a welcome BACK!
It was around the 2020 election, back when I dropped you. I still have the emails, including an unfinished draft I never sent.
Anyway, thank you for the welcome back.
Such a joy to read your excoriation of this movie that so many people loved. And look at how much has gone on in the world that I didn't comment for all this time.
Spider-Man: No Way Home deserves everything you throw at it, as does most of the multiversal MCU. But I question the multiverse trope as the culprit.
Instead of a multiverse, let's imagine we live in just one universe, but infinite in size. If it's genuinely infinite, as you're no doubt familiar, there's another you out there somewhere who wrote this same essay with an opposite conclusion. Not only that, there are infinite yous who wrote roughly the same essay, and it's just a question of how frequent certain iterations are over others. Unlike the multiverse, for which we have no evidence, an infinite universe is fairly probable given what we know. Uh oh. Which version of yourself you perceive is mere chance, not choice.
The final statement in that paragraph is false. Those other Jameses are not you. If we hop through space so that you could visit these other selves, which is all a multiverse amounts to, they still are not you.
The multiverse, even an infinite multiverse, is merely a sci fi trope that can serve a variety of stories. Spider-Man: No Way Home's rot does not lie in using this trope. It lies in mistaking the mechanics of metaphors for their meanings. Your recap of past Spider-Man movies leaves out how each movie featured some physical mechanic for the evil of its villains. In a purely literal take on Spider-Man 2, Doc Ock didn't just choose wrong: he had an inhibitor chip that took a blow at the same time that his wife died and his experiment failed, and then when he's confronted with the consequences of his actions, the tentacles visibly spark and fritz in the water, which lets him reassert control. If you're the writers of No Way Home, you don't recognize how the mechanics of the supervillain are metaphors for obsession, loss of grounding in humanity, and moral choice, and you make the story about fixing the chip. The multiverse trope didn't do that. Storytelling illiteracy did.
Incidentally, this is the same error that we on the left see scriptural literalists as committing. (Not implying you're in that camp.)
Meanwhile, for a multiversal story that isn't a moral black hole, we don't even need to look far. There's one multiversal story in the MCU that had something to say, namely Loki season 1. (Let's please ignore season 2.) What if you kept making the same mistakes over and over? What if every version of yourself you try to be kept failing in the same way? What if you had no concept of any possible version of yourself you could love, or deem worthy of love, or be capable of loving someone else? Okay, now what would it take, and what would it mean, for someone like that to see, and then start to become, someone more than they have been? That's Loki season 1, and as the polar opposite of No Way Home, it uses a multiverse trope specifically to call a character to greater accountability.
Now, about the multiverse killing God.
I've never heard an atheist raise the multiverse idea to argue against intelligent design, mainly because atheists regard intelligent design as silly to begin with. (I won't get into why here because it would divert the discussion.) Needing to invent a multiverse to argue against intelligent design would require granting that intelligent design arguments have validity, which atheists generally don't. Besides, the multiverse as proposed within quantum physics has universes split when particles could go either way, not whole universes with completely different physical laws. So it doesn't even work for this argument anyway. While I'm sure Dawkins used it, because he's a kitchen sink kind of guy and also a jerk, I don't think it figures prominently among atheists, and isn't particularly about killing God.
It's mainly just a lazy way to bring in multiple Spider-Man actors. It's been done to death enough lately that I'd rather not see more of it. But I'm not convinced it kills free will any more than our single universe, and all the deterministic arguments you can make about how it works. It's a sci fi device, no better or worse than faster than light travel, transporter clones, or cybernetic collective consciousness.