Multiverse Metaphysics

Metaphysics is best described as the study of ultimate reality. For pragmatists, the whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what difference it would make to you and me m, at definite instants of our life, if this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one.

A good deal of metaphysics has been posited on the various exchanges between the three options of metaphysical pluralism (there are lots of different objects), nihilism (there are no objects), and monism (there is just one object). Multiversalism is their synthesis. 

The point of the world-making thesis is to spur further innovation in developing new ones. The means of deciding between competing metaphysics is their practical value. There is no external perspective from which to adjudge. 

Inside the Multiverse we cannot simply apply the homogenous and monistic label of Nature to what is unfolding everywhere around, before, inside, after and outside us. The introduction of the word Multiverse is a means for understanding the interconnectedness of coexistence. The Multiverse denotes an ontology that stresses “there is a both-and logic operating here. We can have tiny components and a big self: reductionism and holism at the same time.” The multiverse is as a whole that cannot be separated from its parts. The parts inseparable from each other and the whole. In the multiverse, the part is not only connected to the whole by way of multiple linkages, the part actually includes the whole. It is multipolar without reductionism or holism prevailing. Essentially, this metaphysical claim is that “absolutely everything is absolutely related to absolutely everything else.”

Visualizing the multiverse is difficult, as it defies our imaginative capacities and transcends iconography. The multiverse has no central position that privileges any one form of being over others. It thereby erases definitive interior and exterior boundaries of beings. Emphasizing the interconnection of beings, the multiverse permits no distance, such that all beings are said to relate to each other in an open system rendering ambiguous those entities with which we presume familiarity. This strange multiverse without center or edge has no privileged authority. 

The multiverse is revealed through the uncanny. It is revealed through that being we encounter whose foreignness is all the more enthralling when we realize its intimate connection to us in the vast assemblage of objects that sustain us. Beings unable to be completely comprehended and labeled. In light of this, the multiverse valorises uncertainty – the never-quite-knowing something. This amounts to the ability to let strangers be strange. 

Every human is constituted by billions of nonhumans living, reproducing, and working tirelessly in their bodies to keep us and themselves alive. No human subjectivity is distinct from other subjectivities in the world. This collapses the separation between humans and nature. It encourages humans to think of their surroundings, including other humans, as deeply interconnected. We should imagine the multiverse as the intertwining and interconnection of beings to one another. There is no beginning or end to this intricate interweaving. In this colossal ambiguity, other beings are not entirely knowable, so humans must appreciate the aesthetics of strangeness and let live what is not understood. 

Though the East has long intuited the notion of interconnection, the West is beginning to synthesize this knowledge. The ecological or cosmological thought is difficult to understand outside of abstraction. The mind avidly searches for objects of focus and since infinity is not an object which can be focused on, there is confusion. The infinity of interconnection is a concept that works like quicksand; the more someone understands the more deeply they fall into uncertainty. When one sparkling jewel multiplies into thousands of lights, there is no longer definition in the vision. This is the deep contemplation of the human struggle to conceive of interconnection. Morton’s own metaphor for a cosmic ecology of the mesh is inspired by Indra’s Net found in Vedic cosmology. 

A Copernican Revolution or the paradigm shift of the Anthropocene thus awaits us, one that further decenters humanity by drastically expanding our ontological and ethical imaginations. The anti-ontological philosopher Emmanuel Levinas shall help steer us through these paradoxical ideas. Levinas' view implies an ontologically incomplete Universe where there is no neat nesting of parts in wholes. Levinas puts totality into stark opposition with infinity. For Levinas, holism would be totality. Thinking ecology involves thinking infinity, in many different senses. Copernicus and Galileo turned the notion of “sunrise” into a convenient abstraction, while we know that in reality the Earth is rotating around the sun. In the same way, the hyperobject that is climate change turns the weather into a false immediacy, an abstraction that seems real because it’s wet and cold, for instance.

Amongst several dates under consideration, the International Anthropocene Working Group published a 2015 paper suggesting that the Trinity test on July 16, 1945, was the starting point of the proposed new epoch. Such an event serves as the iconic pinnacle of modernity, encapsulated in the words of Robert Oppenheimer when he witnessed the atomic fireball glowing over the New Mexico desert in the world’s first nuclear explosion: “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” Those words are from the Vedic scripture the Bhagavad Gita, but they have been mistranslated from the more accurate “I am become time, the destroyer of worlds.” Morton asserts in an article entitled Ecology without the Present (2016) that the ‘hyperobjects’ of the Anthropocene “makes it impossible even for the most recalcitrant metaphysician of presence to get a grip on ecological reality.” 

The Trinity test began to deposit a thin layer of radioactive materials in Earth’s crust which amounted to the distribution of an object beyond conventional understandings of time and space - hence Morton’s term ‘hyperobject.’ The creation of the atom bomb not only proved that mass and energy are not distinct entities but can be transformed into each other (the meaning of Einstein’s E=MC2). The threat of nuclear annihilation of the Earth meant that modern science had permanently altered the nature of ethical life on the planet. “The ‘Anthropocene’ is retroactively posited, a radar signal from a weird event, an event at which human and geological temporalities intersected one another.” The end of nature has already occurred as a historical event. “We can be uncannily precise about the date on which the world ended - July 16, 1945. Was it the end of history, or the beginning? It was certainly the beginning of the end of the world, not as a decisive apocalypse, but as the opening of a far more uncanny historicity, in which humans realize we are living on after the end of the world” - the end of nature as paradigm, ideology, worldview. 

In the Postnature Epoch, each ethical decision is made on the inside of a hyperobject unbounded by conventional notions of timescales.  It is the end of the world, because for a world to be coherent, there must be a here and a there, a now and a then. Nuclear materials like other hyperobjects are so massively distributed in time and space that they end the idea that time is a neutral container that is outside the physical universe. Climate change is a perfect example of a hyperobject operating across vast timescales. Likewise geological time, emerging for humans since the advent of modernity, is an abyss whose reality becomes increasingly uncanny the more scientific inquiry is able to uncover it. The planet’s cataclysmic history is marked by the fiery formation of the earth's crust, asteroid collisions, and mass extinctions of lifeforms ranging from odd sea creatures to colossal dinosaurs. Inside hyperobjects, knowledge ceases to be demystification.

Now evaporates into a relative motion of traffic between past and future. Hyperobjects like climate change are “uncanny” because they are both far away and immediate. They are at the very same moment present and real and yet distant and invisible. They transcend our current comprehension which is why we need to transform our thinking to accommodate scales we never have before. The universe itself is a hyperobject within the multiverse. Without a world, without Nature, nonhumans intermingle intimately with humans. This feature is something weird realism of multiversalism is beginning to contend with as emergent features of the uncanny intersection of geological time and human history. 

This metaphor of Indra’s Net presents an image of the reflections of infinite sparkling jewels. Such an image still produces ambiguity nonetheless since there is no longer definition in the brightness of such vision. In the tradition of Vedic cosmology, the nature of reality has long been represented by the jeweled Net of Indra, which represents an omnipresent interconnectedness in the cosmos. Indra is the lord of heaven and the king of the Vedic deities. Over his palace on Mount Meru hangs a net that stretches infinitely in all directions. At each node of the net, where the heavenly strands intersect, is a jewel. Infinite in number, each facet of each jewel reflects all the other jewels hanging from the net. Indra’s net is meant to illustrate the interconnectedness of all phenomena. Here the part is not only connected to the whole by way of multiple linkages. The part actually includes the whole. Using Indra’s Net as a model for reality eliminates belief in individual sovereignty alone and emphasizes mutual dependence instead. 

The metaphor of Indra’s Net is a way to begin to conceive of the dynamism that accompanies interconnection. The vision that the story presents is of a network of cause and effect which cascades into infinity allows the habits of dualistic thinking to be transcended in favor of a consciousness that acknowledges interconnection as reality. The wisdom of interconnection, so long understood in Vedic ontology, has the power to instruct us to think ecologically and cosmologically in the Postnature Epoch. The knowledge of interconnection in the West has helped spur ontological transformation. The metaphor of Indra’s Jeweled Net is so dynamic that it can be employed as a stunning analogy to understand Vedic teachings as well as the facets of contemporary ecological thought in which science and philosophy merge. Yet the “multiverse” is not a mystical concept, and Morton has an interest in how humans proceed ethically from his assumptions. 

The environment is a construct of the human tendency to think dualistically and hierarchically. The thrust of environmentalism comes from an urgent feeling of disconnect from nature which is conceived of as a suffering entity outside of ourselves. The notion of separation between humans and nature is frequently embedded in the language of modern environmentalism. However, when we realize everything is interconnected, we cannot hold on to a single, solid, present-at-hand thing 'over there' called Nature. The multiverse articulates that there can be no such disconnect as represented by a dualism between humanity and nature. Thus, the pull of the ecological thought moves humanity beyond nature and into the metaphysics of the multiverse. 

Imagining the multiverse is not easy, as something always eludes our efforts to comprehend all. Indeed as William James surmises, “with his obscure and uncertain speculations as to the intimate nature and causes of things, the philosopher is likened to a ‘blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that is not there.’” Even so, William James describes a pluralistic metaphysics in which “everything you can think of, however vast or inclusive, has on the pluralistic view a genuinely ‘external’ environment of some sort or amount. Things are ‘with’ one another in many ways, but nothing includes everything, or dominates over everything. The word ‘and’ trails along after every sentence. Something always escapes.” James coined the term “multiverse” to describe a pluralistic cosmos that could never be reduced to a unity. At the same time, he insisted that “our multiverse still makes a ‘universe’; for every part tho it may not be in actual or immediate connexion, is nevertheless in some possible or mediated connexion, with every other part however remote.” Thus multiplicity is a feature of the fabric of reality itself - the multiverse which is neither holistic nor reductionist. Monism on the other hand insists that ontology can be contained within a single universal unity. The difference between pluralism and monism is “the difference between… the each-form and the all-form of reality.” The third option, ontological dualism, asserts that the world is divided into two overarching categories. Instead, the pluralistic cosmos of the multiverse lets things exist in themselves without privileging subjectivity or objectivity. 

For multiversalism there is no transcendent monistic or holistic exception. Instead reality is composed of objects that are all on the same ontological level - there is no privileging of humanity or nature. Furthermore, there is no way to conceptually totalize this multiverse of objects since there is no overarching supreme object to totalize them. Indeed, ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Multiversalism argues that existence is composed of objects. Multiversalism puts “things” at the center of this study. Contra anthropocentrism, its aim is to envision the world of things as things in a world rather than our world with things in it.  “Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society (social relativism). Multiversalism  steers a middle path between the two, drawing attention to things at all scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with one another as much with ourselves.” Multiversalism is not the thesis that we should focus on objects instead of humans, but rather that there’s only one ontological category: objects - which also includes humans. As such there are not two distinct ontological domains, one composed of subjectivity (human mind) and the other composed of natural objects.

To be an multiversalist philosopher, one must hold that individual entities of various different scales are the ultimate stuff of the cosmos. There is no superior monistic entity that reigns over all (i.e. Nature). When physicists try to think about the universe as an entity, they soon run into the problem of a top object. Thus some physicists have suggested a multiverse in which our universe is simply one of many. But this pushes the problem back a stage further: in what does this multiverse reside? Or does it continue endlessly? Multiversalism is more comfortable with the implication of this assertion—a potentially infinite progress of objects. In which case, the universe (as well as Nature) cannot be described as a top object because of its embeddedness in the multiverse. 

Multiversalism gets rid of an idea of nature responsible for both human dominion over the natural world and devaluing nonhuman entities. Multiversalism is not a simple conflation of the ‘humanity’ and ‘nature’ categories. Multiversalism does not propose that humanity lower itself to the ground of nature. It demands that people sincerely and unreservedly go outside of themselves, to actually acquaint themselves with the strange such that the strange becomes intimate. Thus the necessary condition for a multiversalist philosopher is imagining the unknown. 

Multiversalism is particularly postnature insofar as it addresses the challenges of the emerging geological epoch, the Anthropocene—a time when human actions, magnified by technology, are so pervasively intertwined with Earth’s systems that it is becoming increasingly unworkable to neatly separate humans from nonhumans. The world of mulitiversalism is one where things encounter each other while nonetheless remaining unknown, mysterious, uncanny.  Indeed the world of multiversalism is not a world at all.  For this pluralistic realism, there is ecology but no background or container called nature, world, or matter. Everything is a substance: a human, a stone, a table, an army, an atom, an idea, etc., and each thing has agency. Objects here are not the opposite of subjects. 

As there is no holistic top object, there is also no reductionist bottom object. There is no smallest entity at the base of all the others which is somehow more real - like an atom. Since an object’s parts cannot fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. Multiversalism is anti-reductionist but it is also anti-holist. An object can’t be “reduced” to its whole either. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. Thus we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. For example, a coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton etc.; but one of these things on its own does not embody part of a reef. Yet the reef is just an assemblage of these particular parts. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is distanced both from its parts and from its whole. Objects cannot be reduced to tiny building blocks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can they be reduced upwards into instances of a global process. Each object contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects. Around each object there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories contend. Objects contain other objects and are contained in other objects. The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. 

If there is no top object and no bottom object neither is there a middle object. There is no such thing as a space or time in which objects float. There is no Nature. There is no world. All connections of objects are emergent properties of objects themselves. This is in line with post-Einsteinian physics in which spacetime is just the product of objects. To reiterate, if there are no top, bottom, or middle objects, then it is possible that there is an infinite regress of objects within objects, and an infinite progress of objects surrounding objects. This possibility seems less objectionable to multiversalism than the notion that there is a top object or a bottom object. Thus we must very seriously revise our commonly held scientific theories of time and space bringing them in line with multiverse theory. 

Quantum theory specifies that quanta withdraw from one another, including the quanta with which we measure them. Thus when you set up quanta to measure the position of a quantum, its momentum withdraws, and vice versa. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle states that when an “observer”--not a subject per se, but a measuring device involving photons or electrons --makes an observation, at least one aspect of the observed is occluded. Observation is as much part of the multiverse of objects as the observable, not some ontologically different state (such as a subject). This is not about how a human knows an object, but how a photon interacts with a photosensitive molecule. Some phenomena are irreducibly undecidable, both wavelike and particle-like. Accordingly, multiversalism is deeply congruent with quantum theory, the most profound, accurate and testable theory of physical reality.

We need to rethink what we mean by subject from the multiversalism perspective. In many ways what is called a subject and what is called an object are not that different. We are accustomed to think that “subject” is one thing and “object” is another. Multiversalism treats subjects and objects as exactly the same. What is conventionally designated as an “object” is just as removed from a multiversalist object as the conventional “subject” is. Multiversslism holds that everything is an object, including the seemingly special one we call subject. A quality we withhold from other beings as if we were gatekeepers of an exclusive clique of subjectivity. 

The goal of environmental ethics today shouldn't be about trying to make people care more about nature. According to Morton, "we stop trying to prove that the forest has intrinsic value… Instead the question is: Do you love the forest? Are you completely entranced and hypnotized by it?” The notion of separation between humans and nature is frequently embedded in the language of modern environmentalism. Many environmentalists have sought to heal this breach between humans and nature by proposing new ecological worldviews that restore a lost connection to the earth. But their appeals however well intentioned remain fundamentally Cartesian, in their dependence on the humanity and nature dualism. When you realize everything is interconnected, “you can't hold on to a single, solid, present-at-hand thing 'over there' called Nature.” For an ecology without nature, we are no longer the arbiter of existence, deciding what is subject and what is object, what has value or no value, what has rights or no rights at all.