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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| Stepping into a quagmire today, because the author of this aeon piece is, as stated in her bio, "a philosopher specialising in theology and natural science." So I'm going to have issues from the very beginning, as I consider theology a "subject without an object," in the words of someone smarter than I am whose name I can't find right now. Many worlds, many selves  If it’s true that we live in a vast multiverse, then our understanding of identity, morality and even God must be reexamined The word "if" is doing most of the work in that subhead. As far as I'm aware, the idea of a multiverse, while making for some interesting (and not so interesting) fiction, is not something that can be supported or falsified scientifically. It arises as a possible, and terribly misunderstood, consequence of one of many interpretations of quantum physics. Recently, I was caught on the horns of a dilemma. I had a decision to make and, either way, I knew my life would follow a different track. On one path, I accept a job offer: it’s an incredible opportunity, but means relocating hundreds of miles away, with no social network. On the other, I stay in Oxford where I’d lived for a decade: less adventure, but close to my friends and family. Both options had upsides and downsides, so I wished that I could take the job and turn it down, somehow living each life in parallel. Well… there was potentially a way to make this happen. I could have my cake and eat it too. One of the most misunderstood things about multiverse speculation is what would cause the Universe to split. It supposedly happens, if at all, when a quantum entity such as an electron is no longer in a probability function, but acquires a defined state. It's not because of human choice. As electrons do this all the time all over the universe, the number of universes split off in this way is a number so large as to be incomprehensible to us (but still just as far from infinity as the number 1 is). There are smartphone apps that can help you decide between two options by harnessing the unpredictable quirks of quantum mechanics. But this is no ordinary coin toss, where randomness decides your fate. Instead, it guarantees that both choices become realities. It guarantees no such thing, and even if it did, there would be no way to get your money back because the "both realities" thing cannot be verified. In principle, though, this would produce results more truly random than most methods, including the proverbial coin toss and the simple app I use to choose these articles from a list, so it could have its uses. It’s inspired by the ‘Many-Worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, first proposed by the physicist Hugh Everett III in his doctoral dissertation in the 1950s. He argued that our Universe branches into multiple worlds every time a quantum event takes place – and thousands happen every second. While "thousands" implies something less than "millions," the actual number is exponentially higher than even millions. But my main quibble here is the conflating of "universe" and "world." Unless you're speaking Hebrew, those words are different: the universe is also exponentially larger than the world. As a philosopher of religion, I am interested in how this mind-boggling scientific theory might force us to reexamine even our most deeply held beliefs. One, it's not a theory; it's a hypothesis. Two, when a theologian says something like this, what they really mean is "how do we still fit God into our world-views, given this information?" It's like they almost get it, but not quite. In fact, I believe that the Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics encourages us to radically reconceptualise our understanding of ourselves. Perhaps I am not a single, unique, enduring subject. Perhaps I am actually like a branching tree, or a splitting amoeba, with many almost identical copies living slightly different lives across a vast and ever-growing multiverse. Even if Many-Worlds is fact, which I'm not saying it is, there's a really important difference between that hypothesis and trees or amoebae: a tree is an entity that we can see in its entirety, and each branch continues to contribute to the whole; the daughters of a splitting amoeba continue to co-exist and might even bump into each other; but once the Universe splits off, that's it: no further contact between the branches. At all. Ever. Not even in "theory." Only in popular fiction. (I've written such fiction myself, though I wouldn't call it "popular," before I realized it was just adding to peoples' confusion about this sort of thing.) I also believe that this picture encourages us to rethink our ideas about moral responsibility, and what religion tells us about God – maybe, even, abandon the traditional idea of God altogether. So close. SO close. For starters, if we live in a universe where there are multiple versions of you, thorny questions are raised about whether these versions of you can be considered the exact same person. There's that "if" again, but this time, it's even more iffy: we do not "live in a universe where there are multiple versions of you." Assuming, again, MWH is real (which, again, I do not), the clones all occupy different and forever separate universes. There's a somewhat-logical philosophical consequence to MWH called quantum immortality. It asserts that if a quantum event could either cause your death or not, your consciousness follows the "alive" path. I say logical, but logic can rest on false premises. Theology, for example. The article goes into other possible philosophical implications (most of which I find to be spurious), and then: An additional thorny problem raised by a universe of many worlds is that of moral responsibility. Most ordinary people’s moral intuitions about right action – whether some action was freely made, whether it accords with shared moral principles, and whether a person can be held responsible for it – were formed under the assumption that we live in a singular universe. Ha! Wait until you start thinking about the moral-responsibility consequences of our lack of free will as it is traditionally understood. The problem is, Many-Worlds is a deterministic theory – and determinism is considered by many, though not all, philosophers to be incompatible with genuine freedom. Oh... so close. So very, very close, but not quite. Consider this: Assume an entity that exists outside of space and time, for whom the past, present, and future has already happened, is happening, and will happen, all at once, and they're aware of all of it. To them, what we call the future is just as immutable as what we call the past, because it's all the same "thing." From the point of view of such an entity, we don't make choices; we're a train that never jumps the tracks and runs on an entirely predictable schedule. That entity could never be surprised. If they could be surprised, they wouldn't be all-knowing. In other words, if God can be surprised, He's not omniscient. If He cannot, then we don't have free will. (This assumes such an entity in the first place, of course.) Across the multiverse, everything that can happen does happen; each branch is inevitable. If that’s the case, even if we feel like we have the freedom to choose what actions we take, this may in fact be an illusion. We wouldn’t think me morally responsible for pushing over my grandmother if someone held a gun to my head and threatened to kill me if I didn’t. Similarly, if all my actions are determined by physical forces outside my control – like the laws of quantum mechanics – then it seems pretty unjust to punish me for them. There are plenty of reasons to punish people who do what we consider to be wrong, whether we have free will or not. I won't go into that here. Lots more at the article, but, as I said, it's possible to build entire logical edifices on nonexistent foundations, which results in the entire building sinking into the quagmire that I just waded through. It's fine to do the thinking, though. One of our superpowers as humans is the ability to imagine the impossible; as with all superpowers, though, it's possible that we abuse it sometimes. |
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