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Rob Sheldon on The Atlantic’s rotting multiverse

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Responding to Barry Arrington’s comment that if The Atlantic thinks the multiverse is reaching its sell by date, surely the food waste dumpster looms, physicist Rob Sheldon comments,

That was a pretty ambiguous article, ending with a question.

Because if the multiverse is a philosophy that is rotting culture, then we must dig down to its root, and ask “where did it come from?”

I think, and we could probably ask 3 philosophers and get 4 opinions, that this multiverse concept is exactly what you expect from materialism.

That is, the alternative to multiverse is NOT a determined, deterministic, Newtonian-Laplacian world. Nor is it a QM world of shadowy probabilities becoming realized by observation. Rather, the alternative to multiverse is, as the article suggests, a Leibnitzian “best of all possible worlds”, a designed world, a universe full of information, a world with a Creator.

For as soon as the Creator is removed, the design erased, the information erased, then we have chaos. Determinism and fatalism really are not unified, they are not univocal, they do not express one idea, rather they express “what is, is” which turns out to be multivalued, multivocal. (Among other reasons, because “is” turns out to be in the mind of the observer, a la President Clinton.)

So if multiverse is rotting our culture, then it is simply the fruiting body of the materialism fungus that had previously digested it.

Note: The article is “The Multiverse Idea Is Rotting Culture: What looks at first glance like an opening up of possibilities is actually an attack on the human imagination,” by Sam Kriss.

See also Is the “Multiverse” Reaching its Sell By Date? Barry Arrington: Maybe, if even The Atlantic has articles with this title: The Multiverse Idea is Rotting Culture

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