The Many World Metaphysics of "The Man in the High Castle"

The Amazon series in which the Axis powers won the Second World War is based on the premise that things might not have turned out with North America split between a Greater Nazi Reich in the east and the Japanese Pacific States, a largely lawless Rocky Mountain area separating the two. It is not too hard for us to imagine at least one war outcome different from this. 

The metaphysics of the series has it that both these possible worlds are actual, as are others, and that information transfer and human travel among them are possible. The political and human consequences of interacting worlds fuel much of the drama of the series. I am going to put aside world politics, fascism, terrorism, life, death and the longings of the human soul to focus, instead, on what I am sure got the audience clicking into episode after episode: the metaphysics of plural worlds.

Spoilers

Likely anyone interested enough in the metaphysics of The Man in the High Castle to get this far has seen sufficient episodes to be pretty spoil-proof. Even if not, what follows doesn’t reveal too much of how the plots and subplots work out. With respect to the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name, upon which Amazon based its series with the help of the novelist’s daughter, the story is different because the stories are different. My discussion of the novel, brief though it is, gives away almost the whole show. So, If a first reading of the novel is in your future, you might want to stop reading this post when you get to its final section, in which will be found all the discussion of the book.

Basics of the series

We learn that there are alternative worlds, i.e. universes, with common pasts up until the late 1930s when their histories diverge. Knowledge of worlds other than the fascist dominated home world of the series comes initially from “travelers” who accidentally or intentionally pop from one world to another or dream or daydream across worlds. These travelers have apparently brought back a large number of  newsreels and other films, many of which reveal a timeline in which the Allies are victorious.

How many worlds?

In the third year of the series, we learn that Dr. Mengale (yes, that Mengele) is working on the technology for a Nebenwelt (neighboring world) initiative. His team, apparently by generating an enormous electromagnetic field, can open a temporary portal to others of the parallel worlds. The ultimate goal is to put first spies then armies through the portal to conquer the universe of universes.  
  

A three dimensional model constructed by the Nazi team shows approximately twelve parallel worlds, depicted as transparent globes connected by rods to a central globe, presumably representing the home world. It is a little hard to do an accurate world count because the model is surrounded for some unexplained reason by mirrors. Which globes are part of the model and which only reflections takes more discernment than I was willing to give it. Presumably these are not the only alternate worlds, but only those that the Nazis had so far explored. 

The relatively small number of the worlds that have been found, each having substantial differences from the home world, is not easy to explain in terms of the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is that physical theory, first set out by Everett in 1957, that is hinted at as the explanation of everything. On the many worlds interpretation, reality branches at each non-determined quantum event. You hear a Geiger counter click, there is a world, identical up to that point to yours, that splits off at that instant – a world in which there is no click. Given the vast number of quantum events happening each second, there should be a lot of worlds very, very like any particular world. (The flickerings of fluorescent lights are quantum events.) So the story line seems to make sense only if the branching of worlds is a great deal rarer than it would be on Everett’s theory.

The metaphysics, physics, and engineering of trans-world travel

The operator of the Nebenwelt device can select among the alternate worlds, as we can infer from American Reichsmarshall John Smith’s ability to walk through the portal to, and be retrieved from, a specific world – one in which his counterpart was an insurance salesman and his son, a home world eugenics sacrifice, is alive. The resources of the home world are sufficient to produce a machine that can not only take one out into the multiverse, but to and from a specific member universe. 

Can this all be done before leaving the home world, or does one, to use a rough metaphor, have to make navigational adjustments after one is out in multiverse space? The series gives no evidence of the latter possibility. Active navigation through a multiverse space likely of many dimensions might well be pretty daunting. It seems unlikely that Mengale’s group would have been able to locate even a dozen universes if that were required. Moreover, the individual travelers seem to get to, and in some cases receive images from, alternate worlds simply by willing the destination or even without willing – as in the “memories” that came to Juliana. I think there must be something like alternate world “addresses” hidden away in the furniture of the home world to which the minds of the travelers and the Nebenwelt machine can gain access, and by virtue of which the world-transit is effectively immediate.

Personal counterpart exclusion.

The most important principle of the metaphysics of High Castle alternative worlds is that two counterparts of the same human individual cannot coexist in any given world. The Nazis discovered that marching ten conscripts through the portal, only two might survive – the two having no counterparts in the alternative world. Amendsen, the man in the high castle, apparently knew this by dint of his understanding of quantum multiverses. Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain.

This makes very important a cousin of the traditional philosophical question, “What constitutes personal identity?” if I am anticipating trans-world travel, it is of real interest to me in what worlds there is someone who counts as “me.” 

One solid fact we could rely upon if we were advising trans-world tourists is that you can travel to a world in which there is the corpse of your counterpart, even of recent decease. This was the case for Reichsmarshall Smith when he visited the world of former insurance salesman Smith. Ruled out, then, are some particularly crude “body similarity” versions of personal identity. That, however, takes us very little ways towards an acceptable theory, and it is about all the help we get from fictional empirical fact.

Yet, I think it is relatively safe to extrapolate that no form of “degree of physical similarity” is going to be key to Nebenwelt same-individual-exclusion. Surely one can visit a world in which her counterpart is deceased even though her counterpart’s identical twin still lives and that twin is very like indeed our  potential tourist. 

The history of one’s physical body seems a more fruitful line. My hunch would be that if world branching occurs after individual A is already living, then all the living successors of A in down-steam worlds exclude each other. There are some complexities if the branching takes place when A is an early zygote capable of twining or absorbing a fraternal twin. (See https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-recent-news-report-in-which-rand-paul.html, Section 6. ) 

If there is no twining or tetragametic chimeric merger on either branch, then one could take the simple definition all the way back to the one cell zygote. (Actually, we could take it back to the pre-fertilization sperm-egg pair, but to little practical advantage.) If there was tetragametic merger on either branch, then there would be no exclusion. At least it seems unlikely that the underlying metaphysics of the many worlds would identify someone having two different genotypes as the same person as someone having only one of the two. 

The post-branch merger on only one branch of identical twins does not produce an individual with two genotypes, and can I think be handled along with the case of post-branch twining on one branch. In both instances, I would advise neither of the twins to try the singleton’s world while the singleton lives, and I would advise the singleton not to visit the twins’ world so long as either of them is alive. Having no understanding what fundamental structure of the multiverse underlies same-person-exclusion, caution seems appropriate for the tricky cases.

We would know more about the Nebenwelt’s exclusionary rule after we performed experiments taking chimpanzees, squids, amoeba, and dandelions through the portals. Ethical concerns, however, rule out the first and probably should rule out the second as well. We might begin by taking a potted tree through the machine to a world where there is another tree, both of which are branch descendants of the same pre-branch sapling.

Counterpart exclusion is a problem, not only because the High Castle series tells us so little about it, but because of its spectacular ill fit with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. 

What time is it on an alternative world?

Alternate worlds are a frequent feature of time travel fiction. They are thought, among other virtues, to sidestep the shooting-your-grandfather paradox, a virtue they only have, however, if the travel is one way. 

Do the many worlds of the series have determinate temporal relations? From the trips to the John-Smith-insurance-salesman world by Juliana via an act of will to escape murder and by Reichsmarschal Smith and other Nazis via the Nebenwelt device, it would seem that a well behaved temporal relationship exists between the two worlds. At least, later excursions from the Nazi world to the Allied world never end up in an earlier, but always a later Allied world. If you visited on May Day, a subsequent trip is not going to land you on April Fools’ Day.  Moreover, Smith’s two day and Juliana’s several day off-world sojourns seem consistent with their having been away from their home world for that duration. If this is right, then we might conclude that there is a particularly simple time relationship between the two worlds, roughly expressible by saying they have the same time.

You might wonder if this could be consistent with the relativity of simultaneity. There is some solace in the fact that the New Yorks of both worlds had, only a few years ago, pre-branch, the exact same spatial and temporal relation to everything else in the universe. After the branching neither, so far as we know, has experienced any changes of significance on an astronomical scale. So why wouldn’t their respective times still be marching along together? (I have some doubts about this argument.) 

 

Unfortunately for the simplicity of inter-world time, Juliana seems to have a few “memories” of future events, perhaps the future of other worlds, perhaps even of her own. Somehow the multiverse must permit time travel, at least of information. 

The Man in the High Castle – the book  

The Amazon series differs from the Philip K. Dick’s novel in ways too many and too great to go into. (One example, John Smith and family are not in the book at all.) In the novel there is reference to only two worlds: the novel’s fascist home world, and the world of a popular novel within the novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The novel within the novel is set in a world in which the Allies win, but is nonetheless very different from our own. It is Great Britain and the US that are the great powers, with Great Britain moving in expansionist and authoritarian course leading to a cold war with the US. 

It turns out that Grasshopper was, in effect, written by the I Ching, as that ancient Chinese divination text was consulted by its “author” using a seeming chance process. (This purported author was Amendsen, the man whose fortified mountain dwelling earned him the title “man in the high castle.” So there are some similarities between book and series. However, Amendsen of the book had no films and lived in suburban Cheyenne when found by Juliana. He seems to have had little interest in making his world more like that of his book, and his wife had less.) 

The I Ching’s “answer” to each of the thousands of Amendsen’s questions controlled every step of the books composition. In a final reveal, protagonist Juliana, throws the coins to ask the I Ching why the existence of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. The answer: “It means . . . that my book is true.” (p. 272.)

There really is, then, the described world of Allied victory. As readers, we conclude that there at least three alternate worlds, counting our (and Dick’s) own. 

So the I Ching divination process conveys information from one possible world to another. That is the only link between the worlds in Dick’s novel – except for a single traveler excursion. After concentrating on a piece of jewelry, Trade Minister Tagomi gets up from a San Francisco park bench to see a massive structure that shouldn’t be there. He is told by a passing stranger that it is the Embarcadero Freeway. He goes into a café where he is not treated at all as he should be as part of the ruling elite of the city. Leaving the café, things are back to normal. Presumably, he had traveled to the Grasshopper world, or possibly to our own. 

I bought the novel after having watched the Amazon series, I was hoping to get a better grip on the many worlds metaphysics of the former. However, there just isn’t enough to help towards that end in Dick’s Man in the High Castle.  It’s a novel that received high critical marks, and a prize. I think almost all his short stories are better.

For a look from the direction of metaphysics on other series and movies see: "Groundhog Day: The Movie as Metaphysics": http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2014/06/groundhog-day-movie-as-metaphysics.html.  "'Her' Computer Consciousness: Can an Artificial Intelligence Be in Love?":http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2018/10/her-computer-consciousness-can.html. "It's A Wonderful Life: The Metaphysics": http://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2016/12/its-wonderful-life-metaphysics.html."Russian Doll: Time, Possible Worlds and Computer Simulations;" https://lawrencecrocker.blogspot.com/2020/04/russian-doll-time-many-worlds-and.html