“Look Both Ways”: Counterfactuals in the Movies

This 2022 Netflix movie may deserve something more than its IMDb of 6.2, if only because it is perhaps the most extended counterfactual conditional movie of all time.

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 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.