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.

Time, Relativity, and the Mayfly Self

The Physics of Time

 

Even before Einstein, physics was never really supportive of our common-sense ideas about time. Humankind has long believed that the past and the future are very different, the one over, done with, fixed, the other ahead, open, malleable. The past keeps gaining new territory from the future across the boundary of the present. The calendar date of tomorrow becomes that of today, then of yesterday. All this seems to force upon us the conclusion that now is something that moves. 

Science, with physics at its base, has been a great success in explaining the phenomena of our world: thunder, billiards, fire, elevators, airplanes, the ability of fish to swim and viruses to infect. What did Newtonian physics have to tell us about this moving now? Nothing. The equations of physics contain variables for time, t₁, t₂, even t₀, but no “now.” 

With Einstein, physics stopped being unhelpful regarding our shared sense that the now moves, and became hostile, or at least unfriendly.