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.

Two (or More) Moving Spotlights of Time

There is something special about this moment: that it is now.  We talk about the “flow” of time, are tempted to say “the now moves” and may find appealing the analogy of a spotlight sweeping across a series of pictures. I am not, here and now, going to defend the, philosophically controversial, moving spotlight theory. What I am going to do is to show that we could have evidence, not decisive evidence but pretty good evidence, that there were two or more spotlight nows moving along the timeline, and perhaps moving at different speeds, or even in different directions.

The Infinite Regress Step of Cosmological Arguments

Arguments for the existence of God purporting to show that there must have been a creator ex nihilo, first mover, or ultimate sustainer of physical reality all share a step that the particular sort of infinite regress that there would otherwise be is a metaphysical impossibility. I will here defend one particular kind of "no infinite regress" premise, although I don't think it goes very far in buttressing even the species of cosmological argument that can claim this true premise.

Can we hope that God exists? If so, should we?

I do not believe that God exists, but I hope that I am wrong.  In fact, everyone should hope that God exists: believers (perhaps with nagging doubts), agnostics, atheists, and those who haven’t given the God question much thought. The evangelists of cross and crescent and their antagonists, especially those atheists still called “new,” have had a well-publicized, widely published, and mostly tiresome debate whether belief in God is reasonable. Completely ignored is a question on which even the most dogmatic theist and virulent atheist might possibly agree: is it reasonable to hope that a powerful intelligence lovingly created us and everything else? See my Hope to God
https://scribl.com/books/E9HZ8/hope-to-god

Amazon: Hope to God: Common Ground for Unbelievers and Believers - Kindle edition by Crocker, Larry. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.

Groundhog Day: The Movie as Metaphysics

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Is the Moving Now an Illusion if God is Omniscient?

Could it be that what is, for better or worse, called “the moving now” is an illusion, or, to put it a little more cautiously, could it be that at the deepest level description of reality there is no point in time that has the special status that we think this very moment has?

One widely held form of theism is committed to the  proposition. It is a usually unnoticed corollary of the combination of two widely held theological positions.

The Moving Now

It seems significant that the present moment in time is not known to physics. There is t and there is Δt, but there is no “the present t” in any equation.