Once you assume a "multiverse" of parallel and equally real realities, you then are faced with a number of things which need clarification. Do you mean that fantasy characters and unicorns are as important and as useful as refrigerators and cars? Does it mean that you are entitled to check out of "reality" into a dreamworld because you claim that it is equally real? This question is one of those things which are answered by common sense rather than philosophy. Sure, the physical world is primary, because that's where you live and survive physically. As I've said before, many people believe that this is all you need, and anything else is not worthy to be called "reality," only fantasy. But even in the multiverse, the physical universe has a kind of precedence because otherwise you don't survive to experience the kind of imagination and consciousness which accesses the other realities.

The next question is, what belongs in those other realities? Well, the aforementioned fantasy characters, superheroes, unicorns, dragons, and other entities are there. These are usually relegated to the limbo of "silly" and "childish" by the professional thinkers, but there are other places in this multiverse of realities which contain "higher" levels such as art, music, creativity, and spirituality. Where do creative ideas come from? Are they, as some evolutionary psychologists contend, programmed into human minds as an evolutionary adaptation to the ever-changing needs and challenges of the environment? Or are they the result of endless mental combinatorics which result in only one of a million ideas being worth pursuing? Are they in a collective unconscious such as that proposed by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung? Or perhaps they already exist in one or more of these realities, which some creative person then accesses through the imagination?

Imagination is the key. Imagination is the central access point around which all those non-physical realities revolve. They depend on consciousness, which in turn depends on living beings. Presumably (and this is still controversial) in a universe in which conscious beings never evolved, there would be no other realities except the physical. Here's where the famous philosophical problem posed by Bishop Berkeley comes in. He's the one who proposed that things only exist if they are perceived by a conscious being. For a believer, that would mean that even if other conscious life didn't exist, God, the ultimate Consciousness, would keep the world in existence. But in a world without God, you again have to make that common-sense assumption that the "real" i.e. physical world exists regardless of whether you perceive it or not.

There is also the New Age notion, twisted out of quantum physics, that claims that perception creates reality by "collapsing the waveform" of uncertain subatomic existences, thus fixing them in one state of reality rather than another. The New Agers love to say that this means that you "create your own reality." But Real Physicists take pains (mostly in vain) to say that it doesn't take consciousness to fix the particles in a single state, only any interaction with anything else in the universe. So having a stray particle bump into something would do just as well as being viewed by a New Age believer.

But those creative physicists (and where does their creativity come from?) also have come up with their own version of the Multiverse, which I am not advanced enough, perhaps will never be advanced enough, to talk about responsibly. They talk about multiple universes and realities, but the big difference in their version of the Multiverse is that no one will ever visit or even perceive those other universes. It's possible, they hope, that perhaps a particle in a supercollider will slip into another universe from this one, but no physicist working on that collider will ever follow it and disappear into another universe. Or at least that would be highly improbable.

Living conscious of the Multiverse means that you live in a world in which things look superimposed, like those sets of transparencies that go over pictures of ruins or skeletons or engineering frameworks in books. Each page of those transparencies has another layer of images printed on it, so that as you turn the pages and place them over the original image, the ruin returns to the way it was in ancient times, the skeleton grows back its internal organs, muscles, and skin, or the engine re-assembles itself piece by piece. This is how imaginative types perceive reality in the multiverse. Yes, the original picture, the physical world, is still there and always will be. But then there are those other transparent layers. There's the folklore layer. The color and light artistic layer. The mathematical layer. The narrative/journalistic layer. The Marxist layer. The musical layer. In this consciousness-mediated multiverse, just as in the modern physicists' multiverse, there is an infinite number of potential realities. And, to bring us back to the original topic of this series, there is a layer of spiritual reality too, and that's what I'll talk about in the next entry in this series.

Posted at 3:36 am | link