The Metaphysics of Many Explanations

What can explanations tell us about the nature of reality?

I open my front door and find a package that I wasn’t expecting.

How did it get there?

You may dismiss this very common scenario as just being a simple matter of discovering where it came from by looking at the label, opening the box, making a call and so on. But in actual fact, the question “where did it come from” is the wrong question.

“What Could Have Caused It To Be Here?”

According to what we know of the multiverse, there are in fact many alternative timelines out there that each lead to that very same moment of a me opening the door and finding a package in exactly the same manner, with exactly the same frame of mind, being conscious of exactly the same thing.

These very same “me” in each timeline must necessarily be the same person - why? because if all the particles in our body are branching trillions of times a second, and we feel we’re the same person, then our identity can only be that continuity of information. And in the case I’m describing, each of those “me” have the same information, and so must be the same person.

This, by the way, is called the Law of Identity. According to common-sense this law, if two things are described by all of their properties and those properties are exactly the same, then it is reasonable to conclude that the objects are identical. In other words, the law of identity states that an object is the same as what we consider to be itself, and that an object is defined by its properties. So, if two things have the same exact properties, they are the same thing, and share identity. Hence: both of those conscious beings with the same information must be the same person, even though they are in two different branches potentially with multiple, quite distinct histories or timelines.

Now, in some of those timelines, the package arrived by mistake and it was intended for someone else. A slight mistake in where the delivery driver’s finger swiped on his phone keyboard, which led to a chain of events and he delivered to the wrong house.

In others, a long lost friend found your address and mailed you a photo album you left at their house when you were children.

And in another, it’s a delivery from Amazon of some shoes you ordered from China a couple of months ago but forgot about and was heavily delayed.

Those are three options, but of course there could be a vast number of possible explanations - some extremely elaborate and far-fetched, and some that would make you slap your forehead and say “of course! how stupid am I!”.

For the sake of this discussion, I’ll add a fourth, far-fetched explanation. In that timeline, the box originated because the pieces of dirt in the garden all quantum-tunneled out of the ground, into the air, came together and the molecules rearranged to form cardboard, position perfectly together into a box shape, and then landed in front of your door. Sounds like magic? It does, but it’s allowable according to the Schrodinger equation, through quantum tunneling, it’s just extremely unlikely to occur.

In the multiverse, though, it does anyway. Every possibility occurs (although they still broadly have to follow the laws of physics).

Imagine, for example, two points on a maze.

In the example above, I show just two different routes. But there could be many. You can probably find a route between them, but in the multiverse all the routes are followed. Yet when we look for evidence about which route was taken, what the explanation was, we narrow things down to find just one. But before we started that narrowing down, all of them led to that point.

In the multiverse, though, there can be some really whacky explanations for things. So why don’t we ever experience this type of thing? This is actually a central question in multiverse theory - and has caused a great many arguments among proponents of the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics.

Consciousness and Making Sense

Most of the things we’re conscious of are things that make sense. In fact, it’s been proven that if you throw something incongruous into someone’s view, we’d actually just ignore it entirely. A good example there is the participants watching a basketball game who wouldn’t notice a gorilla walking through the court right in front of them. Why not? Because it makes no sense, so we don’t notice it. Our brains filter out incongruity all the time in order to find patterns (you can think of incongruity as a kind of redundancy in data compression parlance). Sometimes we might see something unusual, that doesn’t fit in, but then because it has no relevance to our every day life, it fades from memory very quickly. A good example of this would be dreams - very unusual events that we concoct, but we know very well were not related to our every day life and so we simply forget them because they have no use. They are redundant.

In our every day life, our consciousness only picks up things that fit into its model - but what is this model?

The model is how our brain works. It includes some of what we’re expecting, but also includes gaps that it hopes will be filled, fenced off areas that it worries about losing, and an area reserved for the unknown - stuff it infers might be possible, based on its knowledge, but isn’t able, or definite enough, to evaluate.

The structure of this model is a huge topic and I’ll cover it in another post.

You could certainly say that this model is the base from which we, as an observer, encounter the world. Or, more precisely, from which we select from these possible explanations for a particular experience presented to me.

As I said, things that fit into our model are things we can be conscious of. Things that don’t fit in, are things we cannot be conscious of. But in between the two, there is a huge gradient of variation in consciousness. The less likely it is to fit in to our model, the less conscious of it we’ll be.

Now, the theory goes, those timelines where we’re more conscious will be the timelines that we’re more likely to experience. Simply because there’s more “me” in those timelines. There is more continuity of our identity.

(Incidentally, this is a concept called “measure” in quantum mechanics, and is the basis (for example) of the Deutsch-Wallace decision theoretic approach to deriving probabilities in the Many Worlds Interpretation.)

Piecing It Together

Let’s get back to our scenario. At the point that we are confronted with the package, we know little about how it got there and so each of these possible explanations are in a kind of “superposition” - all existing at once. Possibly ordered according to their relative likelihood.

But from that point forwards things bifurcate.

Perhaps in one timeline we glance at the label on the box, hone in on the house number and see that the 8 should have been a 0. The package was sent to the wrong address.

As soon as we have that experience, then the history where the package was delivered to the wrong address - the entire story that led up to that point - becomes my timeline. Little pieces of information that I gain from that point will each narrow down the list of possible (or probable) explanations, in a kind of Bayesian way.

Perhaps this becomes solidified as being more likely because I first had a faint memory of this type of thing happening before. Each of those recollections, no matter how faint, contribute towards the latent expectations part of the model.

Gradually a true explanation emerges, or set of explanations, based purely on how it fits into the model.

Ignorance Is Bliss

But what if we never find out?

How many things do we experience each day without understanding how it happens?

When you eat food, where does it go? You know that it may taste a certain way, but once it goes into your stomach - you have no idea what happens. We just know that at some point it comes out of us, looking quite different. We’re told that it gets broken down by gastric juices, then absorbed in your colon in various ways, and eventually makes its way into your blood stream and then to vital organs. It’s an extremely complex process, but one that you have no idea about until you read about it.

You may wonder: how does my hair grow? How does my body produce things, and renew things, constantly? Where does its energy come from? The more questions you ask like this, the more you seek explanations for why. And you realize a plausible explanation is that it has to do with the food you consume.

So that narrows down what you’ll see when you start to dissect the internal mechanisms of where your food goes. It then becomes a question of how you connect the dots. How do you get from swallowing food, to having energy to breathe? You have a start point, and an end point, and a trillion paths that may join up the two. But which is the most likely? Which fits into your model?

And we start to learn about each of these processes. We see pictures, see accounts of people who have dissected bodies and performed surgeries, and the explanation gradually emerges. It always has gaps though, because we don’t know everything. But we should always keep in mind that what we don’t know exists in superposition - there are multiple explanations, and whichever is true is whichever fits more into your model.

The same even goes for thinking itself. The more we delve into it, the more we’d find explanations even for our own thoughts and how it causes actions through nerves. Of course that created the explanation of a human brain, or neurons communicating and so on. But when we’re not peeking inside, those mechanisms driving the thought exist in a vast array of superpositions of explanations.

One way to look at this is to see that these explanations are material simulations of what ultimately was selected by the mind, by the model. The only real common factor is the model, not the material causes that simulate it. Now what does this tell us about emergence of consciousness? I’ll leave that for another post.

But it is worth mentioning that there are some things we’re simply incapable of knowing. And this is never more true than the realm of the incredibly small: quantum physics. When we look at the behavior of individual particles, we realize that the amount of information we can retrieve on any of them is extremely limited. And when we’re not looking at them, ie. when we have practically no information about them, they behave as if they’re ghosts, existing in multiple places at once - a phenomenon known as superposition - and interfering with their own variations. In reality, what we see are the merging of multiple explanations - even where the values of those explanations cancel each other out, and leave an empty spot on a detector. They all remain in existence until just one is needed.

The truth is, what we don’t need to know can remain hazy like this. It simply doesn’t matter because all that matters is that we manifest expected changes to our experience, and that an explanation exists if and when we seek it.

Read more about this in the article Miracles and Dual Causality.

Choosing History

So the question then becomes: how can this model be changed at will?

Isn’t it kind of important? Because, it would seem, changing this model even slightly would allow me to pick a history to explain an event, but the specific explanation could impact what would be selected next. That would be magic, like changing the future!

At the very least being able to even slightly change this model could help steer me towards certain outcomes and away from others.

And this is the very basis of the Law of Attraction, and manifesting your desires.

Let’s look at an example. Let’s say I just moved into this house. Because of this, a huge portion of my life - much of what I know and rely on through habit has been changed out. There is suddenly a big gap in my model: that dreaded area of the unknown.

It would seem that increasing the unknown can greatly impact your expectations. In fact, greatly reduce your expectations and instead replace it with the even possibility of experiencing something shocking.

This changes the “measure” of which timelines you would be more conscious in. With that heightened anxiety of the unknown, the latent openness to being shocked, we are now just as conscious in some of those timelines that previously we would have considered to be next to impossible.

Perhaps now we receive a package from a trouble-making neighbor, who sent me a letter with a threat. This history always existed, but previously wouldn’t have seemed very likely, so it remained in just a slither of the measure. But now it’s more likely to be experienced because I’m so open to the unknown and to surprise.

(Incidentally, I will add that moving house has coincided with some very bad events in my life, and I do wonder if this very phenomenon is occurring!)

But it’s also possible that someone has recently given me something, and so I was in a frame of mind where I was half-expecting another gift from friendly neighbors. And so in that mindset I would be more conscious in the timelines where I receive a mysterious but kind gift from an old friend.

I can’t help but think that something similar is going on here when we experience unexplainable coincidences, that Carl Jung called Synchronicities.

Novelty

I don’t want to suggest that we can simply think our way to create some new future. It clearly isn’t that straightforward. Consciousness increases where we are adding to our model, and that will depend on what type of thing it is seeking out. We can’t just think of something and it would magically occur. It’s not as simple as some would make it out to be. It’s not that our brain simply filters out incongruity, what we don’t expect - it’s more that it looks to build on top of what it has created in the model, and like putting together a lego set, any blocks that don’t fit in will be discarded. Consciousness is creative.

Now it may be that the block you’re looking for is quite different than any previous block you’ve used, in which case you will be searching for this novel block. The expectation is creative growth, not monotonous continuity. And this fits in well with what we have discussed about consciousness being data compression. So what is your model, and where is it going? What does it allow for? How open is it?

These are things we’ll discuss in more depth in another post.

Causation

But the point I’m really trying to get across in this article is that this whole phenomenon reveals a kind of duality of causes. On the one hand, we can find out about all the locations of all the particles in the world and predict what will happen next according to their trajectory and the laws of physics.

On the other hand, we can look at our model and predict what we’ll likely experience next from a vast array of possible multiverse timelines.

These are two different courses of action that exist in parallel. Effectively two different causes.

The first is upwards causation, also called efficient causation. This is what we’d call the laws of physics.

The second is downwards causation. Perhaps it’s akin to the formal or final cause. This is the realm of belief, of certainty and faith. It’s been called the illative sense. This is what we would be conscious of happening based on our internal model. Every downwards cause has many, even an infinite, upwards causes that could equally explain what happened - just that they’d often be improbable. A coincidence, a fluke, a twist of fate. But explainable nonetheless.

We’re certainly familiar with the former, upwards causation. It’s what we’re taught. It leads us to believe in materialism and in reductionism, that everything can be reduced. The latter is arguably more the domain of religion, at least traditionally.

Both are equally true, but I’m sure you can appreciate that the latter would be a whole lot more helpful to understand, if not master.