Spontaneously Materialising Rhinoceroses and Vicious Unicorns

How did it ever come to this? How is it that we – by which I mean humanity – find ourselves at war with aliens? Interstellar war! And all of our own making. It started, as these things often do, with some really trivial things. It started first with a philosophical puzzle. And this was the puzzle. How can you prove that a rhinoceros will not spontaneously appear in your room? The puzzle is attributed to Ludwig Wittgenstein when he was a philosophy undergraduate student in England. He asked the question of his philosophy professor, and apparently felt that his professor could not adequately answer it. Now it may seem like a rather trivial and silly puzzle – and it is, in and of itself. But it tipped into something that would eventually become a major obsession of humanity and lead to the interstellar conflict that we now face. How did this happen? To answer that we have to go a little into the types of truth that are defined by philosophers. First up we have necessary and contingent truth – and within each of these two categories we have two sub-categories – natural and absolute. An absolute necessary truth then is one that could not possibly be untrue. Into this select category some would place God, others mathematics and Euclidean geometry, whilst others would just leave this category blank. A natural necessity is something that is provisionally true but could have been otherwise – could have been false. Most of what we think we know fits in here. A natural contingency is kind of the reverse – something that could have been true but just happens not to be. And then we come to the absolute contingent category of truth – something that would generally be regarded as untrue. But an absolute contingency is still not quite an impossibility. There’s still just a tiny slither of possibility through which spontaneously materialising rhinoceroses might appear. Wittgenstein’s point therefore was that this category of truth should not be empty and we should never class anything as absolutely impossible. Well, you may be thinking, that’s straight-forward enough – it’s just a case of deciding which things fit into which categories. And anyway, does it really matter if there’s some disagreement as to what goes where? That certainly seems to be the case. But even several hundred years before Wittgenstein there was a strange and unnerving idea going around. The idea was that, if something could be imagined – no matter how unlikely – then it achieved a kind of ghostly reality, even if we decided it wasn’t true. So, with this notion, Wittgenstein’s rhinoceros sort of exists. Let’s pick up another example. All unicorns are vicious. Of course, we believe there are no unicorns, but we have a clear idea of them, so any statement about them has a sort of truth value. You, dear reader, may have thought that unicorns are most likely benign rather than vicious creatures – they may be imaginary, but they have a reputation! The question of the existence or non-existence of things was addressed by Saint Anselm in his ontological proof for the existence of God. Anselm suggested that existence is better than non-existence – which seems reasonable. But Immanuel Kant suggested that saying something exists adds nothing to what we know. ‘Existence is not a predicate’, he said. (This was back in the day when people knew what predicates are!) What, roughly, he meant was that if I say there is a cloud in the sky and then add that the cloud also exists, this has not provided you with any new information. But clarifying whether or not something exists DOES help us sometimes, when there is doubt over whatever we are talking about. On this note, back to unicorns! We could re-state the vicious unicorns example in a particular way, so that its truth or falsehood becomes more apparent: IF there are unicorns THEN they are vicious. This IF, THEN formulation is known as a counterfactual. And the one thing about counterfactuals is that we use them all the time. Most of human life takes on the IF, THEN formula, and usually it is to speculate if things could be better for us or if things might possibly get worse. There can be lots of THEN’s leading from single IF’s. The really interesting thing about counterfactuals is that they can suggest whole other worlds. A bit like the rhino and the unicorn, these possible worlds have a ghostly sense of actually existing. And that’s where our problems really started. There were already contenders for possible worlds hanging around – quite apart from these philosophical ones. We can explain them via what became known as the Multiverse. What counts as a Multiverse has been somewhat open to debate over the years, but here are five possible definitions: First (and a bit spurious) there is only one universe, but it’s infinite, so there are regions of it that are totally detached from one another – in a sense, island universes. Some argue that, given enough time and space, anything that can possibly happen must inevitably happen – even happen an infinite number of times. But this is not really true – there might just be an endless extent of sameness or similarity. The second Multiverse scenario is similar. Here there are bubble universes, each of which goes through its own big bang and eventual collapse back in on itself, or endless expansion. Some of these universes will collapse within a split second – some will expand too quickly or have insufficient matter within them for stars to form, but some will develop much as ours has. (Or, I should say, much as we once thought of as the real universe developed into what we once thought of as the real world!) Just as with our first scenario though, this does not mean that all things that could ever happen will inevitably happen. The third scenario is to have alternative dimensions – with any number of universes existing parallel with our own, but such that we are unaware of them. Again though, there’s nothing to say that all these other universes are not just the same or similar to our own. The fourth scenario is the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum physics. Here, whenever the ‘probability curve’ collapses to provide a particular outcome in the everyday world, what’s happening is that all the possible outcomes from a possibility manifest as separate universes. So, if you like, the universe splits at this point. The reader may note a certain similarity here with the rhino illustration above – all that might happen seems able to happen, in this scenario. But it’s not quite the same. Even if there are an infinite number of new universes created at every split, we might argue that this infinity or infinities still might not allow for everything that could ever be imagined to be realised. And finally, yes, a Multiverse of all imaginary worlds. Does the world not actually split when we make a choice? Do not all the IF’s and THEN’s somehow result in completely separate universes? Well, if you think about it long enough – in fact, if you think about it even for a short time – it’s a truly horrific possibility. No REAL FREEDOM, you see! All the terrible choices you’ve ever considered making – they actually became real worlds! At least the quantum many worlds scenario was a bit more abstract – a collapse of the probability curve is not necessarily because of human choice. But now, yes, somehow we are really responsible – responsible yet helpless. Well, I know what you’re thinking. Just more silly philosophical speculation. Nothing to see here. Move along. And I agree that this would have been the case – had it not been for virtual reality. The first hint of this came with the notion of an evil demon putting fantasies into our heads. How could we tell if these fantasies were real or not? It was updated to the ‘brains in vats’ scenario and from this we got the whole Matrix thing. But it was when we started doing all this for real that our problems got so much worse. The intention, I suppose, was benign, although intensely stupid. Could we build a universe better than God’s? No-one actually said it was about this, at least not out loud, but that’s what it boiled down to. Well, the ‘real’ universe, as we once knew it, was something of an enigma. It hinted towards perfection, but the perfection was always not quite achieved. Some even said that there had to be a bit of randomness and chaos in order to keep the whole show on the road – in fact, some even said the universe was BETTER for being slightly flawed. But then, one person’s ‘slightly flawed’ is another person’s nightmare of torture, rape, cruelty and terror. So yes, could we do better? Could we even have a universe each – to ourselves, alone – that was perfect for us? Tailor-made perfection? And that’s when the simulations really began. And now, who knows, the universe – that is, the real one – may have just been a simulation all along. Maybe we could have coped with just one simulation, and maybe we could even have got to meet its makers one day. But now, who knows who is even a ‘real’ person, or a ‘real’ consciousness, or an artificial person in a real world or a false world inside a real person. And are we living someone’s dream now? Or an alien’s dream? Or a computer’s dream? Someone’s ‘absolute contingency’ just pops into existence as a result of our stupid virtual reality ambitions. Hence – WAR. And who knows if it’s war in the real world or just someone’s dream of a war. Yes, how did it come to this. I just want to reach out my hand and touch a table in front of me and not have any doubt as to who owns the hand or if it’s a real table! Is that too much to ask?! So if you happen to see a rhinoceros in your room today – please do us all a favour. Keep it to yourself!