“He doesn’t row.”
Today let's tumble into the multiverse.
At the beginning of the video game, Bioshock: Infinite, our protagonist (Booker De Witt - you, the player) is rowed across to a lighthouse by a male and a female character, Robert Lutece and his sister Rosalind. The siblings converse as follows:
Robert: He doesn't row.
Rosalind: He doesn't row?
Robert: No, he doesn't row.
Rosalind: Ah, I see.
Which banal interaction is in my opinion a wonderfully adroit bit of dialogue. On the face of it the text pretty much doesn’t do other than run around in a circle. But re-written with italics to reflect the emphases – and as spoken in the game these are quite subtle emphases – it takes on further shades of meaning, even if not yet quite making sense.
Robert: He doesn't row.
Rosalind: He doesn't row?
Robert: No, he doesn't row.
Rosalind: Ah, I see.
In the game, exactly what sense it makes is not revealed until the end. As is attributed to Winston Churchill, ‘history is written by the victors’, so we’ll come back to that end shortly.
In the game there is a note you can find, but might not, written by Rosalind Lutece:
When I was a girl, I dreamt of standing in a room looking at a girl who was, and was not myself, who stood looking at another girl, who also was, and was not myself. My mother took this for a nightmare. I saw it as the beginning of my career in physics.
As an aside, this is one of the rather special things about good narrative video games. As in the real world, there are any number of things it would be worth you stumbling upon, but you don’t. Unlike real life, however, unless you adhere to Buddhist philosophies and their like, in the game world you can go back and do it all again, just to see what happens.
Which leads me both forward and sideways to a strange tale but true.
I went on a motorbike trip with a slightly crazy mate once and we stopped overnight at my parents' place. I’d showered and gone into my bedroom and my mate went into the bathroom. A few minutes later he knocked on my bedroom door then came in wearing just a bath towel around his waist. He urged me to come into the bathroom as he had discovered something that clearly he was excited about.
My parent’s bathroom had a large mirror over the vanity and a full length wall mirror on the opposite side. One of those situations where you could get the image of yourself reflected in the vanity mirror to reflect in the full length mirror behind you which then reflected both images back, and so on… you get the picture. Anyway, with the mere words of…
“Watch this!”
…my mate stood sideways, dropped his towel and swung his willy while standing between the two mirrors, now reflecting in each other the diminishing and virtually infinite number of images of him doing this. This sideshow horror from The Twilight Zone is now indelibly etched into my brain.
All of which is about context, interpretation, history and communication. Oh, and infinity.
Let’s start, and finish, with a current ‘theory of the month’: multiple universes, or multiverses.
In the concept of multiverses, there are an infinite number of universes, running in parallel. As there are an infinite number, goes the theorising, all possibilities will happen, eventually. Every possible variation of your life can, and in fact does, happen, somewhere, at some time, in one of them. Well, I’d argue not necessarily.
Existence is buffered, not random; there is nothing to stop the universe from repeating itself infinitely rather than generating infinitely randomising versions of itself. Is there a universe where I am a whale? No. There may be someplace where I am a sentient, whale-like being, but ‘whales’ and ‘me’ of this version only exist here as these versions in this universe. It’s like clones of you – exact copies, yes, but they’re not multiple ‘you’. Even were it possible to copy across all one’s memories there would still be one ‘you’ and a perfect copy ‘you’.
Multiverses are still constrained by the rules that create, and govern, universes. An infinite iteration of universes will still reside within those constraints. To believe otherwise is to take a thought experiment, such as a bouncing ball, then apply infinity to its condition. Result – infinitely bouncing ball. Not in some instance ball turns into an elephant and explodes, Douglas Adam's wonderful imagination not-with-standing. Infinite repetition does not in itself include infinite randomness. If I take a typewriter and apply some random function where one letter is typed then another and repeat for an infinite number of typewriters and over infinite time – do I get Shakespeare? Probably. If I do the same experiment but use chimpanzees do I get Shakespeare – I’d argue not.
Chimpanzees, like people, run with their own sets of rules – behaviours – which constrain the possible outcomes. I highly suspect chimpanzees will resort to smashing the typewriter or smearing it in faeces well before they get to anything even remotely like Shakespeare. But surely, allowing for infinite re-runs, it should be possible, in fact it is inevitable, that a William Chimpspeare will arrive? I’d still argue no, even allowing for an infinite number of reruns. As I said, there is no rule that states infinity is also infinitely random – it can be the infinite rerun of the same thing and even with some degree of randomness all things operate within their own contexts and ‘rules’.
Some would still argue that at any point where I make a decision I could have made another and from that point a new multiverse pops into existence. Well, that argument relies on the notion that when I, or you, make a choice, like make a cup of tea, the fact that we could have decided otherwise means that we would have decided otherwise in some other iteration. But we didn’t. Because we ‘could have’ doesn’t mean in any sense that at that split second of decision a different outcome could have happened. It didn’t. What evidence is there that if you rerun all the events of the world up to that moment and here I am, you are, and we decided instead not to make that cup of tea? If all those previous milliseconds of existence brought us to the same exact point then I'd say none.
OK, fine, but what’s all this to do with rowing a boat?
Well, you see he doesn’t row.
Bioshock: Infinite is in effect (warning: spoiler!) a story about tracking through one instance of a multiverse narrative. ‘He’ (Booker, who is you) is perfectly able to row, but in none of the instances of the story/multiverses does he row. Why? Ah, yes, indeed, and who knows why? One could argue that the game narrative constrains the possibility artificially. But does it? If all possible versions of multiverses are, well, possible, why isn’t there also a possibility that all multiverses are so constrained? It seems to me there is a logic which says that if all possibilities exist then the possibility exists that only one possibility exists. Run that through your multiverses and guess what?
He doesn’t row.
And I’m never killed by a blue whale suddenly appearing and falling out of the sky (and thank you, Douglas Adams, for that most delicious of images).
If by some quirk of this universe you want to delve more into this madness, this article should amply scratch that itch:
https://bioshockmysteries.wordpress.c...
Even if you don't now, I'm sure in some infinite number of multiverses you will. ; )
At the beginning of the video game, Bioshock: Infinite, our protagonist (Booker De Witt - you, the player) is rowed across to a lighthouse by a male and a female character, Robert Lutece and his sister Rosalind. The siblings converse as follows:
Robert: He doesn't row.
Rosalind: He doesn't row?
Robert: No, he doesn't row.
Rosalind: Ah, I see.
Which banal interaction is in my opinion a wonderfully adroit bit of dialogue. On the face of it the text pretty much doesn’t do other than run around in a circle. But re-written with italics to reflect the emphases – and as spoken in the game these are quite subtle emphases – it takes on further shades of meaning, even if not yet quite making sense.
Robert: He doesn't row.
Rosalind: He doesn't row?
Robert: No, he doesn't row.
Rosalind: Ah, I see.
In the game, exactly what sense it makes is not revealed until the end. As is attributed to Winston Churchill, ‘history is written by the victors’, so we’ll come back to that end shortly.
In the game there is a note you can find, but might not, written by Rosalind Lutece:
When I was a girl, I dreamt of standing in a room looking at a girl who was, and was not myself, who stood looking at another girl, who also was, and was not myself. My mother took this for a nightmare. I saw it as the beginning of my career in physics.
As an aside, this is one of the rather special things about good narrative video games. As in the real world, there are any number of things it would be worth you stumbling upon, but you don’t. Unlike real life, however, unless you adhere to Buddhist philosophies and their like, in the game world you can go back and do it all again, just to see what happens.
Which leads me both forward and sideways to a strange tale but true.
I went on a motorbike trip with a slightly crazy mate once and we stopped overnight at my parents' place. I’d showered and gone into my bedroom and my mate went into the bathroom. A few minutes later he knocked on my bedroom door then came in wearing just a bath towel around his waist. He urged me to come into the bathroom as he had discovered something that clearly he was excited about.
My parent’s bathroom had a large mirror over the vanity and a full length wall mirror on the opposite side. One of those situations where you could get the image of yourself reflected in the vanity mirror to reflect in the full length mirror behind you which then reflected both images back, and so on… you get the picture. Anyway, with the mere words of…
“Watch this!”
…my mate stood sideways, dropped his towel and swung his willy while standing between the two mirrors, now reflecting in each other the diminishing and virtually infinite number of images of him doing this. This sideshow horror from The Twilight Zone is now indelibly etched into my brain.
All of which is about context, interpretation, history and communication. Oh, and infinity.
Let’s start, and finish, with a current ‘theory of the month’: multiple universes, or multiverses.
In the concept of multiverses, there are an infinite number of universes, running in parallel. As there are an infinite number, goes the theorising, all possibilities will happen, eventually. Every possible variation of your life can, and in fact does, happen, somewhere, at some time, in one of them. Well, I’d argue not necessarily.
Existence is buffered, not random; there is nothing to stop the universe from repeating itself infinitely rather than generating infinitely randomising versions of itself. Is there a universe where I am a whale? No. There may be someplace where I am a sentient, whale-like being, but ‘whales’ and ‘me’ of this version only exist here as these versions in this universe. It’s like clones of you – exact copies, yes, but they’re not multiple ‘you’. Even were it possible to copy across all one’s memories there would still be one ‘you’ and a perfect copy ‘you’.
Multiverses are still constrained by the rules that create, and govern, universes. An infinite iteration of universes will still reside within those constraints. To believe otherwise is to take a thought experiment, such as a bouncing ball, then apply infinity to its condition. Result – infinitely bouncing ball. Not in some instance ball turns into an elephant and explodes, Douglas Adam's wonderful imagination not-with-standing. Infinite repetition does not in itself include infinite randomness. If I take a typewriter and apply some random function where one letter is typed then another and repeat for an infinite number of typewriters and over infinite time – do I get Shakespeare? Probably. If I do the same experiment but use chimpanzees do I get Shakespeare – I’d argue not.
Chimpanzees, like people, run with their own sets of rules – behaviours – which constrain the possible outcomes. I highly suspect chimpanzees will resort to smashing the typewriter or smearing it in faeces well before they get to anything even remotely like Shakespeare. But surely, allowing for infinite re-runs, it should be possible, in fact it is inevitable, that a William Chimpspeare will arrive? I’d still argue no, even allowing for an infinite number of reruns. As I said, there is no rule that states infinity is also infinitely random – it can be the infinite rerun of the same thing and even with some degree of randomness all things operate within their own contexts and ‘rules’.
Some would still argue that at any point where I make a decision I could have made another and from that point a new multiverse pops into existence. Well, that argument relies on the notion that when I, or you, make a choice, like make a cup of tea, the fact that we could have decided otherwise means that we would have decided otherwise in some other iteration. But we didn’t. Because we ‘could have’ doesn’t mean in any sense that at that split second of decision a different outcome could have happened. It didn’t. What evidence is there that if you rerun all the events of the world up to that moment and here I am, you are, and we decided instead not to make that cup of tea? If all those previous milliseconds of existence brought us to the same exact point then I'd say none.
OK, fine, but what’s all this to do with rowing a boat?
Well, you see he doesn’t row.
Bioshock: Infinite is in effect (warning: spoiler!) a story about tracking through one instance of a multiverse narrative. ‘He’ (Booker, who is you) is perfectly able to row, but in none of the instances of the story/multiverses does he row. Why? Ah, yes, indeed, and who knows why? One could argue that the game narrative constrains the possibility artificially. But does it? If all possible versions of multiverses are, well, possible, why isn’t there also a possibility that all multiverses are so constrained? It seems to me there is a logic which says that if all possibilities exist then the possibility exists that only one possibility exists. Run that through your multiverses and guess what?
He doesn’t row.
And I’m never killed by a blue whale suddenly appearing and falling out of the sky (and thank you, Douglas Adams, for that most delicious of images).
If by some quirk of this universe you want to delve more into this madness, this article should amply scratch that itch:
https://bioshockmysteries.wordpress.c...
Even if you don't now, I'm sure in some infinite number of multiverses you will. ; )
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