Placing all of that aside, my objection is simply that Lewis’s thesis
of the maximal plurality of worlds does not allow for any free will
worth having, and by “worth having” I mean to suggest that he does
not have good grounds for defeating an “indifference” objection. The
“indifference” objection that Lewis actual y addresses in Section 2.6
is, of course, a hypothetical one that he himself concocts so that he
3 Ibid., 127.
4 Ibid., 126-127.
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can have a response prepared for anyone that might raise anything
like it. However, it seems to me that he misconstrues what the central concern of such an objection would be, perhaps so as to be able to
answer it more easily. At issue is not whether we can change the
‘sum total’ of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in view of the fact that all possibilities, including all possible versions of our own life, are actualized at some world or another. The moral semantics of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ confuse
the point here. Rather, a real indifference objection would be that:
I should be indifferent with respect to my-so-called-life if there is real y, that is ontological y, nothing that I can add to my world or to the lives of those who cohabit it. Whatever meaning the moral
terms ‘good’ and ‘evil’ might have is irrelevant to this objection,
which could be forwarded based on aesthetic rather than ethical
motivations. If they are to be works of art – the visionary labors of a creator – then at no other possible world do there exist such things to vital y experience, and dynamical y respond to, as Shakespeare’s
plays, Coltrane’s jazz, Duncan’s dances, Pollock’s paintings, or
Kubrick’s films.
It is a question of novelty. I must be able, by my actions, to transform the world around me in such a way as it could never be
transformed were it not for my decision to take those actions. Of course, this transformation need not always be according to my
intention, and indeed if it always were exactly what I wanted, that might pose as great a psychological obstacle to a life worth living.
It may be an extremely subtle and hardly noticeable transformation
that I effect in the empirical world, and in the large and long view
it probably always is. However, it must be possible to do something no one has done in just the way that I am contemplating doing it
– not anyone in this world of mine, or anyone however like me in
any other world that there might ever possibly be, or that there ever
has been. Otherwise, I do nothing at al , and for that matter ‘I’ have insufficient personal identity to real y be anyone either.
To be someone who makes his or her life what it alone uniquely is, and not the life of another, demands a non-reductionist view
of consciousness, one wherein our minds are not ontological y
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derivative of some more elementary constituents. Whether these
simples are taken to be empirical y real (as they are in Physicalism)
or whether they are constructs of logical possibility is irrelevant.
When Lewis says that some of his many worlds contain “spirits” who
do not operate according to any physical laws, much less what are
taken to be our physical laws, he is presumably conceiving of these
“spirit” beings as metaphysical simples. Given his reductionism, he
would certainly have to do so in order to even attempt to attribute
any power of choice to them.
However, if they are metaphysical simples, then there seems to be no way that he can conceive of them as ever “doing” anything
with respect to each other or to some other objects, unless anything
with which each of them could interact already had a logical y
predetermined propensity-profile for certain interactions (and not others). In that case, all of the substances with which these “spirits”
(or any other would-be-choosers) might interact, are substances
whose predetermined propensity-profiles compel the latter to act
only according to laws that demarcate a closed system of finite
possibilities that are all bound to be actualized ‘somewhere’ at some
‘time’. It seems that on this view, if ‘I’ were one of these “spirits”, I would only be discursively responsible for what I do – and not an
ontological y responsible agent of actions that created states of affairs, and brought objects into being, that could otherwise never have
been as I alone was able to will them to be. Metaphysical simples can
create nothing at al .
Lewis claims that radical y isolated causal chains provide real
agency for counterparts who are (presently) leading perfectly
identical lives (and in some worlds, lives that have already been
lived in a perfectly identical way in past cycles or eons of eternal
recurrence). He makes this claim in reference to a certain “story”
that he adapts for his own purposes:
A story by Larry Niven even suggests that knowledge of a
plurality of worlds might reasonably undermine the will to live.
Every decision you ever make is made in all the myriad ways it
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might be made. It is made one way by you, other ways by your
other-worldly counterparts who are exactly like you up to the
moment of the decision. Not only difficult and momentous
decisions will be made all different ways; but also easy decisions,
even decisions too easy to take any thought, like the decision to
kill yourself on the spur of the moment for no reason at al . Given
that the decision will in any case be made all different ways, what
does it matter whether you are one of the ones who makes it one
way or one of the ones who makes it another way...5
Lewis goes on to qualify his use of Niven’s story as a hypothetical
“indifference” objection, by pointing out that he is modifying
Niven’s story in order to do so. Apparently, the original story is
about one of two kinds of physical parallel universes: (1) parallel universes between which travel is possible, perhaps through worm-holes or time machines; (2) total y inaccessible parallel universes
that are posited by Hugh Everett as a solution to the supposedly
‘mysterious’ wave-col apse in quantum theory. Lewis seems to think
that it is not clear which of these two types Niven is talking about.
On Lewis’s view, the “universes” of (1) would only be discrete parts
of a single possible world. In regard to (2) he makes the following remark: “Niven may be talking about branching worlds, in which
one present decider has many futures that are all equal y his. If so, I grant his point. That real y would make nonsense of decision.”6
Lewis’s criticism of version (2) of the Niven story concerns
the manner in which a person’s genuine decision making capacity
would be vitiated by there real y existing a version of him for
each and every decision that he could possibly have made. Lewis thinks that this does not pose an agency problem for his thesis of
the plurality of worlds because his possible world counterparts are
entirely causal y isolated from one another. The decisions made by
these Lewisian counterparts are supposed to be real choices because
they are allegedly radical y independent persons. They originate in
5 Ibid., 124-125.
&n
bsp; 6 Ibid., 125.
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different worlds. They are not created, together with their worlds,
as instantiations of alternative decisions faced by a common
predecessor. What I am arguing is that unless contact between
worlds is possible, as it is on interpretation (1) of Niven’s original story, even these counterparts are not “deciders” in any real sense that would convince any creatively minded person that life was
worth living and that decisions were worth making.
I can well imagine traveling through a worm-hole into an
alternate universe where I meet a counterpart of myself who has
lived a very similar life, but has or has had somewhat different
relationships with counterparts of people with whom I have or have
had certain relationships. My presence in his life would change
it and, once I traveled back through the worm-hole to my world,
my encounter with him would make me reflect on and change the
circumstances of my own life as wel . Even if these lives were for
all intents and purposes identical, the possibility of meeting my counterpart would allow each of us to act freely in reaction to the
other – which, at that point, would cause the direction of our two
lives, and of our two worlds, to significantly deviate from one another.
Only in this case would each of us be ontological y independent
agents, as Lewis mistakenly takes his counterparts to be. Lewisian
counterparts are rather effects, the ‘cause’ (or sufficient reason) of whose actions is determined by the character of an atemporal y
complete logical space.
On the face of it, and at first glance, Lewis’s ontology of maximal
possibilities appears very creative (at least compared to other
works of analytic philosophy), and so it seems odd to claim that
it forecloses every existential y significant possibility (and I take the primary meaning of the word “possibility” to be an existential
one). However, upon closer scrutiny, one should realize that Lewis’s
ontology is only ‘creative’ in the sense that certain proofs of higher mathematics seem stunning when first discovered, but then grow
trivial over time. (Surely, even the Pythagorean theorem seemed
‘creative’ in this sense when it was first discovered.) Lewis places
conditions of “size” and “shape” on what could or could not possibly
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coexist with what within the same possible world, and, by extension,
what must be the case at all possible worlds. In so doing, he relies
on a mathematical definition of the possible properties and relations
that any being could logical y have:
But now there is trouble. Only a limited number of distinct
things can coexist in a spacetime continuum. It cannot exceed
the infinite cardinal number of the points in a continuum...Our
principle [of the conceivability of states of affairs at possible worlds]
therefore requires a proviso: ‘size and shape permitting’... Starting
with point-sized things that are uncontroversial y possible, perhaps
because actual, we patch together duplicates of them in great
number (continuum many, or more) to make an entire world. The
mathematical representations are a book-keeping device, to make
sure that the ‘size and shape permitting’ proviso is satisfied.7
Lewis would like to cast his recourse to “mathematical
representations” as no more than “a book-keeping device” that is
useful for adhering to some intrinsic logical laws of being. However,
this manner of representation, of taking things to be so and so, is the matrix of his ontology. In such an ontology, where mathematics is
read into the foundations of all concrete worlds, there “are no gaps
in logical space” and so there is no room for contingency in the
system as a whole. Lewis states this repeatedly:
It is futile to want the entire system of worlds to satisfy a
condition, because it is not contingent what conditions the entire system of worlds does or doesn’t satisfy. You might as well want the number seventeen to be prime, or to be even...8
Is it a matter of wants: should I want there to be less evil and
more good in total, throughout the worlds? It would be an idle
wish, since the character of the totality of all the worlds is not a contingent matter. I see no reason why I ought to have so utterly idle and pointless a wish.9
7 Ibid., 89, 91.
8 Ibid., 125; my emphasis.
9 Ibid., 126; my emphasis.
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Lewis emphasizes that imagination is a poor criterion for defining
possible worlds.10 Things of any significant degree of complexity
are usual y imagined imprecisely, and so something that is logical y
impossible may be thought to be possible simply because what it
would involve has not been imagined with sufficient clarity. While
Lewis emphasizes repeatedly that possible worlds, however bizarre,
are not categorical y different from our ‘actual’ world in their
ontological status (in the reality of their being), he also clearly states that possible worlds, including our own, are essential y of a different kind than the fantastic worlds of story-tellers:
If worlds were like stories or story-tellers, there would indeed
be room for worlds according to which contradictions are true.
The sad truth about the prevarications of these worlds would
not itself be contradictory. But worlds, as I understand them, are
not like stories or story-tellers. They are like this world; and this world is no story, not even a true story.11
Lewis’s metaphor of a world as a story-teller’s tale, and his warning
that the impossible can be imprecisely imagined, suggests what
the world might be like if it were not reducible to quantifiable
fundamental constituents – if its ontology were not basical y
mathematical. It is worthy of note that the Greek root of the word
“mathematical” is mathesi s – which means “that which can be
learned”, in other words that which is formulaical y anticipatable. On the other hand, logos, the Greek root of the word “logic” original y means “discourse” or even “story” and its first philosophical use in
reference to the constitution of the cosmos still retained this sense.
That first use of the notion of “logic” – to refer to dynamical y
adaptable tactical rules on a cosmic scale – was by Heraclitus, who
also called the cosmos “a child at play, moving pieces in a game”. It may be that any free will worth having requires the world to indeed be something like a story-teller’s tale – where fundamental ontology
10 Ibid., 90.
11 Ibid., 7.
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allows for the same logical y ‘impossible’ phantasmagoria that Lewis
attributes to the vagueness of imagination.
In his last years, William James (who was, after al , the brother of
a great story-teller) came close to seriously advocating such a view in connection to the problem of free wil . In two sections on “Novelty
and Causation” in Some Problems of Philosophy, James points out that the notion of “causation” primarily derives from our own
experience of bringing things into being that we intuitively know
could not otherwise have been.12 Our own
acts of origination, our
acts of creation, are the basis upon which we then only secondarily attribute causes to other beings in nature (first to animistic spirits, then to the gods or God, and final y to material beings or natural
laws). To intellectual y abstract “causation” from its primary meaning as an immediate experience of the agency of conscious willing
beings such as ourselves, and to turn it into an impersonal universal
principle, leads to an infinite regress wherein causes col apse into
effects of other causes, without a first cause being found anywhere
within the limits of possible experience. Without a first cause with
an ontological y irreducible explanatory power, all causality loses its necessary aspect.
Lewis thinks of the causal power of inner-worldly individuals
(who have counterparts at other possible worlds) as a power to
actualize certain outcomes, not as a power to create them. For example, he argues that even if in many possible worlds similar to
this one, but slightly different, he completes writing his book while
in others he does not, it is impossible for him to take vicarious
pleasure in knowing that some of his counterparts complete the
book while he does not. Lewis writes: “It matters to me whether I
am one of those among my counterparts who labour on, or one of
those who quit.”13 The completed books and those that will never
be completed already exist in the bounded totality of logical space.
Lewis does not allow for an ontological y significant “labour” on his
12 William James, Writings: 1902–1910 (New York: The Library of America, 1987), 1079-1094.
13 Lewis,
On the Plurality of Worlds, 126.
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part, as an agent, that would cause a book to come into being as an object that otherwise would not be. Note the following two passages:
..I reply that the argument for indifference relies on a false
premise...It is not idle to want continued life for yourself; you
may have it or not, and you will not get what you want if you
make the wrong decision about whether to kill yourself on the
spur of the moment.14
‘What is wrong with actualizing evils, since they will occur in
some other possible world anyway if they don’t occur in this
one?’ – If you actualize evils, you will be an evil-doer, a causal
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