4.2 SM against other SWs

SM vs Berger's symbolic universe
SM vs multiverse of physics
SM vs possible worlds
SM vs fiction worlds
SM vs monoverse physics
Arguments and against SM
Summary

In this section we will test SM against other world stories such as Berger’s symbolic universe, multiverse of physics, possible worlds in philosophy, fiction worlds, and the mainstream monoverse world.

SM vs Berger’s symbolic universe

Berger’s world-making machinery

According to Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, the world-making is carried out in several stages (“Social construction of reality”). During the first stage people externalise and objectify the reality through the habituation of repetitive patterns of behaviour, particularly those pertaining to various interactions between individuals. The key point of such habituation is economy of effort and time when dealing with familiar situations. The process of the objectivation is further reinforced by new generations who did not participate in the production of habituated order and perceive this order as given by nature and discovered rather than created. These patterns of habitual behaviour and relationship are scattered across different dimensions. To make sense out of the whole and to legitimize this manifold of a haphazard knowledge of habits, one needs a symbolic universe. Such universes can be ranked in terms of their quality starting from those of primitive societies based on myths and superstitions and up to the more advanced symbolic universe of the modern society based on science. The universe based on philosophy Berger and Luckmann ranked as less advanced compared to that of science. According to their vision, the science discovers the true world while the philosophy just follows behind with speculations, and in this sense is closer to the mythology.

There are primary and secondary stages of the internalisation of the objectified reality. The first stage starts at early childhood and proceeds until a person develops a capacity to question the existing order from some rational perspective. Significant part of knowledge at the first stage is internalised subconsciously, something taken for granted and never questioned or doubted.

SM vs symbolic universe

There are at least three key points that differentiate our approach from that of Berger and Luckmann. First, while the title of their book says “The social construction of reality”, all examples pertain to the construction of the social order (e.g. customs, legislation, family relations etc.). In our manuscript we do go beyond what is normally considered social and consider questions pertaining to the creation of the truly whole reality rather than just its social part.

Second, Berger and Luckmann curtail the scope of their enquiry into elaborating the origins and evolution of various social orders without trying to analyse these orders in terms of their validity, in whatever sense this notion of the validity could be understood. They acknowledge the existence of different worlds but refuse to analyse their epistemological and ontological foundations. In our book we bite the bullet, and spend a considerable amount of time elaborating epistemological and metaphysical underpinnings of the notion of real to provide criteria delineating between real and fake worlds.

Finally, a picture of different worlds wrapped into a self-enclosed fabric of a particular belief network and suspended in a thin air does not leave much room for analysing sources of contradiction between these worlds and the means for resolving them. Our multiverse theory provides a rich common ground for individual worlds to build on top of this ground new solutions, which may not be conceivable otherwise.

SM vs multiverse theories of physics

First, our theory goes beyond the physics and includes analysis of realms normally excluded from natural sciences (e.g. metaphysics). Second, unlike parallel worlds of physics, which are pretty much isolated from each other so that it is either impossible or almost impossible to find any signs of interaction between these worlds, our worlds are very much entangled and influence each other. Finally, we can test members of our multiverse against empirical evidence to see whether they behave as expected or they do not.

SM vs possible worlds

I shall leave aside the so called erzats possible worlds, describing parallel worlds as not fully real worlds, but some fiction products, and focus instead on possible worlds in the interpretation of Lewis. The key difference between his and our worlds is that his worlds are spatio-temporally isolated from each other, and ours are not. Further, possible worlds have been introduced largely to explain out modal notions. Our worlds have been designed to provide a belief system where people can live. Almost anything is possible in possible worlds of Lewis, it is a kind of panopticon of weird things such that heads of people combined with the bodies of donkeys, and flying pigs. The focus of our discussion was on the worlds which we can observe around and which typically do not contradict our common-sense intuitions of how the world should be. Finally, I would like to highlight again that the most important difference between SM and possible worlds theory is that our theory is amenable to experimental verification. Practices delivering a good life are integral to SM. We can design an SM, practice it and see whether it delivers the promised goods (e.g. sustainable well-being) or it does not.

SM vs Fiction worlds

What is the difference between SM and fiction worlds written up in novels or movie scripts? We already touched on this earlier in this chapter. SWs unlike fiction-worlds provide instructions to practice and instantiate these worlds. Besides that SW are meant to deliver sustainable well-being which may last for the whole life while fiction worlds maintain your well-being only for a limited period of time. Fiction worlds are not meant to provide the inhabitable environments. Besides that fiction worlds tend to be inconsistent with the rest of our knowledge including that guiding our everyday life, they may contradict established physics, they lack empirical evidence etc.

SM vs Monoverse of physics

Table below summarises key points distinguishing SM and monoverse paradigm of of natural sciences.

Storied Multiverse	Monoverse of physics
Acknowledges uncertainty of our knowledge of complex systems (due to either dim curse, or stochasticity, or feedbacks from theory to the design of an experiment etc.)	Appeals to our intuitions rooted in our everyday practices (simple phenomena and recipe like instructions that work)
Is consistent with trends in a forefront science such as multiverse theories in physics, and PW in philosophy	Takes multiverse theories as an erosion of the standards of science
Explains different interpretations of epistemological and metaphysical foundations of the Being by allocating them into different worlds	Cannot explain contradictions and reconcile different rival theories, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, is still committed to the vision of a single true theory.
Is consistent with multiculturalism and different ethics	Is committed to either fundamentalism or nihilism dismissing the cultural differences as a secondary (after physics) insignificant phenomena
Provides economy of explanation at the expense of introducing rich ontology	Provides economy of ontology
Extends the definition of the empirical evidence towards internal states of a person and artefacts created and managed by people (e.g. immediate and mediated experiences of believers)	Restricts the notion of the empirical evidence to physical phenomena
Integrates physics and metaphysics into a cohesive whole	Ignores metaphysics
Assumes the priority of the notion of the sustainable well-being over the notion of truth	Takes the notion of truth to be prior to the notion of well-being
Provides grounds to resolve social tensions fuelled by different interpretations of SW	Insists on one single truth and takes relativism inherent to multiverse as encouraging cynicism
Opens space for a new research and development into the SWs	Takes SWs as social constructs with a limited value
Integrates arts and science into the business of the world making	Takes arts as being secondary to science
Designs new knowledge rather than discovering it	Discovers new knowledge rather than designing it

Arguments for and aginst SM

Argumenst for SM

This section summarises evidence for SM. It starts with purely epistemological arguments and then proceeds with more general considerations offering support to the SM theory (e.g. there might be arguments for a hypothesis appealing, for example, to our aesthetic preferences, ethical norms, perceptions of well-being etc.).

Coherence of the SM story

SM theory tells a more or less coherent story which does not contradict our everyday knowledge (i.e. knowledge shared across all communities) and science. Controversial statements either concern issues allocated to the realm of metaphysics, or they are arranged in a such way that we cannot prove them wrong.
Multiculture

There are many different cultures, each culture telling its own story about the world and the place of humans in this world. The existence of these cultures (storied-worlds) is consistent with the idea of multiverse. Of course, these cultures do not quite prove SM. The sceptic may argue that all they show is that there are many beliefs, but it does not follow from that there are many worlds. Some beliefs might be false and only one of them eventually might be true.
I think, the sceptic’s argument is valid, and we cannot take the existence of the multiculture as a proof of the multiverse. And yet, the fact that multiculturalism persisted throughout the human history does land a credit to the hypothesis of the multiverse.
Multiverse science

Multiverse ideas are gaining momentum in the forefront physics (even though their multiverse is restricted to the world of particles).
Utility of possible-worlds framework in logic

Possible-worlds theory is instrumental to consistent interpretation of modal terms in logic.
Consistency with complex system interpretations

SM is consistent with our understanding of complex systems as entities which lack a precise description and instead involve manifold of interpretations.
Evidence via prior WB

We can speculate that one more evidence in support of the multiverse, comes from the notion of the prior (sustainable) well-being (prior goodness). This point needs further elaboration and a bit more grounding work before it can be properly appreciated. The idea is that if Y always follows from X and only X, then observation of Y proves X. Very simple and powerful. Now if we can design a state Y which is instantiated through the multiverse and only through that multiverse, than observation of that state Y will prove existence of the multiverse. And what is that state which is specific only to multiverse and which we can observe or experience? Let's take a prior sustainable well-being. We can define it as a specific state which can be experienced only by those who live in our multiverse. We may add extra features to this description latter so that it is more recognisable, and then to any enquiry questioning the existence of the multiverse we will refer to the experience of that state as a proof of the multiverse – you see there is a prior well-being, and it exists only in this multiverse, hence the multiverse is real.
We can even formalise this argument as follows

Premise:

a) there is statement Y (goodness is real) such that Y follows from statement X (multiverse is real) and only X.

b) we do not know whether X is true

c) we know Y is true (since we can observe Y)

Conclusion:

d) X is true (multiverse is real)

The argument is valid if the premises are true. Can we justify the first premise which states that our multiverse (and only our multiverse) always implies a prior well-being. Is it so? We know that we can instantiate the well-being (i.e. Y does exist). But does it have to follow only from our multiverse? If a prior w-b can be instantiated from some other sources then it does not necessarily point exclusively to our multiverse.

I think, it is up to us to decide how loose or tight the connection between a prior w-b and our multiverse needs to be. We can write up a story of the multiverse where the prior w-b is vague and loosely attached to that story so that we may have these or similar experiences acquired beyond the multiverse. Alternatively, we can write it in great details and make the P W-B an irreducible characteristic part of the multiverse story, so that no other worlds are able to reproduce the exact same effects. And then, this P W-B will be unequivocally pointing to this particular multiverse.
The sceptic may rebate that the description of the multiverse itself is a fairly dry account of how things are. The notion of prior goodness is about normative and ethical items, and it also refers to some experiential states. THe claim that there is a strong coupling between the notion of goodness and the notion of the multiverse leads to an old question about relationship between "is" and "ought". For our premise (a) to be true, the “ought” must at least follow from “is”.

This is an interesting point. It seems that what we claim here is that we can write a story about the goodness and then instantiate that story and indeed create that goodness. The story represents factual part (is) and the description of the instantiated goodness represents the normative part (ought), and in general one does not follow from another, but of course, in our case, there is also practice which connects these two and, I believe, resolves the problem. The point is that in our argument when we state the first premise (saying that Y-goodness always follows from X-multiverse) we are making implicit reference to practices that makes this premise true.

Another line of reasoning against this argument is that having goodness to follow from multiverse may not necessarily mean that the multiverse is real. We tell fairy tales and react on them through certain experiences but do not clam these tails to be true. To respond to this point, I shall mention again the difference between fairy tales and SWs. A SW comprises a comprehensive description of the world including instructions of how to live good life. You may call it whatever you like but if it works the way it is meant to work, then for me it is very much real.

As a side note, this proof of the existence through the inference can be generalised and applied to any prior belief. As long as the description of an entity comprises certain instructions integral to this description, we can try them to produce experimentally verified products specific to this belief. The gulf between knowledge based on the experience and knowledge based on a prior belief does not exist anymore, because for any prior belief you might be able to devise an observable state which turns this prior belief into the knowledge based on empirical evidence. This empirical evidence might be able to provide justificatory grounds much more solid than the prior statement. But again, all this is conditioned on the outcomes of the experiment. We may wish whatever we like, but only certain configurations instantiate.

The sceptic may argue further that the experience of a prior well-being is indicative of people who believe in multiverse rather than of the multiverse itself.

I believe, this argument is valid if we live in a monoverse. Otherwise it is not. Returning to our premises and conclusion scheme. What we have shown so far is that our premises are plausible. We cannot prove them 100% right, but they are plausible. Hence, we say that the statement “the multiverse is real” is also plausible.

Other (non-epistemological) reasons to believe in multiverse

Epistemology has never been the main reason motivating people to accept one or another belief system. Consider, for example, a view point by a sceptic who believes that the world is simulated by an evil scientist or we are just dreaming it. There are arguments which support these beliefs and neither of them can be ruled out from purely epistemological reasons. Yet, people, typically, do not believe these scenarios for a number of reasons. For example, these scenarios offer a pessimistic worldview, and there are better alternatives. Sceptic theories are not practical, they do not help us to live better lives. Finally, an optimistic attitude makes sense from purely pragmatic reasons - optimists even when they believe for wrong reasons eventually fair better than pessimists.

In what follows I shall outline further, non-epistemological reasons to believe in SM.
SM diversity

SM offers a rich variety of storied-worlds which could be custom made and tailored to individual requirements.
Occam razor

SM provides an economy of the explanation at the expense of introducing diverse ontologies. The sceptic may argue that ontologies matter more than explanations, the multiverse person would see it the other way round.
Black box analogy

The sceptic may put forward as an argument an analogy of the afterlife with a black box where we know nothing about the content. There are people who have entered that black box, but no one ever seen them returning back. We have no idea what is inside that box. The conclusion he reaches is that there is nothing inside.

SM person can reply with three points to this analogy. First, an analogy is not an argument. Second, the absence of evidence does not imply the evidence of absence. Three, this analogy is inspired by the monoverse vision of the world. A proper analogy from the multiverse perspective would be that of many, perhaps, even infinite number of boxes, and different people entering different boxes. We do not know the content of either of these boxes, but it makes sense to suggest that different boxes have different content inside.
Explanation to the best reason argument

Both Williams and Feldman appeal to the explanation to the best reason as an argument against scepticism in epistemology. Analogous argument can be put forward against SM. One of the examples by Feldman goes like this:

Suppose we see footprints in the sand along the beach. The footprints are in the shape of boots commonly worn by people, though not typically worn by people on the beach. We might wonder why these prints are on the beach. There is an obvious explanation and a host of alternative explanations. The obvious one and an alternative one are: A. People wearing boots recently walked along the beach B. Cows wearing boots and walking on their hind legs recently walked along the beach. Both A and B, when suitably filled out, do explain the prints you observed. But A has the virtue of simplicity.

Or take another example by Williams:

“In everyday life, claims to knowledge are rarely, if ever, advanced on the bases of justifications that are logically impregnable. There are all kinds of ways in which our beliefs might be false, or less than conclusively justified, that we do not bother to investigate. … if I go to the zoo and see some black-and white stripped equines in an enclosure prominently labelled “Zebras”, I am justified in believing that I have seen zebras. However, there are all sorts of possibilities that my evidence – adequate by everyday standards – does not rule out: for example, that the zoo’s zebras all die and have been replaced with cleverly disguised mules. But as we imagining the situation, I have no reason to suspect any monkey (or zebra) business” (NM unless there is some further evidence that zoos sometimes go in for the deception of this kind).

The key difference between these two examples and our multiverse interpretation vs monoverse is that in the former case we know that if needed we can collect further evidence and claim with certainty that the footprints were made by people and zebras in the zoo are indeed real zebras. No such ground truthing is available when it comes to delineating between the mono and miltiverse interpretations of the world.
Utility to resolving social conflicts

SM advocates a picture of the multiverse where many different worlds are equally valid and real. Acknowledgement of many worlds undermines fundamentalist claims about exclusive rights for a single and universal truth by a particular community. It also encourages tolerant attitude and behaviour towards others, because the truth of others in SM is not least real or significant than the truth of ours.

Tensions between communities often arise because people stick to their worlds and cannot see and hear anything outside. I hope that SM has a potential to break the wall of stereotypes and provide communication channels across the cultures. The ISO machinery, in particular, could be instrumental to engaging members of different communities in common projects.
Experimental nature of SM

Unlike to some purely abstract philosophical systems, say in metaphysics or epistemology, our multiverse is amenable to experimental verification. We can not only write up new stories but also instantiate and test them by enacting these scripts.
Future projects

SM opens possibility of many new interesting projects, we may have not dreamed about within the monoverse framework. We can design new storied-worlds and experiment with them, we can enact character types, we can play whatever other abstract entities we invent as long as we provide coherent descriptions and means to instantiate the corresponding objects.
Good life

SM is meant to deliver a good life.
ISO machinery

SM is based on a generalised ISO machinery extending beyond the realm of conventional artificial entities towards natural systems, thus establishing a single vocabulary to describe a wide range of phenomena.

Arguments against SM

In this section I shall compile a relatively short list of arguments against multiverse story. I am not going to elaborate much on it and instead will leave it to the opponents of the multiverse theory to do their job and fill in the missing content.

Lack of empirical evidence

We do not have today convincing evidence of afterlife or parallel physical universes.
Lack of coherence

SM theory, as presented in this manuscript, represents the work in progress rather than a completed project. There are loose ends which detract from the coherence value of the whole framework. (having said this, I think, given the challenge of the undertaking, it is not surprising that we did not produce the final polished product here).
Lack of predictive powers

One may argue that SM does not add to our capacity to predict the future. We already predict it within the monoverse framework, hence, there is no need for SM.

This might be indeed the case if we restrict our enquiry to the field of established natural sciences dealing with relatively simple phenomena where we predict the future rather than design it. With more complex objects, it makes sense to talk about designing the future through the ISO machinery rather than predicting it through science. Besides that, the contribution of SM to our practices is geared towards ethical rather than purely epistemological factors.
SM contradicts our intuition

Indeed, some aspect of SM may feel counterintuitive. On the other hand, appeal to intuitions may not count as a convincing argument in matters dealing with complex systems.
Occam’s razor

SM introduces too many ontologies. This argument is rebated by the reference to the economy in explanations.
Accusation in Relativism entailing Cynicism

Accusation in cynicism is always around whenever the notion of the relativism is on air. I do not intend to spend much time on this point which has been elaborated by others elsewhere. It will suffice to say that cynicism can appear in any world, and some measures are always required to protect against unhealthy forms of the relativism.

Summary

As we seen in this chapter there are arguments for and against SM (as was expected). The reader may take it as a weak point of this theory but I am happy that we did not lock ourselves into the cast of irresistible mix of logic and facts. The situation is rather dialectical. It looks like as of today, arguments for the multiverse are strong enough, to be defended in the court of reason. Further, they are solid enough to support individual’s belief networks but they are not watertight. This balance between the integrity and firmness of this structure, on the one hand, and its uncertainty and looseness, on the other hand, is about right, I believe, for someone to hang on and rely on this structure and at the same time to affirm himself by making a free choice to move in or move out. It is not like we have no choice and must live in the multiverse. It is that we can choose to live in the multiverse if we wish so and it seems to me the framework is solid enough to accommodate our lives. The next and the most viable proof of SM should come from practice.