John C. Wright's Journal

A Reader with the binary name of The Deuce wrote a post on the self-defeating nature of multiverse arguments. I reprint it here as a guest post.

The biggest problem with the multiverse idea (beyond the fact that it’s simply a post-hoc rationalization to explain away the necessity of an intellect behind the natural world) is that it ultimately has to assume what it’s trying to disprove: Namely that mind is real and irreducible to the action of blind, physical matter.

Conjuring up infinite chance resources to explain things has no limiting principle. The logic that multiverse proponents use to explain away cosmic-fine tuning, the origin of life, the evolution of conscious rational creatures, etc., could in principle be used to explain away *any* observation. Eg. “No, I didn’t steal the cookie from the cookie jar. It’s just that given infinite universes, there had to be infinite ones where the cookie dematerialized at the same time that I entered the kitchen alone, and that’s what happened here.”

Followed consistently, such thinking would be fatal to all empirical inferences of causality and science itself.

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I thought this worth reprinting for those who had never seen it. A reminder of folksy Americanism from the prior Turn of the Century. Enjoy.

1899

A Message to Garcia

By Elbert Hubbard

In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at Perihelion. When war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the insurgents. García was somewhere in the mountain fastnesses of Cuba—no one knew where. No mail nor telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly.

What to do!

Someone said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find García for you, if anybody can.”

Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to García. How “the fellow by the name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oilskin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three weeks came out on the other side of the island, having traversed a hostile country on foot and delivered his letter to García, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail.

The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to García; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?” By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies; do the thing—“Carry a message to García!”

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This article was written for Tangent #18, Spring 1997  by the great Dave Wolverton. Reprinted here in unauthorized form for the sake of preserving this significant essay. The words below are his. 

A unexpected guest column from our own radio-jockeyish yet thaumaturgical RJ Wizard. The words below are his. Perhaps we should heed them:

These comments follow a pattern. Mr. Wright posts the latest miscarriage of justice, and several commenters (not always the same ones) howl War! and suggest we lower ourselves to various, but not explicitly identified, forms of violence. I don’t think most people realize how far down the pike we are. That they so freely and without thought throw such words out there, out of all context and consideration.

I just read Walker Percy’s THE MOVIEGOER published in 1960 (that is 62 years ago, more than two generations have passed) and one of his characters laments the post-Christian world of lax sexual visions.

Post-Christian. Think about that. Walker Percy was no dummy (see LOVE in the RUINS). 1960. He was calling it, our world, his Southern, Bible-belt world, post-Christian before the onslaught of the sexual revolution made its first major assault (though the battle was well underway plenty before then) and the general downfall in public decorum, manners. Before the full on assault on education, morality and every single thing that Western Civilization stands for and rests upon was openly underway. Before openly and publicly spitting on Christ was openly and publicly applauded. Before Christian was a sneer word. Before Jesus was invited into the pot circle as an eastern guru in the late 60’s and early 70’s.

Now if it be true that it was already a post-Christian world by then, what is it now sixty-two years later?

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A friend sent me this remark, and I pass it along without comment:

The issue Martin ran into with ASOIAF [A Song of Ice and Fire] is, ironically, one of this own hand… he spent five books subverting expectations, killing key characters, torturing and scattering the survivors to the ends of creation… and only now realized that there’s no way in hell he can actually bring them all back in one place and piece together a story that makes sense in just two books. The problem with endless deconstruction is that, eventually, you have nothing left to build with.

That legacy is why Martin will never write the book – the old hippie has made his life’s work a refutation of classic fantasy like Tolkien, and admitting that maybe he was wrong? That would sting worse than even declining sales. Better an unfinished book with a ton of questions than a badly ended one that disproves its own central thesis.