Category: Metaphysics

One approach to time travel is to embrace timeline branching: when someone travels in time and changes something (which is inevitable), then a branch grows from the timeline. This, as was discussed in the previous essay, allows a possible solution to the grandfather paradox. But it also gives rise to various problems and questions, such as the need to account for the creation of a new universe for each timeline branch. The fact that these universes are populated also creates a problem, specifically one with personal identity. Since I used the grandfather paradox as the context previously, I will continue to do so.

Suppose that Sally and Ted travel back in time and Sally kills her grandfather Sam. Ted does not murder his grandfather. Assuming the timeline branching solution to the grandfather problem, Sally creates a new timeline branch in which Sam is killed. While Sally does not exist (one assumes) in the new timeline, Ted does. There would be at least two Teds now: one that is in the original timeline and the Ted in the new timeline. In fact, anyone who was alive for the creation of the new timeline would presumably also in the new timeline as the entire population of the universe would be replicated. This raises some obvious questions about how this would work and issues within the context of personal identity. For the sake of simplicity, I will focus on Ted as my example, but this would also apply to anyone who ends up being branched.

To keep it simple, let us suppose that Sally and Ted are the first time travelers, so there have been no time branches. When they travel back, they create the first branch. While Sally will not exist in the new branch (and her act of murder might result in other people not existing or even new people existing), Ted will exist in both. So how would this work?

One option is to take the time splitting metaphor literally: the universe and the people in it are split into two. Think of this as like an amoeba dividing. This does raise the obvious question of whether whatever makes a person the person they are can be split. For example, Leibniz took a person to be a monad, and his monads are metaphysically simple: they cannot be split. But if personal identity rests on something that can be split up, then this would be possible. For example, Hume (sort of) advances a bundle theory of personal identity. On his view, the self is not a simple, indivisible entity. It is a collection or bundle of perceptions. To use a metaphor, just as a bundle of marbles could be divided up, this bundle could also be divided between timelines. This would lead to questions about trans timeline identity: would there be one divided person or two people who arose from a past person? In the case of Ted, there would be one Ted in each timeline, and they might (or might not) be the same person.

Another option is that the people in the new timeline are identical duplicates. This would require that the basis of personal identity be something that can be copied. Locke, for example, makes consciousness (memory) the basis of personal identity and even considers a case in which a person’s consciousness (memory) is duplicated. With a basis of personal identity that can be copied, the problem is solved: each new timeline person is a copy of the original. This also leads to the question of whether they are a trans timeline person or multiple different people who happen to have originated from the same person. One obvious consideration is that the basis of personal identity is supposed to be what makes a person distinct from all other things and this suggests that there should only be one of each person. But this view can be countered by arguing that it is philosophically fine to have multiples of the same person. This could be reined in a bit by limiting it to one person per timeline, the challenge would be justifying and explaining this restriction. On this view, there would be Ted in the original timeline and a Ted copy in the new timeline, who might or might not be the same person.

A third option is that the new timeline is a completely new creation that just resembles the original. The people do exactly resemble each other, but this is analogous to having two unrelated people that happen to look exactly alike: while the appear to be the same, this is not due to any connection between them. This is essentially an alternative reality view in which the reality begins with a timeline branch. While this does have some appeal, if the branch is not connected to the main timeline, then one must explain how it connects to time travel. One way to do this is to take the view that what seems to be time travel just creates an alternative reality and there is, in fact, no travelling. In this case, there would be a new Ted-like person who just happens to be exactly like Ted but has no metaphysical connection to the original Ted.

This matter becomes even more complex is one starts to consider theological and moral matters. For example, if God exists and people are souls that are sent to an appropriate afterlife, then God would need to sort out who is responsible for what. This should be super easy for God, barely an inconvenience. But without God, the ethics become more challenging: if a person is split into two people, which one is accountable for the past deeds? Perhaps they both are, like an amoeba who has split into two. If a new alternative reality is created and all the people are new, they should not be accountable for any past deeds, because they have no past at that moment of creation. Time travel is, of course, an even bigger mess than one would imagine.

The grandfather problem is a classic time travel problem. Oversimplified, the problem is as follows. If time travel is possible, then a person should be able to go back in time and kill their grandfather before they have any children. But if they do, then the killer would never exist and would not be able to go back in time and kill their grandfather. So, their grandfather would not be killed and they would exist and be able to go back in time and kill him. But if they kill him, then they would not exist. And so on. There have been attempts of varying quality to solve this problem and one is to advance the notion of timeline branching. The simple version is that time is like a river and travelling back in time to change things results in the creation of a new branch of the river, flowing onward in a somewhat different direction.

So, imagine that Sally goes back in time to kill her grandfather. She succeeds and thus creates a new timeline in which he dies. Presumably, she returns to her own timeline and finds that her original grandfather was never killed by her. She might keep trying and from her perspective she would kill him over and over, only to return to find that she never succeeds. But with each trip to the past, she creates another new timeline. For those who prefer their time travel murder free, any change a time traveler made would presumably create a new timeline and this would include the smallest change. Time travelers would certainly end up creating new timelines in which they (or, more likely, someone like them) exist and would probably keep traveling in time, thus creating branches off the branches. While having so many branches would seem excessive, there are metaphysical concerns for even having one additional timeline branch.

Each extra timeline branch would seem to require the creation of an entire new universe. But even if it created less than that, there would still be the same concern, albeit on a smaller scale. This concern is the origin of the stuff that makes up the new timeline. One solution is to just allow ex-nihilo creation: the new universe appears out of nothing, mostly duplicating the original with the relevant changes arising from the time travel. Allowing ex-nihilo creation would have implications beyond time travel and is generally considered sketchy metaphysics. It can, of course, be given a divine twist: God or other supernatural beings are kept busy creating new universes in response to time travel. This would also involve some interesting problems but is not any more problematic than having just one universe created by God or other supernatural being(s). As such, if you already accept that God can create a universe out of nothing, then the problem is solved. One could even endorse pantheism: everything is God and God just “creates” new modes “in” Himself that are the new timelines. Pantheism to the rescue.

A second solution is that the basic stuff (prime matter or similar) for new timelines already exists and just needs to be formed by whatever it is that does that sort of thing. The easiest answer is to just use whatever originated the first universe to fill the role of creating the new timelines. While there would be the question of why it keeps doing that, it seems sensible that if it can do it once, it can keep doing it.

In terms of the stuff, perhaps there is a finite amount of stuff and eventually time travel would no longer be possible because no new timelines can be created. But an easy fix is to make a clever appeal to the infinite: if there is infinite stuff, then no matter how much stuff is taken to make a new timeline universe, then there would still be infinite stuff left to keep creating new timelines. Infinity to the rescue once again.

One could also use various clever workarounds. For example, maybe solipsism is true and only I exist, so there would be no need to create new timelines. Or perhaps Descartes got it right and it is just him and the evil demon; the demon can just deceive Descartes about time travel without creating anything. But if the evil demon travels in time and changes things, then the problem would still arise. Or maybe there is actually nothing, no self, no reality and no time travel. In that case, there would also be no problem.

George enjoyed and hated the privileged position of being the grandson of Edgar the Tyrant, the man who had killed his kindly brother Sam. Edgar had conquered the Seven Systems with alien technology and established the most crushing despotism in human history. Like his grandfather, George was a brilliant scientist with a special talent for understanding alien technology. Unlike his grandfather, George was burdened with ethics and compassion. After discerning the secrets of an alien time machine, George nobly decided to sacrifice himself by going back in time and killing his grandfather before he discovered the trove of alien technology that enabled his reign of terror.

After travelling back in time and locating his target, George took careful aim with the alien plasma rifle, confident that the heavy weapon would guarantee the death of his grandfather. It did exactly that, vaporizing not only him but several meters of ground.

George expected to be erased from time instantly, but in realizing that he still existed he realized he still existed. Thinking that it might take some time for the effects to catch up to him (or head back to him, however it worked) he sat down to wait. And wait. When nothing happened, he thought “hmm, maybe that rumor about grandma and Uncle Sam was true after all” and travelled back to his time.

 

Time travel, as any time traveler will tell you, is problematic. One of the classic problems is the Grandfather Paradox. If you can travel in time, then you should be able to go back in time and kill your grandfather (or grandmother, to avoid sexism in temporal murder). However, if you kill your grandfather, then you would never exist and would not be able to go back and kill him. As such, time travel would make it possible to kill your grandfather but killing him would make it impossible for you to kill him. Hence the paradox.

One solution is to take it as a reductio ad absurdum of time travel. If time travel were possible, it would lead to an unacceptable paradox. Therefore, time travel is not possible. Another approach is to address the paradox with a bit of temporal deus ex machina: you can travel back and time and try to kill your grandfather, but you will never be able to succeed. If you, for example, try to run him over with a car, you will run out of gas or get a flat tire. If, as another example, you try to shoot him with a rifle, every round will miss or misfire. Or you will get caught by the police. There is an obvious question of how this temporal enforcement mechanism would work.

One could, of course, invoke a teleological explanation: there is a purposeful agent that ensures that you will never succeed. As with non-time travel teleological agents, this could be a supernatural being (God or a god of time), mortal agents (time cops, perhaps) or some sort of Aristotelian temporal paradox-preventer (perhaps related to the first mover).

In the context of doing metaphysics in accord with the economic style of argumentation, using a teleological metaphysical entity to solve the paradox would raise the cost of the theory. As per Occam’s razor, entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Metaphysical teleological explanations also tend to be out of favor in philosophy, especially those of the supernatural sort. This will tend to impose both a “weirdness” and implausibility cost on the theory.

But this cost can be offset if the entity provides enough benefits, such as explanatory power. On this economic model one chooses between metaphysical theories in a way analogous to choosing between smartphones: the one with the best benefits for the lowest cost would be the winner.

Having mortal agents prevent the paradox could make for interesting science fiction (and imposes no metaphysical cost) but there is an obvious problem: mortal agents could fail. While one could argue that time police would have a huge advantage over a lone time-traveler, there are easy-to-imagine scenarios where even a lone time-traveler succeeds. One could imagine, for example, a rogue time cop deciding to kill their grandparent. Because of this, fallible protectors of time would not solve the problem.

Another approach would be to embrace a form of non-teleological determinism: while one could travel back in time one can never succeed in killing one’s grandfather because one failed. This would seem to have broader implications for time travel as well in terms of making any changes to the past. This does raise the question of how this determinism would work but determinism (in its various forms) is already a well-established philosophical position. As such, if you are already a determinist, then you can presumably apply it to time at no extra cost and solve this problem.

Science fiction has other options that could solve the problem. One approach taken by Alfred Bester  in “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” is that going back in time to commit murders does not affect the timeline, but instead affects the traveler by gradually removing them from reality. While the mechanism for this would need to be explained, it does solve the paradox: you could go back and kill your grandfather, but this would have no impact on the timeline. You would just fade a bit, metaphysically speaking, and history would remain unchanged.

Another approach is that time travel creates alternative timelines. The traveler goes back and murders his grandfather and thus creates a new timeline in which this occurred. The original timeline (whatever that might mean) remains intact. The time traveler might also split and they would exist in the original timeline because nothing changes there. But they would not exist in the “new” timeline: they killed their grandfather in that timeline and hence would never be born. Since time travel is mysterious and messy, perhaps the time traveler would be exempt from the split in some manner. Or perhaps not.

This approach does raise some obvious problems. One is that time travel would seem to create new timelines ex nihilo: they seem to simply come into existence from nothing. Unless, of course, the original timeline gets sliced like a pizza, something that would seem to be, at least in theory, detectable. Then again, if the original timeline is infinite, dividing infinity results in infinities. Another set of problems would involve personal identity. If the split occurs, what happens to the identity of the people in the original timeline and those “created” in the new timeline? For example, if Sally goes back and kills her grandfather and splits the timeline, then there would be a new timeline with the people from the original “duplicated” (perhaps including her grandfather if a there is an afterlife). To illustrate, consider Sally’s grandmother Sarah. When Sally kills her grandfather and splits the timeline, then there would now be at least two Sarahs. Both arose from the unsplit Sarah, so they would both seem to be Sarah. But they are now two people unless there is some form of cross timeline personal identity. Some theories of personal identity can easily handle this. For example, Locke’s consciousness-based theory would entail that both Sarahs were the original Sarah (if their memories remain) but they are no longer the same person after the split because they have different memories. Theories, like Descartes’, that make the person the soul would need to account for there being two souls: does the original divide like an amoeba or does a new soul get created? Or something else? All these issues (and others) need to be addressed to make this solution work.

While there are numerous problems that arise from this approach, it does not require postulating the existence of new types of metaphysical entities: one just needs multiples of what we already have, namely the timeline. This does not raise the ontological cost of the theory. To use an analogy, if one accepts the existence of one supernatural god, accepting a second or tenth god comes with no extra ontological cost. The price is paid for each metaphysical type rather than each token of that type. There might be other costs arising from this, though, such as matters of weirdness or plausibility.

The last approach I will consider is that time travel is dimensional travel. That is, when you travel in “time” you are going to another reality that is at a different time than your reality. On this view, when someone travels “in time” to kill “their” grandfather, they are travelling to an alternate reality and killing an alternate version of their grandfather. In that reality, “they” would not exist, but they could return to their own reality, which would be one in which their grandfather was not killed by a time traveler. This would be analogous to killing the grandfather’s twin brother: this kills someone like him but not him.

While this approach does require explaining how dimensional travel would work, it has fewer problems than the split timeline approach. While it does require multiple dimensions, so does the split timeline approach. But it does not require that they appear ex-nihilo or form from division. It also does not face the problems with personal identity: the person in the other reality is not the traveler’s grandfather, just someone similar. The obvious downside to this approach is that it solves the problem by eliminating time travel. But maybe that is a good thing.

 

While science fiction has intelligent trees and fantasy has its ents and dryads, the idea of trees thinking has often been used to mock philosophers. But scientists now seriously consider the question of whether trees have mental states, such as feelings. This scientific acceptance allows a non-mocking philosophical discussion of the issue.

From a philosophical standpoint, the issue is whether a tree can have a mind. Unfortunately, philosophers do not agree on the nature of the mind. I will consider whether some of the main theories of mind would allow for thinking trees. There are a variety of philosophic theories which attempt to explain the mind. Some of the better-known ones include identity theory, substance dualism, property dualism and functionalism. The implications of each will be considered in turn.

Identity theory is a materialist theory of mind; the view that the mind is composed of matter. Identity theorists assert each mental state is identical to a state of the central nervous system. So, the mind is the central nervous system and its states. Given identity theory, trees cannot think. This is because they lack a central nervous system of the sort humans possess. But this could be criticized as human-centric, and it could be argued that a tree can have mental states that are identical to the relevant physical states of its body.

Substance dualists claim reality contains two fundamental types of substances: material and immaterial. On this view, which was embraced by Descartes, the mind is an immaterial substance which has a causal relation with its body. This mysterious relation enables the mind to control and receive information from the body and allows the body to affect the mind. On this view, a tree could have a mind. A tree having an incorporeal mind connected to its material shell is no more mysterious that a human having an incorporeal mind. It is also no less mysterious. The popular version of substance dualism is that a person is their soul and this soul brings life to the body. A tree having a soul is also no more (or less) mysterious than a human having a soul.

A second type of dualism is property dualism: the mind and body are not distinct substances. Instead, the mind is made up of mental properties that are not identical with physical properties. For example, the property of being the feeling of sadness could not be reduced to a physical property of the brain, such as the firing of certain neurons. So, the mind and body are distinct, but not different substances.

This sort of dualism would allow for trees to think. This is because the theory does not require the physical properties of the body be the same properties that make up the human nervous system. All that would be needed is the right sort of mental and physical properties. Again, that trees could have this metaphysical makeup is no stranger than the belief that humans do.

The last view to be considered is functionalism. There are many varieties of functionalism, but they all have a common foundation: mental states are defined in functional terms. A functional definition of a mental state defines that mental state in terms of its role/function in a mental system of inputs and outputs. To illustrate, a mental state, such as being in pain, is defined in terms of the causal relations it has to external influences on the body, other mental states, and bodily behavior.

Functionalism is usually taken to be a materialist view of the mind because the functional systems are supposed to be physical systems. While identity theory and functionalism are both materialist theories, they differ in a critical way. For identity theorists, each mental state, such as being sad, is identical to a physical state, such as the state of neurons in a specific part of the brain. For two mental states to be the same, the physical states must be identical. So, if mental states are states of neurons in a certain part of the human nervous system, then anything that lacks this sort of biological nervous cannot have a mind.

The functionalist has a different view: a mental state, such as feeling sad, is not defined in terms of a physical state. Instead, while functionalists believe each mental state is some physical state, for two mental states to be the same they need only be functionally identical.  So, if mental states are defined functionally, then anything that can exhibit these functions can have a mind. While trees obviously lack the brain and nervous system of a human, they could have physical systems that function in analogous ways. To use an analogy, different computer hardware can run the same programs. For example, this essay can be read using on a wide variety of hardware platforms including an Android phone, an Xbox One and perhaps even an old Macintosh with a Motorola chip. 

While the issue of whether trees do think or not remains, this essay has addressed the issue of whether they could have minds within the context of modern philosophy of mind. If dualism, property dualism or functionalism is correct, then trees could have minds and think. However, if identity theory is correct, then trees cannot think. Unless, of course, a tree philosopher has an identity theory for trees.

 

Imagine a twenty-sided die (a d20 as it is known to gamers) being rolled. In the ideal the die has a 1 in 20 chance of rolling a 20 (or any number). It is natural to think of the die as being a locus of chance, a random number generator whose roll cannot be predicted. While this is an appealing view of dice, there is a question about what random chance amounts to.

One way to look at the matter is that if a d20 is rolled 20 times, then one of those rolls will be a 20. Obviously enough, this is not true. As any gamer will tell you, the number of 20s rolled while rolling 20 times varies. This can be explained by the fact that dice are imperfect and roll some numbers more than others. There are also the influences of the roller, the surface on which the die lands and so on. As such, a d20 is not a perfect random number generator. But imagine there could be a perfect d20 rolled under perfect conditions. What would occur?

One possibility is that each number would come up within the 20 rolls, albeit at random. As such, every 20 rolls would guarantee a 20 (and only one 20), thus accounting for the 1 in 20 chances of rolling a 20. This seems problematic. There is the obvious question of what would ensure that each of the twenty numbers were rolled once (and only once). Then again, that this would occur is only a little weirder than the idea of chance itself.

But a small number of random events (such as rolling a d20 only twenty times) will deviate from what probability dictates. It is also well-established that as the number of rolls increases, the closer the outcomes will match the expected results. This principle is known as the law of large numbers. As such, getting three 20s or no 20s in a series of 20 rolls would not be surprising. But as the number of rolls increases, the closer the results will be to the expected 1 in 20 outcomes for each number. So, the 1 in 20 odds of getting a 20 with a d20 does not seem to mean that 20 rolls will guarantee one and only one 20, it means that with enough rolls about 1 in 20 of all the rolls will be 20s. This does not say much about how chance works beyond noting that chance seems to play out “correctly” over large numbers.

One way to look at this is that if there were an infinite number of d20 rolls, then 5% of the infinite number of rolls would be 20s. One might wonder what 5% of infinity would be; would it not be infinite as well? Since infinity is such a mess, a more manageable approach would be to use the largest finite number (which presumably has its own problems) and note that 5% of that number of d20 rolls would be 20s.

Another approach would be that the 1 in 20 chance means that if all 1 in 20 chance events were formed into sets of 20, sets could be made from all the events that would have one occurrence each of the 1 in 20 events. Using dice as an example, if all the d20 rolls in the universe were known (perhaps by God) and collected into sets of numbers, they could be dived up into sets of twenty with each number in each set. So, while my 20 rolls would not guarantee a 20, there would be one 20 out of every 20 rolls in the universe. There is still the question of how this would work. One possibility is that random events are not random and this ensures the proper distribution of events such as dice rolls.

It could be claimed that chance is a bare fact, that a perfect d20 rolled in perfect conditions would have a 1 in 20 chance of producing a specific number. On this view, the law of large numbers might fail. If chance were real, it would not be impossible for results to be radically different than predicted. That is, there could be an infinite number of rolls of a perfect d20 with no 20 ever being rolled. One could even imagine that since a 1 can be rolled on any roll, someone could roll an infinite number of consecutive 1s. Intuitively this seems impossible. It is natural to think that in an infinity every possibility must occur (and perhaps do so perfectly in accord with the probability). But this would only be a necessity if chance worked a certain way, perhaps that for every 20 rolls in the universe there must be one of each result. Then again, infinity is a magical number, so perhaps this guarantee is part of the magic.

While true love is the subject of many tales, its metaphysical foundation is rarely addressed. A way to explore its metaphysics is by using possible worlds. Imagine, if you will, a bereaved lover seeking to replace their lost love by finding an exact counterpart in another world. This raises the issue of whether it is rational to love the metaphysical counterpart of someone you love. I will argue that This is as rational as loving the original person by using appeals to intuitions and analogies. In the interest of fairness, I will also consider and refute the transcendent argument for true love.

The metaphysics of the show Rick & Morty includes the existence of an infinite number of alternative worlds, each of which with its own Rick and Morty. The Rick and the Morty that are, one assumes, the actual stars of the show have been forced to abandon their original reality and various replacement realities. However, they always end up living with “their” family (Beth, Summer and sometimes Jerry). While Rick claims not to care, he loves “his” daughter Beth and granddaughter Summer. However, as he and Morty t know, the Beth and Summer of their adopted world are not their Beth and Summer. They are the daughter and granddaughter of the Rick of that world. A Rick who is (usually) dead.

CW’s The Flash show also makes use of the multiple world plot device as well, one that dates to the early days of comics. The DC comic universe features a multitude of different earths, most notably Earth 1 and Earth 2. Earth 2 was the home of the original Batman, Superman and other, it was used to maintain the timeline in which, for example, Superman was on earth in the 1930s. In a series of episodes of the TV show The Flash, Barry Allen (the Flash) travelled to Earth 2 and met counterparts of people he knew and loved on his world, such as his beloved Iris. On Earth 2, the non-Flash Barry Allen 2 was married to Iris and Barry Allen 1 (from Earth 1) pretended to be Barry Allen 2 and was obsessed with her and her father, despite being told the people of Earth 2 were not the same people as those of Earth 1.

While people tend to feel for no rational reason, there is an interesting question as to whether it makes sense to love someone because they are the counterpart of someone you love. While this would be an interesting matter for psychology, the metaphysical aspect of this case is a question of whether the counterparts are such that it is rational to love or care about them because they are metaphysical counterparts of someone you love or care about.

For the sake of the discussion that follows, consider the following sci-fi scenario: Sam and Kelly met in graduate school, fell madly in love and were married shortly after their graduation. They were both hired by Kalikrates Dimensional, a startup dedicated to developing portals to other dimensions.

During an experiment, Sam was pulled into the death blender dimension and ejected as a human smoothie. Unfortunately, he had neglected to keep up his premiums with Life Ensurance and had no personality backup to be loaded into a clone body. Distraught, Kelly considered cloning him anyway, but decided that without his memories and personality, it would not be Sam.

Driven by her loss, she developed a much safer portal system and then developed an Indexer that would scan and index the possible worlds. She programmed the Indexer to find a world just like her own, but where “she” rather than “Sam” would die in the portal accident. The Indexer labeled this world Earth 35765. Timing it perfectly, she popped through her portal just as the Kelly of 35765 would have returned, had she not been blended. The Kelly 35765 smoothie ended up in Kelly 1’s world, while Kelly 1 took over her life. Kelly 1 might have been happy with Sam 35765, but she was murdered and replaced a year later by the bereaved and insane Kelly 45765. Given this scenario, would it be rational for Kelly 1 to love Sam 35765?

One way to look at this matter is to use an analogy to counterparts in this world. To be specific, there are unrelated people who look exactly like other people in this world. And there are also identical twins. While a person might be fooled by a twin or look-alike, they would probably not love them simply because they looked like someone they loved. The same can be applied to counterparts in other worlds: they look like someone you love, but they are not the one you love.

I agree that it would be irrational to love someone simply because they looked like someone one already loves. After all, the look-alike could be utterly horrible or at least utterly incompatible. As such, it would be foolish to love such a twin solely based on appearance. That sort of shallow love would be irrational even in this world. But certainly possible.

However, it can be rational to love a counterpart that exactly resembles the original. Such a counterpart could have the qualities that would provide a rational foundation for love. For example, if Kelly 1 loved Sam 1 because of his personality, values, laughter, and such, then if Sam 35765 had the same qualities, then it would make sense for Kelly 1 to love him. After all, he has the same qualities. To use an analogy, if Kelly loves Cherry Breeze pie because of its qualities, then she is obviously not limited to loving the first Cherry Breeze pie she had and any adequately similar Cherry Breeze pie would suffice.

Now imagine that there was one Cherry Breeze pie that Kelly loved above all others and that this pie could be duplicated to such a degree that every aspect of the pie would be indistinguishable from her most beloved pie. In this case, Kelly would love that exactly resembling pie as much as the original.

There is the concern that there would be a fundamental difference between any counterpart and the original; namely that there would be no history or relationship with the counterpart. So, while Kelly 1 might love the qualities of Sam 35765, she has never done anything with him and thus has no history or relationship with him. She could develop a history and relationship over time, but that would be falling in love with a new person. While it is true that Kelly 1 has no past relationship with Sam 35765, she selected the world in which Kelly 35765 and Sam 35765 did everything that Kelly 1 and Sam 1 did and there would be no distinguishable difference. Kelly 1 knows everything that happened between the other Kelly and Sam and will act exactly as Kelly 1 would have.

Going back to the pie analogy, while Kelly would have no established relationship with the new pie, the fact that it is (by hypothesis) exactly like the original pie in every way (other than being new) would intuitively entail that Kelly would love the new pie as much as the original. Everything discernable about the relationships with the pies would be the same other than their bare difference. If Kelly declared that she loved the original but did not care for the new pie, her claim would seem to be utterly unfounded for she could point to no qualitative difference that would warrant her assertion.

It could even be contended that, in a way, Kelly does have a relationship with the pie. Since it is exactly like the original pie, it would fit seamlessly into the relationship she had with the original pie. As such, it would be rational to love the exact counterpart of someone one loves.

Since I made the error of referencing true love, I opened the portal to an obvious objection to my position. One basic element of true love is that one person (Kelly 1) loves another (Sam 1) and not that person’s qualities. This is because qualities change and can be possessed by others. Intuitively, true love will not fade and cannot be transferred to another person that simply has the same qualities.

For example, if Kelly loves Sam because of his brilliance and humor, then she would love someone else who had the same brilliance and humor. This sort of interchangeable love is not true love. If what is loved is not the qualities of a person, there is the question of what this might be.  What is wanted is something “beneath” all the qualities that makes the person the person they are and distinguished them from all other things. Fortunately, philosophy has just the thing: the metaphysical self. This, as should come as no surprise, takes the discussion into the realm of Kantian philosophy.

Kant split the world into noumena and phenomena. The phenomena are the things as they appear to us. This is what we experience-such how good a person looks in a swimsuit. We can have empirical knowledge of such things. The noumena are the things in themselves. Kant claimed the noumena cannot be known because they are beyond our experience.

On Kant’s view, it would be sensible to stick with the phenomena and not speculate about the noumena. But Kant claims that cannot resist the lure of the transcendent illusions of metaphysics.

The metaphysical self is the illusion that is needed here. Like David Hume, Kant thinks we have no impression of the metaphysical self. What we do have are impressions, via introspection, of the empirical self. The inner eye never sees that metaphysical self; it just encounters things like feelings and thoughts.

Unlike Hume, Kant argues that we must think of our experiences as if they occur within a unified self. This provides a frame of reference for thought and it is thus useful to accept a metaphysical self. Since it is useful and we need the metaphysical self to make sense of things, Kant concludes that we should accept it. While Kant did not take the step of arguing for true love, I will do this now.

Applying his method to true love, true love would be impossible without the metaphysical self. This makes it a necessary condition for true love. The metaphysical self is beyond the realm of scientific proof. However, true love is irresistible because it seems critical for our happiness and our conception of ourselves. As such, while Kelly 1 might feel that she loves Sam 35756, this would be irrational: Sam 35756 is not her true love. As would be imagined, in a tragically poignant Twilight Zone style sci-fi story, she would come to realize this. While true love is appealing, the objection can be countered. This should not be surprising, since the argument itself acknowledges that it is appealing to an illusion. But, of course, what is needed is a substantive reply.

While the idea of a metaphysical self behind all the qualities sounds fancy, it is merely a repainted bare particular. It is bare because it does not have any qualities of its own beneath all the qualities that it possesses. It is a particular because there is only one of each (and each one can only be in one location at a time). In the ideal love of the objection, one loves the bare particularity of another as opposed to qualities that can change or be duplicated.

Fortunately for my position, there is a serious problem with this notion of love. When we interact with the world we interact with various qualities. For example, Kelly can see Sam’s quirky smile and experience his keen intelligence. But it seems impossible for her to be aware of his bare particularity. Since it has no qualities there would be nothing to experience. It would  be impossible for Kelly to be aware of Sam’s bare particularity to love him. As such, love must be about detectable qualities.

While this is less romantic than the idea of metaphysical true love, it is more realistic and intuitively appealing. When one person talks about why they love another, they talk about the qualities of the person. Many dating app make claim to assess people for various qualities to us them to find compatibility and love. Scientists also talk about the emotion of love as being driven by genes in search of suitable genes to combine with. Given this evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that when Kelly loves Sam, she loves his qualities. As such, if it was rational for Kelly 1 to love Sam 1, then it is just as rational for Kelly 1 to love Same 35756. There is, after all, no discernible difference between the Sams. Thus, love is not only possible, but also possible across worlds.

 

Cherry Breeze Pie Recipe

Ingredients

 

Crust

1/4 cup sugar

1 cup graham cracker crumbs

1/3 cup butter or margarine — melted

or 1 pre-made graham cracker crust

 

Filling

1 package cream cheese — (8 ounces)

1 can sweetened condensed milk

1/2 cup lemon juice

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 can cherry pie filling — (1 pound, 5 ounces)

 

Directions

1. Cook butter and sugar in saucepan over medium heat until mixture boils. Remove from heat and mix in graham cracker crumbs. Press mixture evenly and firmly into 9-inch pie plate to form a crust. Chill. (Or just buy a pre-made crust).

 

2. Beat cream cheese until smooth. Gradually mix in sweetened condensed milk, stir in lemon juice and vanilla. Spread in crust. Refrigerate 3-4 hours or until firm.

 

3. Top with chilled cherry pie filling. To remove pie pieces easily, place hot wet towel around sides and bottom of pan before cutting.