Many Worlds and the Problems of Evil

post by Jonah Wilberg (jrwilb@googlemail.com) · 2025-01-09T16:10:46.752Z · LW · GW · 1 comments

Contents

  Problems of Evil
  Cosmic unfairness
  Quantum theology
  Making it fair
  Starmaker
None
1 comment

Summary: The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics helps us towards an overall evaluation of existence. I consider some recent work in philosophy of religion on the quantum multiverse and the Problem of Evil, as well as Olaf Stapledon’s Starmaker.

I’ve previously suggested  [LW · GW]that when we think about the ethical implications of the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) [? · GW] of quantum mechanics, the kinds of implications we should expect are ones about how to feel in certain ethical situations, and what kinds of character traits or ‘virtues’ we should try to develop. 

I’ve argued [LW · GW] that MWI implies virtues in which we feel better about mutually exclusive life choices by reminding ourselves that there really are worlds in which we choose ‘the road not taken’.

I’ve also shown [LW · GW] that MWI can help us feel better about improbable bad events, since the things we value remain unaffected in most other worlds, and also [? · GW] to remain virtuous when faced with improbable good events.

In this post I want to zoom out fully and consider how we should feel about the quantum multiverse as a whole.

Problems of Evil

Let me start by considering how this connects to what's known as the problem of evil. As standardly defined, this is the theological problem of reconciling the existence of evil and suffering with an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient God.

Philosophers and theologians have debated whether there is a logical inconsistency between the existence of e.g. children dying of cancer and the traditional Christian conception of God. 

And irrespective of logical consistency, it seems plausible that from an empirical, bayesian point of view the existence of, say, species of parasitic wasps that eat their hosts alive from inside, reduces the credibility of a benevolent creator.

You might think that if you’re an atheist this is all quite uninteresting, except as an argument to trot out when debating with Christians. 

But there’s a deeper version of problem of evil that even atheists must deal with. Which is, to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with your desire to feel ok about life, the universe and everything.

Joe Carlsmith has nicely described  [LW · GW]how when writers like C.S.Lewis (in A Grief Obseved) or Dostoievski (in The Brothers Karamazov) grapple with the problem of evil, what they’re really concerned to preserve is an ‘existential positive’: a sense that, when taking the widest possible view, one can still feel good about things.

Similarly Eliezer describes  [LW · GW]a kind of optimistic feeling - shared by atheists and theists alike - that “life is fair” or that massively bad events (like the eradication of humanity by AI) are “not allowed” since “things have to make sense”^[1].

So there’s an atheistic version of the problem of evil that concerns how we should feel about the universe as a while.

But if MWI is true the universe is a quantum multiverse. So the question I raised at the start, of how we should feel about the multiverse as a whole, is not just a theoretical one: it’s a deeply existential question, tied to religious impulses, and the search for meaning.

Cosmic unfairness

So how do we answer this question?

I discussed earlier how MWI can alleviate a certain sense of unfairness - the sense that you or your loved ones are picked out for misfortune - by reminding us that the relevant unlucky events actually didn’t occur in most other worlds.

And it’s important to disentangle this specific kind of unfairness from the kind of unfairness involved in the problems of evil. This is not always easy to do. 

The writings by C.S Lewis and Eliezer mentioned above were both informed by emotional reactions to specific tragedies. Lewis was grieving the death of his wife. Eliezer was processing the anger he felt at the death of his brother^[2]:

What we need to distinguish in such cases is 

• Local unfairness: of all the people who could have got cancer, why did it need to be her
• Cosmic unfairness: why does anyone need to get cancer

When Eliezer says it seems disproportionate that the twentieth century could have gone differently if “a different sperm fertilized the egg, on the night that Adolf Hitler was conceived”, he is thinking of local unfairness.

And as we have seen, MWI changes the equation here: it is not disproportionate or non-sensical since a different sperm did in fact fertilize the egg in the other quantum worlds. The number of other worlds out there with better outcomes is proportionate to the extent to which we were unlucky in having Adolf Hitler in this world.

The cosmic unfairness on the other hand is what Eliezer evokes in the following passage:

We live in the what-if universe beyond the reach of God, driven by the mathematical laws and nothing else.  Whatever physics says will happen, will happen.  Absolutely anything, good or bad, will happen.  And there is nothing in the laws of physics to lift this rule even for the really extreme cases, where you might expect Nature to be a little more reasonable.

Eliezer is right to say ‘will happen’ here. It’s not just that the annihilation of entire civilizations, populated planets, solar systems and galaxies is possible. it’s not just that AI could kill us all. It’s that all these things actually will happen in some branch of the multiverse, as long as they remain within the laws of quantum mechanics.

The question is what this means for our overall existential evaluation. Is there a response to Eliezer’s charge of cosmic unfairness?

Quantum theology

One obvious initial response is to note that Eliezer’s ‘extreme cases’ cut both ways: the quantum multiverse contains extreme good as well as extreme evil. In addition to galactic death camps, there are cosmic utopias beyond our imaginings.

The question then becomes whether the good cases in some sense outweigh the bad, or vice versa - or whether good and bad are in cosmic balance.

This topic has received some attention in recent philosophy of religion. In his book Evil and Many Worlds, which explicitly deals with the quantum multiverse, William Hunt makes a good case for the option of cosmic balance on the basis of ignorance^[3]:

Because of the deterministic nature of the multiverse, an omniscient being would know the final balance, but we do not, and we never could, as access is denied. However, with the risk of paradox and applying the Principle of Indifference, I settle upon equilibrium

The Principle of Indifference he refers to is the idea that “if the truth of an evidential proposition cannot be probabilistically confirmed or disconfirmed, then it should be allocated a probability value of 0.5”.

Hunt doesn’t stop here, however, but presses on to argue that the multiverse has an overall positive valence, because the existence of free will is a significant positive not factored in to the previous conclusion that good and evil are balanced. 

Unfortunately this variant on the classic free-will defence against the problem of evil seems to based on a specific version of rule-consequentialism in ethics, and is not very plausible outside that framework.

Are we then left with a balanced, morally neutral multiverse?

Another philosopher of religion who has engaged with the quantum multiverse is Emily Qureshi-Hurst, and she suggests not.

Some evil is so horrendous, she thinks, that no amount of good can outbalance it. She writes of “the rape of a woman and axing off her arms, child pornography, slow death by starvation”. The idea here is similar to Dostoievski’s point in The Brothers Karamazov that we might not want to live in a world in which children face terrible suffering, no matter how much good also exists.

And the key point is this: the quantum multiverse seems to accentuate the problem. Even if they exist in worlds with relatively low quantum weights, the most horrendous evils do exist, according to MWI. 

In particular, when it comes to your own multiverse counterparts, in addition to versions with immensely flourishing lives, there are those living the worst physically possible versions, most likely involving horrendous evils.

So it seems what we have is “a reality in which at least one version of every single person is living the worst iteration of their life possible” and as a result “suffering..is grossly engorged in the [Many-Worlds] picture”.

So contemporary philosophy of religion, far from providing a satisfactory response to Eliezer’s charge of cosmic unfairness, actually sharpens it.

Making it fair

Given the force of the charge of unfairness, it seems that any ‘existential positive’ vision of the multiverse will seem plausible only to the extent that it respects and incorporates the horrendous suffering of its worst branches.

Eliezer himself points to a kind of optimism consistent with this kind of suffering, when he says that while the universe now may be neutral and unfair, we can make it fairer:

If humanity's future unfolds in the right way, we might be able to make our future light cone fair(er).  We can't modify fundamental physics, but on a higher level of organization we could build some guardrails and put down some padding; organize the particles into a pattern that does some internal checks against catastrophe.  There's a lot of stuff out there that we can't touch—but it may help to consider everything that isn't in our future light cone, as being part of the "generalized past".  As if it had all already happened.  There's at least the prospect of defeating neutrality, in the only future we can touch—the only world that it accomplishes something to care about.

I think one can make this point even stronger by reminding ourselves that an evaluation of existence as a whole should include the entirety of the temporal dimension, and not just a ‘time-slice’ of the cosmos. So if we - or some other species - are able to make things fairer, this would itself be a fact about the time-independent cosmos that could merit positive existential evaluation.

Here too though the multiverse view seems to dampen our optimism. In a continually branching cosmos, there is no single branch that would count as “defeating neutrality”. It seems that at best we can defeat neutrality in some branches, while in others we will fail to do so, or make things worse.

It’s true that you could consider all other multiverse branches as part of the “generalized past” as Eliezer suggests - though this would be stretching the idea given that some of these branches are in fact in our future light cone. And even then MWI will have massively multiplied the “stuff out there that we can’t touch”, leaving us with a much smaller island of fairness (in relative terms) amid the cosmic ocean of darkness.

Starmaker

Let’s be clear there’s no upfront guarantee that a coherent ‘existential positive’ vision of the multiverse is possible. I could have ended the discussion at this point.

But I do want to bring in one more mind that’s confronted the problem of evil head on from a perspective quite close to the many-worlds view.

Olaf Stapledon’s sci-fi masterpiece, StarMaker, portrays a kind of God or demi-urge who creates a series of universes of ever-increasing complexity and ‘maturity’. 

Among the more mature creations is something like a quantum multiverse. In is such that “whenever a creature was faced with several possible courses of action, it took them all, thereby creating many distinct temporal dimensions and distinct histories of the cosmos”.

But that multiverse is itself set within a larger sequence of cosmic creations, and this sequence can be considered a multiverse of a different kind. Specifically it is similar to what Max Tegmark calls the Level 4 multiverse^[4] - the range of mathematical structures that could define physical laws and associated universes (the quantum multiverse is ‘Level 3’). 

Stapledon’s engagement with the problem of evil really comes to the fore when he describes “the ultimate cosmos”. This cosmos is ‘ultimate’ both in the sense that it comes last in the sequence of creations, and in the sense that “its relation to each earlier cosmos was approximately that of our own cosmos to a human being, nay to a single physical atom.”

Given that it “embraced within its own organic texture the essences of all its predecessors” we can think of it as a variant of the level 4 multiverse in which the diverse component universes are organically interrelated and mutually interactive.

While not being a quantum multiverse, this ultimate cosmos raises similar existential concerns. The suffering that seems most horrendous to Stapledon is the suffering of the “awakened spirits” of an entire component universe^[5].

For some of these ultimate beings not only suffered, but suffered in darkness. Though gifted with full power of insight, their power was barren. The vision was withheld from them. They suffered as lesser spirits would never suffer. Such intensity of harsh experience was intolerable to me, the frail spirit of a lowly cosmos. In an agony of horror and pity I despairing stopped the ears of my mind. In my littleness I cried out against my maker that no glory of the eternal and absolute could redeem such agony in the creatures. Even if the misery I had glimpsed was in fact but a few dark strands woven into the golden tapestry to enrich it, and all the rest was bliss, yet such desolation of awakened spirits, I cried ought not, ought never to be.

I quote this passage in full to show how Stapleton, echoing Dostoievski, fully confronts the problem of horrendous evil, in a context that is as we have seen very relevant to the quantum multiverse.

Yet he does find his way through to an existential positive experience of illumination:

It was with anguish and horror, and yet with acquiescence, even with praise, that I felt or seemed to feel something of the eternal spirit’s temper as it apprehended in one intuitive and timeless vision all our lives. Here was no pity, no proffer of salvation, no kindly aid. Or here were all pity and all love, but mastered by a frosty ecstasy…That this should be the upshot of all our lives, this scientist’s, no, artist’s keen appraisal! And yet I worshipped!

He recognises that the existence of horrendous evil cannot be reconciled with either a loving God, or with an existential stance of love towards a godless multiverse. 

In his discussion [LW · GW] of love and the problems of evil, Joe Carlsmith brings in Erich Fromm’s distinction between ‘Father love’ - which is conditional upon merit - and ‘Mother love’ that is unconditional. But this does not seem to help: horrendous evil is simply unlovable. 

Stapledon’s insightful idea is that unlovable evils may still have redeeming qualities, which appear from a contemplative scientific or aesthetic perspective. 

Like Nietzsche’s claim that it is “only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified”, Starmaker’s perspective might seem itself cold and immoral. But this is why Stapledon stresses that this aesthetic perspective coexists with “all pity and all love”.

He asks us to hold two thoughts in our mind simultaneously^[6]: both that the multiverse is horrendously unfair and immoral, and that it is a beautiful, holy object of contemplation.

Stapleton twice uses the phrase ‘crystal ecstasy’ to summarise this vision. I read this as encapsulating both the coldness and hardness of cosmic injustice, and the exquisite order revealed in both scientific and aesthetic appreciation.

The astonishing simplicity-within-complexity of the universal wave function underlying the quantum multiverse seems at least as deserving of this appreciation as Starmaker’s ultimate cosmos.

In his final chapter, in which the narrator is brought 'back to earth', Stapledon adds a further dimension to his vision. Writing in the late 1930s, with premonitions of global war, he describes an outlook

Black with the rising storm of this world's madness, though shot through with flashes of a new and violent hope, the hope of a sane, a reasonable, a happier world.

In response to the question "how to face such an age?", he suggests that despite its coldness, his crystalline vision can offer a guiding light. 

When we see global crisis against the background of the "hypercosmical reality" of his vision, it "does not lose but gains significance". 

In a similar vein, contemplation of the horrors and crystal ecstasies of the quantum multiverse might serve to generate a sense of meaning in our own stormy age.

1. ^{^}

   This view comes close to that described in a scholarly treatment of the subject by Yujin Nagasawa. In The Problem of Evil for Atheists he argues that the problem for Atheists is one of ‘Axiological expectation mismatch’: the mismatch between the expectation that the world not contain radical evil, and the observation that it does.

2. ^{^}

    Another famous example is Harold Kushner’s book When bad things happen to good people.

3. ^{^}

   Evil and Many Worlds, p131

4. ^{^}

    In his book, Our Mathematical Universe

5. ^{^}

   Starmaker, p128

6. ^{^}

   Or perhaps in metamodern oscillation.

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