While We Miss Chances You Can Almost Hear Time Slipping Away

Part One of Two.

Self portrait, Princess Victoria of Kent, 1835

One September morning eleven years ago David Angell boarded a plane that would lead to his death. On the very same day, due to a sequence of fortuitous mistakes, Seth McFarlane missed the very same flight and Mark Wahlberg cancelled his tickets for that flight at short notice. In another universe where the chain of cause and effect was subtly different; all of them died, or none of them died, or some who died did not and vice versa. When you raise the stakes, the fridge horror of the Many Worlds Interpretation becomes apparent.

Most of us have never dodged a bullet of that calibre, though I don't think it would be unreasonable to say most people have experience of almost being run-over. Not quite the kind of traumatic event that drives a person to madness thinking of all the variables that could have fallen in place and sealed their fate, but with the multiverse theory in mind it becomes apparent that for every recognisable counterpart of yourself that survives a close-call there may be just as many that did not. And now empathically, or perhaps egotistically, your imagination now places you in your other's shoes. For all that you stood outside the path of oblivion you condemned another you to the fate you are so relieved to have been spared.

If there are negative occurrences we have avoided, then there are surely positive outcomes we have been denied. The question then becomes: what could have happened differently, what could I have done differently, what elements of my surroundings, upbringing, or the flavour of my cornflakes in the morning affected me and by how much and in what ways did they all have to differ to bring about a different eventuality? The answer is: none of it really matters. Your multiverse doppelgänger do not exist in this universe and, as the universe is the totality of existence, they are completely outside reality - in other words, imaginary - which also renders multiverse theory psuedo-science. The only actions you can ever control are your own and must realise to deny responsibility for events leading to and from those actions is really an act of suicide - because an act without an actor is nothing.

To address the title; for a long time (from my youthful perspective) I wished particular things had turned out in particularly different ways, but had things turned out differently I would not be me. I would be someone almost entirely like me but without this set of experiences; and without my experiences I wouldn't be the person realising that. Had I been in someone else's place it might be my name that came to be listed as father on a birth certificate... then I think perhaps things turned out better.

Written December 6th 2012
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