VIDEO: Are Parallel Universes Real?

The idea of other worlds – worlds we don’t have access to – and parallel universes has always fascinated people.

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We seem to have this need of knowing that we are not alone.

According to Wikipedia, in philosophy and logic, the concept of a possible world is used to express modal claims. The concept of possible worlds is common in contemporary philosophical discourse but has been disputed.

From this groundwork, the theory of possible worlds became a central part of many philosophical developments, from the 1960s onwards – including, most famously, the analysis of counterfactual conditionals in terms of “nearby possible worlds” developed by David Lewis and Robert Stalnaker.

On this analysis, when we discuss what would happen if some set of conditions were the case, the truth of our claims is determined by what is true at the nearest possible world (or the set of nearest possible worlds) where the conditions obtain.

(A possible world W1 is said to be near to another possible world W2 in respect of R to the degree that the same things happen in W1 and W2 in respect of R; the more different something happens in two possible worlds in a certain respect, the “further” they are from one another in that respect.)

Consider this conditional sentence: “If George W. Bush hadn’t become president of the U.S. in 2001, Al Gore would have.”

The sentence would be taken to express a claim that could be reformulated as follows: “In all nearest worlds to our actual world (nearest in relevant respects) where George W. Bush didn’t become president of the U.S. in 2001, Al Gore became president of the U.S. then instead.”

And on this interpretation of the sentence, if there is or are some nearest worlds to the actual world (nearest in relevant respects) where George W. Bush didn’t become president but Al Gore didn’t either, then the claim expressed by this counterfactual would be false.

Possible worlds theory in literary studies uses concepts from possible-world logic and applies them to worlds that are created by fictional texts, fictional universe. In particular, possible-world theory provides a useful vocabulary and conceptual framework with which to describe such worlds.

However, a literary world is a specific type of possible world, quite distinct from the possible worlds in logic.

Literary critics, such as Marie-Laure Ryan, Lubomír Doležel, and Thomas Pavel, have used possible-worlds theory to address notions of literary truth, the nature of fictionality, and the relationship between fictional worlds and reality. Taxonomies of fictional possibilities have also been proposed where the likelihood of a fictional world is assessed.

Possible-world theory is also used within narratology to divide a specific text into its constituent worlds, possible and actual. In this approach, the modal structure of the fictional text is analysed in relation to its narrative and thematic concerns.

Rein Raud has extended this approach onto “cultural” worlds, comparing possible worlds to the particular constructions of reality of different cultures. However, the metaphor of the “cultural possible worlds” relates to the framework of cultural relativism.