I recently had the opportunity to watch the film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. It was good. Certainly the special effects were amazing to behold, and hence I would recommend watching this film in the theater if you are able to. But I admit, I was paying particular attention to something while watching: how they were planning to handle the idea of the multiverse.

As I previous discussed regarding the Marvel series Loki, what seems to be the most popular idea of the multiverse is tied tightly to the most popular idea of a free will. In Loki, what spawned a new universe within the multiverse was when an individual was faced with a choice that required that person to exercise their free will. Based on logistical issues I observed in the series, it seemed to me that these particular events that spawned a new universe were extremely rare, and hence free will itself was extremely rare (or perhaps the exercising of a free will is extremely rare). In Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it is further established that dreams are also tied very closely with the multiverse. Warning for spoilers ahead.

In the new film, it is suggested that when a person dreams, their dreaming is really the individual experiencing an alternate version of themselves in some other universe. Doctor Strange, toward the beginning of the film, wakes up from a nightmare where he was attempting to rescue another character from a demon, and as it turns out, this was simply a different version of himself performing the very same activity. His dream was his experience of the alternate version of himself.

This is later emphasized by the character America Chavez, who suggests that because she happens to be unique in the entire multiverse, she does not dream. After all, for her to dream would be for her to experience an alternate version of herself in some other universe. As she never dreams, there must not be any other versions of herself in any other universes. Here begins the problem with an infinite multiverse.

In a previous post, I briefly raised the issue of “what infinity means.” I said, “infinity is NOT a number. Infinity is an idea regarding boundlessness. That is, to speak of infinity is to speak of something that is unbounded.” In the case of an infinite multiverse, this does not suggest that there is a countable number, or even an extremely large number, of universes in existence. It suggests that the multiverse itself is boundless. In the case of Loki’s free will spawning new universes, it would be suggesting that there is no limit to the number of universes that can be spawned. The number of universes would likely be vast and uncountable as a result of this boundlessness, but there is no way to really say.

This becomes even more complicated with the alleged occurrence of an individual who has no counterparts in ANY other universe, like Chavez. In the case of infinity, if something has even the remotest possibility of occurring once, it is guaranteed to occur many, many times. In a truly infinite multiverse, there would be NO singularities, no individuals. Putting this another way, while there is nothing that says every universe will have an occurrence of myself, the fact that I exist in this one guarantees that I will exist in others. As infinity is not a number, I cannot say precisely in how many I will exist and how many I will not exist, but it seems reasonable to conclude that the probability of my existence in any particular universe will approach about 50%. This can be said about any individual in fact.

For there to be only one single America Chavez in an infinite multiverse breaks the very idea of an infinite multiverse. Unless we are not dealing with an infinite multiverse…

Here it becomes time to raise Rick and Morty, and the “Central Finite Curve.” The idea is simple: apparently Rick Sanchez somehow segregated a portion of the multiverse (specifically selecting only universes where alternative versions of himself were the most intelligent entity within that universe) and restricted interdimensional travel to only those select universes. In other words, the reason the story can get away with suggesting (up to that point) that in every universe Rick was the most intelligent entity was because the audience (and most of the characters) were led to believe that they had access to all possible universes within the entire multiverse. In the season five finale, it was revealed that this was a lie, and the Evil Morty was able to break out of the confines of the segregation and enter the true, unrestricted multiverse. As there has yet to be any newer episodes or seasons of the show thus far, it is hard to say where they will take this idea.

The point here is that in the storyline of Rick and Morty, it is acknowledged (at least on some level) that in an infinite multiverse there can be no uniqueness. The main protagonist of the series is often referred to as “The Rickest Rick,” suggesting that there is something about this Rick that makes him unique in all of the multiverse; however, in the finale we realize that he was simply unique within the segregated portion of universes defined by the Central Finite Curve, which as the name itself tells us is finite and not infinite.

If the storyline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is to attempt to maintain any modicum of legitimacy in its exploration of infinity and an infinite multiverse, it will have to come up with a damned good explanation for how there could possibly be unique entities in a realm that can, by definition, not contain any unique entites.