Actually, it isn’t much. Not the truth, anyway.
The emphasis is on “the”, not on “truth”.
Because, as far as truth goes, a statement may be true. But what is the opposite of truth?
Of course, the opposite is also true.
It’s a counter-intuitive idea that may take some time to get used to.
But the idea that the Earth is a sphere rotating around the sun and on its own axis is also counter-intuitive, or at least it was when first presented.
But it could be observed. Galileo Galilei demonstrated it.
Now scientists confront us with the theory that there is not just one universe, but an indefinite number of them, many with their own laws of nature.
Difficult to imagine, but again, measurable. It’s knowledge born out of observations in quantum mechanics whereby, for example, an atom’s electrons, even though they have mass, do not have a location that can be precisely determined (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle).
So, what is truth? If there is an indefinite number of universes, everything that can be imagined as false is also true.
For another aspect of the topic, we have to go back to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
In his Critique of Pure Reason, he distinguished between things-in-themselves as they exist independent of an observer, and the perceptions we have of them. These perceptions depend on the apparatus used in their observation (for humans, their senses and brains).
To give a simple example: feces itself does not stink; it merely emits gases. The perception that it stinks rests entirely with the observer. For flies, it just smells sweet.
But it’s not just beauty in the eye, and bad smells in the nose of the observer.
Immanuel Kant recognized that even the concepts of space and time are forms of intuition of the observer, not the thing-in-itself.
Immanuel Kant’s philosophy prepared the ground for Albert Einstein’s theories, in which he linked the speed of light to the flow of time, reasoning that the speed of light is inextricably tied to time, and that exceeding it would theoretically result in traveling back in time.
We have learned time and again that intuitions and perceptions are poor indicators of truth.
So, I guess the multiverse is just fine.
And truths are but (mostly useful) intuitions and perceptions of an observer.
The only thing an observer can be absolutely certain of is their own existence. Therefore, Descartes famously stated: “I think, therefore I am.”
And the philosophical school of solipsism is based on the recognition of the fact that the only thing a mind can truly be sure of is its own existence. Everything else experienced as reality may just as well be imagination.
In fact, this may just be it. Anyway, if there is an indefinite number of universes, there are enough of them for each of us to occupy his or her own.
We can already recognize the pattern that the truest truths are those that are closest to the biological observer. This is why I don’t doubt the reality of my sensations: pain, hunger, sexual desires, pleasure.
These observer-focused realities are so true that we do not even need language to be aware of them.
But the more complicated our perceptions become, the more difficult it is to think of them in categories other than language. Intuitions like “democracies are the political system best suited to safeguard human rights” could not be expressed, and would be hard to think of as true, in any way other than through the application of words.
Immanuel Kant emphasized the need to differentiate between the thing-in-itself and its representation in the mind of an observer.
Thereafter, the 20th-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein emphasized that the ideas we entertain, including those considered philosophical, are a function (in the mathematical sense) of the language used to express them. And that “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must pass over in silence”. Knowledge of almost everything depends on the absence of lexical voids.
Just a difference of language already can make for different truths; multiverse awareness is not even needed for that.
A lot of complex European philosophy is very hard to express in analytic (as opposed to inflectional) languages, where more meaning is carried in single words rather than deductive statements. That’s why the work of Martin Heidegger is so difficult to translate into Chinese, where the concept of “being” is often included in nouns and adjectives, and verb forms do not differentiate tenses.
And that’s why it is so hard to be an atheist if one’s native language is Arabic.
For the co-existence of divergent truths, the preservation of the world’s linguistic diversity is important, indeed.
Because some truths can only enter and exit the human mind if there is a language adequate to express them.
And because complex truths all so often are just a question of the language used, and because what is false in one language may just as well be true in another, and because the potential number of languages is just as indefinite as the number of universes in the multiverse, the ideas of a German Marxist, an Arabic Islamist, and a Papuan Animist are equally acceptable to me. Even though they contradict each other, they may be true in themselves, in their own languages, in their own universes.
On the other hand, for me personally, and for other humans (if they exist outside of my imagination), concepts that express themselves only in languages are less relevant than primary realities that do not need languages, such as pain, hunger, sexual desires, and pleasure.
