32. Turing-Complete Identities 🔗

History is all the identities we’ve inhabited so far

Kinda makes sense that the end of history would be marked by terminal identitarianism. Consequence, not cause. If nobody can find a way to continue everybody’s identity evolution, history ends.

Identitarian consensus: when everybody agrees what boxes everybody is in. It’s a much deeper state of stable equilibrium than everybody simply having a fixed identity. The way common knowledge is a deeper equilibrium than mere belief or even mutual belief.

There was a funny Volkswagen ad where an Indian guy responds to some question about yoga with “just because I drive a Volkswagen you think I’m into yoga?”

It’s funny because it simultaneously acknowledges and subverts an identitarian consensus

Also Seinfeld anti-dentite joke

An identitarian consensus is also a set of roles and permissions within a narrative. Stereotyping is just the shallowest layer. History ends at an identitarian consensus not because the narrative ends but because it becomes 100% tropey

The instinct behind simple role-swaps (eg female or black superheroes) as a way to break out of an identitarian consensus equilibrium is solid but... naive. Like transposing a tune to a new key rather than composing a new one. Doesn’t restart history, just phase-shifts it.

An example of a history-restart type shift is from Campbellian Monomyth hero to LeGuinesque Carrier Bag unheroine. Doctor Who pulled that off, though it has other weaknesses.

Real history edition: when women stop leading like men. Good or bad, you can’t ignore the fact that it’s equilibrium-breaking history restart/reboot. This ain’t Margaret Thatcher or Indira Gandhi style nytimes.com/2019/03/30/opi…

The link between end of history and identitarian consensus also explains why “diversity” as a simplistic alternative to a straight-white-male-centric equilibrium doesn’t work for anything except post-apocalyptic survivalist stories. That’s just the aftermath of the end of history

To extend the music metaphor, this is not a transposition, it’s a polyphony degenerating into a cacophony. Random noise around an EoH equilibrium.

Experimenting with fiction has shown me just how terrible social identities are for writing believable, growing characters. It’s almost like trying to make an address behave like a house. A category error. An address can let you guess a lot about a house but isn’t itself a house.

Otoh, you can’t just make up a character from, say, a set of archetypal inner paradoxes. The context matters in a way that becomes immediately obvious when you try to name a character. A name instantly induces a world.

The thing about history-reboot level narratives is that any one local binding, like the name of a key character, immediately binds the rest of the narrative as well. Choosing any one thing is like choosing everything. And now the whole story is a clockwork deterministic universe.

The best you can do is “glitch” the global binding a bit by simultaneously acknowledging/subverting a piece of it, like my Volkswagen-yoga example. This is not an archetypal paradox driving a character OR a world paradox driving a history. It’s the nexus between the two.

This creates just enough room, like a 99.9% global binding instead of 100%, for history to get restarted. Tiny new root sneaking through the cracks of a tessellation defining a world.

Note btw that most science fiction is only cosmetically a building of alternative worlds. Much of the average stuff is simple relabeling. The better ones just acknowledge it openly.

An example of doing more is Dark Materials, where cosmetic similarities suggest a glitchy parallel universe that’s not quite like ours. Deepness in the Sky also pulls that off by constructing an uncanny valley of spider-beings whose story is told via overwrought human mapping.

I’ve been trying to systematize these intuitions by playing with situated archetypes that work across a whole class of worlds rather than inducing a specific one. Then you suggest the whole universe via “beat” frequencies that emerge in juxtaposition with a familiar universe

Getting back to history, a narrative is only a history if it’s not in an end-of-history identitarian consensus equilibrium. Good fiction has the feel of history.

It’s not enough that the world changes (plot) or characters grow individually or in mutuality. The world and characters must change together in, for want of a better term, Turing complete ways. Even a strange attractor or brownian motion won’t do.

It’s the entanglement that evolves irreversibly. And the characters don’t have to be “rich” in a literary sense for this. In fact that’s often a liability. Even 2d caricatures that are terrible by rules of “good” character dev can drive historic narrative if entangled right

This stuff is very hard. That’s why only a few cases have been solved analytically. For example evil twins from evil parallel universes who differ in social identity only by a goatee (van dyke actually...) is a surprisingly sophisticated device if you dig a bit into it.

“Good” and “evil” are shorthand codes/world-hashes for 2 different narrative equilibria, with a leak in either direction capable of restarting history. Good/evil is a property of the entanglement between the characters and home universes.

Importantly, social identity is only an address. That is why a trivial marker (facial hair) works to distinguish the two universes. It happens to be gendered but that’s unimportant. It could be a nongendered trait like long hair.

Interestingly, Marxist thought gets this whole idea in a degenerate way: “none of us is free until all of us are free” or “the oppressor requires liberation as much as the oppressed.” That’s a good special case of entangled history.

Where it fails is treating aspects of the context, like class, as immutable. A workers paradise isn’t classless. It’s a degenerate one-class, end-of-history society. To transcend class-structure, you need something with equal expressive power that preserves Turing-completeness.