Sunday, April 6, 2008

"Variant Traversals": A New Fictional Character

I don't yet know anything about this new character except for the following speech out of his or her mouth:

“When I say I think of my life as one of Y-1 variant traversals of N+/-X dimensional space, with differential probabilities for four values of Y, what exactly am I saying? That if this world doesn’t exist, if we are all merely something approximating characters in the bad dream of a demiurge such as might be hypothesized by a second century Gnostic, then we set Y to equal one with a five percent probability. That if this world is an Existentialist wasteland in which the current life being lived is all that will ever exist, then we set Y to equal two with a ten percent probability. That if this world is part of a JudeoChristoIslamic universe consisting of this life followed by an afterlife spent in some kind of Heaven or Hell or Purgatory, then we set Y to equal three with a one-thousandth of one percent probability. And that if the current lifetime on this world is one of many lifetimes on many worlds that some version of the core “I” will experience over many millennia, then we set Y to equal an integer between 4 and Y-1 with an 84 and 999/1000th percent probability. The assigned probabilities are my best guesses. Yours no doubt would likely be at least somewhat different. For the moment we will ignore more complex solutions in which the value of Y is either less than one or fractional.”

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