I Am a Strange Loop

The cultural norms in Twinwirld take for granted and thus reinforce the view of a pair of halves as a natural and indissoluble unit. Whereas in our society, identical twins often yearn to break away from each other, to strike out on their own, to show the world that they are not identical people, such desires and behavior in Twinwirld would be seen as anomalous and deeply puzzling. The two halves of a pairson would scratch tweir head (or each other’s head — why not?), and say to each other, perhaps even in synchrony, “Why in the Twinwirld did twey break apart? Who would ever want to become a halfling? It would be such a semitary existence!”

I mentioned at the outset that 1 percent of births in Twinwirld result in halflings rather than pairsons. Actually, it’s not quite 1 percent — more like 0.99 percent. But in any case, in Twinwirld, a very young pairson will sometimes wonder what it could possibly be like to be born a halfling, and not to be composed of two nearly identical “left” and “right” halves that hang around together all the time, echoing each other’s words, thinking each other’s thoughts, forming a tight team. The latter state seems so absolutely normal that it is very hard to imagine a halfling’s deeply strange, semitary, and impoverished life (often jokingly called a “half-life”).

What about that tiny remaining portion of births, happening just 0.01 percent of the time? Well, there is a curious phenomenon that can occur in pregnancy: both fertilized eggs constituting the zwygote break in half at the same moment (no two knows why it always happens this way, but it does), and as a result, instead of a single twild being born, two genetically identical twildren emerge! (Oddly, the babies are called “identical twinns”, although they are never exactly identical.) The pairents of twinns of course love both of their “identical” offspring equally well, and very often give them cutely resonant pairs of names (such as “Natalie” and “Natalia”, in the case of twinn girlzes, or “Lucas” and “Luke”, for twinn boyzes).

Sometimes twinns feel the need, as they are growing up, to break away from each other, to strike out on their own, to show the wirld that they are not identical pairsons. But then again, some twinns enjoy playing the near-identicality game to the hilt. Roy and Bruce Nabel, for instance, are a typical pair of twinn boyzes (actually, now they’re grown up) who love to confuse their friends by having Bruce turn up when Roy is expected, or vice versa. Nearly everytwo in Twinwirld finds such stunts quite amusing, because the idea of twinns is so unfamiliar to ordinary pairsons in Twinwirld. Indeed, a normal (non-twinn) pairson in Twinwirld has almost no concept of what it could be like to be a twinn. How extremely strange it would be to grow up side by side with sometwo almost identical to twoself !

There was once even an author in Twinwirld who concocted a curious philosophical fantasy-world called “Twinnwirrld”, whose defining feature was that 99 percent of all births resulted in so-called “identical twinns” — but that’s a whole nother story.

“Twe”-tweaking by Twinwirld-twiddling

Several intertwined issues are inevitably raised by our short and hopefully provocative little jaunt. The most vivid, of course, is that in Twinwirld, a solo human body — a half — builds up a sense of itself as an “i” (lowercase!), while at the same time a pair of human bodies — a pairson — builds up a sense of itself as a “Twe”. This latter process happens partly thanks to genetics (just one genome, found in the zwygote, determines a pairson) and partly thanks to acculturation, enhanced by a slew of linguistic conventions, some of which were mentioned.

Suppose we wanted to apply the loaded word “soul” to beings in Twinwirld. What or who in Twinwirld has a soul? Even the noun “being” is a loaded word. What constitutes a being in Twinwirld? To my mind, both of these questions have the same answer as the following question: “What kind of entity in Twinwirld builds up an unshakable conviction of itself as an ‘I’? Is it a half, a pairson, or both?” What we’re really asking here is how strong each of two salient and rival analogies is — namely, how strong is the analogy between an “i” and an “I”, and how strong is the analogy between a “Twe” and an “I”?

I suspect that any human reader of this chapter can easily identify with a Twinwirld half (such as Karen’l or Greg’r), which would suggest that the “i”/“I” analogy seems convincing to most readers. I hope, however, that my human readers will also see a convincing analogy between Twe-ness and I-ness, even if, for some, it is less strong than that between “i” and “I”. In any case, since Twinwirld is just a fantasy, one can adjust its parameters as one wishes. You and I are both free, reader, to twiddle knobs of various sorts on Twinwirld to make “i” weaker and “Twe” stronger, or the reverse.