I Am a Strange Loop

I am not speaking of the pronoun “we”, because that word reaches out beyond the pairson who is speaking, and includes other pairsons. Thus “we” might mean, for instance, “our whole school” or “everytwo at last night’s dinner party”. Instead, there is a special variant of “we” — “Twe” (always spelled with a capital “T”) — which denotes just that pairson of which the speaker is the left or right half. And of course there is an analogous pronoun, “” (which, although it looks as though it should be pronounced “double-you”, is actually pronounced “tyou”, like the “Tue” in a British “Tuesday”), used for addressing exactly one other pairson. Thus, for example, back when they were first getting to know each other, Greg (that is, either Greg’l or Greg’r — I don’t know which half of twem) once said very timidly to Karen (on whom twey had a crush), “Tonight after dinner, Twe are going to the movies; would like to join twus, Karen?”

The pronoun “you” also exists in Twinwirld, but it is plural only, which means that it is never used for addressing just one other dividual — it always denotes a group. “Do you know how to ski?” might be asked of an entire family, but never of just one twild or one pairent. (The way to ask that would be, of course, “Do know how to ski?”) Analogously, “they” never denotes just one dividual. “Both of them came to our wedding” is a statement about a duo of pairsons (that is to say, four halves — or four “persons”, in the quaint terminology of those hailing from our world). As for a third-pairson singular pronoun, there is one — “twey” — and it is genderless. Thus “Did twey go to the concert last night?” could be a question about either Karen or Greg (but not about both together, as that would require “they”), and “Have twey had the measles?” could be asked about either Lucas or Natalie, but of course not about both.

Pairsonal Identity in Twinwirld

A young pairson in Twinwirld grows up with a natural sense of being just one unit, even though twey consist of two disconnected parts. “Every dividual is indivisible”, runs an ancient Twinwirld saying. All sorts of conventions in Twinwirld systematically reinforce and lock in this feeling of unity and indivisibility. For instance, only one grade is earned for work that do in school. It may be that one half of is a bit weaker than the other half is in, say, math or drawing, but that doesn’t affect collective self-image; what counts is the team’s joint performance. When a twild learns to play a musical instrument, both halves have their own instrument, practice the same pieces, and do so simultaneously. A bit later in life, when ’re in college, read novels written by pairsons, go to exhibits of paintings painted by pairsons, and study theorems proven by pairsons. In a word, credit and blame, glory and shame, neglect and fame are always doled out to pairsons, never to mere halves of pairsons.

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.

For the twirlwind trip just undertaken, I set the knobs determining Twinwirld at a middle-range level in order to make both analogies roughly equally plausible, hence to make the competition between “i” and “Twe” quite tight. But now I want to tweak Twinwirld so as to make “Twe” a bit stronger. In this new fantasy world, which I’ll dub “Siamese Twinwirld”, instead of positing that 99 percent of births yield standard identical twins, I’ll posit that 99 percent of births yield Siamese twins joined, say, at the hip. Moreover, I’ll stipulate that the Twinwirld pronoun “i” doesn’t exist in Siamese Twinwirld. Now the only analogy that remains is that between our concept of “I” and their concept of “Twe”. This may seem extremely far-fetched, but the curious thing is, our standard earthly world has much in common with Siamese Twinwirld. Here’s why.

We all possess two cerebral hemispheres (left and right halves), each of which can function pretty well as a brain on its own, in case one side of our brain is damaged. I’ll presume that both of your hemispheres are in good shape, dear reader, in which case what you mean when you say “I” involves a very tight team consisting of your left and right half-brains, each of which is fed directly by just one of your eyes and just one of your ears. The