I'm not a cat
Sometimes there is a sense that something is inevitable. It happens in all timelines, even the ones where no one wants to do it. The sense of inevitability is what actually causes it to happen. Why fight the inevitable? But notice there is something funny about that explanation. The primary object, the source of causality, is the sense of inevitability. Not the people. Alan would have you lean into this. We shape the world, and we are shaped by ideas, so ideas shape the world. Of course that's not true literally. Ideas don't actually exist. But neither do people. The world is just a soup of atoms. Thoughts, feelings, decisions, even bodies don't exist, they're only abstractions that we use to manage the chaos. If narrativium is just as useful for predicting the flow of the soup as the familiar story of people with conscious agency, can we really say that it is less real than us? Once upon a time there was an explosion of thought. A species that had spent hundreds of thousands of years