The Commutative Model

“Writing an interesting, meaningful story is actually very simple. All you’re really doing is basic logical deductions. Start with a spectacle—imagine a soul-etching experience. Of course, for what you imagined to feel universal to others, you must stay emotionally porous. But for now, let’s assume you’re still sensitive. You have taste. This experience—where does it take place? What happened? To whom does it mean something?… And then, you reason backwards, going against the direction of timeflow, against the grain of cause and effect—who is experiencing? Who is witnessing? What identities are being held? What must’ve happened that interlaced them at this exact moment, two paths interlocking in space-time? Piece by piece, these toy blocks rewind into the box, the colored paint strips off, their shapes disappear and merge into one another as boundaries vanish…and your story would begin from this box of one wooden block.” 

The guest of the podcast finished speaking and smiled gingerly. Halfway through, his mind had drifted into the cathedral-like lecture hall.

At those times, standing behind the podium, he always knew that he was the NPC, a prop on a stage, while all the eyes and all the human players behind them stared back blankly. You’d never know what players from the other dimension are thinking, or intending. But it doesn’t matter. All a good prop needs to do is follow the tracks laid out on the stage. And so, each day, he wheels himself across the lecture hall, cycling through his lines, fluently memorized as the responsible, well-respected professor that he is. A talented writer, of course, that’s why the university hired him, for a smoother script. With his tongue on autopilot, his mind wandered. Not to any place exactly, more into a state. A realm where gestating concepts had not yet taken form, had not yet “collapsed”, as his colleagues in the physics department would say.

“Building a successful startup at a massive scale is actually very simple. All you’re really doing is basic logical progression.” The podcast’s host responded, but not in continuation of what the professor said, “Start with a convenience—imagine the times when necessary work is no longer needed. Whose laborious effort is spared? For whom does it bring pleasure, relief, bliss, or the numbing of pain?… And then, you reason backwards, deconstructing the traits of this scenario, unraveling its intertwined components—how did this pain come about? What tool is used to grant pleasure? What tasks are required of this tool? Would features use uninvented or undefined functions to turn x into f(x)? Does it violate the laws of physics? Whose will needs to be persuaded? And that will—what value must its owner receive to surrender or to initiate? Drop by drop, the flood un-happens, reduced back into mist and rain, into clouds and creeks, into patches of frozen ice…and you always begin from a state of higher entropy. Creating value is the act of salvaging order from a system of chaos.” The host beamed.

Based on the host’s facial expressions as he previously listened, the professor thought the host to be someone who makes an effort to follow what other people have to say. The kind of student his gaze would gravitate towards in moments of vulnerability, when even a sliver of recognition is to be taken as validation against the void. Every lecture, he’d always try to first spot these students. It’s weird to have one talking back at him just now—especially in a way that mirrors the very structure of his own argument. Uncanny, even, it felt like an alien puppeteering a human body stitched from various corpses - no, not Frankenstein’s monster - puppeteering a single corpse that had been alive just now - the corpse he himself gave birth to - no, it’s puppeteering his corpse, reanimated by something foreign, staring back blankly. 

Was it ever valid to assume that the player is of the same species as the playable character?

The professor felt he should say something. Their silence is being faithfully transcribed. Future listeners would think he was too distracted or, worse, not witty enough to make a quick comeback.

“You’re not wrong. It’s just - I never thought about utilizing - no. I have never and will never exploit my inspiration or my craft. Even though I’m sharing an engineered approach to bring creativity onto myself, I would never write for any other purpose than for the sake of creation itself. I only write when inspired - ” The word muse almost slipped out. He bit the inside of his lower lip and scooped her back in. Muse as a concept is too cliche, despite how much he believed and devoted—for him, writing was never less sensually intense than being stroked by God Himself—he didn’t want some cliche like muse to subtract from what he just said. It would be blasphemous. 

“I didn’t mean it in the sense of adopting your approach for monetary gains. I was trying to use your tool - ” The host caught a flicker of displeasure across his guest’s face, before the professor even noticed it himself, “your theory, what you’ve developed - what you’ve refined, distilled, concentrated from years of writing. I think it might also apply to other fields.”

“And why would that be necessary. What’s the point?” The professor smiled. Through his untightened lips, this line seeped out. Only as it was leaving did he realize the condescending tone wrapped in what he said. But the host didn’t seem to parse this subtly. Perhaps he’d interviewed enough people to hide any reactions that originated from his personal self. But the host paused. The professor could almost see the loading wheel spinning above his head. 

“I think,” when he finally spoke again, the host’s voice came from all angles, as if inside the professor’s mind, “if we can grow a methodology by adopting all the practical ways of every field, human knowledge would become whole again.”

“But you’re only making analogies. Elaborate ones, I’ll give you that; I never thought my prompts for creative writing students might be used in finance - ”

“I’m not equating fundamentally different concepts,” the host cut in, catching the professor off guard, “The analogy is to highlight how different things may hold identical relations.”

“Ah, I see. You’re getting into the ‘Dao’ of things, philosophical abstractions. Well, of course parallels can be drawn. We’re all fundamentally human!” The professor subconsciously mimicked how the host had pronounced fundamentally, adding serious weight to each syllable that they’ve become discrete from their neighbors, “Humans interacting with environments. My readers, your customers—they are external to us, systems beyond our control. Writers, businessmen, I mean founders or what-have-yous, at the end of the day, are humans responding to different stimuli, attempting to navigate environments to arrive at their intended points. Things hold the same relations not because creative writing converges with startup-founding, but because we perceive and interact through the same lens of consciousness.”

“Exactly. The lens of consciousness.” The host paused and reflected: “Which is an algorithm adapting to different contexts running on the same set of neurons. And so, at the fun-da-men-tal level,” the word is now heavily chopped at each syllable, becoming altogether less elegant, like a gap-toothed scientist, “This world, or our perceptions, is encoded by the same underlying stuff. Low-dimensional stuff dressed in high-dimensional fluff. Where different fields diverge is an illusion. Fundamentally, writing a piece that resonates with other people is the same as running a company that satisfies other people. They’re just different designs of user interfaces under the same cognitive operating system.”

“Okay. Well. Following that train of thought, you’re trying to figure out this one way to be able to do anything.” 

The professor was mildly impatient. He suddenly realized how the host had led him through a maze only to arrive at a pre-buried monologue, instead of listening to what he, the featured guest, wished to share. Having his expressive agency stolen didn’t irritate him; it brought about a comforting sense of familiar boredom—reminded him of that professor at dinner parties who always tried to steer conversations toward philosophy to impress new faces.

“One way to perceive myself as being able to do anything.” The host didn’t further elaborate; instead tossed the conversation back to him.

“And why would that be necessary. What’s the point?” This time, no longer condescending, the professor felt himself to be a kindergarten teacher whose job wasn’t to debate, but to coax toddlers into speaking a few more sentences, just so that they could get better at expressing themselves through language.

“To create a commutative model… frees our descendants from desire, because with this model as a user manual, a treasure map, they could get to anywhere in life. Eventually, when enough human lives have iterated to fully flesh out the intricate details of the model, and we have gathered well-documented results from these cyclic tests and trials, we might understand what our creator is after.”

Our creator?

As if a toddler suddenly quoted the bible, the substitute teacher internally rolled their eyes at the unexpected intrusion of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.

The host carried on, “Our creator(s). What were they trying to solve for, trying to develop, by introducing conscious beings and their aggregate civilizations into this world?”

“Hm. What would those with world-creating powers use a treasure map of a toy world for?”

The professor genuinely mused this over. An interesting writing prompt for sure, despite the unnecessarily long detour to get here. Or perhaps the host was leading him on—an immersive style of interviewing, like how some performers favor method acting. Personally, though, the professor thinks that tricking oneself shouldn’t be necessary if the receiver is smart enough to get the point quickly with plain, verbal articulation.

“In a novel, I might explore the benefits of having such a ‘treasure map’ by tracing its emergence across different altitudes of life’s pursuit. Narration from multiple-perspectives: some stories grand and systemic - a refugee trying to bring her illegitimate birth mother across borders; some clueless with absurdly high stakes - a trader who stole millions returning home to find everything ransacked and accounts hacked; some fast-paced with hopeful anxiety - an underground casino guard, while looking for office jobs to start a family, accidentally witnessing a murder; some ridiculously frivolous - a college girl trying to snag a rich husband after her best friend gets a luxury handbag—I’m not misogynistic, just thinking out loud here—what was the overarching theme again? Oh, right, ‘the commutative model’, as you call it.”

The host gave an encouraging nod. The professor continued: “Characters picturing their ideal state of life, reasoning backwards to see what conditions must be met. Then, finding the key events to trigger this change. Deconstructing further to relate things to where they are now. Maybe it’s a self-corrective process that shifts and changes as they go. Some succeed—families reunited, stolen wealth enjoyed, pasts buried, social classes ascended. Some fail—orphaned forever, lives locked away, ending in a violent death or worse, chronic loneliness. And some might not follow through—a gust breezes by and people chase something else. Old desires and their downstream possibilities shrivelled, forgotten, no one around to witness or mourn, as the new identity has a new set of desires—lower-hanging, perhaps, greater promises, perhaps.”

And what would be the value extracted from these lives? What good would a model do when everyone can be easily made into simple creatures in an eternal search for food, sex, and one more night’s sleep? Whatever the solution our creator(s) are searching for, it only exists to give meaning to the riddle. But why create riddles for the sake of self-justifying solutions? A simulation might be a better comparison, but simulations are made to evoke feelings, teach lessons, grant insights with minimal consequence—but what do the programmers not already know that needs iterations of lives to figure out?

Noticing the host had leaned in closer, the professor felt an oncoming rush of shyness.

“Depending on the intent and medium,” He continued, “for example, if I need a philosophical tone, I’d write an ending to reveal that the creator did it just to prove that they could—wanting to play god, even as literal gods. But if for a short story, I’d finish on a playful note that everything was done for entertainment, with our world created as a reality show to shave off their eternal boredom. And the commutative model is just a lousy byproduct to be tossed out every now and then.”

“What if you base the writing on your own belief? If you have to bet with personal faith.” Seeing that the professor’s train of thought has lost momentum, the host prodded lightly.

“…to better understand themselves. In this narrative, our world would be a simplified simulation of a reality that houses these higher beings, these creator(s). So they could extract our commutative model applicable to their world.”

Unsatisfied, the host pressed on: “That brings us back into a loop. There’s no meaning if we’re just mirroring worlds with simulations, there could be infinitely many layers—”

“Not necessarily. We could be created from a hackathon in their world. To see from whose simulation, running on the sponsor’s computing platform, of course, from which a commutative model as complex as the one in their reality would emerge. We could be created as a grad student’s research project, where by tallying the sum total or ratios of joy and gratification to pain and suffering under different commutative models, they could optimize social infrastructures through controlled experimentation instead of qualitative debates. It also could be that our commutative model and our creator’s model aren’t hierarchical after all, meaning we’re not just blurred second copies of an already-blurry photocopy, but we're all sections of a loop—where the reality that created our consciousness was itself created by the artificial consciousness that we’ve yet to create, in a ringed timeline in which everyone births themselves.”

For the first time, the host smiled, revealing two gapped teeth: “Interesting. Going down a rabbit hole, only to end up in the starting spot—stuck in a loop, forever falling—isn’t that what orbiting is?”

“Really, I could give you a thousand of these.” The professor learned it’s best to ignore some questions and went on: “To calculate the age of our creator’s own civilization by running multiple simulation trials and averaging the time needed for a civilization like theirs to reach a commutative model. Or to gain political advantage by perfecting the commutative model faster than their opponents, if it can truly advance anything and get anyone anywhere. Or to instill compassion into gods-in-training before they become beings that govern life like us, you know, like CEOs working entry-level jobs for a comprehensive understanding of how things work. Hell, it might be an art piece—the commutative model, not us or our reality, when reduced to its purest form of abstract math, is just an aesthetically pleasing installation to our creators, to be hung in one of their mansions as a flashy centerpiece.”

Worshipping his own creativity, the professor cowered his voice to a more humble tone: “But really, once we assume the existence of creator(s) with intent, we’re bound to be stuck in a logical fallacy. Any motivations we propose are biased by our own lens: prejudices of human logic, earthly physics, this universe’s cause and effects… a watermark of human thoughts that we can never scrub clean.”

“Thank you, Professor. That was an amazing discussion. For our audience listening—many of whom aspire to be the best-selling author of their time—could you share a little bit of your creative process for writing an interesting, meaningful story?”