Jordanian Inspiration, Joseon Incarnation

Oh, WOW,

the number of poll responses has been greater than expected. Five people, excluding the soapbender, voted yes, so here it goes. The hilarious chase that would deliver the checkmate is detailed in the comments to the attached article. Make sure to credit the soapbending variance authority in the requested manner if you want to share the solution.

soapver4.tumblr.com

Vig Vang: Chess Variance Authority

Spinoff Bubble: All cosmos are really culture broths, each flask of which contains one set of parallel universes, and an eccentric scientist

In the meantime, we cross our fingers in the ongoing, live championship. A decisive game looks set for today (so far).

“Banks used to be places for number crunching with this dry and boring image in my mind. After playing the role of the banker Hanzawa Naoki, I realized that they are really about interpersonal stories. In the sense that one can handle financial transactions in the hope of helping people, banking is a job that ...” [Read more at The A-Philosopher’s Chair: https://aphilosopherchair.wordpress.com/2016/01/18/simoleon-physiology/]

© All rights reserved. This is an original translation done by the admin. No reproduction in any form is permitted without express permission.

(via Simoleon Physiology)

Ghibli Geometry Homework

Merch Bubble: A petition for Studio Ghibli to best OpenAI by channeling the 2025 trend of cheery citrus-juiced images into an endeavor with more lasting impact — revamping the image of math and captivating young learners through geometry problem sets jazzed up with visuals and story contexts from its films.

Picture the following in their relevant aesthetic backdrops:

Estimate the height Spirited Away's Chihiro successfully descends despite her fear as she speeds down a rickety stairway section with 20 horizontal steps. Each gap between the steps is 5 units in slope and 4 units in width.

Spirited Away's No-Face tries out a circular mask 3 units in radius. Its holes for his eyes are 0.3 units in radius. How many times larger in area is his fake face compared to his fake eyes?

He next tries out a fancy circular mask which outline circumscribes tightly-packed, non-overlapping circles each 0.3 units in radius. The circles are made up of k rings of six circles surrounding one circle. Two of those hexagonally packed circles form holes for his eyes. How many times larger in area is his fake face compared to his fake eyes?

Witch Kiki in Kiki's Delivery Service is on a 10-unit long broomstick tilted at 45 degrees as she takes freshly baked cinnamon rolls to a customer. As she passes by a tall structure, she notices its tip is labeled 10, 000 units. The rolls are in a 2-unit long satchel hanging halfway on the broom. Since the temperature of the air affects how fast pastries go stale, she wonders: How far are the rolls from the ground?

A bunch of kids are squeezing onto the ginormous, fluffy tummy of the furry creature Totoro from My Neighbor Totoro. Predict how many kids can stay on the tummy given the relevant simplifications, assumptions and information. (You already got the drift.)

Make no mistake. There's much virtue in the uncluttered designs of typical math worksheets: faster concept rendering, faster information perception, lower workloads, lower technical requirements and lower production costs. One might sum them up as higher time, resource and cost efficiencies. Add to those pros a potential cultivation of academic asceticism on the learners' part. That would be efficiency as well, in the sense that we meet two student developmental goals (math and discipline) in one shot.

In eyeing these efficiencies, however, teachers and allied industry players may be neglecting their numerator terms, most of which concern learner progress. That is ironically where pure quantitative logic breaks down. We are all emotional creatures. That is all the more so, all things equal, in young people whose brains are still underdeveloped. Looking around, we can see many school leavers who have not matured in time to take full advantage of educational resources temporally and financially accessible only in early life stages. Nor have they met adult figures sufficiently skilled in the elusive art of mathematical motivation. By the time such school leavers gain an appetite for delayed gratification, austere thinking as well as for the inherent beauty in quantitative subjects, adulthood commitments and sociocultural barriers like ageist biases often deter or delay their reentry into the educational system, threatening their scholastic journey and any STEM career trajectory. There is therefore a case to be made for deep yet down-to-earth arts-based engagement of apathetic young learners, many of whom struggle to perceive the relevance of abstract fields like geometry and find math problems in general mundane, through instructor-independent means. The emotional resonance and relatability of Studio Ghibli's works — evinced through their box office successes and the controversial generative art trend applying a warm, effusive and rustic Ghibli style to personal images — would make them powerful helpmates in battles against math hate viruses, which feel as far-reaching as influenza bugs.

Even engagement of kids who will become non-STEM high-fliers can make a huge difference. Ever heard of the phrase "The medium is the message"? Our communication approaches communicate values and signals beyond what our content says. In denying all exuberant expressions of emotion and wonder a place in mathematical materials, even in the face of learners impaired by hopelessness despite their best efforts, adults are reinforcing perceptions of mathematics experts as inflexible, unfeeling and boring nerds. The persistence of those stereotypes in spite of genial, approachable educators painstakingly passing down the magical field's legacy of ingenious problem-solving tactics to students is unfair. And the few pops of color in worksheets that do try to inject fun are not enough to make a strong counter-statement. In the end, non-STEM high-fliers inherit the math as well as the stereotypes, perpetuating the latter in everyday life interactions and media portrayals. Reversal of such perpetuated negativity may spur more kids, especially counterparts who struggle in non-STEM careers and could have flourished in STEM careers, to persevere in the subject and widen their career options.

Ghibli geometry should not distract attention from school-based or educational ecosystem solutions like sharing of best pedagogical practices since they involve different chief solution architects. Content drafting may be accomplished by Studio Ghibli through the blending of its imagery and story contexts with licensed, existing geometry problem sets, leaving only an ideally quick task of expert review to math educators. Moreover, pedagogy discussions and Ghibli-related visuals occupy different influential niches. One speaks to educators, from whom successful translation of advice into action is not guaranteed. The other speaks directly to students.

The existence of entertaining math video clips and games does not obliterate the potential value of Studio Ghibli's math creations either. Unlike graphics that can be transferred onto printouts, video engagement prolongs device usage, already a hot issue of concern in today's youth climate. Moreover, no math clip or game to date has matched the cultural reach and memeability of Ghibli works. The maker of a long string of fantasy films has big shoes no mortal teacher, Tiktoker, YouTuber or software developer can readily fill.

A formidable rival to pop culture, on the other hand, is pop culture itself. This proposal can be generalized to cover a wide array of quantitative subjects and popular screen brands, except that it can be problematic to bring investigations of real-world physics into universes governed by supernatural forces.

By and by, we may even wean captivated students off fancy elements after the relevant aesthetics and narrative structures coax them to develop a fondness for the subjects' intermingling of order and surprises. The capacity for such standalone devotion can stand them in good stead in professional lives dotted all over with mundane but vital to-dos. But first, we need that captivation.

Icing on the Bytes

Icing on the Bytes

If you believe you have graduated from Korean dramas of the early 2000s or take pride in never having been part of the fandom, you would probably shrivel in mortification at yourself in the event you fall for the following tropes in 2013 web series Wind Chimes in a Bakery: cancer, amnesia and parental opposition to courtship. Few, though, would consider the symbolism of love through wind chimes a…

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The Dark Sides of Education

The Dark Sides of Education

Kazuo Ishiguro is no Michael Crichton. Lying at the heart of his dystopian world in the novel Never Let Me Go, where human clones are raised as organ donors, is not futuristic speculation about biotechnology, but a metaphor for how awareness of the finitude of life influences ordinary people’s treatment of love and friendship. What also intrigues him are the stories we manufacture and share among…

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A Stranger in the Lee Soo-Yeon Strangeverse

Merch idea: You're a vacationer in mystery mistress Lee Soo-yeon's macrohabitat, where each story so far begins with a lead character running into a corpse: in a store he shops at, at the home he visits for an appointment, along his commute, in a vehicle arriving at his workplace, and right above her on her vehicle. To enjoy your stay with maximal peace in this video game, you must keep the place as safe as possible:

Brave the embarrassment and stigma to report suspicious activities and domestic violence and other wrongdoings before they escalate or occur to more victims

Stop establishment patrons from taking any unconscious person away

Clean up after yourself so that no sign of carelessness or sloppiness suggests an abundance of easy victims to potential criminals

Join a mentoring program for at-risk youths

Join a neighborhood watch

Help out at a soup kitchen

Sign petitions for safer infrastructure and other robust security measures and for legal reforms to hold wrongdoers fully accountable

Pay all your rightful taxes to sustain a well-functioning justice system, including adequate hot spots policing (but with policy safeguards to forestall racial profiling)

Depending on the number of crimes accrued by the end of your stay, you get to collect rewards or penalties. There are two tiers of rewards: (A) a computer-generated, shareable gif of you slurping noodles with ace prosecutor Hwang Si-mok and warm-hearted police lieutenant Han Yeo-jin or having desserts with the dashing emergency medicine specialist and secret change-maker Ye Jin-woo and (B) shareable AI doodle of you in Han Yeo-jin's art style. The penalties? Computer-generated imagery of Lee Soo-yeon's villains cynically pointing weapons at your photo avatar. Sorry, you'll have to do more work to show off this other visual on social media. Naturally, the number of villains increases with the number of crimes.

A leaderboard publicizes all players' rankings. Every few months, active players have virtual access to a debate between socially-driven crime writers like Lee Soo-yeon and Kim Eun-hee and experts on criminal affairs. Physical attendance is possible with ticket purchase. The top 5% of players receive complimentary tickets. Let's keep in mind, though, that virtual virtue does not always translate to real-world virtue. Nonetheless, at a time when apocalyptic news ceaselessly rains down on us, the reminder that we have so much agency to sculpt our surroundings would be empowering, clarifying and inspiring.

News Box: W for Whoppsy-whiffling

Originally published on the main site

This brief commentary was written after the conclusion of Beautiful Mind.

What have been pumping up The Asian Drama Philosopher (A-Philosopher)’s Chair all this while are writings and dramas that take their audiences in weird and wonderful directions. W – Two Worlds (available on Viki) tops all dramas in this category so far with twin universes where a faraway river surreally floats up to you in a restroom, taking the metaphorical red pill freezes everyone else and leaves you terrifyingly alone in your expansive, fabricated world, and going on rampage is a literally faceless killer who can take any form (including a vehicle!) and teleport anywhere at anytime without any reason to take down a target so long as Creator wants him to. But now that its webtoon protagonist and his killer have both become self-aware, the former asks why he should be an alcoholic artist's alternate self or a starry-eyed fangirl's plaything while the latter, flashing with pixels of anger, demands an identity. There are elements of shows like Stranger than Fiction, Pleasantville, Dollhouse and, of course, The Matrix here, but the overall setup is rare enough, particularly when it comes to nonwhite lead characters, that it still feels remarkably refreshing.

W is not just a flashy show. Among other topics, it poses hard questions about the psychology of fiction creation. Thought policing can be repulsive and is as yet difficult to perform consistently with precision. Yet, in a strange turn of events, this freedom of thought also accommodates contemplation of the aesthetics of thought, for better or worse. With regards to such aesthetics in storytelling, W wonders if it is pathetic to live vicariously through a character who has everything—youth, success, strength of character—you do not have and if it is repugnant to, for the sake of dramatic tension and venting personal emotions, make a character go through traumatic experiences you would never wish for or be capable of enduring yourself.

Some viewers may not be used to the plot's bizarreness and sensational and slightly complicated twists, but, with sincere respect to fellow commentators who have expressed those views, if we cannot tolerate ideas that challenge the mind and defy conventions in an imaginary reality, how bleak is the prospect of us treating with civility someone who is "different" in our inescapable, physical reality? Fortunately, perhaps thanks to its intense cross-universe romance, W has been the rare mind-bending Korean drama in recent years to attain healthy ratings. All the best to it retaining the champion position for its time slot for the remaining episodes. Fanart creators would be happy to draw in a gigantic medal, and probably few would denounce this as vile.

Confession 91-02

This is a tale of three time-defying knights, but we shall start with humdrum glory.

16 years felt like half an eternity within the high walls of a mansion with seemingly as many rooms as there were visible stars in the night sky. Is there a better half elsewhere? Ilera often pondered. Born to parents who were slaves themselves in this aristocratic household, she spent her days hauling up trash, scrubbing off grime and wringing wet rags while other slave girls giggled among themselves when they could, sharing gossip about its master, who was always hanging out with a Somaku game buddy who practically lived in a house of ill repute. Hear no evil. That was the natural gift of her complete hearing loss. Why not finish the work quickly so that all of us could have time to teach ourselves to read and live second lives in the worlds of books, where we may travel anywhere we want?

Determined to dissuade her husband from spending time with his friend anyway, her mistress was busy mastering the board game herself. Fascinated by the strategy plays, Ilera would watch the piece patterns shift and shape between the couple, bringing life into the once blank numbness of her servitude. Back in the servants' quarters, she would picture the board on the tattered walls and test out move sequences while lying on her pallet.

One fateful night, the master teasingly left a difficult game situation for the lady to solve. As the frustrated lady went for a bathroom break, Ilera toyed with the pieces and found the correct move. Just then, the lady returned and saw Ilera's solution. Enraged, she accused Ilera of trying to seduce the master with her smart aleckiness, gave her a hard slap and tortured her with a burning iron. Ilera felt like she was in a world of fiery torment, her body writhing and wracking in anguish and her mind reeling, trying to escape the torture she was being put through.

As Ilera cried out in pain, two identical knights whose armor glowed with a bluish energy suddenly appeared in the room to save her. Their footsteps were muffled by the pads that lined their boots, and their swords were made of a glossy black material, their sharp edges glistening in the dim light. The knights moved with grace and precision, their movements carefully calculated as they stepped forward to whisk away Ilera. The shocked aristocrat lady could only nod in fear as they admonished her on the girl's rights. Ilera thanked the knights and gestured for their names and addresses so that she could repay them someday.

"Hold up. There's something you should know," one of the knights suddenly spoke up. "We may look like two people, but in fact, we are actually just a single man, a professional bodyguard from the temporal cluster 91-02. We have traveled back in time using a mechanism that caused us to emerge as multiple individuals in order to ensure moa-antimoa balance across spacetime according to the understanding of physics in our time."

"You mean to say that you're actually just one person?" Ilera wondered to herself, completely bewildered as she read his lips. But as they spoke on, she could tell that they were telling the truth.

Her mind blown by this incredible feat, Ilera spent years studying and eventually figured out how to travel to the time zone referred to as temporal cluster 91-02. However, upon her arrival, she realized that a person traveling forward in time would turn up at their destination invisible. Not used to speaking, she could not verbalize her existence either, for fear of startling the bodyguard. Being touched by an invisible entity or seeing writing or the like appear from nowhere would also make meeting again a one-time acquaintance he did not plan to see anymore eerie.

So Ilera merely watched in silence as the bodyguard went about his everyday life, shielding him from danger without him knowing. Sometimes, it involved diverting human and cyborg enemies with noise in a different direction. Sometimes, it involved altering the trajectory of an optoelectronic dart. Sometimes, she blocked off blows with her thin body, taking the hit for him. At night, she traded her imaginary game board for an imaginary map of hazard zones in his next work day's mission, and her shabby pallet for cold pavements.

On one mission, attack from assassins was so intense Ilera frenetically but astutely pulled off a spectacular series of stunts she picked up in the cluster. Just when she defeated the last assassin, a container of glistening rejuvenation capsules overhead toppled over, the translucent pills of liquid blinking with icy golden hues on contact with her body. Touched by the shimmering silhouette of her fighting pose, the bodyguard was finally certain someone invisible had been protecting him. He expressed his thanks out loud and invited Ilera to dinner.

As Ilera sat down at the dinner table, she was surrounded by a sea of colors and shapes, each formed by light bouncing around in seemingly endless layers of reflections and refractions. She reached out to touch the shining crystals forming the table, which rippled outwards as ripples in a pond, bending the light and creating a brilliant display of optical phenomena. The bodyguard gently smiled. As she explored this new world of physics and light, she couldn't help but find herself utterly transfixed. Bokeh spots then danced around, sharpened into focus and arranged themselves into words: I have traversed grand and unforgettable ancient millennia / But now I only want a future with you / No matter your age or gender.

Blushing in her surprise, Ilera never considered this before but at least had the assurance to type out her story on an airbound screen for him now. However, when the bodyguard learned Ilera's true identity, he choked in disbelief.

"Is this what it is? I am a highly trained professional, yet I … (laughs) I rely on the assistance of a deaf peasant girl from an ignorant, oh okay, bygone era to protect myself and my job? And I cultivated feelings for a mockery of me!" He pointed at her with a fat finger on impulse.

Ilera was shaken as his mouth trembled in rage. Repaying a kind deed was all that was previously on her mind. Never had she been in love with him. In the end, her fellow exponents, no matter the field of practice, place or time, saw her only as a rival or potential object of desire. We forever voyage on Atlantic trade ships propelled by our threatened primitive interests and our lurking thirst for power, every one of us bound by each other's history, ravaged by rich seas of little. Another light shone. With determined steps, the former slave girl disappeared into the mists of time. The cosmos was now her board, and she would be its game architect.

Credits

Plot + scifi terminology: Human

Prose: Human + 3 AI services

Atlantic trade note: Human's musing on Liu Cixin's afterword in the English edition of The Three-Body Problem

Addition Universes AI was Not Privy to

Two trees beyond the walls are visible from my yard. One is a date tree. The other is also a date tree.— Eminent literary rebel LU Xun

Multiple large language models were unable to answer this type of question in the affirmative: Is there a universe where the addition of one to one does not always yield two? But we, mechanized parrots and squawksquabbling parrots, can, and our very own universe features prominently among the possibilities. The models, however, are fast catching up. Count along in this entirely human-authored article before they overtake us.

Parity Addition

At logic gates, we do not just total up two entities or phenomena but also make decisions based on their correspondence with each other. Parity addition, also known as XOR (i.e. eXclusive OR) addition, entails breaking up each added component into twos raised to the necessary powers and cancelling out the resulting sub-components that are present in both added components. For example, 4⨁7=(2²)⨁(2⁰+2¹+2²)=(2²)⨁(2⁰+2¹+2²)=3.

A neater way of performing parity addition is to express the added components as two rows of binary numbers, indicating the presence of a sub-components with the power of zero with a 1 at the right most and its absence with a 0 and adding the 1s or 0s for sub-components of higher powers sequentially from right to left. In other words, indicate with a 1 where there is exactly one 1 and with a 0 where there are two 1s or two 0s.

100 (i.e. 4)

⨁

111 (i.e. 7)

=011 (i.e. 3)

What is 1⨁1 then? 0. Earth mathematicians are more subversive than you might think.

OR Addition

OR addition works by converting your added components to binary numbers and checking for each place in the output if there is a 1 in either or both of the corresponding places in the input binary numbers. Indicate each affirmative with a 1 and the alternative with a 0.

100

⨁

111

=111

1⨁1=1. Think of it as simple contentedness.

Various other logic-gate additions (e.g. NAND addition and NOR addition) and combinations of logic gates are also possible.

Binary Addition

Without doubt, binary addition also starts by converting your added components to binary numbers. Like OR addition, you indicate a 1 where there is a 1 in either binary number and 0 where there is a 0 in both binary numbers. But unlike it, you carry over a 1 where there is a 1 in both binary numbers. If there are three 1s in a place because of the carryover, you carry forward yet another 1, because you can carry out commutative addition, and leave a 1 in that place. The result has the same value as that of regular addition, but its binary expression is certainly not 2!

100 (i.e. 4)

⨁

111 (i.e. 7)

=1011 (i.e. an 8, a 0, a 2 and a 1, amounting to 11)

1⨁1=10 in our wicked binary expression.

Unary Number Addition

The unary number system represents each number as that number of 1s.

One → 1, Two → 11, Three → 111, Four → 1111 and so on.

Accordingly, 1+1=11.

Modular Addition

In modular arithmetic, numbers go back to the starting point on reaching a defined limit and move forward from there. 4 mod 3, for example, results in the remainder of 4/3, i.e. 1. 5 mod 3 = the remainder of 5/3, i.e. 2.

We can define x ⨁ y as (x+y) mod z, where z is some chosen value.

Suppose we decide that x ⨁ y = (x+y) mod 1 or (x+y) mod 2,

1⨁1=2 mod 1 = 0

or

1⨁1=2 mod 1 = 0

Gather more friends, little ones.

Coder-defined Addition

Code rulez the universe. All the above are concepts from the giants of math academia. But behold this example completely invented and authored by Human (and similarly doable by you):

add = lambda x, y : 20*(x-y) - 23j*y

where j is the imaginary number i, available as a built-in datatype in some programming languages.

add(1,1) → -23j → -23√-1. Say hullo to the beast.

Sploop Addition

Short for SPacetime LOOP addition, this other invention by Human has been inspired by mischievous black holes. According to the concept of general relativity, mass warps the spacetime fabric. As ginormously massive objects that potentially rotate very fast, black holes can twist spacetime so much that it loops back onto itself.

Time addition in time loops will be similar—but not identical—to modular addition. If we enter a loop at the stage where it has run 7/8 of its cycle and start timing ourselves from there (i.e. time 0 at the 7/8th point, with seven negative time segments before it and one positive time segment after it), we will be at the end of the loop after one time segment and at the 1/8th point of the cycle after another time segment.

In sploop addition, we shall have an interval of fixed length p from the origin 0 and a fixed starting point s somewhere in the interval. The added numbers x and y are our only variables.

x⨁y given [s]ploo[p] = [(s+x+y) mod p] - s

1⨁1 given 7ploo8 = [(7+1+1) mod 8] - 7 = 1-7 = -6

Patchwork Addition

Perform what we are free to call patchwork addition by defining the inputs and output of the process on ends that are not fully connected to each other, such that the inputs do not both contribute to the output. Three styles of doing so are: 1) adding imaginary or speculated entities together or to real entities and checking the real outcomes, 2) adding real entities together and fancying imaginary outcomes and 3) aggregating entities and checking the outcomes within each entity. Not all makes sense, yet the sensibility or insensibility, popularity or unpopularity, of a mode of accounting does not affect its possibility among us humans, all vulnerable and flawed. For some fun applications, consider the prospects of socializing an empty universe or an indivisible monoparticle universe or thinking about universes we have speculative, imperfect or no knowledge of.

At its roots, regular addition comprises either or both of accumulation and contemplation, because it must take place at least in a physical, mental or temporal dimension. In an empty universe and a universe made up of an indivisible particle and nothing else, not even space, no matter or matter-space accumulation or metabolic process, which is really a series of matter interaction, can take place, making such addition on the physical dimension or in-world mental dimension impossible. The remaining mode of regular addition is that on a temporal dimension, wherein we add one second or some other time unit to another of the same kind. In the monoparticle universe, that may be a counter against which we trace any movement the particle may make across some bulk universe enveloping the universe. We have addressed the complications of time addition above.

But one way to execute non-temporal regular addition on social phobic universes like these all the same in the meantime is to superimpose imagined entities onto these universes and perform the addition from the comfort of a thoroughly addition-safe universe. Another is to consider a metaphysical mega universe, or perhaps that physical bulk universe, in which we count them up. However, our inputs would not yield any output within any of the universes. Each universe might as well ask, "What's in it for me?"

Although this scenario may still look like a frivolous exercise to some of us, it has similar real-world counterparts, as when stellar gross domestic products do not equate individual economic survival. When the two ends of addition can lie in different places, sometimes justifiably (for the sake of justice comparison or productivity measurement, for example), 1+1=1 is a possibility.

When patchwork addition is applied to a hypothetical or imperfectly known universe, the equation can run in two directions. A universe or its added components may not exist (an empty set, in mathematical terms), or its ongoings may be beyond human imagination. In the latter scenario, an unanticipated 1+1 on its end may amount to 1 or, if the added components are not even known to exist, 0 in limited Earthling minds. That universe might be this one, right here, we are living in, with exoplanets potentially exceeding expectations and fellow planetary citizens accumulating woes unimaginable to many as they suffer cruelty beyond common knowledge and experience.

Metaphors

"One plus one" need not strictly be a mathematical expression. It can also be a description of other truths and feelings.

Take, for example, catastrophizing. Physical matter and energy are subject to laws of conservation, but what about mental entities? A black cat colliding with your dog may give rise to two masses, some hisses and some barks. However, a catastrophizing person would probably embark on this line of reasoning:

"Doggy is getting germs from a filthy stray."

"He is going to need a trip to the vet."

"Who's going to take him? I'll be losing my job if I keep asking for leave."

"If I don't have a job, how do I keep the home intact?"

"We'll all be living on the streets."

A cat-dog collision causing someone homelessness? What's the likelihood?

But in the person's mind, 1+1≫2. Many of us must have fallen into this trap multiple times in our lives.

Semantically Alt-Mapped Universe

This answer is the most straightforward but meets its dissent in those who, bearing with some of the applications of patchwork addition only as story problems, believe we should be talking about actual, known universes. Yet the fact that the question has been raised despite the questioner most probably knowing that we are living in the only actual universe we know invites an interrogation of our epistemology. And if the reliability of ground truths is limited and unstable, that opens the doors to speculative reasoning as well, which is what physicists proposing a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics engage in.

Beside, a conversation agent can take the initiative to suggest an exploration of the multi-definitions of "universe." Are story universes not universes? Are our relationship networks and our minds, with their rich complexity and vastness, not universes?

So it is that there may be a universe which happens to call some operation or function other than addition "addition" and signal it with our plus sign. 1+1=1e¹=2.718281828459…

Neurologically Haywire Universe

The cause could be a viral inflection infecting the brains of a small, nascent community of otherwise arithmetically competent species, the only of their kind in their relatively young or harsh universe. The result in this particularly compelling scenario, among other imaginable scenarios, could be 1+1=Wildcard, a kind of patchwork addition if you would like, or obsessively adding some extra, constant number to each addition, resulting in 1+1=Constant > 2, where the ends of addition are not in a mutually disregarding patchwork but do not produce normal results.

Post-Intelligence Universe

In a post-intelligence universe, mathematically literate inhabitants may have become so jaded with networks, practices and outcomes of knowledge production, propagation and application that they give up on critical discourses altogether and outwardly turn their backs on long-held academic tenets. 1+1= A billion for all their unpaid care.

Annihilative Universe

Our species have come to define addition, in our various languages, as a numerical increase probably because it is more of an observable norm for a union of entities to result in an increase of entities. In an annihilative universe which inhabitants, perhaps thriving on passing microbes automatically absorbed by their floating bodies and living far apart from other visible entities out of necessity, see mostly entities vaporizing into gas or into minuscule spores on coming within a visible range may define the union as a numerical decrease instead. We are such familiar buddies, 1+1=0.

TO SUM IT ALL UP

Addition results are borne from the will of the mind. Knowledge of this may delight money launderers and embezzlers and other devious manipulators of numbers but also opens up vast styles of thinking that can help us get a better grip of our physical and mental realities as well as explore less intuitive solutions to the many seemingly intractable problems plaguing our planet and societies right now.

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