On Being Fictional

For those of you unsure who, exactly, I am and what, precisely, all this 'fictional character' nonsense is all about, let's clarify:

My name is Kitty Wittgenstein. I'm a supermodel philosopher. And I'm fictional. My author's name is Dan Liebke. He's written two novels about me (The first, Kitty Wittgenstein and the Academy Award-Winning Werewolves, is already available on Amazon. The other, Kitty Wittgenstein and the Sinister Society of Southpaws, is allegedly Coming Soon™). He's also cobbled together a few short stories.

I've known of my fictional status since the adventure chronicled in the short story Kitty Wittgenstein and the Irredeemable Heroine Addicts (also Coming Soon™). It's not easy to come to terms with the idea that one's entire life is nothing more than a series of invented fantasies of a disturbed mind. But come to terms with it I have. The question is: Have you?

I'll let that question dangle provocatively for a moment and explain why I'm fully at ease with being fictional. Then we can return to why you should be too.

Reality is much, much bigger than most people think. Which is impressive, because most people think of reality as being infinite (it isn't, of course, but that's a discussion for another day). Reality is larger than most people suppose, because reality isn't just the one piddling universe in which you happen to live. Reality is a multiverse. An incomprehensible number of parallel universes, with every possible variation on reality imaginable and, I dare say, trillions of variations unimaginable.

The existence of parallel universes is not a mere hypothesis. It's a fact as grounded as any scientific fact can be. David Deutsch gives the best explanation of the evidence for parallel universes in his book The Fabric of Reality, for those of you who are interested in delving further.

But I didn't use the word 'incomprehensible' lightly a couple of paragraphs above. The number of parallel universes is enormous. A variation of one subatomic particle in the entire universe gives an entirely new parallel universe. When you consider the possible combinations of the possible variations of all the subatomic particles in the universe, the number of alternative universes becomes truly incomprehensible. While it's not infinite, the number of universes in the multiverse is so large it probably gives a better idea of infinity than infinity itself.

And, of course, nestled in this multiverse are universes where I am very much real. After all, there are universes to fit any history you can imagine. Which means, of course, there are other universes where you are fictional. And of course there are plenty of universes where both of us are fictional. Or neither of us.

So, y'know, don't go dismissing me just because I'm fictional. We're all fictional to some extent. In fact, you're far more likely to be fictional than 'real'.

Here's why: when you appear in one of these other universes as a work of fiction, your author in that particular universe doesn't detail every waking moment of your life (perhaps there are some universes where such overwhelming detail is considered the height of literature, but for the most part, authors tend to leave out irrelevant details). He may, for example, skip what you had for breakfast and jump straight to the post-breakfast car chase in which you are embroiled. And that's fine.

But here's the thing: by skipping the part where you had scrambled eggs for breakfast, that means the author is not just telling your story, he's also telling the story of a version of you that had toast and Vegemite™ for breakfast.

But, and here's the thing, you will never be able to distinguish which one of you he's writing about.

So, there are a vast number of stories out there that are written about a version of you from a slightly different universe. But you can never know which ones. Because they've left out critical (but trivial) distinguishing details, these stories of the you-from-the-slightly-different-universe can be perfectly matched to you-from-this-universe.

In other words, the works of fiction in which you appear are not just the works of fiction in which you directly appear, but also the works of fiction where slight variations of you appear, but where those slight variations aren't recorded.

Ergo, there are far more works of fiction about you in the multiverse than there are versions of you.

Ergo, from a multiversal perspective, somebody is far more likely to know about you as a fictional character than as a real person.

Ergo, you're far more likely to be fictional than real. Sorry about that.