“And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds" - On the naturalistic possibility of soulmates

Towards an analytic philosophy of soulmates

For Neil Sinhababu who showed the way

When the earth was still flat, and the clouds made of fire and the mountains stretched up the sky- sometimes higher.

As a philosopher, I am often asked whether or not I believe in soulmates by people who are not aware of the priorities of contemporary philosophy. In the past, I sort of replied with a mumbled “Not really”. But I now believe this question is very interesting. I believe there is a cosmic sense of “soulmate” which can make sense even to people who do not believe in souls, destiny, etc.

There is a concept missing in English- soul shape, psyche configuration, character but specifically when understood as a repeatable thing, where multiple people might share the same character.

I first became aware of it when I read Ink and Vellum. The characters in these novels are not individuals but living archetypes. Archetypes that fight a ‘war’ across the space of all possible worlds/stories In nomine amoris to save the life of one of their own- to find the one thread in which Pan/Puck/Dumuzid/A young murdered gay man lives. All of narrative necessity is arranged against them, every trope says he must die because he is the tragic, fey young man who dies again and again in so many stories. Thus the heroes war against the pattern of reality- the narrative happening at the level of the archetype, but illustrated or presented to the reader through various instances of the archetype.

In a world of eight billion people, in a world where 100 billion people have lived some of them are probably very similar to you. Not perfectly similar, but damn similar.

But more than that. If reality is infinite, there may well be an infinity of me down to any level of detail desired. It is possible that reality is infinite but only a finite region has space suitable for humans and human-like creatures, but this seems unlikely.

Define ethotype as follows. Someone who is sufficiently similar to you as to have the same core personality dynamics has the same ethotype as you. We could use the word “archetype” here, but that, I think would be misleading because archetype is often used to refer to a deep but nonspecific similarity, whereas I am talking about a much more intimate mapping of the fundamental processes that make a person. Now humans vary along near-infinite dimensions and no people are going to be exactly similar in personality dynamics so we’re just going to have to draw a line around how similar something has to be to count as the same ethotype. That line drawing is going to be, to a large degree an arbitrary choice, as is the choice about what features are the most important.

But once we have a system of categories- and numerous categorizations are possible-, we can organize people into ethotypes based on the hypothetical taxonomy we have set up. Again, how similar two people have to be in order to count of instances of a singular ethotype is going to be a matter of convention, and in practice knowing that two people fell into the same ethotype is going to be impossible for humans- it’s too complex a question, but in principle, one could set up these categories and assign people to them. Some categories might have hundreds of instances, some might be unique.

Note also, ethotypes need not be lifelong. Depending on how the boundaries of the ethotypes are set, we will phase in and out of different ethotypes over our lives. Doing so is not equivalent to death, although perhaps a great change is somewhat like a death and a birth, and might deserve mourning or celebration or both.

Now suppose that every instance of a particular ethotype craved for a particular kind of person as a lover (or friend), a particular kind of person best categorised unde another ethotype. In that case, the second ethotype can be described as the first ethotype soulmate. Hence there is a naturalistic sense in which a person can have a soulmate.

Necessary and sufficient conditions for soulmates follow:

If to be of a certain ethotype is inherently to want to be with another particular ethotype, then the beloved ethotype is the lover ethotype’s soulmate.

Note that soulmate in this sense is a potentially (likely) asymmetric relation. Just because ethotype A intrinsically craves ethotype B does not mean that ethotype B intrinsically craves ethotype A. Of course, that does not necessitate a barrier to ethotype B from becoming deeply attached to ethotype A. One can fall in love with a person who is not one’s soulmate in this sense, and so B might still fall in love with A, even though their ethotype does not require it in the same way that A’s ethotype requires B.

Some cravings however will be tragic- ethotype A intrinsically wants ethotype B, but ethotype B intrinsically has little time for ethotype A.

One can have multiple soulmate ethotypes, and multiple people might fall into the same ethotype, and in this sense be soulmates.

There is another interesting consequence- It is entirely possible that falling in love is sufficient to change one’s ethotype, quite plausibly into an ethotype with an intrinsic connection with the ethotype of the person you have fallen in love with. In the sense of soulmate I am exploring here, falling in love with someone might make them your soulmate. I like that, I like that soulmates are not merely thrust upon us and our agency has no power to change it.

Note that I’ve said that a lot depends on the resolution with which you divide people into ethotypes. If I were to do a fuller treatment of this I’d note that the resolution or criteria with which you divide people into ‘lover’ ethotypes can be different to the resolution with which you divide people into ‘belover’ ethotypes etc. etc. I think things will work better if you split people into lover ethotypes at a finer grain than you split them into beloved ethotypes. but I’ll leave a technical treatment aside because I don’t think it’s necessary at this juncture.

I was feeling romantic, and it was either this or write the cringest imaginable fan-fic about a space marine and rogue pskyer.

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I love how over-the-top this is.