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Non-Narratable Worlds

A working definition written for this wiki from the notes · first appears in What Is Intelligence? ()

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From David Albert (After Physics): a world is narratable if everything true of it can be told as a single temporal sequence of global instantaneous states; some quantum-mechanical worlds are not. Via J. S. Bell and Metahaven's The Hard Question of Art, Latent Spacecraft extends the idea to latent spaces, Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and GAN speech: each resists being told as a story yet depends on a hidden structural armature. The proposed response is not narration but navigation — making the interior architectural and walkable. Note the transfer shifts Albert's structural impossibility into an epistemic one (too many dimensions to picture); the paper's own phrasing wavers between "not narratable" and "navigable and thus narratable."

Glossary generated 2026-09-09 · may be out of date