What-if 0009: "Soul Mates"

[rhomboidal]

http://what-if.xkcd.com/9/

Hehe, I don't like the odds of finding your soul mate on Chatroulette by gazing into each other's brown eyes.

[Quicksilver]

I never understood the concept of "soul mates." It would imply anyone not interested in getting married would leave their "soul mate" alone forever. Not to mention all the kids who die before they understand the concept of a soul mate.

[VectorZero]

And if I can't have "If I didn't have you" there's always delectable, inflatable you.

[AvatarIII]

I never understood the concept of "soul mates." It would imply anyone not interested in getting married would leave their "soul mate" alone forever. Not to mention all the kids who die before they understand the concept of a soul mate.

Surely if you were not interested in marriage, neither would your soul mate. Besides, I don't think having a soul mate explicitly implies any sort of sexual or romantic relationship, i think you could equally be soul mates with a friend, or even a teacher/student or family member.

[rmsgrey]

A one-in-a-million love means that there are roughly seven thousand others at the same level or better "out there". If you mean "one in a million of those roughly the same age" rather than "one in a million people", that's still 500 candidates, but I prefer to start with the entire population and filter out people who would be perfect if not for age, gender, location, an ability to whistle discordantly coupled with an inability to not do so, etc...

If you're looking for your one-in-a-million person (or one of them, anyway), then, taking Randall's lifetime-encounter rate of half a million people, then roughly half of all lifetimes will find their "one true-enough love" - of course, that's a naive figure - unlike the randomly assigned soulmate, the one-in-a-million will tend to be local - those who live in an inconvenient location need to be significantly better in other areas to compensate - and to share at least some interests - so the chances of encountering each other are better than blind chance.


Of course, many people who believe in soulmates also believe that whatever mechanism pairs them off also destines them to meet (with a form of destiny that can be thwarted - otherwise the only explanation for so many people being single is that only some people have soulmates...)

[APL]

If a two-way connection isn't needed for the magic to happen, then certain jobs would offer you much higher odds than cashier or Times Square cop.

A television personality or a movie star could easily be observed by millions or even hundreds of millions of viewers in a relatively short period of time. That would make them even more coveted jobs than they are now. (The shows and movies would mostly be about soul-mate finding. Which could make Star Trek interesting. )

[mollux67]

Wouldn't there be some kind of "memory effect". Maybe this has a very mathematical name but I ain't a specialist.
When you're playing a memory game, by sorting out the couples, the game is getting easier exponentially (by decreasing the number of possible couples) and I expect this phenomenon to occur too in the SoulMateRoulette.
Even though you bring up fresh younger souls constantly in the system you also eject the older ones that didn't find their soulmate out of bad luck.

I know that it wasn't meant to reduce the populations too far in this comic to keep the probability of finding the soulmate very low, but when you sort out the sexual preferences, interests, etc. But there arent that plenty fish in the sea...

[TheAbstractor]

First we need to hear a story from the Midrash:

A Roman matron was discussing Jewish belief with Rabbi Yossi ben Halafta. "Okay," she says, "I get the part about G-d creating heaven and earth. But once He got that down, what has He been doing since?"

"Since then," Rabbi Yossi replied, "He's been matchmaking."

"Matchmaking?" the matron repeated in surprise.

"Sure. Like this young lady marries this young man... and so on. Lots of matchmaking to do every day."

"That's ridiculous!" the matron exclaimed. "That's no feat for a G-d who created heaven and earth. Why, even I could do that!"

And to prove her point, that night the matron took one thousand of her male servants and one thousand of her female servants and matched them together as husband and wife.

The feat, however, was short lived. That night was a sleepless night of howling, screaming, smashed windows, slammed doors and angry voices. The next morning, men and women hobbled, limped and crawled to their mistress, whining and pleading, "I don't want this one! Please get me out of this!"

The matron immediately called for Rabbi Yossi ben Halafta to return. "There is no god like your G-d!" she proclaimed. "It is all true, your Torah is indeed beautiful and praiseworthy, and you spoke the truth!"

Rabbi Yossi replied, "If it seemed easy in your eyes, it is as difficult before the Holy One, blessed be He, as the splitting of the Red Sea."

"The Almighty matches men and women despite what they think they want, despite what they think is good for them. As the verse alludes, 'G-d gets singles to become housebound; He brings out prisoners with great difficulties.'"

[disq]

Love the Tim Minchin reference.

[Carteeg_Struve]

I think the major issue comes down to the misconception that "Soul Mates" also means "Sole Mates".

*insert lame "What is our souls are Mormon" joke here*

[AvatarIII]

if my Soul mate lives in South Korea, does that make them my Seoul mate?

[Adam H]

The way I've always thought about soul mates is that about 1/1000 of the population could be your soul mate, until you fall in love with one of them. Then that person becomes your one and only soul mate.

That's obviously not the way things work, but whenever someone says they believe in soul mates that's what I assume they mean. That, or God has one particular soul mate that he'll put in your life.

[Tristan]

I think he stopped to early on the problem.

The next question becomes what is the ideal population size for one true soul mate. You can assume that at first some small number of people actually find their soul-mates through some method or another, and that some much larger number of people fake it. But if the precent of people who fake plus the number that actually find it times the average number of kids is less then the replacement rate then the population will shrink. As the population shrinks, the odds of finding your soul mate start to go up. I'm not sure if more people finding their soul mates will make more people want to fake it (so that they aren't left out) or less (because they think there is hope of it actually working). So to first order if you cut the population to a 1/10th and assume things are linear then "a few decades" becomes a few years, which really isn't that bad at all if you consider how much time people put into the problem now.

Being lazy for a second and assuming an average number of children per household for the world to be the same as the USs rate of 3.14, and assuming a constant faking rate of 20% for people not finding their soul mates of we get
(% finding their soul mates + 20% * (1 - % finding their soul mates)) * 3.14 = 2
is where we are at equilibrium
or (2/3.14 - .2) / .8 = % finding their soul mates ~ 55% of people need to find their soul mates.
which is a lot of people given the framing of the problem so population will shrink, UNLESS 2/3.14 or ~64% or make people will just fake it, which might be where we are now....

-T

[flicky1991]

My opinion is that, if there were any sort of concept of destiny, it's not something that could be scientifically studied or measured, because that measuring would happen inside the affected universe - that is, these experiments would be destined to show a particular result no matter what choices the scientists make. The scientific method just stops applying when you talk about things like this.

Despite that, I liked the article. Applying science to impossible situations is what "what-if" is for, really. XD

[Radical Pi]

The way I've always thought about soul mates is that about 1/1000 of the population could be your soul mate, until you fall in love with one of them. Then that person becomes your one and only soul mate.

So basically Schrödinger's soul mate?

[Carteeg_Struve]

The way I've always thought about soul mates is that about 1/1000 of the population could be your soul mate, until you fall in love with one of them. Then that person becomes your one and only soul mate.

So basically Schrödinger's soul mate?

Hrm.... then I should probably let her out of the box now.

[Quizatzhaderac]

I'm pretty sure that the concept of soul mates is that it's more deterministic, not less. This what-if hypothesizes with your partner is independent of culture, interests, gender, body type, etcetera.

Moreover some models presuppose the matching causing the meeting.

But let's suppose people have a non-trivial imperfect conceptions of what their mate is like. For instance, I'd guess my mate is a woman, near my age, not a militant racist, et cetra. I could (with some chance of failure) restrict my search to much smaller groups where each member is more likely to be my mate.

[VectorZero]

if my Soul mate lives in South Korea, does that make them my Seoul mate?

Here's my sole, mate.

There's a hole in your soul, there's a sole in your hole...

[Wnderer]

Propinquity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propinquity

The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" Love Is a Science (1959)

Dobie Gillis: [Dobie bemoans his situation, suffering through science class, turns to his table mate] And as for you, you don't make things any easier, you know? A whole month I've been sitting here next to you and I haven't heard one word out of you, not one single word, not even "hello." You just sit there doing everything right and giving me the big freeze. For Pete's sake, speak to me. Say something! Say anything!
Zelda Gilroy: I love you.
Dobie Gillis: [Stunned] I beg your pardon?
Zelda Gilroy: That's right. I love you.
Dobie Gillis: Zelda, I am of course flattered--
Zelda Gilroy: Now don't get a swelled head. You're nothing so special. You're dumb as a post, you're pigeon-toed and you'll be bald before you're 30.
Dobie Gillis: Is that so? Well, I don't want to be unkind, but you're not exactly a traffic-stopper yourself.
Zelda Gilroy: Yeah, we're a couple of dogs all right. But still, we're not too repulsive. Antway, what's the difference? We're victims of propinquity.
Dobie Gillis: What's that?
Zelda Gilroy: Propinquity: nearness, closeness. Sida, Post and Wembley of harvard in a study of 2,900 married couples proved that in 87% of the cases the couples first fell in love because of propinquity. You put a boy and a girl close to each other for long enough it's bound to happen. It's a scientific fact.
Dobie Gillis: No offense, Zelda, but I don't love you.
Zelda Gilroy: You will. You're Gillis, I'm Gilroy. Don't forget they seat students alphabetically in science classes. You'll be sitting next to me all year and next year too. And then when we go on to to medical school, eight more years of propinquity. Don't fight it, Dobie. You can't beat science.
Dobie Gillis: I can try, Zelda. I can try.

If only. I sat behind a very hot girl all through highschool and it didn't get me anywhere.

[bmonk]

The way I've always thought about soul mates is that about 1/1000 of the population could be your soul mate, until you fall in love with one of them. Then that person becomes your one and only soul mate.

So basically Schrödinger's soul mate?

Hrm.... then I should probably let her out of the box now.

:like:

But the whole soul mate idea has a seriously flawed premise: that love is basically fated, and that we are really able to love only someone like us in all things.

What if love is a matter of choice and self-dedication, built over time? What if part of the attraction is to someone different than us in various ways? Both of these are true in our experience--as in the love of parent and child, or friends.

A soul mate, perhaps, is a love for lazy people, who can't be bothered to exert themselves, or to work through difficulties, in who they love.

[Uthor]

Why not just buy a gun that can only harm your true love? That would simplify things.

http://www.alessonislearned.com/index.php?comic=10

[rmsgrey]

But the whole soul mate idea has a seriously flawed premise: that love is basically fated, and that we are really able to love only someone like us in all things.

I thought the idea of a soul mate was not that they were your clone, but that they were your other half - not like you in all things, but complementary to you in all things...

[Angelastic]

Here's my sole, mate.

And if that's not your one, there are plenty more fish in the sea.

(at least, there used to be. )

[Carteeg_Struve]

Propinquity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propinquity

If only. I sat behind a very hot girl all through highschool and it didn't get me anywhere.

Too bad you weren't next to or in front of her.

[bmonk]

But the whole soul mate idea has a seriously flawed premise: that love is basically fated, and that we are really able to love only someone like us in all things.

I thought the idea of a soul mate was not that they were your clone, but that they were your other half - not like you in all things, but complementary to you in all things...

Originally I thought that too--but many people don't use it that way. They want someone who understands them, never disagrees or wants anything else, and so on. In other words: they may be attracted to people not like them, but their soul mate is just like they are.

[Wnderer]

But the whole soul mate idea has a seriously flawed premise: that love is basically fated, and that we are really able to love only someone like us in all things.

I thought the idea of a soul mate was not that they were your clone, but that they were your other half - not like you in all things, but complementary to you in all things...

Originally I thought that too--but many people don't use it that way. They want someone who understands them, never disagrees or wants anything else, and so on. In other words: they may be attracted to people not like them, but their soul mate is just like they are.

I believe soul mates are from Plato.

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with 4 arms, 4 legs and a head with 2 faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search for other halves.”
–Plato’s The Symposium

[SerMufasa]

I'm looking closely at the odds and this is the conclusion I've reached: how would we even know soul mates existed? We're talking a very small percentage of the population will end up with their soul mate - how believable would they be? There would arise an entire population of asoulmatists that believe the concept of soul mates is delusional.

So ok to fix this, let us add a biological imperative.

Let us say that humans evolved with "soul mate identification" as the sole mechanism for reproduction. In other words, if you don't find your soul mate, you don't reproduce.

Since the initial emergent population of the species would be small, soul mate identification is easy. As the population grows, however, soul mate identification becomes harder. As a result, the species essentially enters a stasis population total where enough people are able to find their soul mate during (female) child bearing years in order to keep the species reproducing. In such a population, you'd have a pretty good chance of finding your soul mate.

In other words, it's not really an issue for the general population; either it's not widely believed and pursued, or the population is self-soul mate sustaining.

[DarsVaeda]

poor blind people!

[Quizatzhaderac]

They can tell by feeling the other person's face. Romanticized blind people can tell everything by feeling a persons face.

Actually if they had a perfect memory, blind people could partially solve the problem efficiently. By examining two people they'd be able to arrange a match. Assuming 500 faces an hour and a 2000 hour work year, by the time an age group reaches 20 a blind person could have examined 20% of them; leading to 4% being matched up. 20 years isn't much effort compared to 4 million perfect matches.

[jpk]

They Might Be Giants pretty much put this one to bed a while back. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEjutUbgpH8

[Max™]

The way I've always thought about soul mates is that about 1/1000 of the population could be your soul mate, until you fall in love with one of them. Then that person becomes your one and only soul mate.

So basically Schrödinger's soul mate?

Hrm.... then I should probably let her out of the box now.

Just make sure you don't observe her!

As for the soul mate idea, that would be nice if I had a soul, ah well, such is life.

[RogueCynic]

According to this thread, http://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/605943/896971#target, I already found my soul mate, or I have a second one coming.

[FrobozzWizard]

I believe soul mates are from Plato.

“According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with 4 arms, 4 legs and a head with 2 faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search for other halves.”
–Plato’s The Symposium

Plato's Symposium has Aristophanes (best known for his comedy) coming up with this idea, and also having a serious case of hiccups. That was a pretty clear indication that it was meant about as seriously as stuff Jim Carey says: There may be some truth buried in there, but mostly it's about being funny. Later on in the same dialogue there's an extended discussion of Socrates being able to drink everyone else under the table, which he then starts to do just as the curtains close on the scene.

[The Moomin]

Maybe a side effect of teleporting everyone to Rhode Island to jump in the air would be that thousands would be able to meet their soul mates in the crush.

Rumour has it that true love hits you like Yoda accelerating a baseball to 0.9c into your face.

Then you could guess at SAT test answers over a half-full glass to confirm your suitability for each other, before being blasted into space to live out the rest of your days on a planet of moles to escape the robot uprising.

[Rand]

An email I just sent xkcd in response to the what-if:


Hi Randall,

Your most recent "what-if" seems to rely on the bizarre assumption that the eye contact has to be mutual. So if I see my soul mate and she doesn't see me, I won't recognize her? Seems implausible. If we allow for one-way recognition, a number of possibilities come up.

The first question is how accurate your soul-mate-sense is. Assuming you can recognize if a composite image of 4 billion eyes contains your soulmate's eyes, you can actually find your soulmate pretty efficiently. Each examination of a composite picture reduces the pool by half, so 33 examinations (2^33 = ~8 billion) will find you your soul mate. Adjust according to your soul-mate-vision.

Creating the composite images shouldn't be hard; they can really just be pre-generated and shown as necessary. (That 7 billion individuals + 3.5 billion duals + ... = 14 billion pictures stored. A cinch.)

Actually storing contact info could be a security concern, but there are numerous ways around it. (Just use Facebook for example.)

Other things to take into account: The age distribution of your possible soul mates. You've claimed that there are roughly a half billion potential matches per person (I'd like to know how you arrived at that) but we're ignoring the probability assigned to each match! Presumably you can't be uniformly likely to be soulmates with any person within 10 years of you, because people-born-within-ten-years-of-1970 does not equal people-born-within-ten-years-of-1962. I would tend to assume some sort of bell curve (modified for the side with a higher pool) with the highest likelihood of your soulmate being within 2-3 years of you. That should be helpful.

Also, I'm not sure why you didn't take orientation into account. For gay men and lesbian women (probably less so for lesbians, due to higher sexual fluidity among women) this actually becomes a far simpler problem. And once you've eliminated gays and lesbians from the pool, you've made the lives of the unfortunate unmatched bisexuals at least somewhat easier. (I assume a one-way match is sufficient, followed by some form of contact.)

I realize that this doesn't fit the questioners phrasing of "only one soul mate, a random person somewhere in the world", but that phrasing actually solves the problem for us. To be precise, I have to be born with a soul mate, and so does she. Ergo, we must be born - and die - at the exact same time. And there would only be two such people. Now I realize that this can be problematic, and I'd suggest one of two approaches:

1) We allow a short window for one soulmate to be mateless.

2) We define personhood based on the existence of a person's soulmate (and revoke it accordingly). (This doesn't solve the personhood debate because we still have to determine "existence", but I'd call that "presence on Earth with a functioning body. Brain function I'll leave to the brain functionaries.) This might cause some people moral dilemmas, but what can you do?

Naturally, I prefer #1. Of course, this would lead to all sorts of schemes for immortality, most of which, ironically, involve you and your soulmate never coming in contact.

[TiPerihelion]

I feel like Randall is conflating "soulmate" with "love at first sight." I never considered "love at first sight" to be built into the concept of a soulmate. I checked the Wiki page to see if it discussed methods of identifying soulmates--nada. Is this a standard feature? Granted, if finding one's soulmate isn't simply a matter of glancing into their eyes, that would make the likelihood of finding them astronomically small. Still, to the extent that I believe in soulmates, I believe it could take years of regular contact to recognize one's soulmate as such.

If it is a "love at first sight" thing, I highly doubt the magic happens one-sidedly. Hence, staring at your sweetie on the screen while he sings [insert Justin Bieber song here] would not be sufficient. However, gazing at each other through a webcam would. Reciprocity seems relevant.

Also, I was under the assumption that soulmates had to be capable of meeting in their lifetimes. Hence, the pool of candidates would be limited to those whose lifetimes intersect. This is not to say that your soulmate can't die before you meet. Just that the two of you had to be alive at the same time, however short.

[Jackpot777]

if my Soul mate lives in South Korea, does that make them my Seoul mate?

Here's my sole, mate.

Here's my sole, mate.



...ah, never mind, cobber. She came back to me, bloody oath!

[Jackpot777]

Maybe a side effect of teleporting everyone to Rhode Island to jump in the air would be that thousands would be able to meet their soul mates in the crush.

Rumour has it that true love hits you like Yoda accelerating a baseball to 0.9c into your face.

Then you could guess at SAT test answers over a half-full glass to confirm your suitability for each other, before being blasted into space to live out the rest of your days on a planet of moles to escape the robot uprising.

[Pfhorrest]

Of course, many people who believe in soulmates also believe that whatever mechanism pairs them off also destines them to meet (with a form of destiny that can be thwarted - otherwise the only explanation for so many people being single is that only some people have soulmates...)

Yeah, I always thought the concept of a soul mate was that everyone has someone they are destined to live happily ever after with. It's supposed to be a comforting thought, like belief in the afterlife or something: hey, shit may suck right now, but it's virtually guaranteed to get better so long as you don't intentionally turn away from it! The fact that many people live long lonely lives, or that per this What-If it's statistically improbable that most people will ever meet their soul mate, is thus strong evidence against the existence of soul mates. Unless you want to appeal to the Just World Hypothesis and say all those lonely people obviously deserve it since if they had just accepted their soul mate when they met them then everybody would be happy. (Sure, and poor people are obviously lazy and worthless otherwise people would pay them for all their hard work and skill and they would be rich by now...)

[reegee]

Who cares about soul mates when there is Cheese: http://youtu.be/bVKCHZqax84
Just spun out to see a boy from my home town get a mention on xkcd!
oh and

...ah, never mind, cobber. She came back to me, bloody oath!

yeah you do know aussies don't say cobber right?