Acausal romance

That link asks me to "download attachment." In this context, that's a beautiful idea.

At first, I had some major hangups about impossible girls.

Beautiful. The author also has a blog where he posts stuff like this.

The world's greatest lovers were undoubtedly Mellius and Gretelina, whose pure, passionate and soul-searing affair would have scorched the pages of History if they had not, because of some unexplained quirk of fate, been born two hundred years apart on different continents.

-- Terry Pratchett, Mort

A potentially-existent immortal mind that knows and understands you down to the microphysical level and loves you and appreciates being loved by you?

Except for the stipulation of a feminine gender, that is /exactly/ the mode of relationship Christians advocate developing, and claim to have developed with God.

Acausal marriage is a great way to lower your acausal taxes. Of course, most people don't actually pay their acausal taxes anyway.

Oh yeah, and in case anyone is interested, I interviewed the author about this article and about the Humean theory of motivation, back in December 2010.

()

In practice, this seems to break down at a specific point: this can be outlined, for instance, with the hypothetical stipulation "...and possesses the technology or similar power to cross universe boundaries and appear visible before me in my room, and will do so in exactly ten seconds.".

As with the fallacy of a certain ontological argument, the imagination/definition of something does not make it existential, and even if a certain concept contains no apparent inherent logical impossibilities that still does not mean that there could/would exist a universe in which it could come to pass.

'All possible worlds' does not mean 'All imaginable worlds'. 'All possible people' does not mean 'All imaginable people'. Past a certain threshold of specificity, one goes from {general types of people who exist almost everywhere, universally speaking} to {specific types of people who only exist in the imaginations of people like you who exist almost everwhere, universally speaking}.

(As a general principle, for instance/incidentally, causality still needs to apply.)

Edit:

I don't like how every time you send or receive a love letter from her you're adding conditions. Under this framework, that means you're changing your girlfriend! I'm not sure what the point of monogamy is if every time you correspond with your mate you switch to a new one.

See also Ana Ng, which is about acausal romance within the actual world.

With the sex ratio around here we might have to take what we can get.

What a relief to read this post! All along I have thought I was in love with someone imaginary.

"I'd be foolish to ignore the possibility that if we'd ever actually met you would have hated me..."
Mystery, Hugh Laurie

Which is to say, sometimes acausal romances have certain perceived advantages.

Possibly related: acausal sex

A "girlfriend" having the ability to specify the author's world with "microphysical detail" clearly has a great amount of computational power available to her, and the author ought to expect some minuscule amount of his measure to awaken in said girlfriend's universe, having just been fabricated via their equivalent of nanotechnology...

This has just beat out Alan Sidelle's "The Answering Machine Paradox" (paywalled, sorry) as my favorite philosophical paper.

Oh man, I think I came up with something very similar to this whilst being extremely horny and extremely lonely

Do we agree that Many Worlds provides a justification for modal realism? It certainly wouldn't imply every "possible" world, just every world dictated by the Schrödinger equation.

Hah, that's nothing surprising. I always knew that Asuka and me would always love each other, even should it prove impossible for us to ever meet. (I consider substitutes to be vulgar.) *

*Link is highly NSFW, and that website/tabloid is generally devoted to reinforcing stereotypes about the anime fandom.