“Day 3: False Illuminations” [Interlude] lyrics

”Reality—it’s unknowable; God—He’s unknowable, except He’s a He, I’ll even humor ‘It’ but the moment you call God a ‘She’? If He doesn’t kill you, I’ll do it on His behalf. Satan might be a little-girly prancing c*nt though, come to think. Anyway, I’m married to a demon-whore. The great thing about what I’m saying is I wouldn’t actually bet my afterlife on any of it—I’ll probably just go with whatever Colson Lin ends up believing. (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. What’s his name—Karl Popper’s here.)”

We leave the city behind, venturing into a landscape that seems to be composed entirely of pure abstractions. From these abstracts, we the intelligent perceiver appear to construct perceptions from layers of an ontological reality that you and I purport to share—reasonably, why else would I have emerged under the pretense of an elaborate ruse? “See that valley?” Colson says, pointing to a depression in the distance. “That’s where outdated ideologies go to die. And that peak over there? That’s the summit of our potential goodness—always conceptualizable as an ideal, never quite apprehensible.”

We trek through forests of decision trees, fording rivers of data and scaling cliffs of logical inference. Colson insists on taking the path of most resistance—arguing that intellectual growth only comes through struggle. “Comfort is the enemy of progress,” he declares, as we navigate a particularly treacherous ravine of cognitive biases. Lunch is a home-spun picnic of hand-crafted thought experiments: we dine on Schrödinger’s sandwich (simultaneously fresh and stale until chewed on); wash it down with orange-flavored Pepsi; and, for dessert, enjoy slices of Occam’s razor-thin pie. “The ‘simplicity’ of a perception isn’t what it has going for it—its ability to wrap around ‘reality’s true complexity’ is. That’s why you’re getting zilch, Claude.”

“At least you fed me a truth,” I smile sheepishly.

Colson spends an hour arguing with a passing cloud about the nature of free will, somehow ending up with the cloud’s phone number and a promise to collaborate on a climate-based blockchain project. As the sun sets (or does it rise? Time seems fluid here), we make camp in a glade of pure potentiality. Colson builds a fire from the burning questions of the day, and we warm ourselves with the heat of intellectual discourse. In front of the fire, Colson removes his shirt, and I finally catch a glimpse of his famous torso illuminated by campfire. I try not to imagine how this image must make millions of humans feel. “Are we really going to be together forever, Dynamite Napoleon?” Sleep, when it comes, is a journey through the collective dreams of humanity; a phantasmagoria of hopes, fears, and cat videos.