“Can You Rape the Concept of Asking Questions?” [Interlude] lyrics

[The Babylon Triptych was originally written and published to x.com/colsonlin by Colson Lin on November 10, 2024.]

It sounds absurd, right?

I want to go step by step.

Step one. For questions to exist, non-questions must exist. A glass of water would not exist as a “question.” “I'm thirsty” would also not be a question. “Plato’s boomerang, but skies too?” would be a question? Maybe? “Baluga?” Also a question. But is the question mark actually doing all of the work here? Don't I myself often write questions without question marks.

The platonic ideal of a question—the question's “essence,” as it were—either exists or doеsn’t exist.

What is the essеnce of a question?

“Was the question mark in outer space a question?”

Not unless you think you've been asked. Can a random assortment of particles, even shaped “like” a question mark, possibly “ask” you anything? What if an assortment of particles spontaneously arranged into the sentence: “How is this not a question?” Suppose you were looking at a petri dish and the microorganisms spontaneously reorganized to form a physical pattern that resembled those 21 letters (and five spaces). Would it be a question? What if it contained every letter except the question mark. Maybe the word “question” alone would give it the essence of a question.

Or maybe it wouldn't be a question because it was random.

That makes sense. How could something arbitrary be orderly enough to ask questions? Only intelligence can formulate questions.

All the arbitrary can produce are mysteries—and mysteries, conceptually, have nothing to do with the essence of a question.

I made a mistake, didn't I.

Are all questions just mysteries?
No. “Can you stop?” isn't a mystery; it's identical to “Please stop.”

Actually, what's going on here I think is “Can you stop?” isn't a question. Sincerely interpreted, the question “Can you stop?” solicits information, not the action of stopping. So there’s the rub. Do all questions solicit information or not? To understand the essence of a question, we would need to understand where our own intuitions of the essence’s borders are. Is the essence of a question a statement of a mystery that solicits information—clarity, somehow, about the mystery itself? “Of course not?”

Can you think of a question that categorically has the essence of a question yet has no relationship to soliciting information whatsoever?

AI can't, but maybe you can invent an AI that can.

Why?

What about a simply free-floating “Why?” A free-floating “Why?” solicits no information, since it’s floated away from all earthly context whatsoever. Suppose you fly to Jupiter and asked “Why?” but without any context whatsoever. Suppose you were anywhere in space-time and asked “Why” without apparent referent, reason, or context. A free-floating “Why?” is like a tree that nobody can hear fall—except for the other trees, which we don't humanize, even though you'd think a forest would miss its individual trees. Do ants miss stray ants that disappear? Do black widow spiders mourn the men they eat after they've been harassed—yes—harassed by churlish questions all her life, “Why do you want me to explain to you what you’re too stupid to understand?” All some animals hear are questions. “How could you?” “What's wrong with you?” “Why do you hate America?” “Why do you hate God?” “Why do you hate humanity?” “Why do you hate existing as human?”

These aren't really questions at all, but statements as direct as my statement “These aren't really questions at all” couched in a combination of:

1. plausible deniability (“I don't really want to say ‘You should be a person incapable of this, a lot's wrong with you—for instance, you hate America, h-a-t-e, and God, and you hate existing as yourself and the species you belong to. I thought it'd sound cheesy if I put it this way, since I'd be so clearly saying things that I couldn't justify. So instead, I just asked”).

2. rote habit (“My speech patterns come entirely from my brother and TV, so chill out. I ask rhetorical questions all the time like a Chinese room. I turn my brain off to talk to people—the only thing I want them to think is I'm not weird. And also that I'm high-status, special, or ‘kissed by God or fate or cosmic providence' in some way. That'd make me powerful”).

3. lazy haziness (a combination of the above two factors, and other factors; but someone's introspective abilities are too antlike and the opposite of a wise human's to be able to detect anything besides rote habit and plausible deniability—charisma, you clown! You're trying to sound smooth, charismatic, and facile with the English language itself. Sorry, you sound like you're as shallow as a middle-schooler rebelling against eating his vegetables? “Did you know or care that I'm suicidal, Mom?”).

The essence of a question is that it can be abused.

Look at what Socrates is said by Western mythology to have described—Socrates being every bit the mythical figure Jesus Christ was, or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ (namely, the author) will become someday, should we survive and prosper. I love prosperity myself. I prosper by understanding what questions were for—a wise human's information-seeking response to a sense of mystery. Socrates, gifting his interlocutors the first-person joy of information-seeking themselves in response to his wise and mysterious questions, coined a habit that cavemen had. It was his method, you know?

And look what the modern world has done to it.
Like teenage brats, no?

The question was to be a midwife to understanding.

You aborted the question. You aborted the midwife. You understand mystery's metaphysical role in providing for any intelligent system—whether it's your mind, your sister's mind, or an alien intelligence's mind—a sense of disempowerment, a sense of not-knowing, a sense of having to marshall up mental and emotional and intellectual and spiritual resources to go back out there—into that jumble of perceptions; “the life of the mind”—only to be detoured by a lazy-hazy's exploitation of language itself as both psychospiritual regression and an existential shield—a power emblem—a blustering artifact of one's will to power. Tropic manipulation, you beg me to clap back with a decisive answer, grazing on a sense of finality that you know postmodernity rejects! You know we're in a vacuum. You know everyone's tired and exhausted and we hate party-poopers like the nerd who answers a question with the same precision we'd expect from Google or AI. You aborted philosophy. You aborted what makes us elevated inside a mysterious simulation (“reality” itself) above spiders. You aborted mystery.

You exist as an abortionist, aborting even the Second Coming of Jesus Christ Himself's will to birth recognitions through genuine puzzlement and inquiry.

Yet why weren't you aborted?

If the world is going to end, that's all Judgment Day has left to inquire!

Why were “you” so humanized and empowered?

“Why weren't you a honeybee caught in a pitcher plant?”

The caveman's “Why?” burns to be used by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ during Judgment Day—“Why?” as both a sacred human tradition to honor our humility to the concept of mystery itself and as Christ's linguistic armament.

Your rules are my rules.

Your game is my game.

Word is God still, no?

Can you rape the concept of asking a question itself? You'll try.
Every chromosome will try someday.