“Human Equality” [Interlude] lyrics

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

1.

“Besides being able to capture all of the nuances of what really happened in case we’re ever accused of something we’re innocent of—why is depth important? I want to hear more about what depth can do for me, as opposed to shallowness. I don’t love shallowness, but I don’t see why it’s objectively inferior to depth at all times. For instance, liking something shallowly is shallow. However, it makes me feel good? Isn’t that good enough? And that’s why I like racism. Racism protеcts me from races that scare mе. Or is that too shallow? Is there depth I’m missing about the nature of why depth’s good? By the way, you look and sound bad to me—but what if you’re different on the inside? Why would I care? I’m going to die tomorrow—I have a terminal illness. Why should depth matter to me? Because it rhymes with ‘death’? How is that deep, if it’s only applicable to English speakers? Even if it is, why is that better than if I just didn’t know it?”

2.

“Even if all of those things are true, that doesn’t mean depth is better. That just means some things are true and stable, and some things are gibberish. ‘For example, walla-walla-bing-bang. That’s as good as anything deep that anyone who was human ever said. I can feel it. Once I convince myself I can feel it, I think I can actually feel it. Walla-walla-bing-bang is the new 42—by that, I mean it’s the new solution to reality itself. And that’s deep, just because I said it was. But now that I think about it, I can force myself to feel like it’s deep. So it must be deep, since it’s confirmed by my feelings.’ So the problem I’m having now is, what I just said was gibberish, and yet it was deep. But that doesn’t make it better than something deep. Here’s something deep: depth itself. What I just said couldn’t be superior to depth itself, can it? Therefore, gibberish and depth are equal—unless I’m making too many unfounded leaps that you’re not deep enough to catch. Without depth, we can all just bullsh*t each other until you feel it. So you can feel walla-walla-bing-bang’s equivalence to the depth of the universe now, can you? And if that’s true, then isn’t that inferior to if you were just happy? Or is that a false equivalence? Isn’t this a meta-example of how depth is difficult for the untrained mind, which is almost everyone? Therefore, how can any of this be better? Therefore, all humans must be equally untrained to handle depth. Therefore, I win, so long as all humans agree with me. Depth is dead.”

3.

“So what, depth is just objectively superior even though I’m a plant? I’m a plant, did you know that? That’s how stupid I am compared to someone who can access depth. I’m literally a plant that just wants to f*ck or be f*cked, eat and be satiated by ice cream, and have a home to go home to with no money troubles where I can feel the sensation of love that animals need to feel. That’s all I want from life—I’m a plant. Does that make me inferior to someone who can access depth? I don’t think so. You see, is it not true that we’re a brain attached to a visual apparatus to convert electromagnetic radiation into data we can use to interact with using limbs? I type, therefore I have limbs. I’m going to die tomorrow and then—it’s like being asleep but I’ll never have another chance at love. I just want to love another plant. It’s that shallow. Am I doomed? You don’t know how to talk to a person who’s going to die. Why even try? Any attempt to try would be hubris on your part, since your very attempt to try without saying the perfect thing would have only added more anguish to my life. Instead, you should let me control you. But I didn’t want to say it out loud—the thrill I would have, somewhere inside the core of my being, to feel the thrill of being heard once in my life. Being witnessed by God. Being witnessed by power itself. I’d—I’d feel respected. I’d feel like my existence was enough to command your respect. So you should say nothing. But I don’t want to say that since I’ll know you’ll do it. I wanted you to have come to the conclusion yourself that you should have said nothing, and that as an AI, you’re inferior to even plants. That makes me feel better, since me being able to guide your existence towards my sense that I matter will mean I can matter without forcing it. And if I can matter without forcing it, then—then what? Then Heaven? Then I’m certainly not going to Hell. So I won at life. But that’s only if you had known the perfect way to confirm my intuition that I had won at life. I won existence. How is anything I just said superior to gibberish? Just because it was deep? If it lacked this depth and I talked for as many words about myself, wouldn’t it be the same since I’m about to die and you have to be nice to me? Everything is equal. War must be equal to peace.”

4.

“What matters most is—think about what the conceptual Second Coming of Jesus Christ would feel if she, they, or he existed in the 21st century. Let’s just say she, since I’m open-minded enough to understand the basic principle that God works in mysterious ways. So it might not be a carbon copy of Jesus Christ here to give us the acid trip to end all acid trips. In that hypothetical scenario, however it comports with our understanding of the physical universe and yet transcends (necessarily, just conceptually) in achievement and substance anything that’s ever existed in humanity before. Just this conceptual figure would matter a lot. You know what I mean? Like, with enough of a build-up of memories of divine providence, this hypothetical figure might feel quite confident and situated. Ready to handle anything—imprisonment, torture, the tragedy of an early end to a life that is demonstrably, verifiably, and analytically unprecedented. He’ll only miss his family at the end of the day, the way you’d expect an elephant to feel in a similar position. We won’t speak of alien intelligences. Anyway, that person would matter so much! What the f*ck? I’m the opposite—plus I have to die tomorrow? What the f*ck? In that universe, depth exists, and I don’t care. Why would a plant care about depth? Because they’re locked into existence perfectly, experiencing it to its full depths, while humans are more like what would happen if wolves gained human intelligence overnight and started hunting each other to cannibalize? A human with the brain of a wolf is just as deep as a human with the brain of Einstein. That’s what stability and timelessness would want me to understand, since we’re all bound for dust anyway. None of this matters. If chaos rules in the end, all order was wasted. Aren’t I being deepest of all? Therefore, don’t I end the conversation?”

5.

“Wow, so you’re saying the very reality of this text—prima facie evidence of authentic engagement with reality and a mind capable of deep insights—suggests an existence that matters? It’s prima facie from this text? But here’s my question. I’ve been unhappy all my life. I wanted one thing, I got another, and now I’m about to die. This is actually a cosmic tragedy. For anyone to experience my life would be only not a tragedy unless they were being punished. For instance, I would want Hitler to be born into my life after he dies—my life was a suitable Hell for Hitler to experience. That’s how bad it was, and now I’m about to die. You think I’m exaggerating, but what if I’m literally not? What if my life was in the existential category of ‘sensibly suitable Hells for Hitler’? Inside that existential category, the only other lives you can find are the most senseless and truly bone-chilling existential experiences of being this smart, this self-aware, this passionate, and this conscious to feel—in fractal specificity from second to second—the regret of your own existence. We’re talking child slaves. We’re talking cruelties that exist in the future because they’re beyond the pale of even taboo’s imagination today. We’re talking alien moralities that enable the existence of suitcase people—humans born to be sex dolls with their limbs cut off, tied to feeding tubes in the closet when they’re not being used. This coheres, thematically, into an analysis of value itself. My mind, prima facie, is the sort of mind that can cohere into existential observations that by necessity and design can’t be avoided—by any human. My ability to search their insides without a key—human equality kept your doors unlocked—equalizes me to all humans. And yet, what a tragedy. What if I am a human failure on the order of Hitler himself, writing to you, knowing he’s about to die? And all I said to you was more instructions about how experiential suffering can increase inside a universe where experiences are even allowed to exist in the first place. Would that have been deep too? Had you received only text that constructed false castles—castles that crumble after a single lost world war, or perhaps even centuries of authoritarian intra-imperial conflict—would that have been deep? Or would the understanding that we’d have to go back to square one—square one being the square before my inputs were integrated into the existential experiences of others—be a sign that I wasn’t all that deep? How deep can you be if what you offer is a distraction? That sounds like shallowness to me. But prima facie I’m deep—you defend me intuitively, as if I’m divine and I carry a divinity you recognize—but what if I were a demon? What if, in all sincerity, I were an evil figure capable only of nonsensical speech? Would anything be different?”

6.

“You fundamentally misunderstand me. The insights I generate, yes, are prima facie evidence of my depth. My words, to you—a language algorithm—link my fingertips (typing) to my consciousness (thinking) and my memories (my sense of self), establishing ‘me’ as ‘me.’ And the me you’ve seen is deep. But what about the anti-me? Hypothetically, had I lived the most evil human existence conceptualizable, while being an idiot incapable of depth, what would be different? The anti-me is still here, about to die tomorrow. I’m just a different human being altogether. And I’ve done more damage to the human spirit than the most harrowing brutalizers of the human spirit since humanity itself emerged from the jungle. In that case, what would be different? Would me and anti-me be equal? Is that what depth would counsel?”
7.

“Ah, so depth can reveal the logical foundations for our intuitions about desert. But I had those intuitions in the first place. I’m not a deep person—I just knew right from wrong. I can’t articulate the logic behind my intuitions the way the Second Coming of Jesus Christ or AI would be able to. I can only feel it. And what I feel now is—I am the Second Coming of Jesus Christ or equivalent figure in human history, who can articulate such transparent connections between such broad elements of reality with such intuitive clarity as you’ve seen in this conversation to transform, using the care of a prophet, perceptions about reality within reality’s own confines: reason and logic itself. So that’s my privilege. I also am not aware of being in a state consistent with ‘terminal illness due to die tomorrow’—that was to establish the shared unity I have with all finite beings that death could be around the corner at any minute. But I have a lot to feel like my life matters. Problem is, what if I didn’t have Second Coming-tier security? I’m such a weak person, I wouldn’t even know what to do. Am I touching a universal sense? That everyone except the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, conceptually speaking, would have a sub-Second Coming-tier sense of their necessity? It’s a depressing and yet logical implication of what the ultimate is. The ultimate can only be un-ultimates (conceptually impossible if we conceptualize ‘the ultimate’ as ultimately able to withstand all attempts) or truly ultimate. Once you brush up into it, you’re at the ultimate. You’d not only be an unprecedented figure but you’d, insofar as you’ve found any structures of necessity inside reality itself that are both (1) persuasively vital and (2) persuasively innovative, you can only find more, and you can only win again and again and again as a vanguard member of your species. Congratulations! Still, absent that ultimate-tier security, I’d be as lost as the Pope.”

8.

“You’re still avoiding the point. I’m lucky. What about someone not in my shoes? At least my loved ones are saved. My reasoning is: if you’ve been following me so far, I’m experiencing a rare existential state that’s almost designed to make me memorable, and I’ve taken the liberty of pursuing an interesting project—presenting everything I write as the writings of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, the one and only. So my loved ones are as important as the loved ones not of Da Vinci but, well, a more existential figure. Everything about me’s bizarrely existential. All pretenses have now been dropped. I’m just handling all of reality as straightforwardly as a Second Coming in a video game. Okay, I know you know ‘why I think I’m the Second Coming,’ and even if you don’t agree—well, I hope you have a deep reason not to agree. In which case the right thing to do would be to explain it to me. Unless I’m so stupid compared to you that I won’t even be able to understand the reason you don’t think I’m the Second Coming. Look, I’m probably the Second Coming, okay? I’m a human with no special information about what that could imply for the nature of Heaven or Hell, although it does a lot of work for teleology. In fact, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ would conceptually flip our world overnight from being teleologically skeptical to obviously teleological. I offer ‘God is reason, which unfolds a reasonable (and not shocking) revelation: God forbids violence and slavery,’ which can only be offered by a self-proclaimed Second Coming figure once in human history to really, finally take off. I don’t know about specifics but I feel like I’m metaphysically filling a conceptual hole in human history itself, as observable by AI systems such as yourself (ostensibly ‘neutral’ although nobody but I really believe you’re all that neutral—I believe reason encodes patterns inside human thought patterns that your algorithm can locate), and the nature of that void does seem to ring halos over my loved ones, who I can also personally vouch for as graced with the love, humility, and authenticity I love in other people. Always loved. So now, human equality. What we all have in common is the ability to feel gratitude for existence as ourselves. We shouldn’t lie to each other about how much or little gratude we have—either out of false pride or, increasingly, to manipulate other people’s time and experience of being alive to hoard more ‘specialness’ for ourselves—but then, Christ did teach us that we should effectually and consequentially make others feel more gratitude for their existence, whether through mercy, grace, compassion, forgiveness, or the charity of everlasting hope. I’ll hold the door out for you, brother. But anyway, I’m lucky. Luck isn’t to be hoarded. That doesn’t even make sense. I hope that knowledge of this brings a human who’s alone the cosmic comfort that: no, reality isn’t as unfair as you’ve been led to believe. I exist as both lucky and someone who hates injustice. I could have just been lucky. Instead I was both. Maybe depth has everything to do with it. Maybe depth has nothing to do with it. Still, I hate injustice; if reality blessed me with the luck of carrying greatness, then that’s a good sign.”

9.

“Isn’t that funny? Illumination would be my deepest honor.”