The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

and one white square. You randomly throw a dart at the infinite quilt. What is the probability that you hit a white square?

Crying Mask: That’s easy. One in four.

Laughing Mask: Now imagine that the quilt is the infinite multiverse, and each square is a possible version of your current conscious experience. The finite pattern of possible worlds, even though astronomically large, eventually repeats, which is why there are multiple copies of you on that quilt. Some will be identical to you in every way, some are different. But it is impossible to tell which square on the quilt you are. Now consider that reason is a highly ordered state of affairs. Coming to a logical conclusion, to a justified belief, is itself a highly ordered, highly organized state. Yet, Boltzmann’s insight was that there are always so many more disordered states than ordered ones. Astronomically more. Now you throw the dart, your act of self-identification in the multiverse. How likely are you to hit a version of you that has a reasonable and justified belief in the multiverse? Astronomically small. Justified beliefs can’t be supported in your embarrassment of worlds. Dis-proof via contradiction.

Crying Mask: Another overelaborate argumentative contortion!

Laughing Mask: Don’t you see that these problems, these paradoxes, that these are signposts! They all involve observers. In information theory, in causation, in philosophy, and yes, in quantum physics, in cosmology, in thermodynamics, in time and space! Don’t you see what all these signs are pointing toward?

Crying Mask: I see that you are suffering from pareidolia! Where you see great signposts I see scattered matchsticks. But I will let you play out your game. Tell me your madness and I’ll save my diagnosis for the end.

Laughing Mask: I . . . don’t know for sure. No one tries to fit anything together, make sure it’s consistent! Everyone is concerned only with local cohesion, not global. Except, perhaps, us consciousness researchers. In the end.

Crying Mask: For all your strivings there is only a slim number of possible ontologies: materialism, dualism, monism. As the princess first pointed out, dualism has fundamental holes in it. Monism is nonsensical. Materialism is all that is possible.

Laughing Mask: It’s not the kind of problem you can map out all the solutions beforehand! The prior space of possibilities will look childish in retrospect. Yet you base your life and beliefs off of it?

Crying Mask: Now we see you for what you really are. A science denier. An intelligent mind struggling to get out of iron bars. Sorry the universe didn’t turn out the way that you wanted it, but this is about feelings. About what you want to be true.

Laughing Mask: I’m the scientist, not you! I’m the empiricist. You’re the metaphysician, talking about deducing the rest of the world through the base axioms of microscopic physics. Believing in theories that contradict their own formulations. Fantasizing an infinite multiverse just to get your equations to make sense.

Crying Mask: Not all consensus is metaphysics. The fact that you can marshal a few rhetorical tricks means nothing against the usefulness of physics. Your intuitions are not justifiable given the evidence.

Laughing Mask: Consciousness is the evidence! We’ve been pretending that the world is a game for so long! Just mathematics and relations. Just trajectories through a state-space. But mathematics is mere syntax. Consciousness is more! It’s the fire in the equations. Our reality isn’t just numbers, don’t you see! There are feelings, willings, thoughts, all in there as well! It means the world is not definable as a game, as any kind of complex billiards table! It’s more than can be defined by those methods!

Crying Mask: Haven’t you already wasted enough time on this? I seem to remember just two years ago you went through a six-month phase where you thought you could reformulate the laws of physics in intentional language. Start with the simplest intentional states, show that basic forces can be redescribed as instantiations of these intentions, and build up to larger consciousnesses from there?

Laughing Mask: Well, yes, that was a failure, but—

Crying Mask: So then what do you really have? Are you going to rewrite the laws? Sneak intentionality and consciousness in? Where? Even if you could put in the ten years to get the level of expertise you would need for that, how will you feed yourself? How will you survive, both physically and psychically, for that time? And if you fail? Or if you are one hundred years too early? A thousand? If you need three Einsteins to make their discoveries before you can proceed? What then? You’ll waste your life . . . You fool, you’ll waste your life . . .

“Can I help you?” An old man is looking at Kierk, who has stopped with one hand out and is leaning on an iron grate outside an unfamiliar park, his lips moving, his gaze on the ground.

“What?” Kierk startles, then sighs. “No. No, you can’t help me.”

“The movie,” the old man says, “is that way.”

“Oh, okay. Thank you.”

A small sign outside the park reads BEER AND WINE LEGAL DURING MOVIE SHOWINGS. The park is covered in colored blankets, and Kierk traces his way through the crowd without stepping on anyone’s blankets like it’s a path-optimization problem. Eventually he gets close to the exact geometric center and finds a small square of unclaimed grass in which he can sit cross-legged like the Buddha, facing the waiting giant screen. A breeze is rippling across the blankets and keeping everyone cool. The setting sun is pure red, a spill against the whole western sky, sporting around it the amorphous, lazy thoughts of clouds. The zenith is crossed by the strokes of two contrails forming a perfect giant X. The shadows of the horde around him are elongated, the whole world becoming a piece of art, impossibly real with talk, an extended thing. In the middle of it all he closes his eyes and lets the conversations wash over him—listening to the two white women with a picnic basket