The Fifth Science

by Exurb1a

I wonder, if we all divorced ourselves in two, what would be the result? One half the observer, one half the doer. I doubt we'd be impressed with what we found.

A lifetime of almosts. Almost kissing Abigail Payne only to go back inside. Almost giving his father a piece of his mind just before the old man died. Almost pursuing his true dream of becoming a railway driver, only to go into academia instead out of a stupid sense of duty. Humans must be the only animals who build zoos for themselves.

Most humans were not malicious, only drastically misguided and desperate in their loneliness. They learned at some point that there was an eccentric core to their personality and that it was possible no one else shared their own brand of eccentricity. They put up screens around that core to shield from embarrassment and shame. For all the pompous forms in which writers and musicians have described it, love was surely that moment when the screens might come down in front of another human, if only for a moment, and freely give them a long, unfettered look into the true middle where the fear and anguish lives.

The central tenet of his metaphysic consisted in declaring that mind as a stuff is not some property native to brains, or not necessarily native to them anyway. Mind is rather the product of a very particular complexity. This of course opens the door to all manner of entities being conscious then, not just humans, and not even just creatures rooted in biology.

Sweet Jesus, history is strange. When trying to see into the future, one always forgets that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. To every discovery, a parry. For every dove, a bullet.

In all things, across all avenues, a choice must be made: whether to follow love, truth, or power. That choice will consume the chooser. If he follows only love then his wellbeing will be constantly at the mercy of another, though his highs will be sublime. If he follows truth then it will be a lonely journey, but potentially a noble one. If he should follow power though, not only will he come to know a desperate and revolting loneliness, but he will also never experience even a drop of satisfaction in anything.

“Because perhaps we were born of a single deviation in the mindpattern of our packets. Think about it, every day there must be trillions of reactions on a neurological level, neurons interfering with neurons. Usually nothing happens and the system runs along fine. But every now and then, almost never actually, some random interference gives birth to a new conscious system, hosted inside the first. And there it is. Us.”

“There is no time and no duration in etherspace,” the lantern said, watching the voidskipper. “All events occur at once. It is the privilege of one awake during that journey to see events ahead and events behind. We learn the true names of everything and we learn to say them. Given the complexities of the ribbondash travel process, we occasionally arrive before we set off.”