ORGANELLE

“…and some ideas are compelling due to what they imply rather than what they declare or claim…”

— infraheard

When you form a new relationship with a member of the (cohort/clan/tribe/people), then, rather naturally, what usually occurs is that members of the (cctp) come and check you out. They see if you’re real. Authentic. Sincere. True. And often, this process is represented in dreams.”

— dreamcounter

“I’ve often heard that we ‘spend half our lives sleeping’. But if you think about it, you can experience an entire lifetime in a single dream… so, in reality, we probably actually spend 97% of our experiential timing.”

— dreamcounting

“It’s the most important game that we almost always avoid playing…”

— a worm

I have always found riddles and ‘hypothetical’ questions interesting. The former, perhaps, usually at least, more than the latter.

Why?

Because the latter often introduces a situation that is either impossible in actual fact, or so profoundly unlikely as to be equivalent to impossibility.

Hypothetical questions often (not always) represent situations in which completely absurd organizing principles, circumstances and participants are woven together to intentionally produce some kind of conundrum.

For example: Joe has a .22 handgun. Tom has a .38 handgun. There are ten men in the room. Each has a gun of greater caliber than each individual man previous to him in order. If you enter the room and are seeking protection, to which man do you address your plea?

Here is the actual number of situations on Earth that match this hypothetical situation: 0

Here is the chance that any person will actually encounter this situation or something closely resembling it in a human lifetime: 0 (+/- .00008263…)

The ‘train switch’ hypothetical, familiar to many of us, is a similar conundrum. It presents a ridiculously absurd question »as if it were a natural concern. This should be called out when it’s going on. The answer isn’t, for example, ‘I save the single person I know, condemning the other 5 to doom’. But rather: I find the person who set this up, and subject them to the consequences that naturally emerge from having done so. Or something resembling this.

Hypothetical questions such as these tell us very little (or nothing at all) about actual circumstances, value judgments, and so on, because they place the subject of the question into a situation that is a: not actual, and thus subject to broad forms of distortion or linguistic confusion, and b: often so incredibly unlikely as to comprise the form of decision that nearly zero humans in history were ever faced with making.

When hypothetical questions appear authoritative — while at the same time presenting an absurd, bizarre, or intentionally composed conundrum, we should be ready to dismiss them formally, overtly. »After having done so, if we so desire, we may explore their ramifications… unencumbered by their seeming necessity or urgency, as well as the the moral, ethical and/or value-based conflicts they may propose…

∞ “I knew at once that the left side of her face was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was reborn with every glance at it.

But I also felt, or intuited — that the exotic veil that artfully obscured the other half hid something as unthinkable as it was irredeemable.

The thought of what must hide there infected me. It nestled in my breast like a fungus or worm. It chewed in places one should not mention. I felt its tiny teeth, and swore my opposition to its lethal purpose.”

— Half Taken

“He was the nemesis of all of my forms and arts; and thus the friend of their true defense, for in long contest with and against him, I learned the vulnerabilities of the fiercest of the opposing factions, and could thus encompass their contraries in my own developmental movement.”

— an anonymous informant

“… a highly articulate yet almost purely improvised sequence of creatively self-and-other-advancing responses that would be as impossible to rationality’s analysis as they would be to its abilities to mimic them. This is part of what sports »is: the inability to mimic many simultaneous domains of unpredictable crisis and opportunity. But it is a phony representation, and what it represents is life itself. The problem is this: our representation is fake, and we do not form teams except for the sake of representations.

That which informs this dance is the spirit of intelligence in true relation, not logic, rationality, or economy. And though these should not be entirely evicted from the dance, nor should they ever rule over or declare their ‘judgments’ of it.”

— a fragment

^ “We design the wedding garb before we have the slightest experience of mating or suitors. We build the church because we have neither contact with nor experience of the divine.

We go to war before we recognize that we are fingers on the same hand, and most of what we call medicine is poison because we see only the effect we desire, and none of the prices incurred where we have chosen to be blind. Convenience is the darker shadow of our medicine.

We have photographed the fish before we arrive at the lake, and we are in love with the camera, not the light, the living water; the tense relationship between counting, recording, broadcasting and reality has removed 3/4ths of our vision before the mind was moved to action.”

— an anonymous informant

“So, we have this thing we do, where, whenever we want to talk about something without other people being able to figure our what we’re talking about, is to simply speak as if what we want to talk about was something we picked up from watching Oprah. We have a code for it. JSO. Just say Oprah.”

± infreaheard