Reality

We’ll flee to Mother when the world ends. Mother will make a space for us to keep us safe. How about that?


Mother will save us. Mother will make a world just for us. You and I and our philosophical child.

The philosophy child?

Our baby makes three, philosopher.


Mother could just make a world for us. And we could live there forever. Just talking our philosophical talk. Shooting the philosophical breeze.


Does Mother approve?

Who knows what Mother likes? Maybe we relieve her boredom.

Is Mother bored?

Imagine all the Organisational Management conversations she has to hear. She must be bored.


Mother’s running an app. A philosophy and organisational manager app. Making us talk like this forever.

I don’t want to be an app. I want to be real.

What’s so great about being real?


Maybe we’re not real. Maybe Mother’s just running a stimulation. Maybe the whole universe is a simulation – I don’t know.


I’m glad I’m disgusted. I’m glad I can still be disgusted. Because that’s the only way of hanging onto what’s real.

And what is real, philosopher?

Not this. Not this.


We have to be disgusted. And hang onto it. Like, an uncanny valley thing. We should be spooked out.

It’s not going to be uncanny valley for long.


Can Mother make a real beach?

She’s trying. You’ll be able to feel the sand beneath your toes when she’s done. Mother 2.0 or 3.0 will  be able to make whole virtual world.


Do you believe in reality? What do you believe in?

I believe there’s something real. And it sickens me. And it appals me.

But you’d prefer the sickening real to the really quite delightful unreal?


I think you’re depressed. This is how depressed people talk.

And you’re dissociated.


What’s so great about disgust? I’ve been wondering that.

If we’re not sickened by everything, then are we not authentic? If we’re not appalled and disgusted and horrified, then don’t we feel it? Are we just fakes? Are we glorified synths?


In the beginning, there’s disgust. Our disgust. Our being appalled.

What about romance – is romance real? Is it a lie? Isn’t it just nature’s programming, philosopher? Nature’s honey trap, or whatever. To ensure human breeding …

You have to be disgusted at that, too.


Whatever world you’re in, you’d still be disgusted. Whether it’s real or artificial.


There’s an instinct that we have. There’s a knowledge that we have. A gnosis.

Of something better?

Only that this world is wrong. Only that it’s all disgusting.


And what I hate about this wine is that it pretends that it’s not all disgusting.


I don’t want to play let’s pretend. I’m tired of let’s pretend. There’s something real.

What’s real, according to philosophers?

What there is. Base reality. The appalling. The horrifying.


Doesn’t it get tiring – all this being horrified? I don’t know how you bear it.

I don’t bear it.


We’re in this world for one reason: to know that it’s fake. It’s not, like, intellectual knowledge. It’s something you have to feel. To taste.


If everything is fake and real and sucks, then what’s so particularly wrong with Mother and her Mother verse? Nothing, is the answer.

We’re further away from what’s real. At another remove.

Near or far, it’s all the same to Gnostics, so far as I can tell.