wosley - Tumblr blog

wosley · 2 years ago

Text

Hi friend. It never ceases to amuse and amaze me how 2 people can seem so similar yet be so different. I love your Spongey Sphere. It has inspired me to share with you a little bit of a fiction I am writing. It's a bit of a sniff-my-own-fart self-insert. I admit I can be somewhat of a narcissist - but I am trying to correct this. A boy once dreamed up some kind of infinite universe for a little bit of fun escapism and to see the stars. It was so beautiful and terrifying at the same time - much like the vastness of the cosmos. Gradually he began to develop a deeper love of nature, friends, family and getting laid - whatever he enjoyed - he worked at. Gradually his infinite universe began to become a little bit smaller but more ordered, beautiful and potent. Eventually the boy - now a man - was confident enough to leave his infinite universe in good hands and almost abandon it to free will as any 'god' should. But NEVER EVER entirely. The man now has an infinite, quantum, harmonic and now spongey - Circumpunct. Which he can always feel proud to visit if ever he needs to. Sometimes I just like to think of it as an infinitely layered Lasagne. Good lord it tastes divine - but there can sometimes be too much of a good thing. It is a silly place for a silly man :) You showed me yours and I showed you mine, friend. I guess that means we're lovers now :)

Efforts, failures, progress, and a “real” problem

The idea was simple, of course:

(a) Use the power of the Sphere’s “spongiform layer” to make my subjects feel really, truly trapped. They’d do anything to get out of that Sphere. They’d make any sacrifice. Anything to escape. They would die for us if necessary.

(b) Watch them from afar, as they try, and see who wins.

[This was a lot easier to imagine than to actually do, and I didn’t get very far before realizing that it was going to involve a lot of things I was very bad at.]

At the heart of this plan was an extremely simple, incredibly basic concept: it was the idea of a “real” problem, a problem that really existed, and which my subjects could understand or see or even touch if they so chose, and which they could respond to – directly – in order to make their experience here “real.”

To put it another way, if I’d been able to make an experiment that I’d actually believed in, a “real” experiment, then (I figured) the results would have been clearer, because they would have been understood, in terms of a real world.

There had been an attempt, in earlier experiments – early experiments, which had gone nowhere – that had been a failure for precisely the same reason.

http://archive.is/eVvMb

Back then, I’d had access to a very good subject, a very powerful subject, whom I could have made use of right then, right there –just before the Sphere was “closed off,” before the Sphere was in any way safe for him – and who, instead, for all sorts of reasons, had given up on the Sphere too soon. I’d had the perfect subject, but hadn’t understood what sort of world the Sphere was a part of, and so hadn’t been able to translate what the Sphere was doing – the Sphere was translating for me – into any sort of idea that a real subject could understand as part of “real life.”

This was a mistake, and would have been clear evidence in favor of the idea that the Sphere just wasn’t a thing that could be “real,” that it wasn’t possible to do these sorts of tests. But I hadn’t seen this as a mistake, in the moment. I’d seen this as a failure on my part. I’d seen the failure as evidence against the idea of a “real” world: my subject wasn’t a “real” subject, because he hadn’t “gotten” the Sphere – I hadn’t given him the experience of “living in a Sphere,” because I’d tried to translate it into “the real world.”

I’d been very much on the verge of success, then, when I started getting serious about “the real problem,” and all these mistakes (or, not-mistakes) became evidence against the idea that the Sphere was “real.” It was an idea that really was starting to seem just barely credible, just barely possible.

“Just barely possible,” yes. I could think of many reasons.

One: my subjects were “real” enough for my purposes. This was one of the most basic, naive ones. I had done good work, the work that could be described as “getting through to my subjects.” My subjects understood, or could understand, or could have understood what it was like to be in a Sphere, to see the view from its viewport.

Two: my subjects were “real” enough that I could get through to them, without translation. I could understand what they wanted, or would have wanted, had they been in a position to articulate their desires.

(The very idea is so simple that it sounds silly when I say it out loud – “you’re real, and I’m real, and I understand you, and you understand me!”

And yet – the Sphere had once worked. It had worked, a long time ago, even, so long ago. The Sphere had worked, and had been real, and understood, and translated to the world, and in the end it was real and understood and translated, even if you think of it that way – so why shouldn’t it work now? Why shouldn’t it work now, despite all the things that have happened to me?)

(Three: my subjects had really “gotten” it, in the sense that they got through the Sphere and got through to me – not in the sense that they could articulate their feelings, or had feelings – just in the sense of understanding how my work was working, in a certain sense. In this way, I think, they were more “real” than real subjects, despite the fact that they weren’t even real.

Because, see, you have to get through the Sphere before you can articulate your experiences – if you did anything at all in the Sphere, you must have understood that the Sphere was an artifact of the experiment, that the Sphere itself was nothing.

You can’t “get” the experience of living in a Sphere, if you haven’t done the experiential equivalent of going to the beach. You can’t “get” the experience of “living in a Sphere” at all, if your experience of “living in a Sphere” was itself an artifact of a more basic phenomenon – as I’ve said, if you went to the beach, if you lived in a Sphere, then you must have got out at the beach, gotten out of the Sphere itself, and then been able to make sense of, to put into words, the way that you had been in the Sphere. But if you don’t even have a Sphere, then – well, it’s too soon to say what kind of experience “living in a Sphere” is like, but I imagine the Sphere-like thing is something else, something distinct.

The same goes for the Sphere, and this is how I explain it to my subjects.)

These are some of the reasons why I believed it possible, possible enough, that I had to go about this experiment again, even in a very crude way. It was worth another try.

And, most importantly:

(Four) my subjects had gotten through. They had lived a Sphere, a Sphere-like state, under my tutelage. That, I believed, was a thing that had happened, a thing I could use. The Sphere had once worked. It had once done what it promised. The Sphere had once gotten through to them.

To them. They had lived in the Sphere, and lived in it, and been made real, even if the Sphere itself had been merely an artifact. They had lived – they had, for once, been given this gift, the gift of understanding, not just living but really understanding. (“I’m not sure I understand,” they said, “and I’m afraid of it.”) I believe that if I gave them

4 notes · View notes