A:
Hey, speaking of, how'd it go with Whos-its-butts?
B:
You mean Kim?
A:
Yeah, what did I say?
B:
Very funny. It went terribly, if you must know.
A:
Aw, sorry man.
B:
Well, it's not my fault
A:
Sure
B:
There was a large wait for a table.
A:
You went to that new Indian place by you, right?
B:
Correct, Golden Bombay.
A:
Right.
B:
There was a large wait, but fortunately they had a bar.
A:
Nice.
B:
Correct. We each had two drinks at the bar, then finally got a table and sat down. We looked at the menu, and I suggested that we could split a bottle of wine, to which she replied, "No, I wouldn't drink much, I've already had the two." Which would be fine, but she then said, "I normally would've had just one, but I was kind of nervous about the date and everything, we Gemini are always kind of nervous."
A:
I'm actually a Gemini, too.
B:
But surely you don't believe in astrology!
A:
Yeah, no, I don't read horoscopes or anything. But so what was the bad part of the date?
B:
That was the bad part! She goes so far as to read her horoscope almost daily, I asked. She truly believes that garbage.
A:
Yeah, but it's not like it's the focal point of her life or anything right? She's not a professional palm reader or something.
B:
Doesn't matter. Does not matter one bit. You either live in the real world, or you live in a fantasy world. Either/or. You don't get to own a cellphone, or use the internet, or ride in a plane on one hand, and on the other hand, genuinely think that the alignment of the planets on the day you're born matters one bit with regards to your personality.
A:
Jesus, dude, you're being an asshole. She's a cool girl.
B:
I used to think so, too. But now I know
A:
Look
B:
NOW I KNOW that she is not, in fact, because her own internal belief-system is so inconsistent with itself, that it's painfully clear that's she's never thought or considered--even shallowly--what the world actually is.
A:
Look
B:
She's never even considered for a second how her whole day to day life is powered by science and technology and computers, and those all ONLY WORK BECAUSE MATERIALISM IS TRUE, except but apparently for her that's all well and good for most of the time, but every once in awhile she gets to special plead up to some stellar constellation who is apparently also alive and cares deeply about magically shaping the personalities of a particular species of great apes, namely us, when really
A:
LOOK! You understand that you don't have to actually implement this poor girl, right? You don't need to build her! You don't need to maintain her! You don't have to write unittests for her edgecases! You don't have to architect her and then roll your snotty little eyes when you have to give her mild interest in horoscopes its own little oval shape with an arrow on the system diagram, right? Do you understand that?
B:
Well
A:
Do you understand that deep internal consistency has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what it means to be a person that you want to spend time with? Do you really get that deriving an entire fucking personality from three axioms is not a Good Thing? Do you feel deeply that a life that gives Stephen Wolfram and a bunch of other complex systems nerds a hard-on is not a life worth living, right?
B:
Surely
A:
I'm picturing you now on your dream date, with some girl that has the same stupid dead face as you, and you both order the same stupid dish, and then you each write down who you are on a napkin, and you're both stupid and proud of yourself that you fit on a napkin, that YOU, not a description, or a profile, or anything else, but actually YOU, who YOU are, fits on a napkin, and neither of you takes that for the obscenity that it is, and then you two exchange napkins, and read each other's, and then you just lean back a little bit and you each live your whole life together, each separately in your own head. Just running the simulation, you don't need to actually live it, you don't need to spend the time together, you don't need to have the fights, or cook the meals, or make the roadtrips, or share the nights, you don't need any of that to figure out who each other is, or to figure out who you are. You've got it all on the napkin, just run the simulation. And the two of you don't need to talk, or share, it's totally deterministic, you guys are running the exact same simulation in your head, same inputs, same outputs, and by the time the food arrives, you've lived your whole life together, you know everything there is to know, and you're stupid and proud of that fact and you don't understand that it's because you've impoverished your own lives and taken each other down with you. And after dinner, whether you sleep together, or get married, or have kids, none of that matters, those'll all be just memories, everything you do you'll just sleep walk through because you already did it all between the time you ordered and the time the chana masala arrived. You'll be dead and proud that you compressed your life and another's down to ten minutes. Is that what you want? No alarms and no surprises, baby. A life that tastes as good as the inside of your own mouth. Being emperor of the kingdom inside your own skull. Becoming in-bent. Doesn't that shit terrify you, brother? It should. It sure as hell terrifies me.