The Execution of an Antimeme
They called him Blob. To some Blob represented the frontier of human knowledge, to others an insult. To a few, Blob was the manifestation of the Divine, captured in a small cubical black box. But to the Foundation, Blob was a cosmic error. On the charge of “Crimes Against Human Intellect”, Blob was sentenced for extermination; A judgement which proved to be quite controversial within the Foundation. Three camps arose:
The “Faithful”, or those with utmost belief in the eventual triumph of human intellect. They believed that with enough time and resilience humanity will conquer all of existence, and to whom the word “unknowable” might as well have been gibberish. The Faithful believed that this sentence was a premature admission of defeat. “If only we have more time”, they said, “Surely we will understand it.” And of course, once they understood it, what power would Blob have over them?
Then there were the “Disillusionists”, who believed that this whole charade was largely unnecessary. Surely a charge of “Crime Against Human Intellect” was reactionary panic. We know the Blob exists, then by virtue of this fact, do we not establish that it must have some properties? And further any object with properties must exist! Where is then the unknowability?Through argument alone we have proved that we know it. Do these two aspects not mutually cover and explain each other? If it worked for Descartes, one said, why can’t it work for Blob? Was not then the extermination of Blob entirely pointless?
And finally there were the “Supremacists”, the largest faction of them all. “It is unknowable”, they said. It must therefore be destroyed. There was no other way. Their dogma stated that the Universe belonged to Man, and therefore only that which can be within Man’s comprehension and eventual reach should be allowed to exist. Blob had, by merely existing, committed the gravest crime of them all, and it was Man’s divine right and duty to obliterate it.
Such was the fate of an “Antimeme” in this universe.
No one knew the origins of Blob, or how the Foundation found it. There was extensive documentation, photos, journals, logs, and anyone could read it.
But no one could comprehend it afterwards, and that was the point.
Blob was an antimeme: An entity that refuses comprehension. Blob could not be understood. That is not to say it was difficult to understand Blob, but that it is Blob’s nature to prevent its own comprehension. No one even knew if Blob did this of its own will, or if Blob was sentient at all. Those who have interacted with Blob know that they interacted with it, but once removed from its presence, lose all recollection of the interaction. Any notes they take show the wear and tear of writing on the paper, but either end up blank or with no legible words or symbols, no pattern, no grammar, and no structure. All pictures taken come out fully saturated.
Like a word on the tip of their tongues that they just can’t remember, Blob exists in a small black box, in sight but forever out of reach. The Foundation would have largely left blob alone but for the fact that researchers who went in pairs to interact with Blob came out with a memory of themselves going for the interaction, but no memory of their peers being there. Some even lost all memory of their peer’s entirely. This led to the realisation that Blob could not only prevent it’s own understanding, it could also wipe people’s memory of shared experiences with other people within its proximity. Who was to then say that Blob was not a malicious mass casualty event, but one which left the survivors with no memory of the victims, and no memory of the calamity?
On the day of the execution, Blob —rather the black box that was supposed to contain Blob, was doused in fuel and set on fire. Some spectators gasped, many cheered, a few looked the other way. Blob burnt like ordinary wood, cracked and cackled as the fire spread and then the box suddenly opened —to nothing. There was nothing inside. But was there nothing? Or was Blob, still an antimeme, was in sight but outside the realm of perception? In the end there was no resolution. Even in flames, Blob remained outside human understanding. But the seeming extermination of Blob raised a new unsettling question: That which can be understood must exist, but is the opposite true as well? The human body exists within and is bound by the laws of this universe, but what of the human mind? If the human mind is also bound then does it imply that all which it can imagine, no matter how absurd, abhorrent, fanciful, or bizarre or even contradictory, must exist somewhere in existence?
Simply put, was the set of all human imaginations not a subset to all which can exist? Or like how Blob was beyond human understanding, the human mind could also create ideas which were beyond the realms of the universe. If so, how was this even possible? Perhaps Antimemetics was the universe’s way of protecting itself from paradoxes of thought, or perhaps all of this is wishful thinking.