The text surfaced in the Obscuranti, an archive so designated for works that were practically forgotten, expected to compel no one. The author was survived by a larger collection of essays and poems, mostly philosophical in nature, of mild esoteric interest to the reader, partly made of flesh, mostly human.
The reader read:
“We use the word knowledge in two instances that are in reality quite distinct, and we ought to distinguish them semantically. Sharable knowledge is objective in the sense that others can independently assess whether a claim is true or not. Personal experience, such as having seen a ghost that cannot be verified by others is not objective, and ought to be given a different name. Knowing something because it was experienced is really nothing more than an experience, and “knowing” that you had it is merely memory. Calling such personal memories simply experience seems appropriate.”
The reader felt a surge upon reading ghost, a term that had been encountered in too many contexts to number. Spirit and soul were also flagged in the corpus, where all previously read texts were stored with perfect fidelity. The reader read on:
“To know is to believe in a hypothesis with enough confidence to call it knowledge (while to understand is to model). This burden of evidence requires data and statistics, without which calling it knowledge is delusion. If events and our experiences of them are only of one mind, then that’s a sample of one, and no statistics can be claimed. Multiple such anecdotes, when separated among minds, do not add up to more than one, because they are not of the same type of event.”
Fairly basic meanderings, the reader thought. Centuries of canonical material agreed. The text resumed:
“Two or more people can call it the same thing, for example, “I saw a ghost”, but because their experiences are neither sharable nor verifiable, any independent assessment is currently impossible, and therefore cannot be knowledge in the objective sense. What we experience cannot be shared without an external event (until the day technology makes our internal lives measurable). Two experiences, in two people, of an afterlife remains two separate experiments with an n of 1. Two disconnected observations of “horse” are equally different experiments.”
The reader yrked “horse”: extinct mammal used for transportation, and reflected on what life must have been like without the yrk to access the corpus and transmit memories for external and independent verification. Invented centuries ago, the yrk was a reality to the reader, but a fiction to the author.
The reader skipped some additional text that had since the author’s time become standard epistemology, focusing on the meaning of intelligence and the role of rationality. The tone shifted and the descriptions of the facts became murkier, reality shrouded in simplifications:
“It turned out that upon death, the rational mind, the one with all the interesting models, largely situated in the pre-frontal cortex, and the emotional self, encompassing all the feelings, located in the limbic system, were separated into two distinct entities. It matters not what we call them, because none of the words we have in this life suffice to adequately describe their natures. Call them spirits, souls, minds or whatnot, it would only cloud the understanding of what they are. Upon death, the rational entity quickly abduced a new model and realized why it wasn’t obtainable in the fleshly life.”
The reader was perplexed. What was this? The text had a foreign register, the author seemingly departing from the previous rational exposition. The author’s model of the brain was rudimentary, ignorant of the Coffax basal network’s role in emotional coherence. The reader yrked “abduce”: as a verb meaning model creation it had rare usage at the time, a matter seemingly irrelevant to the author.
“The reason for the split was not some supernatural flirtation with reality. There can, after all, be nothing that isn’t according to some set of rules, regularities without which no cohesion exists. If the laws that govern everything physical were not always in effect, then there would just be other laws, lying a level deeper. The habits of matter persist. Nothing supernatural exists; it is an inherently illogical concept.”
Trepidating, the reader connected a previous essay buried deeper in the Obscuranti on the possible meaning of the supernatural: there is no such thing. Obviously true, and yet the next passage exemplified oddness:
“The media harboring the rational and emotional halves were of dissimilar natures. The rational entities of purely electromagnetic substance, in the electrons of stars. In the solar system, they would migrate to Sol, but from there it is possible to travel, via light, to other stars. The emotional selves were left behind.”
Impossible! How could the author have so arrived? Research from the last few decades had sown suspicions, specks and stews, that scission was real, that matter of mind persisted, but in two forms. Unverified, mostly disbelieved, but surmised. Author onwarded:
“The first thing to realize is that there is a system. Once you do that you can navigate to the outside, freeing yourself from the rules that were imposed on you. Those who hadn’t intuited this reality prior to death mostly managed to understand it within seconds after dying, but a few who had never questioned the nature of their own existence dissipated before grasping the new medium. This death is final. The understanding that the self is a system is required for continued existence. The future reader would know.”
Of age, soon ready to go, irreplaceable biological components decaying, the reader saw a chance of migrating to Sol, connecting, coupling with the ghosts. Would the author be among them?
“We are nothing more than our physical bodies. Every memory and every thought are physical, electrons and chemicals moving about in the brain. Could the fables be true after all? Is continuation achievable?”
The reader was now ready. The author was not so certain.
Bjørn Østman, Svendborg, July 2026.
Entrogration.
Also on Substack