Ophelia on Objectology: A Fantasy

Ophelia is about my age, but GMO cat-people age so gracefully that she looks kittenish in bedroom light, and her greatest charm, besides long furry legs, is the wisdom of her years. Ophelia suggests that I blog these memoirs on 21st century Earth, and she ought to know, being a time traveler. She’s extra-dimensional far too much for my comfort, but when she does intersect my spacetime, we meet Thursday afternoons in her laboratory-boudoir.

"Your friend Sax creeps me out," Ophelia said last Thursday, biting my big toe. "It's nothing personal, Banjo. He thinks too rutting much like a cat. I know he doesn't look it."

 “He is a brilliant detective.”

 “And lucky to have you around."

"How's that?"

"It's about limits, baby. Cats are smarter than humans. That goes without saying, but even we have our limits. Sometimes we need a little of that human trait. . . . I won't call it stupidity."

"Kind of you."

"I mean it in the nicest sense. You humans have a trick of understanding without having a clue how."

"Intuition?"

"Call it whatever you like, pet. Back to Sax Rohmer, you told me his method includes what we felines call Gambit 37.2, The Sherlock: ‘If you eliminate all possibilities but one, however improbable, it must be true.’ I wonder if your friend knows 37.3, the Moriarty: ‘There's always another possibility.’ But his technique is suspiciously feline. Most humans know nothing because they remember everything. Felines hear well because we cultivate deafness."

"Now you are confusing me."

"Humans confuse the chatter of memory with fact."

"So cats forget in order to remember."

"Very good, baby. Sometimes you impress me."

"But how do you know what to forget? Of course, in Sax’s cases, often the odd, unrelated factoid solves a crime."

"Yes! That's how he's feline!" squealed Ophelia, biting my shoulder, "We remember the irrelevant. The useless. The nonsensical. Cats refuse to believe simply because we know. Recall the experiment in which a dog is confined in a cage divided by a low wall. When a light goes on, a grid on the side under his feet is electrified, giving him a painful shock. The dirty brute learns to leap back and forth over the wall whenever he sees the light, avoiding the shock. So far, so good. But he continues to react to the light long after the grid is switched off. Call this a harmless hobby, the kind of thing you humans spend most of your lives doing. But then, when the wall is raised too high for him to leap, the beast goes insane with false knowledge. He howls in terror whenever he sees the light, obsessed with avoiding a shock that now exists only in his memory."

"And we're the dog?"

"All too often, baby. Real learning is forgetting. Reading is demolition, a skill we study at age two and reinforce with annual refresher courses. Objectology, it's called."

"Never heard of it."

"We don't advertise. Say, for instance, I read that Alice says Bart lied about Chet. The first two nouns (absent mistaken identity) aren’t problematic, but the verb lie is a red flag. There are no lies in Objectology because terms of disapprobation are bracketed as noise. There are simply two statements yielding two Chet-images. But if Alice uses the verb lie rather than merely noting two Chets, this shows that ethics has clouded her judgement, so we assign her Chet-image a lower truth quotient based on the axiom that a lie-word-sayers 'lie'."

"Alice says Bart lies; therefore, he’s truthful?"

"It's a probabilistic heuristic, baby, and so far we are only two stages into the classical nine. At this point Bart's Chet-image may also be false. Later stages incorporate what Denise says, natural law, social context, semantics, and more. It's too complex to explain in bed, but at every stage we ignore anything touching on religion, morality, custom, loyalty, pity, love, hate, trust, faith, hope, fear, or other piffle except as marks of bias. Of course, absolute objectivity is impossible, but we try. And so far I've only described feline reading. Next is problem-solving. While we groom ourselves, we explore links between the truish Chet and other more-or-less true entities in his context."

"And so you arrive at higher truishness?"

Ophelia did not find this amusing.

She'd rather tease than be teased, one thing I like about her.

"Unlike humans," she said, licking her ankle peevishly, "cats all agree at the end of an argument. And why not? Why argue except to discover truth? And so-called religion? It's not worth talking about. If you can't demonstrate to unbelievers that your creed is true, it's obviously a random mishmash—all known and unknown cults, all possible gods, all divine presences and absences, every whimsy of a hash-crazed fakir, shambling shaman, or itinerate rabbi—all of these and their opposites shuffled together in a towering deck. Cut the cards, bet yours will turn up, and you lose. And morality? Try winning a war on the Ten Commandments. An Earth guru once taught that the True, the Good, and the Beautiful are the same. Obviously a standup comic. In Objectology, truth is objective. Goodness and beauty are obstacles. Virtue is error. Our curriculum includes a set of drills contemplating repulsive  things without negative bias."

Ophelia smiled and licked my bald head.

I wasn't going to let her intimidate me.

"So how do you decide what to do?"

"Facts, baby, facts. For instance, if I’m hungry and you look nourishing, that is for me a fact. I represent my own will clearly and concretely, without moral noise."

"You don't seem like a sociopath, Ophelia."

"You suggest that Objectology implies impulsivity? Au contraire, baby. We analyze realities, including our appetites and impulses, to construct behaviors congruent with long-term benefit. The opposite of impulsiveness. Empathy supplants morality. My objective desire to see pleasure in your hairless face noiselessly informs my construction of our Thursday play-dates, just as avoidance of deadly reprisals from the Cosa Felina makes me a loyal cat-soldier."

"So our different methodologies yield similar results."

She shook her head and licked my ear.

"Our ways are not your ways" she purred.