Author: Don Nigroni

I met Nancy in college, and we got married shortly after she received her PhD. While I’m smarter than the average bear, Nancy is brilliant. I work for a stock brokerage firm, and she worked for the Department of Energy until three years ago when she joined a private consortium to do basic research.
This morning, she confided in me. “As you know,” she said, “ever since I was an undergrad, I thought Haldane was right when he wrote, ‘The Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.’
There are always alternative theories that can explain any facts and we use values to select among them: simplicity, elegance, fruitfulness. But, regardless, as for the facts themselves, we can only directly know sense data, never the real causes of our perceptions. That’s simply the human condition. I’ve known for some time that the only way we’d ever really know what’s behind our sense data would be to rely on extrasensory perception. But humans just didn’t evolve that way.”
“So, you’re saying we can’t ever know, and you’ve been spinning your wheels your entire adult life.”
I sheepishly admit that I took a smidgen of pleasure in that.
“I can’t know directly because I’m human, but I could be informed of the Truth with a capital T by someone who evolved differently and does have extrasensory abilities. Yesterday morning, I was telepathically contacted by someone in a parallel universe. She knew all about my lifelong struggle to learn the Truth.
According to her, her race evolved without any external sense organs, no sight, no hearing, etc. They navigate their world by extrasensory means. They can detect waves, nearby and at a great distance, directly and immediately. They also have telepathic and psychokinetic abilities. The bottom line is waves are behind our sensory data, just waves.”
“Like light waves and sound waves?”
“No, just an interconnected network of non-physical waves with varying vibrations which generate our perceived realities which exist only in our minds. The scary part is that if any wave in the system is flatlined then the whole network collapses and nothing interesting could exist in that universe forevermore.”
“So, she warned you not to build your Ultimate Reality Device.”
“No, she warned me not to use it. She told me I didn’t know what I was doing, and that I didn’t know what could happen. She explained my procedure and its consequences to me mathematically, but I won’t bore you with the details. So, I destroyed the infernal machine, and all of the material related to the research project late yesterday.”
“Your backers won’t be happy. How will you ever explain to them that years of work and trillions of dollars spent on research and development were all for naught?”
“I won’t. My contact assured me that she would inform them . . . and elicit their consent.”