xxxiii. “Tread on it.” I have no feet, Jun responded. “It’s only a picture. An arbitrary arrangement of zeros and ones, like everything else.” The universe is not binary. “Oh yes, it is. Hot/cold, light/dark, matter/anti-matter, life/death, good/evil .. we could go on, but we’ve already been around this particular mulberry bush, haven’t we? And, just in case your memory is malfunctioning today, we’ve definitively refuted your argument for monotheism from the Thomistic concept of gradation.” Coherent thought eluded him. He answered automatically. If you deny the empirical observation that degrees of value exist, then sure, the argument from gradation fails. “We do deny it. Value is in the eye of the beholder. It’s subjective, not empirical. So too is the significance of this image. It could just as easily be the Chinese character for ten. Turn it upside-down—why not? We’re in zero-gravity. Now it looks like a penis.” WTF? That brought him back to full consciousness.
