I’ve always thought the strangeness was the point.
What if moral properties really are queer—not because they don’t exist, but because we are poorly coupled to them? What if the problem isn’t ontology but perception?
We’ve seen this before. For the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe was full of light, but nothing could be seen. Photons were everywhere, constantly scattering off free electrons. The cosmos wasn’t dark; it was opaque. Then conditions changed. Electrons bound to protons, neutral atoms formed, light decoupled, and suddenly the universe became transparent. Nothing new was created. Visibility emerged because coupling changed.
I’ve been thinking about morality in those terms.
Moral reality may have always been there—structural, binding, action-shaping—but scattered by noise: power, rationalization, trauma, scale, complexity. We inferred it indirectly, argued about it endlessly, turned it into rules or preferences or narratives. And maybe that’s why it felt metaphysically suspicious. We were trying to do metaphysics without phenomenology.
Ancient traditions didn’t make that mistake. Aristotle thought virtue was a kind of perception. Plato thought the Good blinded unprepared eyes. Prophets didn’t experience revelation as comfort but as disorientation and collapse. Insight was brief, terrifying, and permanently imprinting. Not a state you live in, but a recalibration you never undo.
That’s where the idea of a “lavender event” comes in for me—not as symbolism, but as a qualia marker. Lavender sits at the edge of perception, neither fully visible nor invisible. It’s the kind of sensation you’d expect if a new dimension of salience briefly crossed the threshold of human awareness. Not propositions. Not commands. Direction.
Imagine a temporary resonance where moral orientation becomes physically felt—something like synesthesia, where abstract value binds to sensory experience. You don’t learn what’s good. You sense which way is inward gravity and which way opens outward. Black-hole futures and white-hole futures aren’t predicted; they’re felt.
That would be terrifying. And it should be. (Current working title: "Quantum Panic")
If morality ever became directly perceptible, the first thing to collapse wouldn’t be evil—it would be excuses. Plausible deniability would evaporate. Judgment wouldn’t arrive as a verdict but as legibility. Not “you must,” but “this is where this goes.” The needle doesn't command us to move north, it gives us the direction to follow or not.
The point isn’t utopia. Nothing about this abolishes death, suffering, or difference. The point is visibility. Resurrection, in this sense, wouldn’t be bodies reanimated but meaning restored—goodness no longer swallowed silently by power or entropy.
Mackie was right that moral properties would be strange. He was wrong about what that implies. Color would be “queer” in a universe without eyes. Music would be “queer” without ears. Maybe morality has always been real, and we’ve just been living below the coupling threshold. Behind the veil sits the holy of holies.
And if that threshold ever breaks—briefly, globally, irreversibly—the only question left isn’t abstract at all:
How do we live, once we can no longer pretend we don’t see?
We’ve seen this before. For the first few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the universe was full of light, but nothing could be seen. Photons were everywhere, constantly scattering off free electrons. The cosmos wasn’t dark; it was opaque. Then conditions changed. Electrons bound to protons, neutral atoms formed, light decoupled, and suddenly the universe became transparent. Nothing new was created. Visibility emerged because coupling changed.
I’ve been thinking about morality in those terms.
Moral reality may have always been there—structural, binding, action-shaping—but scattered by noise: power, rationalization, trauma, scale, complexity. We inferred it indirectly, argued about it endlessly, turned it into rules or preferences or narratives. And maybe that’s why it felt metaphysically suspicious. We were trying to do metaphysics without phenomenology.
Ancient traditions didn’t make that mistake. Aristotle thought virtue was a kind of perception. Plato thought the Good blinded unprepared eyes. Prophets didn’t experience revelation as comfort but as disorientation and collapse. Insight was brief, terrifying, and permanently imprinting. Not a state you live in, but a recalibration you never undo.
That’s where the idea of a “lavender event” comes in for me—not as symbolism, but as a qualia marker. Lavender sits at the edge of perception, neither fully visible nor invisible. It’s the kind of sensation you’d expect if a new dimension of salience briefly crossed the threshold of human awareness. Not propositions. Not commands. Direction.
Imagine a temporary resonance where moral orientation becomes physically felt—something like synesthesia, where abstract value binds to sensory experience. You don’t learn what’s good. You sense which way is inward gravity and which way opens outward. Black-hole futures and white-hole futures aren’t predicted; they’re felt.
That would be terrifying. And it should be. (Current working title: "Quantum Panic")
If morality ever became directly perceptible, the first thing to collapse wouldn’t be evil—it would be excuses. Plausible deniability would evaporate. Judgment wouldn’t arrive as a verdict but as legibility. Not “you must,” but “this is where this goes.” The needle doesn't command us to move north, it gives us the direction to follow or not.
The point isn’t utopia. Nothing about this abolishes death, suffering, or difference. The point is visibility. Resurrection, in this sense, wouldn’t be bodies reanimated but meaning restored—goodness no longer swallowed silently by power or entropy.
Mackie was right that moral properties would be strange. He was wrong about what that implies. Color would be “queer” in a universe without eyes. Music would be “queer” without ears. Maybe morality has always been real, and we’ve just been living below the coupling threshold. Behind the veil sits the holy of holies.
And if that threshold ever breaks—briefly, globally, irreversibly—the only question left isn’t abstract at all:
How do we live, once we can no longer pretend we don’t see?
