Crying Mask: For all your strivings there is only a slim number of possible ontologies: materialism, dualism, monism. As the princess first pointed out, dualism has fundamental holes in it. Monism is nonsensical. Materialism is all that is possible.

Laughing Mask: It’s not the kind of problem you can map out all the solutions beforehand! The prior space of possibilities will look childish in retrospect. Yet you base your life and beliefs off of it?

Crying Mask: Now we see you for what you really are. A science denier. An intelligent mind struggling to get out of iron bars. Sorry the universe didn’t turn out the way that you wanted it, but this is about feelings. About what you want to be true.

Laughing Mask: I’m the scientist, not you! I’m the empiricist. You’re the metaphysician, talking about deducing the rest of the world through the base axioms of microscopic physics. Believing in theories that contradict their own formulations. Fantasizing an infinite multiverse just to get your equations to make sense.

Crying Mask: Not all consensus is metaphysics. The fact that you can marshal a few rhetorical tricks means nothing against the usefulness of physics. Your intuitions are not justifiable given the evidence.

Laughing Mask: Consciousness is the evidence! We’ve been pretending that the world is a game for so long! Just mathematics and relations. Just trajectories through a state-space. But mathematics is mere syntax. Consciousness is more! It’s the fire in the equations. Our reality isn’t just numbers, don’t you see! There are feelings, willings, thoughts, all in there as well! It means the world is not definable as a game, as any kind of complex billiards table! It’s more than can be defined by those methods!

Crying Mask: Haven’t you already wasted enough time on this? I seem to remember just two years ago you went through a six-month phase where you thought you could reformulate the laws of physics in intentional language. Start with the simplest intentional states, show that basic forces can be redescribed as instantiations of these intentions, and build up to larger consciousnesses from there?

Laughing Mask: Well, yes, that was a failure, but—

Crying Mask: So then what do you really have? Are you going to rewrite the laws? Sneak intentionality and consciousness in? Where? Even if you could put in the ten years to get the level of expertise you would need for that, how will you feed yourself? How will you survive, both physically and psychically, for that time? And if you fail? Or if you are one hundred years too early? A thousand? If you need three Einsteins to make their discoveries before you can proceed? What then? You’ll waste your life . . . You fool, you’ll waste your life . . .