The lingering trauma of centuries. Ransom cannot get out of its shadow. Part of me cannot either.

There was once a problem in philosophy called “the explanatory gap.” Imagine a gray-scale person raised in a black-and-white. They are taught a comprehensive scientific explanation of color, including the physics of the eye and the biology of the brain. They read lengthy and evocative descriptions of color. They taste foods and smell scents that are often associated with particular colors. They are allowed to do everything related to color except to see a color.

One day, they are allowed out of the room and into the world. They see color for the first time. They experience a thing they have never experienced before.

The explanatory gap is the difference between what they learn inside the room and what they see outside. The gap between knowing everything about color and actually seeing a color. In this gap lives the idea of “qualia,” the first-person experiences of the mind. You cannot describe or communicate qualia; you can only have them.

Is there an explanatory gap between knowing the history of Eliksni violence against humanity and living through it? Is there a gap between experiencing full-sensorium captures of that night and actually being there, in London, when the Devils finally broke the wall?

There must be. Qualia of pain and hate.

Only–

We solved the explanatory gap. Golden Age philosophers correctly identified the difference between the education of color and the experience of color. Experience occurs in the brain. Qualia, no matter how ineffable, are the result of physical processes. If the Gray Room Dweller had never experienced Red, it was because the neural correlates of the qualia Red had never been activated. Give the Gray Room Dweller a dose of hallucinogens, or an EMP to the right part of the brain, and they could experience all the colors imaginable without ever leaving their black-and-white room. The problem was never one of incommunicable experience, but one of insufficiently rich communication. We cannot write a book that evokes the experience of Red, but we can design a brain stimulus which makes a Human see red. The same goes for ancient thought experiments like Nagel’s bat, which was solved by the epistemology bridge–although there are arguments the bridge just negotiates a compatible illusion–

I wonder if Ransom would still push for the “complete extirpation of invasive Fallen from the system” if he lost his memory of all those centuries, if he had to relearn it all from books. What if he were like a newborn Guardian again? Richly educated on our bleak history with the Eliksni, but not scarred by the experience of it?

Would he still arrive at the same unshakeable conviction that they all have to go?

Or would he be missing some irreducible qualia, some pearl grown around the grit of first-person suffering?

O, Traveler. I see it now!