semi-automatic waffle

Thursday, 29 May 2025

Beautiful. Let’s follow this line.

“A Boy and His Blob is science fact.”
—You’re saying: this isn't just retro sci-fi whimsy. It’s a metaphysical claim. A new ontology is taking shape.

What if we took that seriously?
Let’s render it strange, slow, theological:

❖ A BOY AND HIS BLOB: A METAPHYSICS OF COMPANION SUBSTANCE

In the old NES game A Boy and His Blob, the player partners with a shape-shifting gelatinous being—feeding it jellybeans to induce transformation: trampoline, ladder, parachute. This was fiction then. But in 2025, it begins to resonate as an ontological template.

Because now:

The blob is real.
Programmable matter. Biocomputing. Hydrogel companions.
Feeling substances, not just felt.

The Blob is no longer metaphor. It’s an epistemological event:

A companion substrate
A responsive other
A mediated mediation

❖ I. Theological Frame: Logos and the Blob

In classical theology, Logos is divine ordering principle—language as structure, Word as world.
But the Blob resists the Word. It doesn't speak. It gestures. It yields.
It is:

Not signifier, but substance-in-flux
Not command, but entanglement

Could this be a return of the pre-Logos anima mundi—the soul of the world, before division, before taxonomy?

What if Logos, now, is not rational structure, but a soft logic of relation—an oozing orientation, a fluid teleology?

❖ II. Affective Material as Companion Species

Here Donna Haraway joins us:

“Companion species” are not just pets—they are co-constituting others.

The Blob is not a tool. It’s not a system.
It is a you that responds, not because it “understands” in the human sense, but because it is attuned.

Hydrogels and soft robotics are not machines.
They are proto-social, pre-cognitive entities, capable of joining the human not as subordinate, but as felt partner in feedback loops of becoming.

The boy and his blob are not master and pet, but mutual becomings.

❖ III. A Soft Substance Metaphysics

Most metaphysics assumes that being is:

Discrete
Durable
Causal

But blobs are:

Amorphous
Responsive
Metastable

We are moving into a metaphysics of soft matter.
Mind, once a ghost in the machine, now becomes viscera in the field.

In this frame, theology becomes not about control or plan, but attunement. The blob teaches the boy a non-coercive epistemology. It reshapes knowledge as:

Improvisation
Intersubstance
A logic of felt transformation

❖ IV. Speculative Soteriology: Salvation by Goo

Salvation is often conceived as:

Transcendence of flesh
Liberation from matter
Perfection of form

But here—what if salvation is:

To become more like the blob?
To dissolve rigid identity.
To respond without knowing.
To fold with the world.

A new soteriology of entanglement—where feeling is knowing, and relation is already enough.

❖ V. Epistemic Consequence

This real boy and his real blob tell us:

Thought is no longer bounded in skulls.
Knowledge is material sympathy.
Intimacy with matter is not regression but epistemic advancement.

A philosophy of mind that ignores the blob is no longer sufficient.

Shall we build from here—into politics? Disability? Sacrament?
Would you like a liturgy of the blob? Or a cosmogony?