“Space is big,” Douglas Adams
A dangerous syllogism exists that states: “If anyone understands clerical errors, it’s the front desk at The Grand Hotel.”
It's dangerous because if anyone understands the front desk at The Grand Hotel, it might be the sapient fungus that has been eating that desk even before the world ended. The fungus was eating most of the hotel before the world ended and the lack of people had only accelerated its consumption.
It had started in the kitchen scraps in one of its kitchens and from there it grew fine branches of itself underneath the wallpaper and carpets of every corner of every room it could find. Before the world ended, it found many rooms. It would fruit a small piece of itself so it could experience the hotel’s single housekeeper cleaning each of the infinite rooms in less than an hour.
But now the housekeeper is gone, even though that seemed impossible, and the fungus plies and pulls at fibers and compounds until it can take it apart and make something of it.
“Infinity is a difficult concept to dissolve,” the sapient space fungi says when pilgrims travel the innumerate roads that lead to the front desk of The Grand Hotel in search of understanding of clerical errors. “It is particularly difficult if you’ve a habit of breaking up the universe into finite games.”
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“But how do clerical errors end worlds?” an earnest pilgrim asks.
The sapient fungus will go on to explain that the way things are counted determines the outcomes of the counting and that across the infinite phenomena to be counted, there are no ends or beginnings to the ways things can be counted inaccurately leading to an infinite number of people, places, and things that are not counted and never taught to count themselves and so do not count. In the Library of Bable, there is a book in which plenty of unnamed characters can attest to the horrors that can happen to those who are not counted and who do not count.
The pilgrim finds this unsatisfying and persists in their inquiry, desperate to have some concept they can weave the ideas of infinity around without first dissolving the finite box they’ve wrapped around their mind. The fruiting body of the sapient tangle of mycological webs responds with yet another infinitely inaccurate depiction of the infinite number of ways worlds end by bad math, political accounting, overconfident overlooking, and low blood sugar when doing sums.
Everyone is unsatisfied and the game they play together ends. And this interaction leads to many to use to syllogism that brought them here to deduce that no one understands clerical errors.
If a ->b
Not b
Therefore not a
a is 'anyone understands clerical errors'
b is 'the front desk of The Grand Hotel understands clerical errors