Of course, the really interesting question is not so much why the chicken crossed the road on this occasion but why there was, like, a road there in the first place where a chicken could cross it, the co-location of a four-lane separated highway[357] and a poultry run seeming rather at odds with the general desiderata of central Quebec's motorists and poulterers respectively. While this might appear to be mainly a question of preventing collisions between the highway's mechanical and galliform users, the binding constraint in matters of coop design is typically the exclusion of predators[358], for which the highway is in fact perfectly adequate.
[357] This being Autoroute 20, which serves the heavily trafficked Montreal—Quebec City via a right-of-way that runs basically in a straight northeasterly/southwesterly line through the semideveloped agricultural region of Centre-du-Québec and whose high modernist linear geometry makes it the preferred choice of the Québécois motorist despite the need for two crossings of the _fleuve Saint-Laurent_. N.b. that the 20 is paralleled physically and culturally by the C.N.–owned and Via–operated rail line favored by the local _cultistes du prochain train_, who face ludo-kinetic hazards w/r/t the rail corridor not dissimilar to those facing chickens on the road.
[358] Primarily the red fox, _Vulpes vulpes_, but with meaningful threats also from [two pages of details listing animals that eat chickens]
A) We can agree, I hope, that in crossing the road a chicken does not become a qualitatively different chicken. The chicken's inherent moral worth does not increase or diminish with the crossing. And yet, the chickens on our side of the road are treated with a basic sense of compassion, while those on the other are essentially tortured for their entire lives, which in the case of male chicks is measured in hours. We must, then, allow those chickens to "cross the road" within our internal ethical landscape, allowing us to consider their welfare in a manner consistent with our intuitions.
(Peter Singer)
A) We found (p = 0.0002) that crossing the road results in an average spacial displacement of greater than 15 meters, consistent with a model in which the gallinaceous impetus to cross the road is mediated by its geospatial preference ordering.
(academic study that didn't get a statistically significant result for the actual question and is hoping you don't notice)
I only bother to log in and comment because I feel like you take constructive criticism well. It wasn't actually clear from the post (until about halfway through) that this is all just an output from some AI.
I had expected that AI would be featured, but assumed at the start that you had actually sourced instances where these people had actually talked about the question "why did the chicken cross the road?".
I'm a little let down by that, because just sharing outputs from an AI feels pretty boring compared to what you usually write. And to preface it as "answers to this question according to..." when it's actually just LLM junk feels icky.
I look forward to the grim meathook future where everyone is so suspicious that content is AI-generated that no one trusts anything and so some people stop human-generating content, which raises the fraction of AI-generated content, further increasing suspicions, etc...
I'm not sure why Ethan thought this post was AI generated, but to be fair, after I published this, people have sent me a bunch of AI-generated versions of these jokes, and while the quality is worse, I don't think it's *that* much worse. And that damned Marie Kondo one is really annoyingly good. Although, I think everyone is using my human-written jokes in the prompt, so that's some grounds for cope...
(I acknowledge in advance that this is also exactly what an AI would say, sorry.)
A) The road was busy. I caught a break in the traffic and made it as far as the median. Cars careened towards me from both directions. Drivers honked their horns and hurled obscenities at me. I asked myself, "Why am I doing this?"
Someplace to admit this, where it might get the hearing it deserves.
I was probably in my 50s before I actually got the canonical answer "To get to the other side" as it's intended in the joke's true meaning. Never mind that I've lived in the deep South for more than half my life. The idiom "the other side" simply bounced right off me for 50 years.
Well done. I needed to search just to "get" most of the jokes, but then appreciated them very much. Too soon old; too late tuned in. It is a little frightening how good these tools are becoming - or how poor I am at following the drift.
While I was at it I had Claude's take on Gemini's take and answers for:
The Grateful Dead " {To be bound to cover just a little more ground.};
The I Ching {A) Hexagram 29: The Abysmal (Water), doubled. The chicken stands at the edge. Danger above, danger below. The road flows like water through a ravine - one must follow its course. The superior chicken does not resist the current but moves with sincerity of heart. [then 200 words more line by line further]}
and a stochastic chicken: {The chicken's position follows a Wiener process with drift μ toward the other side and volatility σ reflecting environmental noise. [300 or so more words]
The chicken didn't "decide" to cross in any deterministic sense. Rather, given its initial conditions and the stochastic forcing terms (thermal fluctuations, predator scares, feed distributions), crossing was simply the outcome with highest likelihood in this particular universe.
Run the simulation again, and the chicken might still be here.
" Suppose there’s a rooster standing next to you, and there’s a chicken across the street. The rooster gives a sexually solicitive gesture that is hot by chicken standards, and she promptly runs over to mate with him (I haven’t a clue if this is how it works, but let’s just suppose). And thus we have a key behavioral biological question—why did the chicken cross the road? And if you’re a psychoneuroendocrinologist, your answer would be “Because circulating estrogen levels in that chicken worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signaling,” and if you’re a bioengineer, the answer would be “Because the long bone in the leg of the chicken forms a fulcrum for her pelvis (or some such thing), allowing her to move forward rapidly,” and if you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’d say, “Because over the course of millions of years, chickens that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile left more copies of their genes, and thus this is now an innate behavior in chickens,” and so on, thinking in categories, in differing scientific disciplines of explanation."
I asked Gemini 3 to write some of these, and I thought they were really good. Sorry for posting AI content.
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) The chicken, qua self-organizing system, must maintain the integrity of its Markov blanket against the dissipative forces of the second law of thermodynamics. By engaging in active inference, the chicken minimizes the variational free energy bounded by its internal model of the world. It does not "cross" in a teleological sense; rather, it acts to resolve the prediction error generated by the discrepancy between its sensory states (being on side A) and its generative model (a high-precision prior belief that it is, in fact, on side B). In short, the chicken crosses to avoid the surprise of not having crossed.
(Karl Friston)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) sniff
My God, this is pure ideology! tugs shirt
You ask why the chicken crosses the road, but this presupposes the existence of the road as a neutral space of transit. It is not! The road is the Lacanian Real—that which resists symbolization! The chicken does not want to get to the other side. The chicken crosses because it is terrified of the freedom it possesses on this side. It seeks the comfort of the prohibition. It is like the man who complains his wife is too controlling, yet when she leaves, he immediately hires a dominatrix. The chicken is the dominatrix of its own destiny.
sniff
And so on, and so on.
(Slavoj Žižek)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A)
Most people see a chicken.
I see a disruptor. 🚀
Everyone told the chicken, "Stay in the coop."
"The road is dangerous."
"You don't have the bandwidth."
The chicken didn't listen to the haters. The chicken didn't wait for permission. The chicken leveraged its core competencies (legs) to pivot to a new market (the other side).
5 lessons I learned from this chicken:
Comfort zones are dead zones.
Cross before you're ready.
Beak down, hustle up.
If you get hit by a car, that’s just a pivot to soup.
Synergy.
Agree? 👇
(A LinkedIn Influencer)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see no soul. You will see only the abyss. The overwhelming indifference of nature. The chicken crosses not out of bravery, and not out of hunger, but out of a monumental stupidity that screams into the void. The road is a line of death, and the chicken walks toward it with the blank, chaotic murder-stare of a creature that has forgotten it is alive. I believe the chicken crosses because it hates the road, and it hates itself, and it wishes to punish the pavement with its feet.
(Werner Herzog)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) This question has been marked as a duplicate. This has already been answered in [Thread 492: Mechanics of Avian Transit]. Please use the search bar before posting. Also, your question lacks code to reproduce the crossing environment. Thread closed.
(Stack Overflow Moderator)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) We have heard many lies about this road. The Fake News Media wants you to believe the chicken is stuck on one side. They say, "Oh, the chicken can't cross, it's too dangerous, the traffic is terrible." Wrong. It’s a beautiful chicken. Maybe the best chicken we’ve ever seen. And it crossed that road so fast, your head would spin. It crossed the road and the other side paid for it. We love our chickens, folks, don't we?
(Donald Trump)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the chicken race. By paving the earth with asphalt, the techno-industrial system has forced the chicken into unnatural biological feedback loops. The "crossing" is merely a surrogate activity—an artificial goal provided by the system to give the chicken the illusion of meaningful agency in a world stripped of wild autonomy.
(Ted Kaczynski)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Does the current side of the road spark joy?
holds the chicken gently
Thank you, side of the road, for all the worms you have provided.
bows
Now we release the chicken to the other side, so it can live its best life.
Did you include the post examples in the prompt? If you followed the Automator's strategy of generating thousands and then doing automated scoring (https://dynomight.net/automated/) I wonder if you might well achieve super-human (or at least super-me) quality.
Peter Singer: The chicken crossed the road, was hit by a car, and died painlessly. However, a new chicken immediately hatched on the other side. Since chickens lack biographical self-awareness and possess no future-oriented preferences, the total utility in the world remains unchanged. The real question isn't "why did the chicken cross the road"—it's why we're so sentimentally attached to _that particular_ chicken when _this_ chicken is experientially identical and equally capable of suffering.
[Full disclosure: I came up with the basic idea, and then asked Claude.ai for assistance in writing the comment.]
Well, that actually _was_ my attempt (probably too esoteric) at satirizing Singer's views on animal liberation. Although he is widely regarded as the father of the animal rights movement, I believe his philosophy is quite problematic. Contrary to popular belief, Singer doesn't actually believe in rights. In the unlikely event that anyone wants to delve into this topic deeper, I think the following article is a good critique of Singer's flawed approach to animals:
Interesting read. I tend to lean towards a "rules derived from utilitarian first-principles" style of ethics. For example, I'd argue that we shouldn't kill random people and distribute their organs even if that would save lives on net, because no one wants to live in a world where we're all at risk of being killed for our organs. That article makes a good point that it's much harder to make that argument work for animals (or at least some animals). At first glance, that would seem to present the option of either biting either the bullet that (1) utilitarianism is wrong/incomplete or (2) it's totally fine to painlessly kill an animal and replace it with another one. I'd rather not bite either of those, but I don't see any obvious way to avoid it...
I've recently kind of come around to biting the bullet that utilitarianism is incomplete. This is due to reading David Chapman's book (available online) Meaningness, which goes into the tension between ethical certainty on the one hand, and nihilism on the other (which he equally vehemently argues is wrong).
I don't fully understand it and honestly I might be too unintelligent to be able to get what he's saying, but it's something like this: you think utilitarianism is the best system (obviously), but also there seems to be inevitable flaws. What do? Give up on there being a system, and fall into nihilism? Instead he argues that both are incorrect and that there actually cannot be a complete system. This resonates with me, both because it has always seemed like an impossible dichotomy, and because it reminds me of the classic incompleteness theorems in mathematics and programming languages (no type system can be both sound and complete).
He presents this as a more sophisticated (and ultimately more true) approach to ethics than the hopelessly doomed search for a perfect system. Admittedly this is a very weird idea and also kind of jarring, to a technically minded rationalist such as myself. And I don't really get it, but thought I'd suggest the book to you, thought you might like it.
(There is also In the Cells of the Eggplant, which is about rationality in the same manner, which I have not yet read.)
I always heard that the chicken crossed the road for some fowl purpose.
Of course, the really interesting question is not so much why the chicken crossed the road on this occasion but why there was, like, a road there in the first place where a chicken could cross it, the co-location of a four-lane separated highway[357] and a poultry run seeming rather at odds with the general desiderata of central Quebec's motorists and poulterers respectively. While this might appear to be mainly a question of preventing collisions between the highway's mechanical and galliform users, the binding constraint in matters of coop design is typically the exclusion of predators[358], for which the highway is in fact perfectly adequate.
[357] This being Autoroute 20, which serves the heavily trafficked Montreal—Quebec City via a right-of-way that runs basically in a straight northeasterly/southwesterly line through the semideveloped agricultural region of Centre-du-Québec and whose high modernist linear geometry makes it the preferred choice of the Québécois motorist despite the need for two crossings of the _fleuve Saint-Laurent_. N.b. that the 20 is paralleled physically and culturally by the C.N.–owned and Via–operated rail line favored by the local _cultistes du prochain train_, who face ludo-kinetic hazards w/r/t the rail corridor not dissimilar to those facing chickens on the road.
[358] Primarily the red fox, _Vulpes vulpes_, but with meaningful threats also from [two pages of details listing animals that eat chickens]
(David Foster Wallace)
A) We can agree, I hope, that in crossing the road a chicken does not become a qualitatively different chicken. The chicken's inherent moral worth does not increase or diminish with the crossing. And yet, the chickens on our side of the road are treated with a basic sense of compassion, while those on the other are essentially tortured for their entire lives, which in the case of male chicks is measured in hours. We must, then, allow those chickens to "cross the road" within our internal ethical landscape, allowing us to consider their welfare in a manner consistent with our intuitions.
(Peter Singer)
A) We found (p = 0.0002) that crossing the road results in an average spacial displacement of greater than 15 meters, consistent with a model in which the gallinaceous impetus to cross the road is mediated by its geospatial preference ordering.
(academic study that didn't get a statistically significant result for the actual question and is hoping you don't notice)
A) IT'S ATTACKING! ALERT THE NEIGHBORHOOD!
(my dog)
I only bother to log in and comment because I feel like you take constructive criticism well. It wasn't actually clear from the post (until about halfway through) that this is all just an output from some AI.
I had expected that AI would be featured, but assumed at the start that you had actually sourced instances where these people had actually talked about the question "why did the chicken cross the road?".
I'm a little let down by that, because just sharing outputs from an AI feels pretty boring compared to what you usually write. And to preface it as "answers to this question according to..." when it's actually just LLM junk feels icky.
But this is not from AI. I wrote it all, by myself.
Sure but do you actually expect us to believe you're not an AI??? Cause that's EXACTLY what an Ai would say
I look forward to the grim meathook future where everyone is so suspicious that content is AI-generated that no one trusts anything and so some people stop human-generating content, which raises the fraction of AI-generated content, further increasing suspicions, etc...
I'm not sure why Ethan thought this post was AI generated, but to be fair, after I published this, people have sent me a bunch of AI-generated versions of these jokes, and while the quality is worse, I don't think it's *that* much worse. And that damned Marie Kondo one is really annoyingly good. Although, I think everyone is using my human-written jokes in the prompt, so that's some grounds for cope...
(I acknowledge in advance that this is also exactly what an AI would say, sorry.)
Q) What were you thinking?
A) The road was busy. I caught a break in the traffic and made it as far as the median. Cars careened towards me from both directions. Drivers honked their horns and hurled obscenities at me. I asked myself, "Why am I doing this?"
(A chicken)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
(Rain gently falling)
The road lets the good ones pass and kills the bad ones.
Tarkovsky
Godspeed, grug. I learned a lot from you.
I especially appreciated grug.
I like the weird posts.
Someplace to admit this, where it might get the hearing it deserves.
I was probably in my 50s before I actually got the canonical answer "To get to the other side" as it's intended in the joke's true meaning. Never mind that I've lived in the deep South for more than half my life. The idiom "the other side" simply bounced right off me for 50 years.
Well done. I needed to search just to "get" most of the jokes, but then appreciated them very much. Too soon old; too late tuned in. It is a little frightening how good these tools are becoming - or how poor I am at following the drift.
While I was at it I had Claude's take on Gemini's take and answers for:
The Grateful Dead " {To be bound to cover just a little more ground.};
The I Ching {A) Hexagram 29: The Abysmal (Water), doubled. The chicken stands at the edge. Danger above, danger below. The road flows like water through a ravine - one must follow its course. The superior chicken does not resist the current but moves with sincerity of heart. [then 200 words more line by line further]}
and a stochastic chicken: {The chicken's position follows a Wiener process with drift μ toward the other side and volatility σ reflecting environmental noise. [300 or so more words]
The chicken didn't "decide" to cross in any deterministic sense. Rather, given its initial conditions and the stochastic forcing terms (thermal fluctuations, predator scares, feed distributions), crossing was simply the outcome with highest likelihood in this particular universe.
Run the simulation again, and the chicken might still be here.
AI may or may not be super-human at generating these jokes, but it's clearly superhuman at understanding/explaining them!
" Suppose there’s a rooster standing next to you, and there’s a chicken across the street. The rooster gives a sexually solicitive gesture that is hot by chicken standards, and she promptly runs over to mate with him (I haven’t a clue if this is how it works, but let’s just suppose). And thus we have a key behavioral biological question—why did the chicken cross the road? And if you’re a psychoneuroendocrinologist, your answer would be “Because circulating estrogen levels in that chicken worked in a certain part of her brain to make her responsive to this male signaling,” and if you’re a bioengineer, the answer would be “Because the long bone in the leg of the chicken forms a fulcrum for her pelvis (or some such thing), allowing her to move forward rapidly,” and if you’re an evolutionary biologist, you’d say, “Because over the course of millions of years, chickens that responded to such gestures at a time that they were fertile left more copies of their genes, and thus this is now an innate behavior in chickens,” and so on, thinking in categories, in differing scientific disciplines of explanation."
- Robert Sapolsky, Behave
God, I’m so happy to see Grug
I asked Gemini 3 to write some of these, and I thought they were really good. Sorry for posting AI content.
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) The chicken, qua self-organizing system, must maintain the integrity of its Markov blanket against the dissipative forces of the second law of thermodynamics. By engaging in active inference, the chicken minimizes the variational free energy bounded by its internal model of the world. It does not "cross" in a teleological sense; rather, it acts to resolve the prediction error generated by the discrepancy between its sensory states (being on side A) and its generative model (a high-precision prior belief that it is, in fact, on side B). In short, the chicken crosses to avoid the surprise of not having crossed.
(Karl Friston)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) sniff
My God, this is pure ideology! tugs shirt
You ask why the chicken crosses the road, but this presupposes the existence of the road as a neutral space of transit. It is not! The road is the Lacanian Real—that which resists symbolization! The chicken does not want to get to the other side. The chicken crosses because it is terrified of the freedom it possesses on this side. It seeks the comfort of the prohibition. It is like the man who complains his wife is too controlling, yet when she leaves, he immediately hires a dominatrix. The chicken is the dominatrix of its own destiny.
sniff
And so on, and so on.
(Slavoj Žižek)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A)
Most people see a chicken.
I see a disruptor. 🚀
Everyone told the chicken, "Stay in the coop."
"The road is dangerous."
"You don't have the bandwidth."
The chicken didn't listen to the haters. The chicken didn't wait for permission. The chicken leveraged its core competencies (legs) to pivot to a new market (the other side).
5 lessons I learned from this chicken:
Comfort zones are dead zones.
Cross before you're ready.
Beak down, hustle up.
If you get hit by a car, that’s just a pivot to soup.
Synergy.
Agree? 👇
(A LinkedIn Influencer)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see no soul. You will see only the abyss. The overwhelming indifference of nature. The chicken crosses not out of bravery, and not out of hunger, but out of a monumental stupidity that screams into the void. The road is a line of death, and the chicken walks toward it with the blank, chaotic murder-stare of a creature that has forgotten it is alive. I believe the chicken crosses because it hates the road, and it hates itself, and it wishes to punish the pavement with its feet.
(Werner Herzog)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) This question has been marked as a duplicate. This has already been answered in [Thread 492: Mechanics of Avian Transit]. Please use the search bar before posting. Also, your question lacks code to reproduce the crossing environment. Thread closed.
(Stack Overflow Moderator)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) We have heard many lies about this road. The Fake News Media wants you to believe the chicken is stuck on one side. They say, "Oh, the chicken can't cross, it's too dangerous, the traffic is terrible." Wrong. It’s a beautiful chicken. Maybe the best chicken we’ve ever seen. And it crossed that road so fast, your head would spin. It crossed the road and the other side paid for it. We love our chickens, folks, don't we?
(Donald Trump)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the chicken race. By paving the earth with asphalt, the techno-industrial system has forced the chicken into unnatural biological feedback loops. The "crossing" is merely a surrogate activity—an artificial goal provided by the system to give the chicken the illusion of meaningful agency in a world stripped of wild autonomy.
(Ted Kaczynski)
Q) Why did the chicken cross the road?
A) Does the current side of the road spark joy?
holds the chicken gently
Thank you, side of the road, for all the worms you have provided.
bows
Now we release the chicken to the other side, so it can live its best life.
(Marie Kondo)
Ooof, I have to admit that Werner Herzog is good and Marie Kondo is *really* good.
The Werner Herzog one seems to share some motifs with the actual thoughts of Werner Herzog on chickens, viz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhMo4WlBmGM
(relevant to the season, this is how I first learned of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBTOGCROaRU)
Did you include the post examples in the prompt? If you followed the Automator's strategy of generating thousands and then doing automated scoring (https://dynomight.net/automated/) I wonder if you might well achieve super-human (or at least super-me) quality.
I put your entire post in the prompt for examples :)
Peter Singer: The chicken crossed the road, was hit by a car, and died painlessly. However, a new chicken immediately hatched on the other side. Since chickens lack biographical self-awareness and possess no future-oriented preferences, the total utility in the world remains unchanged. The real question isn't "why did the chicken cross the road"—it's why we're so sentimentally attached to _that particular_ chicken when _this_ chicken is experientially identical and equally capable of suffering.
[Full disclosure: I came up with the basic idea, and then asked Claude.ai for assistance in writing the comment.]
Can I request a version where he's more in "animal liberation" mode? :)
Well, that actually _was_ my attempt (probably too esoteric) at satirizing Singer's views on animal liberation. Although he is widely regarded as the father of the animal rights movement, I believe his philosophy is quite problematic. Contrary to popular belief, Singer doesn't actually believe in rights. In the unlikely event that anyone wants to delve into this topic deeper, I think the following article is a good critique of Singer's flawed approach to animals:
https://www.abolitionistapproach.com/challenging-peter-singers-paternity-claim/
Interesting read. I tend to lean towards a "rules derived from utilitarian first-principles" style of ethics. For example, I'd argue that we shouldn't kill random people and distribute their organs even if that would save lives on net, because no one wants to live in a world where we're all at risk of being killed for our organs. That article makes a good point that it's much harder to make that argument work for animals (or at least some animals). At first glance, that would seem to present the option of either biting either the bullet that (1) utilitarianism is wrong/incomplete or (2) it's totally fine to painlessly kill an animal and replace it with another one. I'd rather not bite either of those, but I don't see any obvious way to avoid it...
I've recently kind of come around to biting the bullet that utilitarianism is incomplete. This is due to reading David Chapman's book (available online) Meaningness, which goes into the tension between ethical certainty on the one hand, and nihilism on the other (which he equally vehemently argues is wrong).
I don't fully understand it and honestly I might be too unintelligent to be able to get what he's saying, but it's something like this: you think utilitarianism is the best system (obviously), but also there seems to be inevitable flaws. What do? Give up on there being a system, and fall into nihilism? Instead he argues that both are incorrect and that there actually cannot be a complete system. This resonates with me, both because it has always seemed like an impossible dichotomy, and because it reminds me of the classic incompleteness theorems in mathematics and programming languages (no type system can be both sound and complete).
He presents this as a more sophisticated (and ultimately more true) approach to ethics than the hopelessly doomed search for a perfect system. Admittedly this is a very weird idea and also kind of jarring, to a technically minded rationalist such as myself. And I don't really get it, but thought I'd suggest the book to you, thought you might like it.
(There is also In the Cells of the Eggplant, which is about rationality in the same manner, which I have not yet read.)