neozones.club/~bytemoth/cuils.txt

Can we make that a unit of measurement?

One Cuil = One level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation.

Example: You ask me for a Hamburger.

1 Cuil: if you asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.

2 Cuils: If you asked me for a hamburger, but it turns out I don't really exist.
 Where I was originally standing, a picture of a hamburger rests on the ground.

3 Cuils: You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special
 sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.

4 Cuils: Why are we speaking German? A mime cries softly as he cradles a young
 cow. Your grandfather stares at you as the cow falls apart into patties. You
 look down only to see me with pickles for eyes, I am singing the song that
 gives birth to the universe.

And so on.

edit: other Cuil levels added for completeness.

5 Cuils: You ask for a hamburger, I give you a hamburger. You raise it to your
 lips and take a bite. Your eye twitches involuntarily. Across the street a
 father of three falls down the stairs. You swallow and look down at the
 hamburger in your hands. I give you a hamburger. You swallow and look down at
 the hamburger in your hands. You cannot swallow. There are children at the top
 of the stairs. A pickle shifts uneasily under the bun. I give you a hamburger.
 You look at my face, and I am pleading with you. The children are crying now.
 You raise the hamburger to your lips, tears stream down your face as you take
 a bite. I give you a hamburger. You are on your knees. You plead with me to go
 across the street. I hear only children's laughter. I give you a hamburger.
 You are screaming as you fall down the stairs. I am your child. You cannot see
 anything. You take a bite of the hamburger. The concrete rushes up to meet you.
 You awake with a start in your own bed. Your eye twitches involuntarily. I give
 you a hamburger. As you kill me, I do not make a sound. I give you a hamburger.

6 Cuils: You ask me for a hamburger. My attempt to reciprocate is cut brutally
 short as my body experiences a sudden lack of electrons. Across a variety of
 hidden dimensions you are dismayed. John Lennon hands me an apple, but it slips
 through my fingers. I am reborn as an ocelot. You disapprove. A crack echoes
 through the universe in defiance of conventional physics as cosmological
 background noise shifts from randomness to a perfect A Flat. Children
 everywhere stop what they are doing and hum along in perfect pitch with the
 background radiation. Birds fall from the sky as the sun engulfs the earth. You
 hesitate momentarily before allowing yourself to assume the locus of all
 knowledge. Entropy crumbles as you peruse the information contained within the
 universe. A small library in Phoenix ceases to exist. You stumble under the
 weight of everythingness, Your mouth opens up to cry out, and collapses around
 your body before blinking you out of the spatial plane. You exist only within
 the fourth dimension. The fountainhead of all knowledge rolls along the ground
 and collides with a small dog. My head tastes sideways as spacetime is
 reestablished, you blink back into the corporeal world disoriented, only for me
 to hand you a hamburger as my body collapses under the strain of
 reconstitution. The universe has reasserted itself. A particular small dog is
 fed steak for the rest of its natural life. You die in a freak accident moments
 later, and you soul works at the returns desk for the Phoenix library. You
 disapprove. Your disapproval sends ripples through the inter-dimensional void
 between life and death. A small child begins to cry as he walks toward the
 stairway where his father stands.

7 Cuils: I give you a hamburger. The universe is engulfed within itself. A bus
 advertising hotdogs drives by a papillon. It disapproves. An unnatural force
 reverses Earth's gravity. You ask for a hamburger. I reciprocate with a mildly
 convulsing potato. You disapprove. Your disapproval releases a cosmic shift in
 the void between birth and life. You ask for a hamburger. A certain small dog
 feasts on hamburger patties for the rest of its unnatural, eternal endurance.
 Your constant disapproval sends silence through everything. A contrived beast
 becomes omnipotent. You ask for a hamburger. I give you a hamburger your body
 becomes an unsettled blob of nothingness, then divides by three. The papillon
 barks. The universe realigns itself. You, the papillon, and the hamburger
 disapprove. This condemnation stops the realignment. Hades freezes over. A pig
 is launched is launched into the unoccupied existence between space and time
 with a specific hamburger. You ask for a hamburger. I give you a hamburger. It
 screams as you lift it to your face. You laugh maniacally as I plead with you.
 You devour the hamburger as it pleads for mercy. I disapprove and condemn you
 to an eternity in a certain void where a certain pig and its specific hamburger
 are located. The Universal Space-time Continuum Committee disapproves of my
 irrational decision. You are locked away and are fed hamburgers for the rest of
 your natural existence. A pickle refuses to break down during the process of
 digestion. You die in a freak accident. A certain pickle lives the rest of its
 life in a comatose state. Your soul disapproves. Down the street a child cries
 as a hamburger gets stuck in, and climbs back up, her esophagus. You ask again
 for a hamburger. I refuse to reciprocate. You demand a lawyer. I remind you
 harshly that this is the new world order. Lawyers no longer exist. Only
 papillons. Your name is written on a list of sins. Blasphemy. You ask for a
 hamburger. The comatose pickle vanquishes your soul from this universe.
 Realignment occurs. You beg for a hamburger. A certain papillon's name is
 written on an obelisk in Egypt. Mumble. Peasants worship the obelisk. Your
 soulless corpse partakes in the festivity. Hamburgers are banned universally.
 The sun implodes. All planets cease to have ever existed. Mercury. Venus.
 Earth. Mars. Jupiter. Saturn. Uranus. Neptune. Pluto is the only mass in
 existence. Conveniently, you are on vacation here. Your need for hamburgers
 re-establishes space-time. Earth is recreated under your intergalactic rule.
 Hamburgers are your army. You wake up. Clowns. Clowns everywhere. Your dream
 rushes to meet you. You are kidnapped. You ask for a hamburger. They hand you
 a hotdog.

--
This needs some closer examination:

1 Cuil: A racoon is not a hamburger, but everything else is the same otherwise.
 That was the only divergence.

2 Cuil: you asked a non-existant person for a hamburger (+1 Cuil), instead
 receiving a non-hamburger representation of a hamburger (+1 Cuil)

3 Cuil: I was never there, presumably a dream (+1 cuil). You were never a human
 being (+1 Cuil). You asked for yourself for consumption (+1 cuil). The world
 being sepia solidifies the first point. Special sauce flying from your lips
 solidifies the second two points.

4 Cuil: german (+0.5), mime holding pre-hamburger(+1), instantaneous hamburger
 assembly via close relative (+1), your eyes become pickles (+0.5), your song
 creates the universe and thus this whole situation (+1)


--
I propose 0 Cuil, or "absolute Cuil". 0 Cuil: I ask for a hamburger, you give me
 the epitome of all hamburgers, to the most subjective detail. Observers in a
 state of Perfect Cuil are often introduced to a phenomenon known as the Cuil
 Paradox, where the hamburger asked/given ratio is so near 1:1 that the observer
 begins to doubt the reality, suspecting that the hamburger was an artifact of
 their manufactured memories.