Whatever it may mean to me may be different to what it may mean to you but I just want you to know that my input is merely a suggestion for an alternative. Given that the story is inherently metamodernist in nature I'd have to digest it in multiple layers in regards to themes. Himself Speaks is largely about building a cult of personality around a persona that doesn't actually exist for the purpose of gaining the pubic's respect for one's project and getting distracted by that hypothetical cult of personality enough that it dilutes one's sense of self. Himself Speaks is also largely about unwittingly playing one's role in one big cosmic poop joke while trying to inject meaning into life through one's art. To throw it all into one big condensed nugget, though? Himself Speaks is about gaslighting. Gaslighting one's own self and others in the process.
Terry forms an alternate identity as a clean slate and the line blurs between him and the identity he created. He just wants people to believe in him; he just wants to appear reputable; he just wants to avoid at all costs feeling like an insignificant speck participating in one big cosmic poop joke. When he realizes that at any and every turn he could just lie to himself and see what he wants to see he decides that action to be akin to a superpower and sets off to understand it better so he can exploit its full potential. Eventually he gets so good at lying to himself that he could practically make a religion out of it, so he did. If he could form a precontext of being a godlike source of information then he would achieve ultimate reputability and not feel like an insignificant speck. All he would have to do is come up with a catchy title with some logically consistent beliefs behind it and strongly imply godhood without ever saying it. After all, what humble godlike source of information would ever address the elephant in the room? He figured it was the perfect crime.
Being a lover of science with, admittedly, only a small breadth of fluent knowledge, he thought deeply about who might be the most godlike and reputable source of information about the cosmos in his eyes and came to the conclusion that it would have to be Issac Newton. Reading up on Newton's life he finds out that Issac was an ardent believer in the process of alchemy despite all his mathematical universal truths and this absolutely fascinates Terry. In this moment he simply cannot believe that Newton had a lapse of judgement and figures that he must have been right in some metaphysical way that the world would only yet understand. Spending many sleepless nights pondering the subject he eventually comes to the conclusion that the secret to alchemy was the relationship between context, the human brain, and the physical world. Following this epiphany he realizes that if he made this new alchemical concept the foundation of a belief system it would be logically consistent enough to let him take the mantle of being the head of a belief system, the most reputable source imaginable according to a subjected individual. Terry figures that if he were that reputable then people would suddenly care about the art that he makes and he would finally forget the signs of the oncoming punchline for his big cosmic poop joke.
When he fails to gain a following after spending hours upon hours crafting a belief system to nest his new, new name in he starts questioning for the meaning of his life ad nauseum vicariously through questioning for the general meaning of meaning. Eventually he figures that he might as well be spending time making educated guesses as to what anything means in a way akin to throwing darts blindly at a dart board and crossing his fingers that he sussed out an empirical truth somehow with a bulls-eye. This all leads to him making this educated guess at an empirical truth:
"In posting this comment 12AM CST 2/1/2021 I have four twos in the date and time as well as a current karma of 44 therefore adding three instances of the number four to this current cosmic situation. Four is the third instance of a number in Pi.
Now, if one were to assess the date considering the femtometer equivalent to a measurement of time then with those given factors only a hypothetical being with the lens of a true platonic perspective for the sake of this argument would be able to consider how many instances of the number two occur on an objective level. Given that there is a quantifiable number, that means assuming the metric both this hypothetical being and real life human being for the sake of this argument use the same metric by sheer chance, there is a possible quantifiable number in conclusion both this hypothetical being and real life human being can come to a full agreeance upon. My previous post was an instance of an educated guess relative to the metric of a statement, therefore if a hypothetical being and I somehow by sheer chance came to the same exact quantifiable sum in agreeance then there is a huge gaping hole in the argument against objectivity existing by some quantifiable subjective metric of how many instances of the number two reside.
The initial "In" is short for "In this argument/statement as I am offering you a gaping hole you may enter in order to perform a metric that can quantify objectively how much number two there is."
In other words, you just read my most ambitious anti-anti joke.