I. APPETIZER
“But fish not with this melancholy bait…”
— William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice I.1
Evening. A stylish apartment, by the front door. ALLEGRA and LUCIAN enter, dressed in elegant clothes. LUCIAN is fastening his watch; ALLEGRA is donning a light sweater over her gown.
ALLEGRA: This place is supposed to be amazing.
LUCIAN: Can’t wait.
ALLEGRA: We look smashing.
LUCIAN: Well, you do anyway!
ALLEGRA: I love you.
LUCIAN: I… I’m surprised at you.
ALLEGRA: Wait… really?
LUCIAN: You’re a scientist.
ALLEGRA: Not this again.
LUCIAN: You know love doesn’t exist.
ALLEGRA: Will you come off it?
LUCIAN: It doesn’t, though.
ALLEGRA: Lucian…
LUCIAN: There are no soul mates, no souls to begin with, and certainly no mystical bonds tying one to another.
ALLEGRA: Are we truly doing this again?
LUCIAN: There are only combinations of genes driving social instincts that are present because, on average, that helps those genes replicate.
ALLEGRA: Fine! You win. I don’t love you, I never have, let’s just go to dinner.
ALLEGRA opens the door.
LUCIAN: Why don’t you take this seriously? I’m asking you to stop perpetuating a deranged mythology.
ALLEGRA: You’re absolutely right. Love doesn’t exist. But our dinner reservation does.
LUCIAN: It’s not merely that it doesn’t exist. “Love” is an actively malevolent fairy tale, invented by misogynist thugs, and ratified by Hallmark, Incorporated, which people continually tell and retell and shove into everyone’s faces, in ways that constantly and predictably wreck people’s lives!
ALLEGRA: Look — I promised myself I wasn’t going to debate you about this anymore.
LUCIAN: Because you know I’m right.
ALLEGRA closes the door.
ALLEGRA: Lucian.
LUCIAN: Yes?
ALLEGRA: You don’t exist.
LUCIAN: How so?
ALLEGRA: You are a collection of cells that are constantly dying and regenerating. You’re not the same collection of cells from one day to the next. Other than some of the neurons sitting in what is purportedly your brain, along with a few morsels of your eyes and heart, there are few cells in your body, if any, that are the same cells today as the ones comprising you ten years ago. Your mental sense of continuity as a coherent entity persisting through time is purely an illusion your brain creates because it keeps the whole biological Ponzi scheme running long enough to replicate your genes so they can get in line to take the ride all over again.
LUCIAN: Yes, that’s a lot like what I said.
ALLEGRA: But even cells and genes aren’t really stable, coherent things. They’re just atoms. You’re just atoms, and that means what you are, mostly, is empty air between electrons. The part that isn’t empty air is, proportionally speaking, a rounding error.
LUCIAN: Okay.
ALLEGRA: Meanwhile, those electrons don’t even have a stable or definite position at any given time. They only behave predictably in large groups because all the quantum randomness washes out at scale into workable probabilities — like the casino always winning over the long term at the blackjack tables. Quote, “you,” end-quote, are not “Lucian,” you are particle flotsam. You are quantum jetsam. You are in no existential way different from, or any more coherent than, the little cloud of dust that rises into the air every single time you come home from work and throw your shoes onto the floor next to, but not onto, the shoe rack, like a barbarian.
LUCIAN: I can’t argue with the physics. Now, regarding shoes—
ALLEGRA: Wonderful. But when I said, “Lucian,” what you said was: “Yes?” You didn’t say: “There is no Lucian, please call me Vaguely Bounded Collection of Particles.”
LUCIAN: Sure, but— Practically, we have no choice but to— It’s a figure of speech…
ALLEGRA opens the door.
ALLEGRA: Congratulations. You’ve discovered human language, a metaphor machine that describes things not on the level of ultimate reality but rather on the level of the contingent realities of human experience. On that contingent level, you exist — and on that level, so does love. And you’re lucky for that, Lucian, because if I didn’t love you, I’d literally kill you. Let’s go to dinner.
Lights down.
II. MAIN COURSE
“Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you; and inform you shall the fish of the sea.”
— Job 12:8
Do you believe in cod?
That’s right. Cod. The fish. Do you believe in it? Does it exist?
Well, let’s be rationalists: No. It is not rational to believe in cod. There is no cod!
Allegra explained why. Cod is really just subatomic particles.1 Whatever may or may not be one level down from subatomic particles, one must admit that everything on any level higher than subatomic particles are mental and/or social constructs — oversimplified stories being told to our brains, by our brains, which themselves also (brains) are only metaphors inspired by the vaguely bounded collections of subatomic particles that they are.
So, at baseline, there is no cod. Not even a single individual cod exists. It’s not just that the species of cod is socially constructed as a category. It is, but beyond that, for any given cod, boiled and sauced and sitting there on your plate — the idea that it is a coherent, unitary object is an illusion. If you look closely enough at the particles, there’s no clean boundary line between “the cod” and “not the cod.” Not only are no two cod exactly alike down to the quark — no one cod is alike even with itself down to the quark, from microsecond to microsecond.
But cod do exist on the level of our experience. They mentally and socially exist. “Cod” is a metaphor, a story that we use to organize our experience. “Cod” is an arbitrary term for an abstract and oversimplified concept that exists to the extent, and only to the extent, that it is a useful part of our lives.
Now, can we argue productively about what exactly we mean by “cod” — i.e., which cod exists, what are the actual parameters of that usefulness in our lives, and what sauces for it are most delicious? Absolutely. But disagreements about the boundaries and definitions are no reason to remove the term “cod” from our vocabulary altogether.
The ultimate “existence” of cod is beside the point; we invoke the name of cod because it serves us to do so. It nourishes us; it enriches our lives; it brings us together and binds times and occasions and generations together as we return, again and again, to the cycle of lifetimes, years, and cooking show seasons.
Now, some people out there would say we should stop telling this story called “cod.” Some might say that this story has done more harm than good, cod forbid (I dispute this calculation, but let’s leave that for another day). Some might say also they don’t want to talk in poetic metaphors when they can just tell the plain and simple truth about the world instead.
But in fact, we never speak the plain and simple truth. All we ever do is speak in metaphors; there’s nothing any of us can say without them. We use metaphorical language not only every time we order fried cod, but every time we say anything, unless all we want to say is, “Quark, quark, photon, quark, Higgs-Boson, photon, quark.”
To object to just one kind of non-literalistic, non-reductive language — the power and the glory (culinarily speaking) of cod, for example — without also objecting to all the uniquitous others, is nothing but selective hyperliteralism. It is an attitude that is at once too skeptical and not nearly skeptical enough!
Let’s not pretend we don’t understand that different levels exist. There is hardware and there is software.
On the level of hardware, there’s nothing called “love,” for example. Physicists have not found any “lovons,” or “cupidons,” or whatever the hypothetical subatomic physical building block of love would be called. “Love” is made of the same physical substrata as everything else.
But love is a powerful software. I have a habit of overexplaining things (a grad school professor once criticized my paper for proving too much of what I might have reasonably just asserted; I found this critique undersupported), but even I don’t feel the need to explain why: Love is good!
Well, much else in life is also good, and also exists only as software. Software is not trivial! And software is the level on which we live our lives.
We see animals in the clouds. We see heroes in the arrangements of the stars. We are creatures of poetry and metaphor. To be human is to see patterns and turn them into stories.
These stories — the very stuff of our lives, from our hopes and dreams and dinner menus to the literal bodies of the people we love — are all, on the subatomic level, fake. They’re quantum jetsam. But on all the levels that matter, nothing could be more real.
Praise be to cod.
III. DESSERT
“it is most mad and moonly
and less it shall unbe
than all the sea which only
is deeper than the sea”
— E. E. Cummings, [love is more thicker than forget]
The restaurant. Soft classical music plays as candles burn. LUCIAN and ALLEGRA sit at a small table, sipping wine and sharing a stuffed cod entrée.
LUCIAN: Okay, fine. I’ll bite. From your perspective: What is love?
ALLEGRA (singing): Baby, don’t hurt me…
LUCIAN: Should’ve seen that coming.
ALLEGRA (singing): Don’t hurt me… No more…
LUCIAN: Yeah yeah. But really. You’re so keen to defend this construct called love. So tell me, what exactly is it supposed to mean?
ALLEGRA puts down her fork and looks at LUCIAN for a silent moment. Then she takes his hand in hers. She guides his hand to his fork and leads him to pick up a piece of cod and bring it to her mouth; she eats it. She takes her own fork and feeds a piece of cod to him. She gets up from the table, walks around to his side, sits in his lap, picks up his wine glass, and raises it to his lips. He drinks. She takes the same glass and drinks. She puts the glass down on the table. She kisses him on the mouth. They stop kissing and look into each other’s eyes. She dabs some sauce from the plate of food with her finger, smears it on his nose, and quickly slaps him upside the head with her other hand.
ALLEGRA: That’s love.
ALLEGRA goes back to her side of the table and sits down.
ALLEGRA: Now eat your cod, shmendrik.
He wipes the sauce off his face with his napkin. They eat their cod together. Lights down.
Okay, sure, I have a preferred theory on the nature of reality on a level more fundamental than subatomic particles (see the latter part of this essay, not to mention the latter part of this essay). But just this once, for a treat, let’s leave the profoundest layers of abstruse ontological speculation unplumbed. It’s enough, for now, for everyone to agree that, in some way, subatomic particles exist. They’re not necessarily the ultimate building blocks of existence, but let them serve as the most basic common denominator that everyone can affirm.
I love this! In fact, this article comes as close as any I've seen to explaining what I've often said to people who say they don't believe in God: "The God I believe in isn't the one you don't believe in."
Smashing. 💜