Solipsism, Quantum Mechanics and Online Dating
This is my drawing of a wave function, based on images on Wikipedia. The blue and red curves represent the function's real and imaginary components. Wave functions, I propose below, can describe love as well as electrons.
AUGUST 22, 2024. I’m always on the lookout for connections between my metaphysical obsessions and personal life. That’s why I’ve been ruminating over how solipsism and quantum mechanics relate to online dating.
I first ventured into the world of online dating after my marriage ended in 2009. To protect the innocent, and guilty, I won’t divulge details. But I suspect my experiences, although superficially idiosyncratic, are typical.
Online dating is merely the modern version of the primordial quest for a mate, with technology providing new modes of (mis)communication. In addition to phone calls, you’ve got video chats, emails, texts, sexts.
Online daters have diverse goals. They want a companion with whom to scuba dive, skydive, golf, see indie flicks, eat at sushi lounges, stroll Balinese beaches. Older women, if Match.com is any guide, yearn to tour Tuscany with a guy who knows his wines.
The online dater might prioritize kinky sex, reciprocal cheerleading, shared housing. But most of us seek something beyond tit-for-tat. Pardon the schmaltz, but we’re looking for love, no other word will do.
If things go well in your initial tech-enabled exchanges, you meet for coffee, lunch, a saunter around a park, as your ancestors did. As you did 30+ years ago, if you’re an oldster like me. If things keep going well, you hug, smooch, yada yada.
All along, you’re swapping tales of woe and triumph, aimed at eliciting sympathy or admiration. Why your marriage failed, why you hate or love your job, why you had or didn’t have kids. You’re baring yourself to each other, emotionally and literally. You and this person you just met on Match.com soon know more about each other than your friends.
Assuming you’re both being honest.
That brings me to solipsism. According to this extreme form of philosophical skepticism, you’re the only conscious being in the world. That insane conclusion reflects a hard truth: No one really knows what’s going on in anyone else’s head, because each of us is sealed in the cell of our own awareness.
Yes, we’ve evolved to intuit others’ thoughts and feelings, a capacity that cognitive scientists call (confusingly) theory of mind. Online dating stretches your theory of mind to the breaking point. You can only guess what your date is feeling, and sometimes you guess wrong. (See my riff on the Henry James novel The Golden Bowl.)
Sex compounds your confusion. You’re as close, physically, as two creatures can be. Oxytocin and other hormones bind you to each other. And yet doubt, perversely, surges with proximity. You wonder: What is she really feeling? Does she feel for me what I feel for her?
As you veer between delight and despair, you’re not sure what you’re really feeling, either. How can we know each other when we can’t even know ourselves?
A friend, when I described how I felt about a woman I just met online, said, That sounds like limerence. I googled it. Limerence is a psychiatric label for obsessive infatuation. The term is derogatory, it implies that limerence is irrational.
But since when was love rational? Limerence is simply the consequence of our yearning for oneness colliding with our unbreachable solitude.
Quantum mechanics strikes me as suited to modeling the paradoxes of online dating. Consider the wave function, the mathematical widget that makes quantum machinery hum. It churns out probability amplitudes, numbers with which you compute the probability of something happening.
The wave function consists of real and imaginary numbers. Real numbers fall on the line, bisected by 0, stretching from negative to positive infinity. You can’t find imaginary numbers on the real-number line, because they consist of multiples of the square root of -1. Yes, the imaginary realm requires its own infinite line.
Real numbers, let’s say, represent objectively measurable behaviors of the online dater. Whereas imaginary numbers capture your wild inner oscillations between fantasy and fear. Your real, quantifiable behavior interacts via positive and negative feedback loops with your imaginings. Contradictory states—dread and desire, intimacy and alienation--exist in superposition. Uncertainty reigns.
In quantum mechanics, measurement collapses the wave function, dispelling superposition, probability, uncertainty. You open the box and discover the cat purring, alive. Phew.
In online dating, the wave function collapses when you have your first zoom chat, dinner date, kiss, naked embrace, spat. But do these “measurements” dispel your uncertainty? Hell no! Love, whether between eager online daters or jaded old spouses, always entails uncertainty. After each measurement, a new wave function springs into action, with a new set of probability amplitudes limning new superposed, real-imaginary possibilities.
Physicists will squawk at my metaphorical shenanigans. But come on, doesn’t love epitomize, more than any other experience, the fusion of the real and imaginary? And how do we know anything but through metaphor, analogy, the likening of this to that? Forget knowing things in themselves. Even for God, that ain’t possible.
A final thought: Our uncertainty about each other triggers all manner of mayhem, from divorce to war. But without this constraint on our cognition, online dating would be much less fun.
Further Reading:
The Dark Matter Inside Our Heads
The Golden Bowl and the Combinatorial Explosion of Theories of Mind