Lev is NOT going to kiss his cheek before they go off to work but he is going to THINK about it. 

Instead, he's going to digitize some digitizables and think way more about Martin and way less about Sasha than an ideal person probably would. 

He can do that, nothing interrupts him. 

That evening Lev cuddles up with Martin on the bed and says, "I have been thinking about physics."

“What about physics?”

"Well," he says. "Actually mostly metaphysics, just a little bit of physics. --I think magic has a ton of implications for a lot of different things that philosophers have been arguing about for ages and also I'm not sure if it obeys the laws of physics."

"I mean, it's magic, right? So I guess that makes sense."

Flop on Martin's shoulder. "I want to say I am thinking about physics because people are like 'oh, it's philosophy, so there's no way you can figure out what's right by looking at the world, you can't test it, you just have to argue about things endlessly forever.' And-- I don't know, maybe some things are things you have to argue about forever because you can't test them, but I don't like things like that. And I think since magic exists actually we can test way, way more things than we thought we could. For example, whether minds exist separately from brains."

“How would we test that?”

"Good question!" He attempts to bounce while being flopped on Martin, which does not work as well as it would hope. "Um, I know I know way more about this than you and I might skip over things if I get excited, so if you're confused just stop me and I'll backtrack a bit. So brains are the organs inside our heads, and we know they play a role in thought because if you have brain damage or take drugs or something then you're going to think differently. But it seems intuitively wrong to many people that this pile of meat could be conscious. Like, walls aren't conscious, plants aren't conscious, how can brains be conscious? And it's really hard to think about how we'd have free will if everything our brains do is determined by physics. So it seems like consciousness and free will and things must be produced by this immaterial thing, called a mind."

“O...kay, I’m following so far...”

"So normally people are like 'oh, minds must not be real, because if your mind freely decides to pick up a pen or something and then you pick up a pen, then an immaterial thing must be affecting a material thing, and we know from the laws of physics that every movement of a physical object is determined by its interactions with other objects and there is no room for a mind to affect any of it.' Except obviously, with magic, immaterial things are affecting material things all the time. And it sure seems like we have a mind. So that's one point in favor of minds existing."

“That makes sense, yeah.” He’s just going to start petting Lev’s hair while Lev talks. 

Headpets AND explaining psychology things to people. This is the best idea. 

"And we can also look at the way that magic interacts with-- minds or brains. We know how things interact with brains-- drugs, brain damage, that sort of thing. And a lot of artifacts do have effects that you also see in drugs. Hallucinogens mostly, I think, but also stims. But some artifacts and spirits do things that you wouldn't be able to do with a drug. Like the spoons that give you an uncontrollable desire to pick up this specific spoon. That isn't something you'd expect a drug to be able to do. But that's not conclusive proof that minds exist, because-- if everything is brains, then the concept of 'this specific set of spoons' has to be encoded in your brain somehow. So maybe the artifact is doing some kind of very complicated interaction with, I don't know, the exact arrangement of neurons that means 'this specific set of spoons' for each individual person."

“That sounds... really complicated.”

"--man, neural networks are complicated and hard to understand and kind of irrelevant, sorry. I just mean to say that, if minds don't exist, you'd expect brains to have some way of representing 'this is this specific set of spoons,' because we're able to think about sets of spoons. So even though magic interacts with concepts like 'this specific set of spoons' that we can't do anything with via, like, brain surgery or drugs or anything, that doesn't mean that minds exist."

“...How would you figure it out, then? If that doesn’t work.”

"Brains evolved, which means they work in all kinds of incredibly bizarre ways. There's all kinds of things like-- there's a blind spot in your vision and you just hallucinate what you expect to be there to fill it up? If you take deep breaths it calms you down because you hyperventilate when you're stressed and so if you're breathing slowly your brain is like 'wow, I'm breathing slowly, I guess I must be calm.' The brain doesn't actually distinguish fear and sexual arousal so if you make people walk across a rickety bridge they'll think the person they see on the other side is hotter. Brains are really, really  weird."

“Yeah, that’s definitely all weird.” And Martin has no idea how it connects to what he asked, but either Lev will explain or he won’t, either way it’ll be fine. Probably. 

"So minds are-- probably less weird? Like, the whole idea of a mind is that it works the way that it feels like it works, we have free will and so on the way it feels like we do. And they probably didn't evolve, I'm not sure how DNA would code for a mind. So if magic is interacting with our thoughts in... a reasonable way, a way that fits the concepts we have and the way we experience things, and that doesn't involve any bizarre random stuff where for some reason it can't tell sexual attraction and fear apart, then probably minds exist. --I guess if it is doing a bunch of bizarre random stuff then minds might also just be really weird, and that question we'd have to wait to settle until we now more about how brains work."

“Huh. Yeah, that— that makes sense, actually.” Forehead kiss. “I would never have thought of that. You’re really good at—thinking about things, and explaining them.”

"Well, yeah, I have a PhD in this literal exact subject, I hope I learned something." He bounces. "And if minds exist and magic interacts with them, it also means we can test which things do and don't have a mind, and thus see which things are conscious and which aren't. Like... do dogs have an uncontrollable urge to grab those spoons? Do fish? Do plants? --This is also practically important because farms kind of torture chickens and if they have minds it is morally wrong to eat them," says the person who had chicken tikka masala for lunch. 

“I think Artefact Storage might have tested that, actually? But if they haven’t, you could probably get permission from Elias to check. Or you could just check and claim to have permission from Elias, since it’s not like he can fire you.”

"I want to test a chicken. And a chimp, and an octopus, and a cat, and a tunafish. And an ant, a fruit fly, a sponge, a plant, a bacterium... a rock... might be a bit hard to figure out whether a rock has an uncontrollable desire to hold a spoon..."

“Probably hard to test the plant, too. I guess you could leave it there for a while and see if it grows towards the spoon?”

"Yeah! --Martin, Martin, you know what we need to do. We need to break into a particle accelerator with some artefact and then test whether the electrons have minds."