“That sounds like a really spectacularly bad idea! Using an artefact is a bad idea, using it around technology is a worse idea, using two artefacts around technology when presumably neither of them have been checked for interactions with particle accelerators...”

"No fun! No fun at all! How else am I supposed to test whether panpsychism is true?"

“I’m sure you can figure something out that won’t probably kill you in like five different ways. I mean, you’re the one with the PhD in this stuff.” ...Kiss?

Lev cannot make up his mind whether he wants to kiss Martin or explain that finding out whether electrons are sapient is important, so instead he just protests unintelligibly into Martin's mouth. 

One of the great things about kissing is that Martin does not have to have a counterargument or knowledge of panpsychism, he just has to have hands and lips and enthusiasm. “Mmmmmloveyou.”

Lev pulls away from the kiss. "Okay but the other thing is that if we know spirits are immaterial and real, and minds are immaterial and real, then maybe lots of other immaterial things are real. Concepts. Numbers. Objective morality. God, although if God is real the way magic works leaves me with even more questions than I normally have about why He made this universe instead of one that sucks less."

“Maybe God is evil? ...I really hope God’s not evil.”

"Well. Whether or not he's evil I'm not going to shul."

“Fair enough!”

"...you have no idea what a shul is and are just saying that because you don't want to sound ignorant."

”...Yeah, you caught me. Is it, like, a church? Except not a church, obviously—you know what I mean.”

"I think churches are a funny kind of shul, personally. You guys stole your religion from us."

“That’s fair! We kind of did!” 

Lev smooshes his face into Martin's shoulder. "I would explain my claim that numbers were not real but I have no idea if you know how... math... works... and I am pretty sure this is a significantly more confusing claim if you don't know math."

“I know... some math?”

"Schools don't teach people real math, they teach them to memorize mathematical procedures and execute them by rote, it's different. --Uh, at some point I probably want to show you how real math works but probably not right now, I am thinking about magic stuff now."

“Yeah, I guess I don’t know any real math then. But! Yes! Magic stuff!”

"So if you think about the stuff we know about triangles, they can't be describing any real triangles, right? Because we can't draw a perfect triangle? So you could think of-- a perfect triangle, or pure triangleness, separately from any triangles that actually exist? And then when we talk about triangles we're actually talking about things we've discovered about that immaterial perfect triangle? And if immaterial things exist maybe that is how math works. --I'm not sure how you could test that but some philosophers thought concepts worked the same way, like, when we talk about what makes something a horse or a house or a human we're actually referencing this sort of idea of Perfect Horseness or Perfect Humanness or Perfect Houseness and that's how we know what a horse or a house or a human is. Does this make any sense at all? I am worried I am just kind of doing word salad."

“I think I... sort of get it?”

"Let me try it a different way." He sits up so he can gesture more enthusiastically while he explains. "So, like, take-- I don't know, marriage. Some people are like 'marriage is what the government says it is,' some people are like 'I can be married to two people if I feel like it, the government doesn't get to decide that,' some people are like 'gay people can't get married,' there's disagreement, right? So you might say 'well, people have different concepts of what marriage is, all you can say is that marriage for Alice is what the government says it is and marriage for Bob doesn't let two men get married.' But if concepts are immaterial things then... in Conceptland somewhere there's the concept of What A Marriage Is, and it doesn't matter what Alice or Bob or the government thinks, the concept is the same. Saying 'two men can't get married' could be wrong in the way that, like, saying triangles have four sides is wrong." He thinks about it. "Or right, I guess, I have no idea whether the universe is homophobic."

“Okay. I think I get it? How could we even find that out, though.”

"Well, if you have... I don't know, a necklace... that made people want to commit rape, and you have one person who's a feminist and thinks if you don't ask all the time when you have sex it's rape, and you have someone else who thinks you can't rape your spouse, and then you put it on both of them and see if it makes them both commit the same crimes, or if the first person stops asking before they have sex with people and the second person doesn't change how they behave towards their wife. I think that would at least be suggestive?"

“O....kay! What about ways of finding out that aren’t that.”

"--also," he adds quickly, "that would be very unethical and if Artefact Storage has any rape necklaces they should not put them on anyone."

Snort. Kiss. “No rape necklaces, as far as I know. Definitely no putting them on people.”