Back when I was an undergraduate student, I took a biopsychology seminar for fourth-year students and graduate students. I was the youngest and only third-year student in the class, and the only person there who was, at the time, not majoring in a science (I ended up earning a Bachelor of Science in Psychology with Honours in addition to my BFA in Creative Writing, so I did change direction). I’d been admitted because I’d gotten 97% in the only course prerequisite, but, quite obviously, I was still somewhat out of my league.

Our final grade was comprised of scores on four essays (which I did well on) and 20% class participation. Lacking the strong background in biology that the older students had, I barely spoke in most class discussions.

Then, one afternoon, during a unit on love and attachment, the professor described Laplace’s Demon to us.

“We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.”

— Pierre Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (1814)

The professor asked the following question:

“If Laplace’s Demon knows the exact position and movement of every particle in the universe in the past and present, does the Demon understand love?”

He asked for a show of hands for “yes”. Half the class raised their hands.

Then he asked for a show of hands for “no”, the Demon doesn’t understand love.

I was the only person who raised her hand.

I told the class that while Laplace’s Demon would know every fact there is to know about love, would know the mechanisms of the chemical reactions, would know every love story past and present and be able to predict who would come to fall in love, the Demon still wouldn’t understand love unless he fell in love himself.

The professor asked the “yeses” to counter my argument.

I don’t remember everything that was said — this was well over 16 years ago — but I remember some of the arguments that annoyed me. That if Laplace’s Demon knew everything there is to know about the mechanics of love, he would also understand what it was like to fall in love without having done so, in the same way that a theoretical all-knowing oncologist could understand cancer without having had cancer himself.

“No,” I said, “He wouldn’t understand what it’s like to have cancer, so his understanding would be incomplete. And “love” is infinitely more complicated than cancer.”

They claimed the mechanics of love (and cancer) were all there is to know about love. That the Demon, knowing all there is to know about the mechanics of love, would be able to concoct some kind of potion or something in order to fall in love himself.

I countered that if the Demon induced love in himself, then the love would be artificial and the Demon’s awareness of this would undermine any true understanding. The Demon would not be able to fall in love, being separate from humanity and so all-knowing that authentic feeling would be near-impossible.

And even if the Demon were capable of falling in love, I added, he would only understand his particular subjective experience of love. No one, nothing, no matter how omniscient, could fully understand “love”. Love is inexplicable.

The argument seemed to go in circles. The “yeses” did not seem to get my point.

Finally, a purple-haired graduate student stood up and offered that I was making a poetic argument, not a scientific one.

I was pissed at her dismissal. I felt that I was making a scientific argument. At the same time, I was exhausted and a bit depressed. How could all these people think so little of love? How could they be so narcissistic as to think it was possible for a theoretical omniscient demon to fully understand something as ineffable as love? (The subtext I thought I picked up on was that they seemed to believe that if they could learn all the facts of something like love, they too would “understand” it — which I found ominous in a bunch of psychology and biology honours and graduate students). How could they be so confident, and yet so obviously wrong? (And what the heck was up with the half of the class that didn’t say a word the entire time, or cast a vote either way? Cowards.)

I don’t have much to say about this story, other than that feeling I had in the classroom is one that frequently returns, including in a minority of my interactions on Substack.

In retrospect, having since read

“[With the left hemisphere] Any subtlety, any nuance, anything that comes from context—and context alters everything—everything that comes from the realm of the implicit is missed. And the realm of the implicit, by the way, includes everything that we really value. So it includes, for instance, the beauty of nature, poetry, music, narrative, myth, ritual, sex, love, the divine—all these things remain implicit. They can be made explicit but when they’re made explicit, they change their nature and they become less than they were. And they may become completely other than they were.”

—Iain McGilchrist1

Recently, I’ve also thought that a more difficult question would be whether God understands love. I asked my husband and he said “yes”. I said “maybe.” If anyone understands love, fully understands it, it’s God, but it’s also possible that some things are just impossible to completely understand — even for God. Maybe love, as a concept, is an asymptote.

My psychedelics-fuelled sense of God is of a consciousness that is evolving alongside us, in a fractal relationship akin to the one we have with our gut microbiomes, one that cannot predict the future with certainty. In this sense, I reject the foundational determinism of Laplace’s Demon. Knowing the placement and movement of every molecule and atom in the universe both past and present can yield reasonable predictions about the future, but the future is still unwritten. There’s chaos, free will, uncertainty.

It’s too bad Pierre Simon Laplace lived before Benoit Mandelbrot and the discovery of fractal geometry.

I write with a lot of confidence about some very difficult topics, but I don’t claim to know anything with certainty, nor to understand any concept fully (and if I’ve implied this, it was an error on my part that warrants correction).2

I’m also cautious that over-intellectualization can destroy some of the wonder, the magic, of our world.

In 2022, my husband and I went to Mexico with our daughter. We got into a conversation with a local who spoke English, and he told us that he wasn’t scared of the coronavirus because “love” and “God” would protect him.

I launched into a long-winded mechanistic explanation about oxytocin and cortisol and the science behind why love and faith can heal.

He waved his hand to shut me up.

“I don’t care about any of that science crap,” he said. “All I need to know is love is medicine.”

We can know things intuitively without understanding them mechanistically. And this can be a more powerful and effective way of knowing some things.

Of course, I think the mechanistic explanations are important. You can’t win an argument with someone who is disconnected from their right hemisphere intuition without appealing to the logic of the left hemisphere.

But I want to appeal to the right hemisphere too — I pray for collective healing of our right hemispheres, a return to intuition, to connection, to nature, to Spirit, to metaphor, to meaning.

A return to love.

I ended up getting a fairly good mark for participation in that class, even though I barely participated in any of the other discussions.

So I guess the professor, at least, thought the poet had a point about love.