36 Arguments for the Existence of God - [70]

“The first time I gave a talk at one of Pappa’s conferences, he told me that if it had been any better he would have had to shoot me,” she had told him tonight on the phone, sounding both proud and sad at the same time.

“Well, then, please don’t make it any better this time,” he’d responded, which at least had made her laugh.

The textbooks for his self-tutorial in game theory are piled up on his night table, and he decides to use his sleeplessness to make some more progress toward understanding the Mandelbaum Equilibrium. The farther he gets in the textbooks, the more he’s been enjoying his foray into her science, finding himself increasingly resorting to its form of reasoning in order to clarify things for himself. The first thing to figure out always is whether a situation is a zero-sum game or not. Sum games are the ones where what’s up for grabs-say, some pot of money-stays constant, and zero-sum games are the kind in which one person’s gain is another person’s loss: the addition of all the players’ winnings add up to zero. You win, I lose; I win, you lose.

All sorts of situations can be analyzed as games, whether zero-sum or not. Take love, for example. Let’s say you’ve got two people in a romantic relationship and neither has said “I love you.”

Let’s call them X and Y.

No, let’s call them Cass and Lucinda.

What are the risks and what are the possible benefits of one of them saying “I love you” first?

Cass grabs a pen from Lucinda’s night table, and, using the inside of the cover of one of the texts as his sketch pad, he draws himself some boxes:

If Cass were to say “I love you” and Lucinda responded “I love you,” which is what the top box on the left represents, then there would be a huge payoff. For Cass there would be bliss, and, presumably, for Lucinda there would be bliss as well, so the result would be bliss times two.

But what if Cass said “I love you” and Lucinda didn’t reciprocate? That would probably result in some degree of discomfort for Lucinda, and a huge loss for Cass, especially if Lucinda was discomfited enough to decide to move out: they had both agreed that the arrangement was experimental.

Cass supposes he has, for the sake of thoroughness, to fill in the box in which the situation is reversed, the lower box on the left, with Lucinda confessing her love and Cass keeping silent, even though he knows that this square exists only in the realm of the purely theoretical. Still, they call it game theory, don’t they? Better call them X and Y.

The last box is the one in which neither of them said “I love you.” That is the status quo.

So now how is Cass supposed to figure out from these boxes the rational thing to do?

If he says, “I love you,” then, considering the situation only from his own point of view, there is possible bliss but also possible hell, which, he supposes, cancel each other out. If he doesn’t say “I love you,” there is neither bliss nor hell to be gained. He will maintain the present situation, which is certainly a positive one for him-not as positive as bliss, of course, but definitely positive. It seems as if it is rational to keep silent- so rational, in fact, that he wonders why anyone would ever risk saying “I love you” first, which is a bit of a paradox.

Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that it isn’t always sensible to be rational.

Or perhaps the Bliss × 2 that can possibly result if a lover speaks out his love is so hugely positive that it blows all the other boxes out of the water. Could that explain why anyone dares to say “I love you” first?

And here’s another thought: If he shows Lucinda his little grid, it would be a way of indirectly saying “I love you” without taking the risk of saying the actual words. If Lucinda wants to accept his reasoning as a way of saying “I love you” and reciprocate, then they will keep the huge payoff of the first box on the left: Bliss × 2. But if she doesn’t want to reciprocate, then he won’t have blurted out an indiscretion that can’t be taken back. They can keep up their present relationship, maintaining the imperfect-but-preferable-to-nothing status quo. So, by indirectly saying “I love you,” Cass, or X, can possibly get the biggest payoff without risking the biggest payout.

Cass extends his grid to test out his calculations:

It is cogent. It is elegant. He has to admit he thinks it pretty damn near brilliant.

The Seltzer Equilibrium, he decides. Now he has an equilibrium to call his own.

XV The Argument from Sacred Circles

There was no doubt among the seven students that something new and momentous was gathering itself around Jonas Elijah Klapper. His interests were precipitously veering away from literature and into theology, and a paradox shift of untold proportions was working its way out. The intensity of the cerebration going on before their eyes was both exalting and humbling. The ovoid seminar table was like the sacred circle that used to be drawn around the inspired poet-prophet to make a safe place for his wracking genius. His sentences emerged with the profundity, sententiousness, and obscurity of Gideon’s favorite poets, so that Gideon might have said that Jonas Elijah Klapper had become a crucible for poetry, only he knew, as they all knew, that something even beyond poetry was being spilled. His invocations of the thing beyond genius amazed them all, including Jonas Elijah Klapper, who sometimes sat back blinking his eyes in wonder over words he had heard himself speak.