Bubblegum

by Adam Levin

“ ‘Pain,’ ” he said. “Or ‘feel’ for that matter. Even ‘eating,’ ‘drinking,’ ‘hungry,’ and ‘thirsty.’ Please forgive this annoying thing I’m doing with my fingers when I say those words, but they’re not the right ones. They’re insufficient metaphors. We don’t, however, have the right words yet, so they’re the ones I’m forced to use. But ‘pain’ is a kind of information, and ‘feeling pain’—or ‘feeling’ anything at all—is a process. ‘Eating’ and ‘drinking’—responsive behaviors to processed information, to the ‘feelings’ of ‘hunger’ and ‘thirst.’ Maybe try, Mrs. Magnet, to think of a personal computer. It ‘eats’ and ‘drinks’ electricity, its ‘body’ is plastic and metal, its ‘organs’ silicon and plastic and metal, and when it processes code it doesn’t ‘know’ how to handle—if, say, it’s an Apple computer, and you insert a Windows diskette in its drive—the computer ‘feels’ ‘pain,’ in response to which it behaves by beeping and sometimes giving off grinding sounds.