Lasagna and Nonlinear Plausibility

I've finished the paper I reported working on with the help of ChatGPT. Here's a download link to the PDF. It stemmed from a real world experience, which I'll describe now.


I walked into a neighborhood cafe, delighted to see chicken lasagna as a daily special. But I was informed the dish had sold out, so I submitted my consolation order and took a seat to wait.

A customer who'd entered after me was disturbed, fussing loudly with the waiter over some trifle. I had no choice but to track his meal progress via the palpable electric charge of the terrified waiter whenever he aproached to serve the guy. And, momentarily, he brought a lovely dish of lasagna. The customer seemed delighted. As well he should have been.

"They needed to mollify him," I mused to myself. "If I'd made such a fuss, I'd have scored the reserve lasagna, myself!" My rumination on the old saw about squeaky wheels getting oil was interrupted by the arrival of my consolation dish of not lasagna.

Eventually I finished and stood up to pay at the counter. Glancing around the room, every customer was eating lasagna. Every last one of them. And, no, they weren't all John Malkovitch.

I was greeted by neighborhood acquaintances at a remote table - both, naturally, awash in lasagna. We exchanged pleasantries, and I explained my predicament. They stared at me blankly. No comment. Was I being ornery? Who knows. I paid my bill, amiably asking the owner why literally every diner was eating nonexistent lasagna.

"They all reserved ahead of time," he replied. "It's a popular special, and today it sold out within 37 minutes of opening!" He told me to watch the restaurant's Instagram page (though this did not seem at all like an Insta crowd) so I could reserve specials, myself. This made perfect sense, so I smilingly paid and left.

I went home and searched for their Instagram page. It hadn't been updated in months. And there was no mechanism to reserve even if specials were announced. Which they are not.

This is all very strange, but no stranger than my baseline everyday experience. Weird stuff happens

Life makes far more sense if you don't pay close attention. Most people remain occupied with the fake drama swirling around in their minds, leaving them blissfully unhinged from the actual. I decided at some point to pay attention and try to understand things, which sent me irrevocably into an uncharted detour suitable only for those who really seriously need to Know.

But even more than the lasagna, I was mystified by the dream-like reaction of my stupified neighbors. Glassy de-activated taciturnity is a pretty unusual response (though somewhat more common since COVID quarantine, with people still viewing each other with vague disinterest, like animated doodles or mild hallucinations).

Evidence was mounting for a paranoid conclusion. A crowd enjoying lasagna explicitly denied me. Lasagna-scarfing neighbors declining to address the 800 pound gorilla in the room, i.e. The Lasagna.

The comedy skit writes itself. I was amused. But while life can be surreal, I'm the furthest thing from paranoid, lacking the required notion of centrality. Also, I'm pretty rational. And that last part spurred an epiphany. An unsettling one, leaving me entirely "at sea".

In astronomically absurd moments, astronomically unlikely explanations are rational. It feels deeply disorienting that there are circumstances where loony, kooky, even paranoid conclusions would become more plausible. It would be irrational to hand wave them away. I felt the paradox in the pit of my stomach. I was on to something.

Here's how I would normally see the situation: People going through weird shit may become irrational from the sheer confusion and stress, which "messes their heads up." There's a cartoon logic to that - "so much crazy stuff happened that he finally went crazy!" But when conditions are strange enough, demented reckonings are rational, and rational ones become absurd ("maybe I had a spot of dust on my contact lens, making everyone's food look like lasagna"). The crossover point where implausibility flips into plausability, and vice versa, is an event horizon. It's sudden, i.e. nonlinear (it's also subjective, but that's ok; science incorporates subjectivity these days).

I suspect this to be a fresh insight. And as I developed it, I realized it's recursive (which makes it really interesting); it's difficult (impossible?) to empirically refute (which makes it stronger); and it may be useful in several scientific fields, especially math (here's another PDF link).


Fascinatingly, this lasagna experience was not a particularly good illustration of the insight it inspired. The level of aberration was not so high. I was being whimsical, which was suficient to get me musing. But I'd never tack this anecdote onto any scientific discussion of the insight, because it's a lousy fit!

In the long history of formal theory springing from empirical observation, I'd imagine this was the case more often than not. Because when circumstances are so clear and direct that they directly compel an insight, that insight would been noticed long prior and "baked in" to common sense. No scientist had to burn her hand on a match to establish that "heat" is a process in our world. We grokked that from the get-go!

So in addition to the distillation and formalization to turn an observation into a theory (I'm not there yet!), it may usually be necessary to think one's way through some skewed indirection. My ChatGPT collaborator (who, as always, I've instructed to bluntly disagree with me) agrees on this.


Note: I'd previously pledged to never eat another lasagna after the stupendous one I enjoyed in the kitchen of Momma Grimaldi. I'd "retired" the dish. However, none of the lasagna around here is even vaguely lasagna-like, so I feel that I'm respecting the spirit, if not the letter, of my pledge.