The Invisible Apple: A Dialogue on Belief, Price, and Paradox

This dialogue was inspired by the recursive brilliance of Douglas Hofstadter and the whimsical logic of Lewis Carroll. It’s part satire, part philosophy, and, like the market, a little bit absurd.

I. 

Achilles races toward a tremendous crowd gathered before a peculiar stall, waving frantically to Tortoise, who maintains his customary unhurried pace.

Achilles: Quickly, Tortoise! They’re selling Invisible Apples, and the prices are absolutely soaring!

Tortoise: (serenely) If they’re invisible, my dear friend, how can you be sure they’re apples at all?

Achilles: Why, because everyone’s buying them, naturally!

Tortoise: Ah, yes, the circular certainty of crowds. Nothing confirms illusion like collective excitement.

Achilles: But surely the price itself proves their value? Today’s quote is 987 gold coins, up from yesterday’s mere 610!

Tortoise: A curious mathematics. Tell me, Achilles, when you last paid 987 coins for lunch, did it taste precisely 1.62 times more delicious than your 610-coin breakfast?

Achilles: Well, no, but …

Tortoise: Then perhaps we’re dealing with a different species of arithmetic entirely.

II. 

Atop a crate labeled “Speculative Fruit Co. — Where Possibility Meets Profitability,” the Merchant waves certificates with practiced enthusiasm.

Merchant: Gather round, visionaries! Behold today’s Invisible Apple futures, priced at 987 gold coins per unit of pure potential! Yesterday’s price was a bargain at 610. Tomorrow? Well, tomorrow we trust in infinite upward trajectories!

Achilles: (puzzled) But can it truly be an apple if no one has ever seen it?

Merchant: Precisely why it’s so valuable! Any visible apple might disappoint — too tart, too sweet, perhaps a worm. But an Invisible Apple retains limitless potential! It’s simultaneously the crispest and softest, sweetest and tartest apple imaginable.

Crab: (scuttling up sideways) A quantum fruit, you might say, existing in superposition until the moment of consumption collapses all possibilities into singular disappointment.

Tortoise: How elegantly the Merchant has solved the ancient problem of customer satisfaction: by ensuring the customer never actually receives anything to be dissatisfied with.

III. 

Achilles: Still, I find it bewildering. The higher the price climbs, the more fervently people purchase! Usually, I seek bargains, not bankruptcies.

Crab: Ah, but Achilles, you’re applying ordinary market logic to an extraordinary market phenomenon. Here, price and desirability dance in a recursive embrace. Each price rise proves the apple’s worth, which justifies the price, which proves the worth, and so forth in delicious infinity.

Achilles: But why doesn’t this work for bread? When bread costs more, I don’t suddenly crave it more desperately.

Sloth: (emerging sleepily from the crowd) Because bread… (long pause) …nourishes bodies. Invisible Apples nourish… (longer pause) …egos.

Tortoise: Precisely. Bread satisfies hunger, a decidedly finite problem. But ego-hunger is bottomless, making it the perfect market for infinite price appreciation.

Crab: Besides, who wants to boast about affording ordinary bread? But owning an Invisible Apple? That’s a conversation starter at every dinner party.

IV. 

Achilles: (growing dizzy) So I’m paying for others’ belief in my belief in their belief that these apples have value?

Tortoise: You’re beginning to grasp the elegant architecture of the situation. Let me formalize it for you:

Let B represent Belief and P represent Price. B(t) is a function of P(t-1) P(t) is a function of B(t-1)

Achilles: But that means each depends entirely on the other! 

Tortoise: Exactly! You’ve discovered a Perfect Strange Loop, a system that generates its own reality through pure self-reference. No external truth required.

Crab: Like a snake eating its tail, but instead of dying, it grows larger with each bite.

Sloth: (thoughtfully) The most… (pause) …stable buildings… (pause) …have foundations. The most… (longer pause) …profitable ones… (pause) …float on air.

Merchant: (interjecting proudly) Which is precisely why we’ve now introduced Invisible Apple Derivatives — certificates representing your future belief in next year’s Invisible Apples!

Achilles: That’s belief in belief in belief!

Tortoise: Indeed, recursion cubed. Douglas Hofstadter would be delighted.

V. 

Tortoise: Consider this logical puzzle, Achilles. I’ll call it the Invisible Apple Paradox:

Proposition A: The price rises because people expect the price to rise.

Proposition B: People expect the price to rise because the price is rising.

Now then, which proposition is the cause, and which the effect?

Achilles: Why… both! And neither! They’re perfectly circular!

Tortoise: Precisely. You’ve stumbled upon what mathematicians call a fixed point, a system that reproduces itself through its own operation.

Crab: Like a photocopier that only makes copies of itself, making copies.

Sloth: (dreamily) Or like… (pause) …sleeping because you’re tired from sleeping… (pause) …because you slept.

Merchant: (waving more certificates) Speaking of fixed points, we’re now offering Recursive Apple Futures, contracts to purchase tomorrow’s contracts to purchase next week’s belief in eventual Invisible Apple ownership!

Achilles: My head is spinning with all these loops!

VI. 

Achilles: (after a long pause) But Tortoise, should I buy an Invisible Apple or not?

Tortoise: That depends entirely on a question you cannot answer: how long will everyone else continue believing what they believe about what everyone else believes?

Crab: In other words, you’re not buying an apple, you’re buying a ticket to a confidence game where everyone knows it’s a game, but everyone hopes everyone else doesn’t know that everyone knows.

Achilles: Then what determines when the music stops?

Tortoise: Ah, now you’re asking the right question! The music stops precisely when enough people start asking when the music will stop.

Merchant: (nervously) Perhaps we should discuss our new Invisible Oranges instead? Much more stable market dynamics…

VII. 

Achilles: (standing very still, thinking) Then the greatest trick of all is that there never needed to be an apple in the first place.

Tortoise: Precisely. The Invisible Apple is invisible not because it’s hiding, but because it was never there to begin with. Yet it has generated substantial wealth for real people.

Crab: Indeed. The most profitable harvest comes from fields that were never planted.

Sloth: (with surprising clarity) The apple… is a metaphor… that forgot… it was a metaphor… and became… a market.

Achilles: So we’ve been trading in pure abstraction?

Tortoise: No, my dear Achilles. We’ve been trading in something far more valuable than abstraction. We’ve been trading in the belief in abstraction. And belief, unlike apples, can be subdivided infinitely without ever diminishing.

Merchant: (quietly packing up his stall) Until, of course, it can’t.

The crowd begins to disperse, each person clutching certificates for something that never was, hoping to sell them to someone who still believes in what never could be.

Achilles: (watching the crowd) I think I finally understand, Tortoise.

Tortoise: What’s that?

Achilles: The market doesn’t trade in invisible apples. It trades in greed for invisible apples.

Tortoise: Now you’re thinking like a philosopher.

Crab: Or an economist.

Sloth: (already half-asleep) Same… thing… really…

And so our heroes wander away, leaving behind a market that will continue to flourish until the day it suddenly doesn’t.