Unmaking Sense

We should not understand the uncertainties of the quantum world as a reflection of human uncertainty and therefore as the projections of human psychology and consciousness. Instead we should understand any persistent structure as an observer arising from the interactions or entanglements between structures as the sources of the persistent entities that we find and identify with the classical world. We create the meaning that we find in the world to reinforce our sense of separateness and significance, that we matter in the world, but ultimately we no more matter to the universe than the ant matter to us. Far from being bleak, this should help us to reorientate our sense of our own importance in a way that makes life more intelligible than it would otherwise be and so frame our problems with a better perspective.

Learning by doing is about constructing what you think is a coherent narrative out of what you think you’ve learnt. In the case of quantum mechanics and the classical world this is a good example of how we need to learn by building the scaffolding that gives rise to some sort of understanding of the relationship between the macroscopic and microscopic worlds. An observer as a persistent structure that need not be conscious or intentional.

The one year anniversary of Unmaking Sense. How distinction depends upon perspective. The Vogons, the council and an ants’ nest put in proportion. Understanding ourselves apart from and integrated into the world.

When we observe the world, we like to think that what we see is evidence that will help us to decide what we should do, but that may not be the case even though we have little option but to think so. The way the world behaves may be governed by things that lie much deeper within it and the things that we can observe and our understanding of cause-and-effect may be correspondingly unreliable. David Hume was one of the first to intuit this fact, to which we can now add greater detail.

How wrapping ideas up in a summative moment of realisation can leave us feeling exhausted, spent, empty. Completing trains of thought and discovering what if anything comes next. Resisting the temptation to come to premature conclusions.

We reduce the complexity of the world to know it, but when we first encounter it we do not have the full picture so what we observe is not reliable. This is not merely appearance and reality but something far more significant.

We reduce the world to one definite thing in order to reduce our anxieties about uncertain things. While the world appears to be in a state of flux and multiplicity we don’t know how to anticipate the future so we are tempted all the time perhaps and often prematurely to reduce the state of the world with all its multiplicities into a single state because it seems more manageable and seems more comfortable even if it turns out to be mistaken.

We analyse more or less every political system in terms of its attitude to self-reference: to self-criticism; to dissent; to unthinking subservience. And we understand capitalism out of the same concern to allow anything but doubts about its own most fundamental assumptions that reflect its social Darwinism and are embodied in its assumption that differential rewards are the just desserts of those of unequal worth as measured by its own self-reinforcing measures of success. But all political systems endorse the same foundational assumption: that the only reliable measure of success is a person’s manifest command of more than their fair share of the world’s resources.

Recursion is a process in computer programming where a program calls itself or a function within a program cause the same function that it’s running in. It’s a very powerful but at first very perplexing and confusing concept. It relies on a capacity for self-reference. And so it’s very much central to the notion of self-consciousness and the relationship between our conscious and non-conscious brains.

I get obsessed with things and I’m not ashamed of it. I understand the things that I am obsessed with are often trivial. But I also understand that they distract my consciousness - which would otherwise be trying to solve at a conscious level problems that my non-conscious brain alone is likely to be able to resolve. So my obsessions are ways of freeing up my non-conscious existence to do what really matters by fixating my consciousness on things that don’t.