losing track of nothing
Reactions? Interactions? Events? The more I think about it, the farther I get from causality, and the farther I get from time. I’m still not sure of what I’m getting closer to. It’s ironic, because I flash between picturing this on a macroscopic scale and considering it in terms of physically non-existent minutiae reacting on a level that we can sensually observe, without anything in between. It’s this whole quantum leap thing (how does anything ‘get’ anywhere?).
I’ve been largely educated ‘liberally,’ or at least by minds which consistently suggest that we look beyond the obvious for the seemingly ridiculous bits and allow them into our perception. It leaves one with a sort of acute paranoia. I find myself peeking around corners, so to speak, for anything that might possibly be taken for granted so that I can follow this tunnel of sorts even farther. And it is a tunnel, like unto Alice’s rabbit-hole. It’s a long way to travel, seeming endless, and to reach the ‘bottom’ leaves your world no less nonsensical than it was to begin with.
The challenge is that one is seeking, even by these means, to come to a sort of satisfaction in the unfocused and chaotic entirety of it all. In the end, that which you seek is that which you already know. That doesn’t stop you, though; you’re still in the tunnel, skittering after the unchallenged assumptions that waver in your peripherals like shadows on the wall of the cave.
Specifically, the book The Dancing Wu Li Masters (Gary Zukav) has been clinging to my brain. Most notably (at the moment, anyway), it has turned time into a much less binding assumption. It’s just a field now, existing all at once and not at all, of the myriad manifestations of probability. How our consciousness moves within this field, how our sensory experience focuses our perceptions of these manifestations, seems awesomely fleeting and meaningless - until we consider that without our selves to do the observing, none of these things are meaningful in a way that could ever impact us. It’s cyclical, and equalized.
The problem with looking at reality as a set of probabilities-manifest is that at first it seems very constricting. When we think of probability, we think of those things that are ‘probable’ - to us, this generally insinuates that they are ‘likely to occur’. It’s easy to fall back into the mental construct of this universe operating as a grand machine, with each and every event pre-determined. Really, the picture painted by such advents as the Schrodinger equation is far more varied and exciting - it’s just harder to imagine.
It means that anything - really anything - is possible. Illogical, unfathomable, inconceivable - all descriptors for things that we cannot fit into our daily experiences with reality. They are outliers to the statistical set we have accepted as ‘making sense’. But this reality, in all its tangible reliability, is not the end-all, is it? What we know of the universe is not truly universal, and even knowing that, our perception is incomplete. Why does quantum theory feel so right?
One could spend a very long time attempting to figure that out. For the time being, I have decided to relax the attempt I would normally make to structure everything systematically. Even thinking of things in terms of chaos, the tendency to attempt to apply causality encroaches. I, myself, spent hours attempting to utilize mathematics to extrapolate on the concept of dimensional compounding using linear coordinate systems conceptually, but found myself speaking only in terms of the ‘physical’ or ‘temporal’ universe which with we are familiar. And it was frustrating - all I was trying to do is prove why everything I had learned made so much sense.
It doesn’t. It doesn’t, because we have constructed definitions for ’sense’ and ‘order’ that simply don’t work. The intersections are not graduated simply because we speak in terms of quanta. They are not points where lines meet, nor rippling tangential fields. They are distributed, to infinity, in unfathomable ‘homogeneity’. From one to the next may simply be a shift from + to -, the disappearance of one necessitating the appearance of another at any place, any time. We dance like sparks among them, as them, as I and as we: going in every direction, having no direction at all.
