From Wikipedia’s ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ listing:
When, how and whether any barrier is crossed between a microscopic quantum world of superposed particles and a macroscopic world of large,non-superposed objects is one of the major interpretational problems of quantum mechanics.
Scientists who are studying quanta (the smallest possible particles of existence) have a dilemma.
Tiny particles seem to obey a different set of laws than what we are familiar with in the end result, or the ‘everyday’ world.
We know, for sure, that these incredibly tiny particles can do things like:
- Be two things at once
- Know, instantly and without communication, what is going on anywhere else in the universe at any given time
(in other words, all is one) - React to the expectations or even to the act of being observed.
In other words,to use a word that would probably make any physicist strangle me, way down at the bottom, everything behaves like magic. Particles do things that large objects can’t do: I can’t be two things at once, trees that fall in the forest fall regardless of observation or being heard. The koans are impossibilities in ‘the real world’ as we understand it, and the scientists are having trouble locating the ‘magic point’ at which the microscopic becomes the macroscopic.
Well, this is what I think:
Quantum mechanics deals with the lowest possible ‘thing’ that the world is. It describes the energy and the matter of these teeny things, this bottom-level process.
Perhaps, though, quanta are comparable to machine code.
An example of machine code:
00000 1001110 LOAD 11110
00001 10110100 STOR 10100
00010 10011110 LOAD 11110
00011 11010100 ADD 10100
00101 00000000 HALT
Just nonsense. Alien and incomprehensible as we look at it. This is quanta.
When we use a computer (when we deal with the world), we don’t see the machine code taking place. Quantum particles do truly insane things, they leap in and out of reality, they bip around and take on lovely, snowflake-like patterns, then are gone in an instant. We don’t see this, all we see if Uncle Fred talking about last week’s fishing trip. We are dealing with the upper-level manifestation of the code: there is a compiler here, and it’s making code into reality.
The code IS the program. You can’t forget this. The limitations of the code are the limitations of the program.
Two things must happen to a computer language before it can be used by you and I. It has to be compiled, or it has to be interpreted.
I don’t know what is ‘compiling’ reality. I am convinced that there is such an action in nature, because frankly there IS a divider between quantum reality and physical reality. Something is making that into this. It’s what I meant by the ‘printer head’.
However, we — our brains, our sense organs — are partially responsible, it seems, for interpretation. We see, the wave function collapses, and the cat is dead. The program has run.
Even the way we think is like this. At the lowest level, our thoughts are composed of scary, thumping abstracts. HOT. COLD. GOOD. BAD. This is the action of the lower brain, the rhomboencephalon, the hindbrain: we share this part of our brains with reptiles. It is very old, has instinct and memory from the earliest days of our race coded inside it, and controls those things that have to do with the dirty details of life. It’s our devil, that hindbrain, you know. That’s where Cthulu and Satan live. Right back there with the sex and the violence.
At the higher level, the cerebral cortex, our thoughts are coherent. They acknowledge time, space, energy and mass. They have meaning according to the real world, partially through direct observation and partially through interaction with the hind- and mid-brain. It’s not COLD BAD, it’s ‘I was out in the snow today, and I’m uncomfortably chilly, so I’m gonna go in for a while’. Vastly de-compressed, individuated. All is no longer one at the higher levels.
And With No Language But A Cry 