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Wednesday, 9 January 2019


Apparently, what used to be thought of as the collapse of the wave function as a result of measurement, is better understood as the diffusion of fragments of information about a mixed state via every interaction that it undergoes, each interaction releasing a fractional clue about the state to its respective interactive partners which then spreads further via other interactions, like gossip. All of these tiny fragments must cohere, must tell a consistent story even if there is no single site where all of the information is gathered together, and so as the fragments accumulate and the 'story' gains focus the state is constrained into a narrower and narrower range of consensual possibilities, the consensuality of which, being point-of-view invariant meaning that they are necessarily 'classical' states. The same pattern might be experienced in certain intimate relations, so that as long as they remain quite secret two-nesses they allow all sorts of strange superpositions and interference patterns to arise. As information about the events leaks out, even to no-one in particular, then the strangeness dissipates and collapses into a banal narrative, as viewed from nowhere by a generalised other. If it seems plausible that such strange quantum-like effects can arise in a two-ness which don't survive exposure, as if a two-ness acts like a double-slit or a quantum computer, then the question arises as to whether such effects can be observed in a single consciousness. Can you 'interfere' with yourself in this way? Strange things might occur in deep meditation, but the answer seems to be no.

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