When considering your love for a benevolent, trusted family member, do you consider it eternal AND scant? Stupid question, right? Of course your love for your blood is eternal. But what happens if that family member unwittingly damages you? Cripples your soul, or drastically impacts your emotional well-being with a single, swift, significant decision.
Is your love still eternal?
Is your love now limited?
Too often, we are asked these dualistic questions and forced to decide if we believe in black or white for the day. We are continuously encouraged to use our gifts of reasoning and logic to deduce whether an experience is "good" OR "bad." At the same time, given enough time and information, we are easily convinced that our initial thoughts of "good" are false and an experience of "bad" was truly perceived.
The issue with this conditioned computational way of thinking, is that the human condition can not be simplified to AND, OR, and NOR experiences. I can not assume how you, the reader, would respond, but in the initial example, my love for the trusted family member can not be described as eternal AND limited, just as it can not be described as eternal OR limited. The result is a combination of the supposedly opposing experiences. An emotion which is lodged between the two poles, but fundamentally and imperceptibly connected to each of them. When asked to accurately describe the emotions I feel towards the family member though, I am at a loss for words. I can not adequately observe the experience through an impartial lens without affecting the state of the emotions.
Webster's dictionary defines the human condition as "part of being a person." In order to truly experience what being a person is, it is necessary for humans to stop approaching experiences with a purely logical state-of-being. Rather than approaching public speaking determined to feel either nervous or confident as expected, embrace the reality that what you feel is likely midway between these emotions. Rather than viewing the dreamworld as a vacation from reality, embrace the fact that reality is a dreamworld, and by actively shifting your consciousness from one dreamworld to the next, you can easily become a master of every experience hurled your way. This is the potential of embracing quantum logic as I see it.
What are your thoughts? Are there scenarios where dualistic thinking has far greater benefits? If not, is it possible to train our brains to ditch our computational nature for a better, more wholesome view of the human condition?
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I have a poster on my wall. In it, a portion of the text of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot is shaped as an arrow and overlaid on the photo... -
When considering your love for a benevolent, trusted family member, do you consider it eternal AND scant? Stupid question, right? Of course ...
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In our society, it is increasingly difficult to find moments of true silence. Silence is defined as an absence of sound, but I have some is...
I, too, have been perplexed lately with how people seem to always be taking a dualistic approach to the world around them. I think it is interesting that you define "the human condition" in order to demonstrate how non-sensical it is that we approach our experiences with this binary machine logic, because the human experience IS all about being a person, and to me that means being illogical.
ReplyDeleteBeing human means making mistakes, and making decisions out of passion. Being logical means weighing your options equally, and choosing the one that is least likely to backfire in your face. So where is the benefit in treating everything so logically?
I think a big part of the reason why we do it is that it simplifies the human experience. We make hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions on a daily basis. Some are as simple as picking which cereal we will pour in our bowls in the morning, while others are as complicated as deciding whether or not the person we are dating is the person we want to spend the rest of our lives with. By thinking about our human experience in terms of dualisms, and applying binary logic to both our little and big decisions, we protect ourselves from becoming completely overwhelmed by all of the grey area that surrounds every assessment we might make about our world. Just as sleep presumably helps us sort through unnecessary information processed throughout the day, logic attempts to save us from the utterly overwhelming task of “shifting our consciousness,” as you say, over and over again.
On the other hand, I do think that there are many dualisms existing in our world that we MUST train our brains to reject. Most of these, I believe, have to do with how we see ourselves or other people: man or woman, gay or straight, wise or naïve, weird or normal. When used in the incorrect context, which they so often are, these dualisms distract us from the important parts of the human experience and force us to focus on the insignificant parts. If we took a more quantum approach to human nature and learned to accept that people exist in the middle region between all of these dualisms, we would most definitely be able to create a better, more wholesome view of the human condition.
I think a large part of the human condition also revolves around what you mentioned earlier about love and feelings. I think it is true that the human condition is a complex "experience" that combines both dualism and quantum logic and Megan pointed out the awesome use of both. But I don't think it necessarily defines the human experience. I think our conscious experience transcends the limits of two systems of logic. After all, and this may be a rather naive understanding of science in general, isn't the whole point of logic to help us humans make sense of the universe. I mean I suppose that much of what we understand today follows fundamental laws of physics and of the universe but we've put those in place because they make sense either classically or quantum(ly?). You mentioned the feeling of love being bound between eternal and limited but aren't those bounds rather arbitrary anyways? How do you quantify a feeling or thought objectively? Or I guess, are our feelings and thoughts governed by these sets of logic? There is love and hate, and you can love to hate, but in my mind they are somewhat exclusive. What are feelings and how come we can feel differently to the same thing? (We talked about this before and the name of this eludes me).
ReplyDeleteWhat my mind keeps circling back towards is the phrase in the Zen Mind reading that “it is impossible to know water in itself”. How does that fit into any logic system? I honestly don’t know and would appreciate any help in that regard. Nonetheless, when it comes to the human experience, to something so complex that it seems impossible to understand, how can we apply logic to it?
Mr. Fells, you briefly touched on a topic thats been bothering me about the Pete boxes when you stated "I can not adequately observe the experience through an impartial lens without affecting the state of the emotions." The premise was that when two Pete boxes are stacked together, a white or black ball will always come out it same color, no randomness. When we seek to observe the mechanism of this process, we alter the inner workings of the machine. It reminds of the movie Interstellar and how the answer to survival of mankind was in a black hole, but they were unable to observe it. The example of the Pete boxes made me wonder about the consequences of our curiosity and the importance of expectations in our everyday lives and in quantum computing. Does having expectations lead to the failure of realizing those expectations? Because we can't directly observe the mechanism of the two stacked Pete boxes, we make sense of them by presuming they conduct their business in contempt of our actions. Because we limit the functionality of the Pete boxes by assuming their inner workings, it is hard to understand the full potential of these technologies, precisely because they don't sit well at all with our "sensible" logic.
ReplyDelete“Is it possible to train our brains to ditch our computational nature for a better, more wholesome view of the human condition?”
ReplyDeleteI am drawn to this interesting question you pose as, from my perspective, humans, especially scientists, continuously do the opposite: our brains naturally think using quantum logic, but we try to train our brains to follow binary logic. Using your example of public speaking, before I get up to speak I feel a swell of emotions and thoughts. I’m nervous about any time constraints or stumbling through my words. I’m confident that I know my material well and have had at least a couple of practice sessions. I’m curious about what questions the audience might have. I want to go first and finish the presentation so I do not overthink anything. I want to present later and get a sense of the tone of previous presenters. I am antsy and calm and everything all rolled into one. It is not until someone asks me, “Are you nervous?,” that my brain switches from all these thoughts and feelings to binary logic of I am either nervous or I am not.
Our society almost seems to be programmed for these quick, binary responses. When you ask someone “How are you?,” a large majority of the time you will only hear a one-word “good” as the response, with no elaboration. In fact, when faced with this question ourselves, we often think of our only choices as “good” or “bad” in the split-second process. It is only when more thoughtful questions are asked (What did you do today?, How are you feeling?, Did anything exciting happen in class?, etc.) that we actually take the time to express and expand upon the “grey areas” of our responses.
We do not need to train our brains to think in terms of a more wholesome human experience, but instead need to train our brains to not fall into the easy-way-out pitfalls of one-word answers. Think before you respond about what you are actually sensing, feeling, and/or thinking before jumping to the simple conclusion. Challenge your peers by asking follow-up questions when you only receive short typical answers. By engaging in deeper-than-surface-level conversations, we can promote a society in which quantum logic responses are thought of as normal instead of the gut-reaction “good.”
The prevalence of dualisms in our world seems to be inherent within human nature, perhaps because humans are social creatures. We desire to be surrounded by those similar to us. Creating similarities and differences- comparisons and contrasts- are the way we define and understand the world around us. It is often humans have to make big decisions, often referred to as the proverbial fork in the road. These decisions arise from our survival instinct as a species. For example, the fight-or-flight response when faced with a threat. If we could not identify differences and dissimilarities between us and the enemy (e.g. the tiger/lion/opposing tribe), we would be harmed by that enemy. Furthermore, if we do not make one of the two opposing decisions within a split second, we also would not survive. So to answer the original author's question if dualistic thinking has a greater benefit than wholistic thinking, the answer is yes. We make millions of binary decisions every day that allow us to live and survive.
ReplyDeleteAs our world becomes more globally interconnected, we see the lines of our previously perceived reality blurred and brought into question. Ethics, systemic thinking, and compassion are needed as opposing ideologies and cultures are brought to the world's center stage. What one group of people previously defined as the normally distributed Gaussian curve must now be redefined and recalculated. Because humans are complex beings composed of mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual components, redefining our realities based on new information may not occur in our lifetimes. However, perhaps the principal of quantum logic can be used in the meantime; and when it comes to dealing with other people (especially when they hurt or offend us), it is crucial to separate who they are from what they do. The human person does not lose value with a sin or multiple sins. So in my answer to the original author's inquiry as to their family member, you can still love who they are, yet not approve of what they do.
Marquize, I tend towards the notion that almost every belief, no matter how incomplete it might be, or twisted, has at least a spec of truth to it. In that, I think that even contrary views, antithetical views, each speak a fragment of the truth. One can view almost anything in our world through a dualistic lens, except for perhaps quantum states of the qubit.... I think though, just as you say, that the more accurate way to view things is almost always a middle ground. A little bit of this, and that, not either or. That is the essence of the balance between yin-yang.
ReplyDeleteSometimes it can be hard to see the truth, take Naziism for example. I would venture that none of us would take the stance that it was totally right, or even a little bit right. But somewhere, deep in every participant, there was some resonance with the ideals of Naziism, so to them, it must have rung of some truth. That is a truth thats hard to look at, hard to find, because it is horrendous, but its there, or there would have been no World War 2. Im not trying to defend Naziism at all, only point out that sometimes the ugliest realities pertain to all of us individually.