Understanding Quantum Logic Through the Humanities

Prior to these last few weeks exploring quantum logic, if you had asked me if I understood it, I would have said yes. I would have given you a textbook definition of the principles of superposition and entanglement. These things never intuitively made sense to me, but I just assumed that's how they were for everyone, in the same way electrical engineering students just nod and say they understand concepts like flux and semiconductor physics. We can make the math come out, and that's all that matters. But truly understanding something in an intuitive way is entirely different. I remember the moment that I was taught to think about circuits as an interconnected system of pipes and pumps, carrying electrons from high to low potential. For the first time, I could really see in my mind's eye what was going on. Zen teachings and the humanities have allowed me to start thinking about quantum logic in the same way. 

Science, for very good reasons, likes to search for definite, black or white outcomes. A vaccine either prevents a disease or it doesn't. The rocket either achieved orbit or it didn't. But the humanities steers away from this viewpoint entirely. To me, the humanities have always been about the exploration of thought and the human condition, and those topics are never clear cut. People are complicated. No emotion is ever devoid of all others. I glance to the bookshelves behind me. Jennifer Egan's A Vist from the Goon Squad, a novel about the healing and simultaneously destructive nature of time, or David Foster Wallace's This is Water, a moving essay about finding purpose in a largely banal and heartless world. Or on the turntable to my right, with the National's new album Sleep Well Beast, an exploration of what happens if you stick around in a good relationship long enough to see the cracks start to form, or Kevin Morby's City Music written about the profound sadness and simultaneous liberation of being alone in New York City. The humanities couldn't exist with the same dualistic mindset we apply to science. There would be nothing to explore, nothing to write about. F. Scott Fitzgerald would have written the treatise on disillusionment, Muddy Waters the definitive work on melancholy, and writers and artists would have moved on to other subjects. But rather it's the vexing, quantum nature of the human condition that keeps them coming back to the same topics again and again.  

But if we are truly going to reject duality, we can't just apply this mindset to the humanities. And in observing highly complex, tiny, very cold quantum systems, this mindset seems to help. But what about the science that seems so clear cut, the kind of basic physics, biology, and chemistry that's been taught to high schoolers for generations? Wouldn't adopting a Zen/quantum mindset towards all things in life require those topics be less clear cut than we originally thought? In my own studies, convolution has always seemed a little quantum. How multiplying a signal in the time domain is the same as convoluting (superimposing) two signals in the frequency domain. It still seems a bit like magic to me, because you could work in one domain and have no idea the effect you were having on the other. Now I'm sure someone more mathematically inclined than I can point out a clear correlation between the two domains, and how in fact it is not quantum at all. My key point is this: if we accept the reality of quantum systems, we must open our minds to systems exhibiting this behavior that are not just very small and very cold. Just changing the mindset that we approach problems with could lead to new ideas.