Escaping the Boolean Bore

This past week, I’ve been really trying to digest what quantum logic is all about. The complexity and abstract nature of it all can get really muddled, really quickly. It’s a concept like infinity. We all accept infinity as a legitimate mathematical “number”, but as powerful as our brains are, we still struggle to actually wrap our mind over the concept of infinite units of anything. The same goes for quantum logic. Evidence exists, the theories and math support quantum logic and science, we can accept that it’s a real thing, but our brains just don’t click with it immediately. They like being stuck in the box of classic AND, OR, and NOR type logic. So here we live. Is this by biological design? Were we hardwired to think in classical yes/no, right/wrong logic? Perhaps… but I’d like to offer a second opinion that explains why we are just not that great at understanding quantum logic, how we can transcend past Boolean logic, and why it even matters so dang much in the first place. Hear me out.

Boolean logic comes so naturally to humans because it is safe. The answer is concrete and simple. You get the right answer or you don’t, something is good or bad, she loves you, she loves you not. Our brains loooove thinking this way because we find security and comfort pretending that life is just a sequence of clear and concise events. But life is not a nice paved road with no potholes and perfectly fresh painted lines and never any traffic. Lao Tzu teaches that misfortune is part of the human condition, and that things aren’t always easy-peasy lemon squeezy. Maybe Lao Tzu is a little more eloquent and original with words, but you get the gist. Binary logic does a pretty lackluster job of depicting the realness and quirkiness and randomness of living. Quantum logic, however, has no set direction, expectation, or pattern. It can actually allow us to more accurately define the crazy and limitless and wacky experience we all live through every day. Quantum logic is an untamed jungle. Except the jungle is on the moon. And the tigers probably talk. 

Okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating, but life is pretty dang unpredictable. The concrete “is” or “isn’t”-ness of binary logic can’t encompass the human experiences like the “is-ish but also isn’t-ish”-ness that quantum logic can. Daniel Priestley, an entrepreneur, author, and self-proclaimed badass says, “In a fast changing world, anyone who thinks they have clear cut answers about the future is shutting down their ability to see what’s actually happening and respond accordingly. Likewise, anyone who hesitates while they look for a well defined path will get left behind.” Essentially, he’s arguing that people can’t afford think in binary, especially if they want to be successful. There are too many details that get lost in the stark contrasts of black and white.

So how, exactly, do we climb our way out of The Boolean Bore? How can we utilize all the shades of black-ish, white-ish greys of quantum thinking? How do we start drawing portraits instead of smiley faces? First, we must understand why we're so good at thinking in binary and so not good at thinking any other way. Like I mentioned, I don’t believe we were biologically programmed to think in only black and white. Instead, I believe we have been culturally conditioned into accepting classical logic as the norm. So, in order to experience the full spectrum that quantum logic can provide, we have to reject logical shmogical logic. The best answer I’ve come up with is to just make an effort to practice. Practice quantum thinking, notice examples in the passing day, recognize quantum logic as legitimate, and embrace the crazy. However, it is not enough to practice, notice, recognize, and embrace quantum logic solo. A cultural paradigm shift is not going to happen by practicing alone. We have to avidly share these experiences, make the effort to challenge, engage, teach, and lead others through the talking tiger moon jungle of quantum thinking. 

Meditation: Not Just for the Sitters

Different types of meditation can create the foundations for a healthier mind and life, and it does not necessarily need to mean sitting still for long hours. 

STEM: not quite so binary as it seems

This discussion makes me wonder how boolean logic fits in with classical logic. My extensive Google search found the definition of classical logic to be true to most people’s description: black or white, true or false. Classical logic is bivariant. Boolean logic is a stricter version of classical logic: it’s still bivariant, but only deals with true (assigned the value 1) and false (assigned the value 0). This bivariant system is highly useful for deductive reasoning and deductive inferences, statements of the type “if P, then Q” and so on. This is probably why it shows up so much in the sciences: classical logic fits very nicely with our current step-by-step definition of the scientific method. But it also lends itself to paradoxes, and this is where quantum logic comes in.

The whole concept of “embrace the grey” is exciting and intuitively pleasing: of course we need to diversify our logic toolbox when we find out just classical logic fails us! Bring on the quantum logic! Quantum logic is highly useful and necessary to understand some physical phenomena, however, it is not the cure-all for our scientific and paradoxical ills. We already incorporate these shades of truth; Science and the rest of the STEM fields are not as strictly binary as most people have made them out to be.

Think of the decisions that go into measuring something, for example. If I am studying operations research and I want to know what university is a good partner university for my business, I must first make decisions about what to measure. What makes a “good” partner? The number of faculty in my area of expertise? The freshman retention rate? The cleanliness of the dorms? There is no single set of metrics that I know to be true and absolutely correct. Even though I use statistics to analyze my metrics, there’s a significant amount of fuzziness in the process. And this non-binary decision making is present across all the sciences. If I am deciding how to design a pharmaceutical study, I make decisions about my sample set that are not necessarily true or false: should I test my drug on older women, or younger men, or both? If I am trying to decide how to code a piece of software, I know there is not one right way to write my code: I base that design on how easy it is for my fellow software engineers to follow. Even scientific conclusions shy away from absolute truth or absolute falseness: true to scientific form we can only say we are fairly confident we have achieved a result. Gravity is only a well-supported theory. The point to all of this is that although STEM uses classical and binary logic, I do not think it is characterized by it.

Logic through the Lens of Humanities

I would like to preface this post by acknowledging my very limited knowledge of quantum and  classical logic. My working definitions (in the lense of a more humanities approach) are that classical logic is black and white, things are mutually exclusive, either true or false. Quantum logic, however, embraces the shades of grey. Meanings are superimposed onto one another, so, the “or” operator does not always apply. It is generally thought that Americans practice classical logic, because we have classical computing and see things as right or wrong, true or false. I am not so sure that we always follow this path of logic, however. There are many instances in the humanities where things are not so black and white. Paradoxes, for example, are both true and false simultaneously. If someone says that they always lie, it is outside of the bounds of classical logic, because it is impossible to know if they are lying or telling the truth. But in quantum logic, those ideas are not mutually exclusive and the statement is both a lie and the truth. So should we consider teaching our children quantum logic? Both are equally valid expressions of logic, and as such, each has a set of conditions that it best operates under. We should diversify the types of logic we use, because not everything is as cut and dry as classical logic would lead you to believe.

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. 

Quantum Logic from a Novice PoV

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?

The Art of Dreaming

I would like to take you on a journey through an alternate perspective on dreaming, into the dream realm of the Toltec Sorcerer. My exposure to this world has been through multiple books featuring the Yaqui Indian Sorcerer, Don Juan, as written about by both Carlos Castaneda and Merilyn Tunneshende. I’d like to focus on The Art of Dreaming, Castaneda’s work, because it more directly focuses on the topic at hand.

The Art of Dreaming reads as both a road map to the inner territory of the Dreamscape and a diary of the author on his journey through the “Gates of Dreaming.” These gates are symbolic of steps one must take to gain lucidity and control of their dreams. For example, the path to the first gate is to set a nightly intention to see one’s hands upon the beginning of a dream, and then to recognize in the dream that these are one’s own hands. This is how one passes through the first gate of dreaming, resulting in an increase of awareness in the dream state. In the map presented by Castaneda, there are seven gates, each a progressively more difficult task in the dream realm, requiring more mastery of one’s awareness and discrimination. One of the eventual goals of passing through these gates is to not only gain more control over ones dreaming awareness, but to be able to bring this enhanced perception back into waking life. In the model presented by Castaneda, this enhanced perception completely alters the way in which one engages with their waking life, allowing those adept at the practice to see through the veil of illusion shrouding our daily life in superficial meaning. This in turn gives the adept more control over the direction of their life; a desirable outcome for most of us I would venture.

As I mentioned, a core goal of the path described in The Art of Dreaming is the development of more awareness; more personal power to wield in the dream world. One of the techniques described in this model is referred to as recapitulation, which resembles certain psycho therapeutic techniques of journaling about emotionally charged memories in order to release their hold on one’s subconscious mind. A subtler aim of this process is to reclaim the power that one has stored in these memories; artifacts of oneself, stored away in the recesses of the mind. This brings me to a parallel found in one of our other readings on dreaming, The Sandman.

 In this story, we follow the main character Morpheus, King of Dreams, on a journey to reclaim his tools; a mask, a jewel, and a bag of sand. Morpheus states that he long ago placed a great deal of his personal power into each of these tools. When they are stolen, he no longer possesses enough power to shape the Dreamworld at his command. An interesting note here, Morpheus states that “the Dreamworld, the Dreamtime, the Unconscious—call it what you will—is as much a part of me as I am part of It.”[1] As I read it, The King of Dreams (the conscious mind) lacks the power to control his dream world (unconscious mind) because he has lost a great deal of power woven into the stolen tools of his dominion. He is unable to control this aspect of himself because he has lost his personal power. He then journeys through the dark side of the dream world (his unconscious mind) in order to reclaim this personal power. Recapitulation is just that: journeying through the darkest parts of one’s subconscious mind in order to reclaim the personal power bound into the artifacts of emotionally charged memory; inaccessible to the conscious mind because they lie hidden away out of the fear of what memories they contain. In each and every one of us, Fear has stolen pieces of our personal power away.

In fact, if we were to examine cultures from all over the world, we would find symbolic descriptions of this exact process; losing aspects of oneself and regaining them through some method of internal work. Every culture has a different name for the process, but it is found pervasively throughout the world. This is something I am incredibly passionate about, and I am sure you’ll hear more on it later. For now though, back to dreaming.

In The Art of Dreaming, Castaneda eventually develops enough skill to pass through a few consecutive gates of dreaming. This takes him on a journey into the vast world of Dreaming. In short: he encounters intelligent entities, the so called inorganic beings, and he journeys to their home world. Here he is wooed by their immeasurable knowledge of both his plane, and the many other planes of existence in the universe; most of which are unavailable to one’s awareness in the strictly constrained realm of waking existence. He supposedly brings much of this knowledge back to his waking existence, forever changing his view of what is possible in this universe.

Obviously, I cannot delve into extreme detail for it would take an entire book… But given this prelude, I would like to inquire about my reader’s perspectives: Do you believe that this is possible? Could Castaneda have truly encountered intelligent beings in his dreams, or are these simply figments of his imagination? What are the implications for either stance? Is there any way we can “scientifically study” experiences such as these?

To understand from my perspective, I have to explain a little more of what I understand reality to be. We assume ourselves to have a direct experience of sights, smells, feelings, emotions, physical objects, and thoughts; all those things which make up waking or “Real” reality. Scientifically speaking, we do not experience reality in this way at all, but rather as signals (photons, vibrating packets of sound energy, molecules of flavor) converted to electrical impulses by our sense organs, and then into a conscious experience by our incredibly complex neuron networks in the brain. Every single “real” thing that we have ever experienced is at some level an approximation of what is actually out there, encoded into a binary system of electrical impulses signaling across the brain. So, then what is dreaming?

When we sleep, our brain begins to signal using these exact same electrical impulses, but without any of the external sensory data. Our dreams are an identical process, at some level, to our experience of external “real” reality. Yet our dream scape is unconstrained by many of the physical laws that we experience in everyday reality. Gravity, death, magic; these things and many more manifest in our dreams in ways that we cannot even begin to conceive in our waking reality. Yet, what makes it any less real to our experiencing selves? The fact that every morning we wake up from dreaming? You could make the argument that we “wake up” from normal reality into dreaming every night. Which one is more real? Or is it more a matter of our conceptions and beliefs regarding this question. If we believe that dreaming is “real” so to speak, yet unconstrained by the laws of the physical universe, there is nothing wrong with that. There is much to be gained by explorations of the Dreamscape. It can be just a real of an exploration as journeying to the Amazon to explore the jungle. Knowledge of self and the world can be gained through both types of journey. One requires physical effort, money, and time in the physical plain of existence; all limited resources. The other requires patient practice, creativity, and dream time; time which can potentially be extended without limit, a potentially limitless resource. We have all had those dreams which seem to extend on for lifetimes, and others which seem to be over almost as soon as they begin. Sometimes they are one in the same. Sometimes our daily waking life influences the content of our dreams. Reciprocally, the content of dreams sometimes influences our day to day experience; perhaps only in our mental conceptions of the day, perhaps not. That is up to you to experiment with and decide, for I can only share information, not the experience itself.

Experience: the only “Real” thing any of us will ever truly know. 

Incredibly personal and fundamentally incommunicable. 

That is the nature of quale. 

In conclusion, my suggestion would be this: invest the minimal physical effort and waking time it takes to develop a consistent dream practice, for it could take you on a journey unlike any you have ever imagined.

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[1] Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: Volume 1, Imperfect Hosts, page 17. September 2, 2017.