Preliminary thanks are in order to Robert Pirsig and Eric Weinstein for the mental nutrients.
Pirsig exposed me to the concept of ‘Mu’ in his philosophical opus, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Z&AMM is a masterpiece because the structure of the book mirrors the content; it begins with two distinct poles and meets up at the intersection of the philosophical and the practical. It deserves much more than a passing tip-of-the-hat, but I’d hate to spend time on a digression in the second paragraph.
I am at the mercy of Japanese to English translators, but mu is the Japanese concept sometimes transcribed as “not having” or “without,” and is most useful to us Anglophones as the third answer to every yes/no question. Pirsig elaborates that mu could be understood in the sense that the spirit of the answer is not sufficiently captured by the question.
It’s a way out of bad questions and thoughtless dichotomies. Mu answers tell us we’re asking an unanswerable question, which is the ultimate signal when trying to correct course.
Pirsig’s thoughts returned to mind as I listened to Eric Weinstein’s take on Superposition. To quote at length:
Superposition is an odd word in that it is the scientific concept we reach for when trying to describe the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat and the theory and philosophy of quantum measurement. We don’t yet know how to say that the cat is both dead and alive at the same time rigorously, so we fudge whatever is going on with this unfortunate feline and say that the cat and the quantum system on which its life depends are a mixture of two distinct states that are, somehow, co-mingled in a way that has defied a satisfying explanation for about a century.
To begin with, superposition isn’t a quantum phenomenon. For example, imagine that you’d come from Europe to Australia and had both Euros and Swiss Franks in your pockets. You might, then, be said to be in a superposition, because you have pocket change in both Euros and Franks rather than a pure state of only one currency or the other. The analogue of the physical observable, in this situation, would be something like a multiple choice question found on the landing card about the contents of your pockets. Here it is easy to see the danger of this set-up. Assuming you have there times as much value of Euros that you do in Franks, what happens when you get a question that doesn’t include your situation as an answer. What if the landing card asked, “Is all of your change in A) Euros or B) Swiss Franks?” with no other options available. Well, this, as stated, is a completely classical superposition problem having nothing to do with quantum theory.
Were you to have such a classical question asked of you like this, there would have been no way for you to answer. However, if the answer were on the multiple-choice menu, there would be no problem at all and you would give a clear answer determined by the state of your pockets. So, if the state in question isn’t on the multiple-choice menu; the classical world is forced to go mute as there is no answer determined by the system. Whereas if it is found on the list of allowable choices, the answer is, then, completely determined by the system’s state at the time that the question was asked.
Oddly, the quantum world is, in a way, exactly as deterministic as the classical one just described, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. In order to understand this, we’ll have to introduce a bit of jargon. So long as the system, now called the Hilbert space state, is on the list of answers, technically called the system of eigenvectors, corresponding to the question, now called a quantum observable, the question will return a completely deterministic answer, technically called the eigenvalue corresponding to the state eigenvector. These are, in a sense “good questions” in quantum theory, because the answer corresponding to the state of the system actually appears as one of the multiple-choice options.
So, if that is completely deterministic, well, then what happened to the famous Quantum Probability Theory and the indeterminacy we hear so much about? What if I told you that it were 100% confined to the situation which classical theory couldn’t handle either.? That is, Quantum Probability Theory only becomes relevant when you ask “bad” quantum questions which say that the system isn’t on the list of multiple choice answers.
Weinstein uses the scientific normality of Superposition to point out that we are, politically speaking, now fully entrapped in a world of bad questions. In the ultimate triumph of undefeated and unstoppable capitalist progress, we have become so enamored with ‘choices’ we don’t even realize that the menu of options to choose from is almost always flawed. Or rather, even discussing the contents of the menu and the menu’s author become one level too deep for any conversation that includes politics.
One of the main story lines of the 2020 election was the near 50/50 popular vote split and the implications of living in a “divided” country. The question the trapped mind wants to ask is, “Why are we so divided?” or “Have we always been this divided?” or “What would it take to unite the country?” But what if these questions are built on a bad premise? What if this is all just a false dichotomy? What if no one is actually divided, but rather talking about different issues faced in different parts of the same society at different times? What if we are all in a Superposition with respect to all political questions, and instead of taking the time to think about the world we’re creating, we allow ourselves to be forced into judging it instead? Through a lens of localization rather than globalization, we could allow ourselves to bite off problems small enough to solve.
It’s the same premise as teaching mindfulness to children- if they can understand that they are upset, and have a toolkit for using the wisdom of their upset-ness in order to remedy the situation that’s actually making them upset, then you avoid all the negative downstream effects like projection-induced bullying.
Later on in the life of this blog I hope to jump into the implications of making judgments from a position of ego rather than a position of self, but suffice it to say now that when you are given a menu of only two choices, you’re going to quickly see the evil in whichever you don’t pick. The law of the gulag: a decrease in the opportunity for competition leads to an increase in ferocity of competition. With 20 talking points in a general election, things are pretty calm. When you do ‘battle’ for the ‘Soul of the Nation’ things will get heated pretty quickly.
Do we actually have a position on anything? Or are we responding to flawed multiple choice questions? Why can’t we bring ourselves to answer mu on anything political? Should we raise or lower taxes? Mu. Should we expand or eliminate Obamacare? Mu. Should abortion be illegal? Mu. There are few good questions left in politics.
One of the reasons political conversations are so dumb is because we’ve allowed ourselves to not do the work. The internet has done a much better job of putting Opinion Menu’s in front of you than it has done the job of pointing you toward the information that would allow you to create your own.
So how do we get out of this? How do we ask better questions? I think the first thing we can do is bring all the distracting, abstract dichotomies back down to Earth. More temporal. We can ask better questions by putting a time element to them. ‘Should we raise taxes right now?’ is nowhere near the best question to ask on tax policy, but it is infinitely better than ‘Should we raise taxes?’
Adding nuance to conversations is difficult, especially after having been programmed by political operatives and consumerist PR campaigns that have convinced us everything must be sided on, and you must answer whether you’re Good or Bad with respect to every minor issue that enters into your ad-sponsored ‘news’ feed. We have fantastic hardware that has been infected with malware, and the answer is to unplug and do a factory reset. Clear your browsing history. Delete the cookies. Wipe the cache clean. Focus your efforts on asking what is needed right now, and you’ll free yourself from having to be eternally correct. Welcome back.