The Little Quantum Darlin'

Some friends and I spent 3 or 4 hours hanging out last night in South Austin at The Little Darlin’, a spot which could probably only be described as an immortalized, permanent shin dig. Just imagine the best backyard barbecue you’ve ever been to mixed with unironic Labatt’s neon signs and enough visible ink from the patrons to make Queequeg feel anonymous and you’ve got the basic gist. The sign out front’s message often ranges from things like “Motorbikers welcome” and “Pedraza forever” to “Come on in we’re listening to Steely Dan”, and as far as I could tell last night the place has been delivering on it’s roadside promises for many years at a very high level. I wasn’t sure how much of the crowd there had ever given a fuck about Socrates, but his admonition on knowing thyself seemed to have sunk in with them to a particularly deep place.

As we often do, my buddies and I started talking about how our weeks went and ended somewhere around unpacking congressional UFO hearings and wondering whether what we mean by higher dimensions (and the things that might live in those dimensions etc) is more of a growing admission of the limitations of our natural faculties for perception. I.e. maybe it’s all happening here and now and there is no such thing as higher and lower dimensions, we’re just not able to see or perceive a great deal of it the same way our eyes are only able to transcribe a certain spectrum of wavelengths into color. An individual’s reality, after all, is a mental model. Data goes into your brain, and your brain works to assimilate it into a comprehensible structure to help you navigate and survive, which it then (for all intents and purposes) projects outward. Anything your brain doesn’t have an input for goes right on by, and anything it does have an input for but perhaps not a language or explanatory model to digest goes into the “what the fuck was that” shelf (essentially) which seems to live somewhere in the more illuminated sections of our personal, and then eventually collective, subconscious awaiting further processing. I’ve often wondered how many people have been driven into literal insanity just from the magnitude of their own incomprehensible experiences, evil or otherwise, and you won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve made no meaningful progress on that topic. But the brute reality appears to be that our encounters or collisions with the edges of our faculties for comprehension can get messy.

My friend Kevin made an amazing call out during our convo on this, which I mainly wanted to use this week’s edition to pass along to you. He pointed out that the limitations of our computers has always been that they run on binary code using something called bits, and that human perception and our current spiritual/philosophical models seem to suffer from these same limitations. I.e. everything is either this or that. For reference, a classical computer bit is either a 0 or 1, either “off” or “on”, and that’s it. It can’t be both, and this sort of dualistic structure creates a more limited framework for the sorts of things computers are able to, well, compute when it comes to the complex questions and problems the real world confronts us with. If you need a visual for what that means, structurally-speaking classical computers are a giant, complex abacus, and moving the beads around for the sorts of calculations we need to do for modern world problems or the next level of scientific exploration would take them hundreds of thousands or millions of years to complete. Which is, uh, suboptimal.

By comparison, quantum computing is a fundamental shift into technical non-dualism and it uses something called a quantum bit, or qubit, to do it. The main differences between a classical bit and a qubit are these:

1. A qubit can be in a state of 0, or 1, or in a superposition of 0 and 1 in the same way light is both a particle and a wave, or an electron appears able to be in 2 places at once. It’s brain-breaking stuff (at least for me), so if you need a simple analogy like I do, you can just think of a qubit as Schrodinger’s famous cat. While the top of the box is closed the cat can be both dead and alive, and we can treat it that way until we need to open the box and observe it’s current condition.

2. Qubits can be quantumly entangled, which for our purposes here means that they can be placed in an unbreakable correlation with one another. In simple terms, if 2 electrons are entangled, we can know the state of both of them by observing one of them (i.e. we can know they both are spinning up if one of them is).

The trickle down effect of these concepts in computing capability is, according to people logarithmically smarter than I am, profound.

I woke up this morning letting the analogy here continue to soak in a bit, and over coffee I wondered if the reason so many of humanity’s macro explanations for reality or spirituality or whatever else end up so flimsy and structurally goofy is just because the model we’re currently using to compute it can’t handle the load. And it seems very likely to me that our metaphysics just requires a model that mirrors the one our other sorts of physics do. That our moral and experiential confusion in our individual lives arises from our insistence on continuing to use the binary, platitudinal arithmetic we first cut our teeth on many millennia ago. Rumi’s poem, after all, says roughly that “out past Good and Evil there is a field/I’ll meet you there” and in light of the talk last night, I found it difficult this morning not to translate that first phrase to “out past 0 and 1”. We seem to live in a world full of what might be described as moral superposition, after all, and much of our art and love comes from something that feels strangely like entanglement.