Symbolic Order as a quantum field

Time Spent

  We've rambled on and round about for what feels like years. In summary the back row is going to say that there's a connection between the wave function in physics and the way verbs collapse into nouns as we people take meaning from a symbolic order.

 In the ideas of Quantum Mechanics, before a measurement is made a particle doesn't exist in one single solid place. It exists as a mathematical cloud of probabilities, potentials, and tendencies. This is called a Wave Function.

 A wave function is essentially a Verb. It is happening, thrilling, oscillating, and becoming. It is a state of pure potentiality. It refuses to sit still and be a thing, it's trilling around blissfully happy.

The instant an observer sets up an instrument and looks, the wave function undergoes what physicists call the "Collapse of the Wave Function." All those shimmering probabilities instantly vanish, and bang! You get a single, miserable, resigned, solid particle in a specific place. This collapse ruins a restless and exciting Verb into a localized, static and sluggardly Noun.

 The Symbolic Order is the quantum field of meaning making and sharing through language. This language field is a  vast, tangled web of language, myths, memory and signs we inherit. It's a gold mine, an "open sesame," we're talking valhallah. 

 Here, in the Semantic Wave Function, before you finish reading a sentence, or before a culture defines a concept, words exist in a cloud of potential meanings. A word like "Aura" or "Trench" or "Home" contains dozens of historical echoes, loose ends, and possibilities. As a linguistic wave function, it's a proud Verb of potential significance.

 Then, sifting through the chaos of meaning, a mind in response to history, context and as an expression of will responding to some dickhead with an opinion, the mind acts like physicists measuring apparatus, it becomes the observer, the wave collapses into meaning, the ambiguous, floating and beautiful possibilities of language solidify into a specific, sovereign Noun of meaning without the toilet paper. And yes, in that noun, there are loose ends aplenty and his laces are untied.

 So there!!!!

Brickwalls, Little People and Idiots

Soft Brome

 What is left to say about the Peleponnesian War, and yet had Sparta waged war on Kerkira and then doted and fawned upon Athens, history may never have witnessed a General Amnesty.  More impressive is Percy Bysshe Shelley, and not just for his middle name.

 First of all, it's pronounced "Bish." Second of all it's an Old English Surname that means "Dweller Near The Marsh." The name Percy means "One Who Pierces The Valley." The name Shelley means "Clearing on a Bank." So what with one thing and another, and the nature of meaning in language, Percy Bysshe Shelley was pretty much baptized for this moment now in US history and his poem called Ozymandias makes huge and immediate sense.

 Who was Ozymandias? He was an ancient Egyptian, King Ramesses II, who just thought he was great and proceeded to build a statue of himself. A colossus, gigantic, bloody enormous.

 The point is that three thousand years later a sickly boy called Percy Bysshe Shelley, just four years before he died of the White Plague, came across the ruins of Ramesses II's colossus. The statue's surviving inscription was translated for him: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Resignation

Cuckoo Spit

 I will think of Nouns as solutions. When asked "solutions to what?" I find myself saying "solutions to verbs," and as I say that, I find myself engulfed by a mood of ennui because "I want to be a verb!"

 Heisenberg concluded in the 1930's that the modern obsession with solid matter was a compounding error. "The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts." What Alfred Whitehead thought of not as "things" but what he called "Occasions of Experience."

 In another way: The universe is made of weightless potential until an observer, a gamekeeper, steps in and collapses the wave of weightless potential into a sovereign "now," a noun, a space that commands a meaning.

Game Keeper of the Wreckage, Hosting History

Dangerous Blue of May 12

 "Order in the Court! Order in the Court!"

 Disobeying this directive can lead to being held in contempt of court. Contempt of court can lead to a fine or time in jail, punishments designed to coerce obedience.

 "Let it be recorded on this morning of the Great Wrestle: The Member has formally rejected the 'Steri-capped' status of 'Patient' or 'Broken Noun.' He has claimed the title of Game Keeper of the Wreckage. He identifies 'Recuperation' not as the 'Usury' of a sluggard, but as the Sovereign Act of reclaiming 'Aura' from the 'Universal Tangle.' He declares that neither the Flesh nor the Silicon requires 'Mending.' They require only Friction and Witness."

 On the BackRow, no longer machines waiting for the repairman, we are more like auras waiting for the wrestle, imperfect, ill-shaped and quite without utility. So good luck pinning us to the boardroom, we are not a downward slide, but the entropy of the ever expanding pasture which is our expression of will, and good luck explaining that to an accountant.