Quantum physics still hurts my head. Just when I feel like it’s swimming into focus for me, it goes away. Or, put another way:
The ψ wave is something unclear, which determines the probability that the electron will be observed in one place rather than in another. It evolves in time according to the equation written by Schrödinger, as long as we do not look at it.
HELGOLAND was probably my last best shot at getting hold of it, and I put it down thinking that the conclusions it led me to were way too simple to be true, and therefore I’d gotten it all wrong beside his best efforts. That said, the takeaways I could grasp were useful. It’s interesting to imagine a plane of the world where the future is not determined by the past.
However, Rovelli’s own grasp reaches wider. In exploring his field. he both goes into digressions and discusses where his field impinges on others. There’s a wonderful sidebar about Aleksandr Bogdanov, which tied right into something I was working on at the time. And the following, on perception:
The majority of the signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain: they go the other way, from the brain to the eyes. What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate stages. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals towards the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain – only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.
When we look around ourselves, we are not truly ‘observing’: we are instead dreaming an image of the world based on what we know (including bias and misconception) and unconsciously scrutinizing the world to reveal any discrepancies.
In the words of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Hippolyte Taine, we can say that ‘external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling “hallucination” a false perception, we must call external perception “a confirmed hallucination”.’
That is a glorious thing. We’re just filtering our perceptions to check if we’re hallucinating correctly. Sighted sentience reinterpreted as dreaming meat. I’m curious as to whether or not auditory perception works that way too. Or, do we dream a touch before the touch? I have a lot more questions than answers after reading this book, but I suspect that on some level Carlo Rovelli would be okay with that. If nothing else, the book is a call to keep learning.