Reclusland

In the interest of reviving the whole idea of what I am coming to call quantum metaphysics, I was going through my older posts, and found this comment by speedbird:

“Information is the shit left over after the soup has been digested.”

And I realized that this points to exactly the same thing as my last post.  Our mind moves through a soup of possibilities, digesting data-bits as we go along, in search of the best possible meaning/truth.   Which we currently seem to be able to do best in a linear, time-line fashion.

Now thinking of information as the shit left over after digesting can be taken a couple of different, and I think, equally valid ways:

1) We absorb certain data giving rise to feelings.  What is left, that is, the data which we don’t absorb, is simply information.

2) We absorb data from the soup as impressions, and once the impressions are absorbed, the information is all we are left with.

(and really, both of these might be seen as the same thing, because the information that’s left after we digest the data from the sea just goes back out and mixes into that sea once again, there is no real boundary between the two)

Also, speedbird also says: “That pre-existing stuff, the quantum soup from which measurements coalesce like dumplings… that pre-existent stuff is /much better/ than data”.

This, I think, is a pretty good description of the “Prima materia“.

And the quantum soup is richer than the data pulled from it.  But the data only exists as separate from that soup/sea because our consciousness pulls it out.  Otherwise it’s all just undifferentiated possibility.  This, I think, is why (in the Buddhist tradition) enlightenment is possible only in the human realm, and not necessarily in the deva realm.  It is in the creation of data out of the sea of quantum possibility, and through our conscious struggle with that data, that our consciousness becomes stronger, our awareness greater.  Only here.  Only now.

And this means that meaning and truth are nothing in themselves.  The realization of an insight is simply a sign that our consciousness/awareness has grown stronger (or, if you prefer, less weak).

I think (or at least hope) that all this is pointing toward a new type of “graven image” of this sea-of-possibilities that we can hold in our awareness, in order to better interact with those possibilities and pull data from them.   A bigger hole for the possibilities to flow through, or a bigger may-pole around which to wrap it’s strings of data.