Episode 76 Quantum linguistics

Hello and welcome to episode 76 of Structure Visions. Structure Visions is a space for exploring new ways of thinking about social structure. My name is Jody Clark and I'm very grateful that you are listening today. You are very welcome here.

If you are new to this podcast or you're new to having ever heard about me, Jody Clark, welcome. I am a linguist at Chateau University and recently I started writing fiction about the intimacy embedded in the structure of language. And this intimacy is something that I am exploring in both my academic work and in my fiction and in the podcast. And the heart of everything that I do in all of those domains and other domains as well is the idea that when we inhabit language, it transforms us.

So I think that requires a slightly different way of thinking about language than maybe we're used to thinking about it. And I just want to explore today this notion of what does it actually mean to inhabit language. Normally I think the tendency is to think about using language, not inhabiting it, but using it, right? So I need to do something.

I need to communicate something. So therefore I'm going to use language to communicate information or to express my desires or something like that. And I remember, I think it must have been around like the 2010s, sometime around that period, where I started hearing moms say to their kids, and I don't have children, so I was just something I was observing as a kind of bystander, where there would be a kid who would be like melting down about something and the mom's getting frustrated. And I started to hear this thing coming out of mom's mouths, which was use your language.

You've got this child who's just this emotional state. And the mother is just desperately trying to figure out what that kid wants. It's like I just cannot respond to every single meltdown. You've got language, please use it.

So please just tell me what you need. So I can completely sympathize with it. I started hearing that, use your language, use your language. And it made me think to say to somebody, use your language, it must be a little bit like watching somebody like just having a meltdown because they're trying to get a screw out of a piece of furniture or something, and they're using their fingernails.

And they've got like to try to get a screw out, and they've got a screwdriver sitting right next to them. And she's like, use the screwdriver for that thing. You know, stop complaining. Use your language.

And so I think there's this notion of we have a tool. Language is a tool. We have a tool to use to express what's going on inside us. And I think that notion of language being used is a tool is a pretty common one.

So when you're like, maybe you work with students and you're trying to get them to write more clearly and so you want them to have access to all of the tools that language provides, or maybe you're advertising. And it's like you think of all the different ways that you can express something. What are the tools that are available to you in order to market something or to share something or to help people understand it? Which I think that's perfectly fine, legitimate metaphor.

But I want to think about it in a new way as well. So I would like us to start, well, you can think whatever you want. But I like to think about how things would change if we thought of language not as a tool, but as a space we inhabit. So when we inhabit language it transforms us.

What if language were, we thought about it in terms of a space that we lived in, that we moved through as opposed to something like a screwdriver that we use for a particular end. So it's not a means to an end, but it's the medium, it's the space that gets structured or is shaped in a particular way. So we'll go into this in a little bit more detail. But for now, let's see if we can maybe understand it viscerally rather than intellectually.

We all have different ways of learning. But for me, I like to have a sort of experience of something. So I'm just going to give you a little exercise to do. You're not going to be great on this.

So and if you've done my lens of language course, if you haven't done it, I'll send you a link to how you can do the lens of language course. This is very similar to the fact that I might be identical to the exercise that's done on that writing through the lens of language course. So there'll be a link in the show notes to how to get to that. Or you can go to grammarfordreamers.com.

And there's a link to the writing through the lens of language course. Anyway, the exercise there is look out at the world around you. So just look at wherever you are. Maybe you're going for a jog.

Maybe you do what I do when I'm listening to podcast, maybe you're doing the washing up. Maybe you're sitting in your garden. Maybe you're in your car. Just look at the world around you and just pretend that I'm there with you in the car and just tell me one thing you see.

Okay, so just tell me and just go ahead and imagine more in conversation. And then what would you say? And I said tell me one thing you see or really run the phone. Right?

Or having a phone conversation. I said just look out and tell me one thing you see. And you can if you want to, you could write that down. Just write down the one thing that you see because that'll let you really, really examine it.

And what we're going to do is examine the language that creates that image of the thing that you see. Okay, so if you asked me to do that, here's I would have to sort of decide on, you know, already the exercise requires me to focus on one thing. So I might say a poppy, you know, if you ask me to say it like one thing that I see, or I might say the fox gloves or I might say our garden because it's clear that I'm looking out over our garden or I might say the moon, right? Because I can see like the kind of quarter moon up in this guy, even though it's daytime.

So I might say a poppy, the fox gloves are garden or the moon. And so you, the more linguistically inclined among you might have noticed that all of those responses are noun phrases. Okay, so noun phrases, you don't have to worry about the terminology. It's just that they can be related to the pronoun, get to them, they, whatever.

Okay, so your response was probably a noun phrase. It might not have been something else, but it might have been noun phrases, it was most likely a noun phrase. But the thing about all of these noun phrases is that each one, even if I didn't use a name or a personal pronoun, which I didn't for any of mine, well yes, I used a personal pronoun for our garden, but the others I didn't, a poppy in the fox gloves or the moon, it still situates me in relation to you, right? So there's a me and there's a you that's implicit in those noun phrases, even if I didn't use those terms, even if I didn't use those pronouns.

So let's explore that. Let's take a poppy. So let's just take that one. So I used something called an indefinite article, so A and N are indefinite articles.

So what the indefinite article does is it situates you and me in a space where you don't have access to the poppy I have access to. If I say a poppy, I'm implying that I can see a poppy and you can't see the poppy. If we could both see it, I would have said I would have said no poppy, or that poppy, but I don't, I say a poppy. And this could be a physical space.

So you're not unfortunately in the garden with me, so we're looking at it with me. So it is a physical distance, right? And it's also for us a time difference because you're not listening to me right now, you'll be listening to me in my future. And so the physical space and the time, the temporal space is different.

So when I say a poppy, it's that acknowledgement that the space is different, the physical and temporal spaces are different. But it could also be, even if we're sitting across each other having a cup of coffee, it could be a mental space where there's this divide. If I say a poppy, if I say think about a poppy, or my favorite thing is a poppy, what I'm doing there is acknowledging that your mental space doesn't have a poppy in it yet. So my mental space does have a poppy and yours doesn't.

And so I'm acknowledging that there's a distinction between our mental spaces, even if we're looking at each other across a cup of cappuccinos. So it's like I'm introducing it into our conversation. So what we notice there, even with just something as simple as a poppy, is that language is dynamic and it responds to the changing shape of the space we're in. And we could even say that it creates a changing shape.

It organizes the space, right? So it could organize the physical space, it could organize the mental space, it could organize the conversational space, it could organize the temporal space. And what we just had there with poppy, we were just going to divide it space. I had poppies, you didn't.

But now we both have the poppy, right? And this is why I use a different determiner, I use the definite determiner that we both have the poppy because I've introduced it. And so now the shape has changed, the space has changed again, it has been organized, you and I are a we now, and we are thinking about the poppy. So the self has changed, you and I have blended, we've come together, we both have the poppy in our consciousness.

So I could also have said like remember that poppy I mentioned earlier, and so it's not a poppy anymore, it's that poppy. So here we have a different determiner, we've got it a monster did that, and that is like a pointing word. So I could say that poppy and point to a poppy in the distance. So I can use that word that, these demonstratives, to point to things that are in our shared space.

So that poppy I mentioned earlier, I'm kind of metaphorically pointing to a time before when we were talking about poppies. If you were in the garden with me, which would be great, then I could point to that poppy. And what we know then is that poppy, I'm suggesting that the poppy is far away from where we are. So we're even organizing our physical space to say that poppy is far away from us.

I could also have said this poppy in which case we're organizing with space to suggest the poppy is close to us. What we've got then is this notion of language organizing space, shaping itself to adapt to changing space, organizing space. So we've got this space and language you can sort of see almost as if there were maybe a camera focusing in on something, but it's not really the visual field that language is organizing. It's actually the self and the self's relationship to the other.

So if I say a poppy, then there are two selves, the one who knows about the poppy and the one who doesn't. If there is the poppy, there is kind of one conjoined self, where we both know about the poppy, right? We can say language organizes space and that its principle of organization is the self, okay? Or at least one key principle of organization is the self.

It organizes space into the self. And like I said, we've already even seen that with just something as simple as a poppy or the poppy. We don't have a kind of neutral reporting where language simply gives information. There's the assumption of what's called a deictic center.

There's an assumption of personhood. Each self sits in its deictic center and the language kind of shapes and changes shapes so that the selves are constantly in kind of fluid realignment, if you like. So language shapes spaces, at least according to the way we're going to be playing with it today and pretty much everything I do, and it shapes selves. And if you think about this self that language shapes, even again, just the poppy example we should from a poppy to the poppy, the self is a kind of a space, right?

Where a moment ago we had two spaces that were divided by this kind of dividing line where I knew about poppies and you didn't or I knew about a poppy and you didn't. And then that dividing line dissolves and you and I are in the same space and so the self is a space. And what I love, the reason why I kind of fixate on that idea or on that image is that it's part of my favorite idea, the idea that I love to play with. And if I've said before that there was a different idea that was my favorite idea, I apologize, my favorite idea might change regularly.

But in any case, my favorite idea is that language creates this membrane and the thing inside the membrane is the self and the membrane is fluid and the membrane shifts and changes. The key thing is that within that self or within that membrane it's possible for new ideas to emerge. And that's the thing that if you would be willing to indulge that idea, we'll explore that. So let's just think about that.

That's kind of a bold statement. The self makes it possible that the language created self makes it possible for new ideas to emerge. So let's not think about ideas. Let's put language to the side and let's just think about ideas.

I think people who do creative work if they ever get interviewed. One of the things that often they're asked is where do you get all your ideas? If you're a creative person you might have been asked that question or you might have wondered that about a different creative person. Where do you get your ideas?

So there's a premise behind that question. Let's explore it. The image is ideas are things to be got. So it's an exchange.

So it's like where did you get that t-shirt? Where did you get your idea? So you walked into a shop, you saw the thing on the rack, you thought I want one of those here to have my credit card, I'm going to put it in my bag and bring it home. Oh look, where did you get your ideas?

I got them from the idea shop. Or maybe you didn't get it from a high street shop. Maybe your ideas come from the black market, like some CD alleyway interchange. Where you got together with your connection and caught up with them on some kind of burner cell phone or they still use those.

And you're in the underbelly of some city and you managed to get these ideas that nobody else can get their hands on and there's something very dangerous about your ideas perhaps. So I'm curious about your ideas. The other thing is maybe you were on some kind of online shop and you did subscribe and save. So maybe you're one of these lucky people who, you know, the ideas just get delivered to your door strap every month at a particular quantity.

Because you've ordered them in bulk, they come regularly and they're slightly less costly. It doesn't have ideas where the price of 10 delivered into your brain every month. So the only reason I extended the metaphor so far is just to just allow us to see that that might be a tiny bit of an absurdity to it as if ideas could be something that you could get. It kind of shows us that notion where you get your ideas.

We're still in a world of instrumentality. In the same way that we were thinking of language, we realized language is often treated like a tool. We're in the world of instruments, we need something, we get something, we do something else with it. Which to me feels just that tiny bit oppressive and market based and capitalistic and unhealthy way.

And so I like to think about it differently. So if we think, so we'll bring our language back in. So language shapes spaces according to the principle of the self. So language comes in and is kind of fixated on creating these self spaces.

And a space is an environment where new ideas can emerge. So that's something that kind of works for me a little bit more. Like it's not so much for me that I go out and get some ideas from somewhere. It's more like I enter into a particular space that make new ideas possible.

And there's all kinds of, and even if that is something like, oh, I got my ideas from listening to this great podcast, I got my ideas from reading this fantastic book, it isn't so much for me that the ideas come out of the book because it's like, well then you could just go read the book. It's like the book creates a space. So maybe the author of the book has written something that creates a kind of space that says ah, new ideas are welcome here. And I feel like I'm entering into a space and new ideas come out of that space.

So that's the way I think of it. Like whatever I need to create something, I sort of put myself into a mental space and I think, oh, what's going to come out of that? But anyway, so if we're saying a space is an environment where new ideas can emerge, we're saying language shapes space is according to the principle of the self. Well the self is an environment where new ideas can emerge.

So you know, we've got a puppy, we've got the puppy language is shaping or organizing the space is organizing the space in terms of selves. And when it does that, when it creates this kind of vesicle that is the self, the new ideas can pop out of that out of completely nothing, right? All it took was just sort of drawing a line around putting a membrane around a particular space and new ideas can pop out of that. So that, here we're in the realm of creating something out of nothing.

And so how do we think about that? Well, luckily for us, there's a whole science around stuff arising out of nothingness. And that's quantum physics. So that's what I'm going to take you to take.

We're going to do a kind of quantum linguistics here. Okay, so I am not a scientist, I'm not a physicist. What little I do know about quantum physics comes from, well, lots of different places, but there's two popular science books written by physicists that I have really like hit me at the right time. They've kind of created that space for me where new ideas could pop up.

And so one of them is both physicists are really great at explaining complex scientific principles using metaphors that make them really accessible to a lay person. To be able to explain the science to somebody who doesn't have access to the maths or doesn't have a scientific background, that's a pretty impressive task. So the two books, if you're interested in this stuff, one is called The Elicant Universe by Brian Greene and the other is called The Self-Aware Universe by Emmett Gerswami. The first book, The Elicant Universe, I stumbled on that when it was first published in 1999 and talk about being in a space.

I was traveling and for me, the liminal space of travel, whether that's an airport or a train station, even sometimes a car journey, is especially long distance travel, that is a space I can enter and new ideas pop up or new ways of seeing things pop up all the time for me. So here I was, I'm on this transatlantic flight for France to the US and I had a pretty long stopover at JFK and New York. And so I did what people do, which is I went to the bookshop and there was this display with all of these, Elicant Universe is all over this book display. So it must have been 1999 because I think the book was brand new.

So I called the Elicant Universe, it's about something called String Theory, which you've probably heard about, that I had never heard about in 1999. And the book is about, from my understanding, it's a way of explaining the remaining mysteries of quantum physics. And again, the idea is, from my understanding, there's four fundamental forces in physics, gravity, the electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force and a weak nuclear force. So we know what gravity is, it's something that makes you fall down.

The electromagnetic force is magnetism, electricity, and visible light. Strong nuclear force is the force that pulls protons and neutrons together in a nucleus. And the weak nuclear force, that, as you may know, is the force that causes a neutron to turn into a proton during nuclear decay. But don't ask me about the weak nuclear force because that's all I got.

Not one line is all I got. I got nothing else about weak nuclear force. So anyway, there's these four forces and quantum physics can account for all of them. So we can explain all of them through quantum principles, except for gravity.

And so, you know, the physicists are like, you know, Brian Green is like, physicists want things to be elegant. That's why the book's called the Elicant Universe. They want them to be, why, how can there be one force that can only be explained using a kind of Newtonian classical, Newtonian classical model? So, how can they be explained by quantum?

And so, string theory is a way of treating gravity as a quantum force. And so, the idea here is that you've got all these little subatomic particles, and each of them is like, look like a little string, and sometimes they're tied up so that they are like a little elastic band, and sometimes they're loose, they have loose ends, and they just vibrate in these different patterns. And gravity is a force that is a string for something, a gram time. So anyway, all that to say, you have to get pretty far in the book before you even get to string theory.

And on my transects, I'm reading this book on this transatlantic flight, so I'm so excited about a copy of the book. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so interesting. And so, I'm like, oh, this is a little space where I'm like, wow, maybe I can understand this. And again, on the plane.

And like I said, string theory is way, way, way through the book, and I started at the beginning. And so, you have, you kind of, he walks you through quite a lot of the sort of serious things in physics before he even lets you learn anything about string theory. So, you get Einstein's relativity, and finally, I was like in an airplane, I'm like, oh, wow, actually that kind of makes sense to me now. And then you get through quantum uncertainty, and you're like, oh my God, that's so interesting.

So, here I am, in this liminal space on this airplane, you know, in transit from one space to another, surrounded by all these people who I don't know, who are going to all these other places, you know, with this very high vantage point, you know what I mean, up in the air, looking down. And it's like this, this space that was myself, like the membrane around myself is a little more dissolute than usual, you know, so my membrane was a little more porous. And so it's like maybe more stuff is getting in, and maybe I'm understanding more than I normally would. And so then I read this thing in Brian Green's book about the double slit experiment.

Okay. Do you know about the double slit experiment? If you do, I'm about to try to explain it. So I apologize if you know about it better than I do, because again, what I know is basically from Brian Green's book, and my apologies to Brian Green if I understood it.

But the key thing is it's like, it's kind of like properly mind-blowing the double slit experiment, and especially when you're an airplane. And especially when you kind of have it come across anything like that quite before. Okay. So I'll give you a little bit of background to it.

So it was designed to shed light an unanswered question about the composition of light. And it was in the 18th century, scientists were asking what light was made of. And they were like, is it particles or is it waves? Okay.

So you can ask yourself a question if you're not that, if you haven't asked that question of yourself before, what is light? Is it a wave or is it a particle? Isaac Newton was on team particle, and a Dutch physicist called Christian Hagen's was on team wave. Okay.

So Tom is young and 1802 set up an experiment. He's like, okay, let's see if we can settle this debate. If something is a wave, it will act like a wave. So you know, water moves in waves.

So if you took a like a tray, a baking tray with sides up on it, and you put, or you do this in your bathtub, but, and you, and you put a, like a sort of thin layer of water in that and you just let it settle. And then you kind of drummed on it. Then you would see the sort of ripples in the water. And you'd see a kind of steady, steady set of ripples up until the first ripple hit the edge of the thing and then it kind of bounced back.

But you get what I'm saying, you see this sort of steady like waves, right? That's what a wave looks like. Okay. And then the other thing we need to know about is an interference pattern.

Okay. So now imagine you take like a card piece of cardboard and you put two slits in the cardboard. So double slit experiment. I'm just two small slits.

And you sort of stick that towards the end of the tray. You let the water calm down completely and then you do the running thing again and you watch those like waves that kind of peaks and troughs going steadily until they hit the double slit, the double slit in the cardboard. When they hit the slits, only some of the water can go through at a time. And so what you've got on either side of slits are like two different sets of waves, right?

Because they're kind of going through their slits. And so you've got two different wave patterns on the other side of the slits and the wave patterns actually interfere with each other, right? So when before you had a sort of consistent peaks and troughs, now you've got wave patterns interfering with each other on the other side of the cardboard thing with the slits in it. And when you've got a peak of one wave hitting the peak of another wave, both the peak amplifies, right?

So you've got higher peak, you've got a higher peak there. And when you've got two troughs, when they meet the troughs become deeper, and when you've got a peak that meets a trough, they cancel each other out. And at those moments the water is level, right? So that's an interference pattern.

And young, Thomas Young was thinking, okay, well look, if light behaves like a wave, if light is a wave, then we should be able to see an interference pattern if we set up the experiment, right? So we had this in some photographic paper and then he put a barrier with two slits in it. So the light which shines through the two slits, and what he wanted to see on the paper was whether there would be two bars on either where the slits were, which would mean that light behaves like a particle. So if it goes through those two bars and all you see on the other side are two bars, then those are like particles that have gone through the bars, the slits.

And that's what you see. Now if it behaves like a wave, what you'll see is an actual interference pattern. So like across the whole photographic paper, you'll see these kind of lighter and darker and brighter shades across the whole paper. So that would be your interference pattern.

And that is what they saw when they put the two slits in, they shone the light on it, on the photographic paper was an interference pattern. So a repeating pattern, an extra bright light, so a peaks are meeting peaks, and dark bits are truss are meeting troughs, and normal bright bits are meeting troughs. And so it was like, okay, well that seems pretty clear, light must be a wave, it acts like a wave. And that was okay until Einstein came along, and Einstein was working on a different problem, and that was how the photoelectric effect worked.

And again, don't ask me about this, but here's what I know about it, when you shine light on a subsets like a metal plate, electrons are emitted from the plate. Now do you explain that? You're shining light on a subsets, wire electrons emitted, and he said, it could be explained if you think of light as little packets of energy, if you think of light as photons, like when a photon hits that metal plate, then it releases an electron. So if light is made up of photons, these little packets of energy, it seems like we're straight back to the particle theory of light.

So if light is made up of these particles, if it is made up of photons, how do we explain that interference pattern we saw in the photographic paper that Thomas Young showed us? Okay, so one way we can think about this is to return to that image of the water. So water creates interference pattern in the double slit experiment. But water itself actually isn't a wave, right?

Water is a bunch of molecules bound together. And the actual waves are the effect of the molecules bumping into each other, right? So what you can imagine, maybe light works like that, maybe light is made up of all these photons, and they bump into each other as they go through the slits from the source to the paper. And maybe the interference pattern comes about because the photons are bumping into each other, and they don't get too excited about that idea because that's not what happens.

The way you can test that, that isn't what happens is you say, well, let's just slow down. Let's slow down the light. We can't slow down the light, but what you can do is just dim the light and let's shoot off each individual photon on the photographic paper. So let's do it one photon at a time.

And so you've got two slits, you've got a photographic paper, you've got your light source, the light source is so dim now that one photon is coming at a time. So there's no photons for the other photons to bump into, right? It's like, maybe like shooting one water molecule at a time, right? There's nothing for it to jostle against.

And so even when you shoot one photon at a time and there are no photons for the thing to jostle against or to bump into, you still get the interference pattern. Like you wait long enough and you're going to get that interference pattern through the double slits. There's nothing, there's like, it's not like water, they're not bumping into each other. So what's actually causing that interference pattern?

So just to be totally clear about how weird that is, that you're getting an interference pattern, even when it's one photon at a time. So this time you can do the experiment again, but this time just close off one of the slits. So close off the left slit and so that the photons are only going, you know, there's only one option, the photons can only go through the right slit. If you do that and you fire the photons one by one, you will get one bar.

You will not get an interference pattern, you just get a bar, like of the photons that went through the slit. And if you close off the right slit, same thing, you get a bar on the other side, right? It's only when you set up the experiment so that both slits are open, excuse me, that you get the interference pattern. When both slits are open and you fire one by one, you're going to an interference pattern, but you don't get the interference pattern when you do just one slit.

So somehow each individual photon knows that you've opened both slits. I can't even know. And they arrange themselves in such a way so that when you completely experiment, you end up with an interference pattern. And you say, how could that be?

And I say, how could that be? And I'm like sitting in this airplane thinking, how could this be? And the way quantum physicists describe it is to say, light is both a wave and a particle. And they even have this lovely amelurgism, a blend.

Light is a wave of cool. It's not a wave or particle, it's a wave of cool. So 35,000 feet up, I'm reading this, my brain is kind of exploding. I'm more porous than usual because I'm in the middle space.

And I'm not quite getting it, but I'm still not quite getting it. But this is phenomenal if I did get this. This would be amazing. If I did genuinely understand this.

And so something is getting through me at some level when I'm reading this at 35,000 feet. And I'm not really, at that point I wasn't quite ready to explain it to someone else. In fact, I haven't tried to explain it to someone else until now. But at the time I could just tell there's something really fascinating here.

And then it got even better because then this guy's brain green describes the process by which scientists figure out that it's not just light that exhibits this wave of cool quality. It's also matter like stuff does this too. And the one who first dared think of such a thing was the French scientist of Broglie in 1923. And he put this idea before Einstein.

You know, it could also be matter that acts like both the way you've done a particle. And Einstein was like, it's just so crazy, it does my work, which is not actually a direct quote. Then in the mid 20s, two scientists, Darrison and Garner did a version of the double split experiment. This time they used electrons rather than photons.

So electrons are atoms, as you know, and atoms are the things that make up all the stuff. So if it's happening with electrons, it's happening in the material world. It's not just happening around the light. And so same thing, two slits.

You've got electrons fired through the slits. You've got a plus versus screen. Even when you're firing one electron at a time, you get interference pattern. And so now I'm reading this.

And I'm like, not just light, also matter. Kind of acts as a wave, also acts as a particle. I'm like, I've booked down on the tray table. I'm gazing in the middle distance.

They're all these people around me. And I'm like, they're flickering in and out of stages of consciousness because they're like reading their magazines and they're going to sleep. And they're kind of, you know, more or less there. And here I am with this image in my head of these photons and electrons.

And they're toggling between wave and particle. It's just like the people who are drifting in and out of consciousness. And I'm flying through the air at 580 miles an hour. And I'm just imagining all of the matter, the steel of the plane, the plastic cup in front of me, the water inside it, the clouds that I can see through the window.

And it's like, it's all made out of particles. But the particles are also waves. Like, I just start to cry a little bit because it's just one of those moments where I'm like, oh, no, it's like so weird, but also probably true. And to be fair, I do often cry in airplanes because sometimes the little space is also an emotional space and I can't really explain it.

But also whenever my thinking shifts and something new, when I learn something new, it does bring up all the feelings for me when I'm learning something new. So anyway, there's just that. So, okay. So we're like, okay, yay.

I've got everything like, everything's turning into particles or turning into waves and waves or turning into particles. And I'm getting a little blurry eyed. And I think maybe the flight attendants are getting a little nervous about me. And then the next question that I ask is like, okay, well, if everything's a wave, what's it a wave of?

Like, you know, water waves are made out of water. Like, what wind waves are made out of air? Like, what is a wave? How can you have a wave without things?

Right? And we know that you can because it creates an interference pattern, even when it's not bombing, even when the photons aren't bombing into each other. So it's a wave of. And I turn back to the elegant universe and Brian Green tells me what waves are made of or at least he tells me what the German physicist Max Born and hypothesized in 1926.

And what Max Born says is these are probability waves. Okay, so I'm just going to read a quote from Brian Green. So Max Born asserted that an electron wave must be interpreted from the standpoint of probability. Places where the magnitude of the wave are large, our places where the electron is more likely to be found, places where the magnitude is small, our places where the electron is less likely to be found.

This is just probability. This is just where it might show up. Like, where the particle is, is where it might be, right? So here's the gist.

At the quantum level, everything remains in its wave state. Like, maybe it's there. Maybe it's there. It's more likely to be here.

Maybe it's there until it's observed. And then when it's observed, the wave collapses, it becomes a particle and it's like, okay, it's here. Since you force me to decide, here it is. This is where it is.

And it's kind of showing up at the place that it's most likely to be. Okay, so this throws a spanner in the work, in the works. This idea that like the thing, when it gets observed, it changes and before that it's just existing in the world of probability. So, you know, normally when we think of a scientific viewpoint, it's like the scientific model is the world is out there to be observed.

It is not part of our observation. It is out there to be observed. It's separate from our subjective consciousness. So the idea that we're, the world we're observing changes as a result of our observation.

That's a little bit mind boggling. That is what the science is saying. At the quantum level, photons, electrons, and other subatomic particles change from being waves when they're not observed to being particles when they are observed and when the particles are showing up, where they're most likely to be in terms of their probability and the waves are probability waves. And so, then you have to ask, well, you don't have to, but the question that often gets asked next is, who is doing the observing?

If something changes from a wave into a particle at the moment is observed, what counts as an observer? Okay, so you can think about this in relation to the Schrodinger's cat experiment, which is a thought experiment, which Schrodinger was developing in order to show how this uncertainty thing is a little bit ludicrous, but it's not actually ludicrous, but anyway, here's the experiment. Stick a cat, you seal it up in a box. This is kind of a statistical experiment, so stick your cat lover, but you stick the cat in a box, you put in a bottle of poison.

The bottle of poison can be broke with a hammer attached to the spring. The cat and the poison in the bottle are all like there, and the world of material realities have been like big things we normally think of in terms of like Newtonian classical physics terms. But the spring, what we do is attach the spring that's attached to the hammer, we attach that to a Geiger counter. The Geiger counter is measuring radioactive material, and it clicks when a radioactive atom decays.

So, if it clicks, it releases the spring, which causes the hammer to pound the bottle of poison breaks, and somehow the cat dies, I guess it's a poison that gets into the air somehow or something. I'm not sure if that's the relation between the poison and the cat. That's not relevant. If it doesn't click, the cat stays alive.

Now, the quantum element of this is the decay of the radioactive atom. That's something that happens at the quantum level, a radioactive atom decaying, and that happens according to the quantum rules of probability. And so, the Geiger counter is following quantum rules, right? So, it remains a wave of probability until it's observed, and the cats, we've already said a cat in a box, and then we can see it.

So, you leave the cat there for an hour, and then you check on it at some random moment. And during the time that you start the experiment and the time you check on it, you ask yourself, okay, well, what's the state of the cat during that time? If we accept the idea of quantum probability waves, then until the cat's state is observed, so until it can be observed whether the cat is alive or dead, it's in what's called a quantum superposition, where it's both alive and dead, right? Because that Geiger counter is counting a quantum moment, right?

That moment about when the atom will decay, if it does decay, follows quantum rules. We don't know until it's observed. It's just waves of probability. And so, the cat is in this superposition, so the cat's state is in this way of probability of being both alive and dead, but once it's observed, the wave function collapses, and it's either alive or dead.

Okay. So, the question then becomes, if you want to go this way, who is it that needs to observe the cat in order for the wave function to collapse, right? So, does it have to be the scientists to set up the experiment? Well, clearly not, I mean, clearly somebody else could observe it doesn't have to be exact scientist, right?

Could you put a recording device inside the box, and does that count? Like the Geiger counter, that could be the observer, right? Or does it, but we don't think of a Geiger counter as being conscious. So, does it have to be the person who looks at the Geiger counter or looks at the cat?

Or does the Geiger counter count? Or like, what about an animal? Like, what if a dog wanders in to the lab and you've like, you know, taken a comfort break, the dog wanders in, smells the cat, rips the box open, and, you know, observes the cat. Does the dog count as the observer?

Or like, what about cat? Like, clearly the cat is observing whether or not it's alive or dead. Is it enough of an observer of its own aliveness to collapse the wave function? So what we realize here is that, and this is something that I have explored through reading and because Mami's book, The Self-aware Universe, maybe it's time for us to think differently about consciousness and individual consciousness.

And that, I think, allows us to kind of go back to things that I was saying about language, earlier about language in the self. And so let's just go back to that thing about language in the self. So I did this exercise where I said, look out at the world around you and tell me one thing you see. And I said, a puppy.

If you were to ask me that question, I would say a puppy. And then the language of that noun phrase shapes the space so that there are two cells. There's someone who has access to the puppy, that's me who voiced it, a puppy, and a you. Someone who doesn't have access to the puppy when I say a puppy.

Now, and what I say there is that there's two cells that the noun phrase, the language, a puppy produces two cells. And that is not normally how we think about the self. Normally, the more familiar notion of the self is, I am a self. My name is Jody, and I am a self, or I have a self.

Like, I identify with the self. And I also identify with my body. And I think of myself maybe as living in the body. And I think it's probably pretty common to think of consciousness as separate from the body.

So I've got a self and a self is conscious and the consciousness kind of lives in the body. So, so with that in mind, we might imagine me like dragging as a self, dragging my body over to where the box or the cat is in a dead, alive superposition. And then myself commands my hands to open the box and then through my eyeballs, my self observes the cat or maybe through my ear balls, I can hear the cat meowing and I know it's alive. And so we've got this image of the self.

We've got cells that are attached to bodies, but still potentially distinct from them, like living inside bodies. And these bodies and cells form these little bags of consciousness, right? So we've got this consciousness that's associated with myself that's inside my body. And like my consciousness is separate from everybody else's consciousness.

So there's all these other little bags of consciousness wandering around. And in addition to that, we tend to think of people as being the only ones who have these bags of consciousness or who are these bags of consciousness. So like the poppy isn't a self. It doesn't have consciousness is what we tend to think, right?

And so this is where we imagine that it has to be like the person who opens the box to see the cat to see whether it's a library dead, and at which point the wave function collapses and it's one or the other. Okay. Now, so bags of consciousness, distinct bags of consciousness hooked up with human bodies and human selves, right? Okay.

So that's the kind of familiar version. And then the image we've been playing with in this episode is language shapes space to form cells. There isn't the consciousness that doesn't require us to assume that consciousness is linked to cells. Instead, we have space and the space gets shaped and the self is one of the shapes or the cells are some of the shapes and these change.

And instead, if we see that way and we don't have this inextricable link between the self and consciousness, then we could potentially say that the space is consciousness, that the space is consists of consciousness, there's made of consciousness, but it is consciousness. And all that the self does when language creates the self is to organize this consciousness to create these different vesicles of consciousness, right? So it's not, it's the consciousness is we're just swimming in it. We're swimming in consciousness, the ground being, right?

We're swimming in consciousness. The self doesn't contain consciousness. The self is a way of organizing consciousness. And I would want to suggest as well, it's not the only way of organizing consciousness, right?

So I think it's fair enough, you're welcome to say that a tree doesn't have a self, but that doesn't mean that it's not a way of organizing consciousness. And so everything is conscious and it just gets reorganized. And the language is one way, human language is one way out of a myriad of ways of organizing consciousness. And human language has this unique trait of organizing it according to cells.

So everything I've done this month, I do, I do things that under this sort of umbrella of calling it grammar for dreamers and structure vision space, part of that. But everything that I've done this month plays with this idea one way or the other. I wrote a couple of stories on my grammar for dreamers blog, grammar for dreamers. One is called yes, yes, and the other is called the woodcarver.

And those play with this notion that I did a mini course on something called your realities and realities linguistic terms. I did this mini course that you can find that on my patreon, patreon.com slash Jodie Clark. And I also did a little behind the scenes look at yes, yes, so you can check that out there too, which gives you a sense of this notion of human beings cannot bear too much reality and explore that idea. But before we finish off this episode today, if you're still with me, and thank you, I'd like to read you the second story that I published this month called the woodcarver is based on the Pinocchio story.

Again, that's on grammarfordreamers.wordpress.com. It's only just short, so stay with me if you like. It's called the woodcarver. All my puppets could move without strings and all could speak, but none of them could lie.

Though I itself was trivial, he wasn't the one who stole Antonio's caranels. But when the words escaped to Pinocchio's painted lips, when he discovered he'd released an utterance that did not match consensus reality, it excited him. Sexually, I mean. Let's say his nose grew.

This manifestation of his delight embarrassed him so much I'd read he'd never dare straight from the truth again, and all my hopes would be dashed. So I taught in the secret of language that none of my other puppets had ever been able to grasp. I taught him might. He was a quick student, and I was quick to test him.

Did you take Antonio's caranels? I asked. A hesitation. The smooth pine globed of his eyes glanced tentatively from drop to balsa eyelids.

I might have, he said. My heart left precipitously. I forced myself not to celebrate too soon. Or else, I prompted.

Or else, the mandible lowered to form the shape of a wooden grin. Or else, someone else, might have taken it, he ventured, my own widening smile encouraged him. Or it might have been whisked away by Mr. Jones.

So the tale of Pinocchio is a cautionary tale. It's not the power of language and free will. So it's like if the strings of your body are removed and you have the capacity to move about and to use language, you might use it to lie, right? This notion of language being a tool.

And one of the ways you could use that tool is a destructed, seemingly destructive to lie. Lying is bad. But lying is only possible in a world that is shaped according to selves. And a world that has been divided into selves, and where each self remains unconscious of what the other self is conscious of.

So if you've got two selves, you know everything, then you can't have lying. So if we think of language as organizing consciousness, organizing the space and spaces consciousness, and we think of it as organizing into selves, we can see that in that organization, the language is bequeathing itself with a very, very strange capacity. That is the capacity not to know. It's the capacity to be unconscious.

It's the capacity to be separated from the vast space of consciousness we're swimming in. So the self doesn't give you consciousness. You are not conscious because you have a self. The self gives you unconsciousness.

It closes you off in its organization. It keeps you from knowing. And so if you're playing over the way I'm playing it with it, which is that this is this language, this organizing principle that is a language that organizes the world into selves or organizes a world into selves. And you're saying, okay, maybe this is something that the universe designed, right?

In the same way it designed electrons and photons, et cetera, in the same way that it designed everything that emerged out of the sea of consciousness. What if it designed all these organizing principles to organize consciousness? And what if one of the things that it designed is the human language? The human language organized it in a particular way according to selves.

And the interesting thing about the human language selves is that they have the capacity not to know to be unconscious. Why would the universe bother? What's the benefit of having spaces within the sea of consciousness that don't know about each other? What's the actual benefit of not knowing?

So I'll just throw out some possibilities. Maybe selves exist to allow for new ideas. Maybe the self created out of language is a way for the universe to close itself off to everything it knows and everything that it can make in order for new things to be made. So maybe the self is a way to create a space from which new ideas can emerge and they can only emerge out of not knowing.

So maybe the telling of untruths isn't to be feared. Maybe everything we think and say is a form of untruth because it's closed off to everything the universe knows. It's at least a partial truth. It can't fully know.

So with this in mind, you can start to allow new possibilities to come through. You can recognize that inhabiting human language means that you're in a world that's organized according to selves, which means you're cut off from the sea of consciousness. And so it's not up to you to worry about everything that is. And instead, you have the opportunity to play with what might be and to join in the game of creation.

So thank you for listening to me play with what might be with these zany ideas about linguistics and the universe and the quantum field. Thank you for joining me in this imaginative space. And if you go to the show notes, you'll find a link to grammarfordreamers.com and you'll can find the stories I talked about. Yes, yes.

And the woodcarver. And you'll find a whole bunch of other linguistics inspired stories I've written. And I mentioned the writing through the lens of language course. You can find that on a grammar for dreamers blog as well.

You can join my patreon community and you can share in all the stuff that I have shared up until this point and keep getting more. You can connect me on Instagram at grammarfordreamers. And I'm going to be on Facebook, grammarfordreamers on Twitter at Jodie.com. And make sure you subscribe to the podcast so that you're always in the know when the next one comes.

Also, if you want to support the podcast, if you could give it a rating and a review, apparently that's more folks know about it. So I really appreciate that. Thanks so much. Happy next time.

Bye.