Episode 76 Quantum linguistics

Structured Visions

Photo by Jason Leung

Where do you get your ideas? The question presumes instrumentality and exchange, as if you could take a trip to your favourite high street shop and come home with the best ideas you can afford.

That same sort of instrumentality comes into play when we think of language as a tool, a means by which we communicate information or express our needs and desires.

In this episode we explore a new way of thinking about language and ideas:

• Ideas emerge from empty space.
• Language organises that space to form selves.
• Selves are the spaces from which new ideas emerge.

Are these selves conscious?

Better to say that the whole space is conscious, the space is consciousness itself.

When language shapes space to create selves, it bequeaths them with a strange gift: the capacity not to know. The capacity to be unconscious. The capacity to be separated from the vast space of consciousness we’re swimming in.

Complex stuff! We may need some help from quantum physics (and a bit of liminal space) to open ourselves to these ideas.

The books I mention in this episode are Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe and Amit Goswami’s The Self-Aware Universe.

The stories I mention are ‘YES/YES’ and ‘The woodcarver’.

Take my free course, ‘Writing through the Lens of Language’, to explore the experiential aspects of ‘inhabiting language’ in more detail: bit.ly/lensoflanguage

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