Surely this is not the “cat who ate the canary.”
Surely this can’t be that same cat.
The cat who was cooped up in Schrodinger’s box?

This is that same cat?!

Like hell, you say. That can’t be the same cat.
That cat was…different. I don’t know how, really, but just…different.

Okay, you over there — yes you, leaning up against the wall — hold that thought. And you — yeah you, you’re standing right next to me:

Hold my beer.

I suppose this story will be one of the more implausible stories you’ve ever heard, but isn’t it true that the best ones always are?

Isn’t it true that we really, really, really wanna see the good guy win? The littlest of the little guys is the guy we’re always betting on in the back of our minds.

We want the tiny little speck of a freckly-faced kid who is always sort of timidly hiding in the back of the class to have the right answer. We want that kid — boy or girl (or neither) to come up with the thing no one else thought of.

We sincerely *do* want that. I’m not ‘making something up’ for comedic effect or something, we want that.

Ever ask yourself why?

Take a minute and do it if you like. It’s fun.

Why do we root for the underdog? Why does it always seem to be the smallest of the small — like the mouse we dreamt with and thought differently about in the end of Aesop’s fable?

I don’t know what you’d say but I’d say it’s because of something like this:

1. We perceive the little guy as being harmless;
2. He causes no one any bother — except, of course, the biggest of the big bullies;
3. We enjoy believing we can ‘beat the odds’;
4. We easily slip the littlest guy’s shoes on (<<<that, right there, is a paradox) because
5. The little guy who successfully vanquishes his demon has, each time he succeeds, illustrated for you a novel pathway by which success can be achieved.

More succinctly:
The protagonists we most enjoy tend to be those who face the most impossible of odds and then still come out on top.

Why have I told you this? What possible relationship does this have to the cat pictured above?

Have you ever thought of how difficult it would be to escape a box designed by Erwin Schrödinger?

Nope. You never did. And because you probably think I’m trying to be funny, I’ll just tell you flat out that I’m not. When I’m attempting to be funny, you can generally “wait things out” for a couple more lines of text until you see I was joking somewhere.

And since you clearly have not seen that (hmmm…) then you must assume that I am…BINGO!

Joking/not joking.

This, my friends, is an example of what we’ll just be calling “m-superposition.” It is a term I’ve coined so that I can more easily explain what in the where-did-that-come-from is going on here.

More succinctly:
Made up the term to help with the discussion of a bewilderingly complex thought.

Now I get it, you hate bewilderingly complex thoughts. Can’t stand them. Ever since junior high — was it algebra? — you were saying, “Ain’t no way I’m gonna be able to follow this. Raise both sides to the power of three? wtf are you talking about, teach?”

But, since I’m the friendly sort of writer and not the kind who will paint a beautiful picture of my parents’ living room and then

shut off the lights real quick

and ask you to run from the couch to the phone, because it’s the middle of the night and it might wake someone up…

Since I know that stubbing your toe (particularly on the narrow leg of an incredibly heavy marble table) is not fun I will not do that to you. I never was going to, but since you have been patient with me over 655 words I will give you the advance heads up that I don’t intend to injure your mind in the next…I dunno, let’s say 5000 words. Or let’s make it 4,344.

I won’t. In fact, I won’t even waste a minute of your time — which is an awfully bold statement, considering that I don’t know what you know any better than you know what I know.

Can I make that statement — for a piece which totals a bit over 5000 words — truthfully? You may not think so, but yes, in fact I logically *can* make that completely and literally true statement and know that it is a true statement.

[We’ll gloss over for the moment that you’re probably saying something like, “I’ll be the judge of that.” Skip also the fact that that sounds like a particularly arrogant thing to say. We’ll cover them elsewhere, here we are on a short budget of words/time.]

So…

m-superposition.

What is it?

m-superposition is [loosely] the state of mind which exists when a person cannot “make up their mind” about whether to do [this thing] or [that thing]

Yes, I know that sounds interesting. How do I know this?

Because the vector I just crafted there, using English sentences, points to a palpable-to-everyone-regardless-of-native-language-and-regardless-of-species concept.

[From time to time I will refer to sentences as ‘vectors’ to describe the aggregate ‘direction’ of a thought. We will come back to why I do this a bit later.]

So now you can see that m-superposition, while it isn’t (perhaps it isn’t) the same as quantum superposition, is still a ‘reasonably valid’ concept to talk about.

Yes, we can talk about what the ‘mind state’ of being in a sort of flux between making two seemingly different decisions can, for example, do TO or FOR a person.

You see? We’re getting somewhere. Because virtually no one (as my best guess) has ever thought of things quite precisely in this way. No one has, for example, meditated on what

persistently exposing oneself to m-superposition can do to a person

Because they have not done this, they similarly have not

considered the ‘true’ [i.e., the ‘more aggregate’] impact of the decisions they make

This is a very VERY deep ‘hole of introspection.’ <<< this term will also come into fairly common use as I write. It refers to those “places” we all sometimes go where we’re stuck in an ‘infinite loop’ of contemplation. See? You knew about that one too. Probably never talked to someone about it, but you did know about it.

Ok, so here we are:

1. m-superposition is the ‘position’ of a mind as it attempts — often quite valiantly — to search for the answer to the puzzle of which of these extraordinarily complex decisions is better?
2. m-superposition can (as easily, I think, though not 100% sure about the ‘as easily’ part) be both fun and rewarding and agonizing and toxic/harmful.

Now we can talk about analyzing things a little more carefully than we might have before. We can talk about, for instance:

If I have a choice between a blue car which costs $20,000 and a red car which costs $27,600 and this one has this set of features and that one has this other set of features how in the name of holy heaven and god am I supposed to figure out which is better?

I’ve used a pretty simple example here, but perhaps you see what I’m driving at:

We quite literally have a nearly infinitely complicated puzzle in front of us.

And that one is only 54 words, folks.

Now I know what some are saying:

“Well, you just have to assign some sort of value to each of the features and then…blah blah blah blah

That doesn’t work, anyone who has ever tried it [very carefully] knows that it cannot possibly work and they might even know that the reason is because that just moves us down in the hierarchy to the next lowest turtle.

You might be ‘double taking.’

I’m just saying assigning values is just as difficult on that ‘more quantum’ level as it is on the ‘big picture’ (e.g., MSRP) level. You’re just plain not going to do an apples-to-apples comparison of traction in winter to the value of a push-button navigation system.

It. Won’t. Happen.

The best you can (possibly) say is “well, how the vehicle performs [this] aspect of its job is worth 30 points of the total of 100 I’m assigning and [this other] aspect is worth 20. I’ll look across every feature it has, rank them in terms of how important I think one versus the other versus the other is, and then I’ll eyeball the amount of points I want each to have.”

You see, I picked a pretty common example because even with the commonest example you can see how it becomes more ‘infinitely’ complex at each deeper level you look at it.

Everyone also kind of knows this. Maybe not consciously every single time, but they *do* kind of know it. The best choice then?

Well, it’s individually determined, obviously, but since we’re talking about m-superposition, not which car you are going to pick it’s easier to think of it this way:

Same situation. You’re a young person. Just graduated from college, got the new job, signed for a nice little bonus and are targeting $80K your first year. Fair enough. You’re out car shopping, and at this point you start allowing yourself to accept that your time is worth “about $40/hour.”

Again, fair enough.

But now let’s do an m-superposition on a ‘different spreadsheet’ of the analysis. Let’s suppose we don’t consider

This car
vs.
this car

but rather we consider

our brain at time t: the day before we are to make our final decision
vs.
our brain at time t+1 day

Note: It is *VITAL* to the analysis that we consider as not just a short interval of time but that particular short interval of time. Fair enough.

So, what is the m-superposition of brain at time t versus t+1 day?

It is, stated loosely, a mind which is ‘in’ a continuous back-and-forth state of flux versus a mind which is ‘in’ a completely different back-and-forth state of flux.

You cannot not realize this. At least not now that it has been stated with reasonable clarity: Those two m-superpositions are very different.

Ok, you can figure this out without me, but since I’m here and since I need something to do ‘while you’re contemplating’ what that means, e.g., how they are different, I will give you some brief descriptions of the ways they vary from one another.

The msp at time t is an msp which is characterized by urgency: “I have only 24 hours left to make this decision!” It is also characterized, to a certain extent, with confidence in your ability. It does have those characteristics. You can almost think of it like…well, you can think of it like you would a cube of water, which has just had some sort of dye squirted into it, and which is then flash frozen. There actually is something like a ‘pattern’ inside your brain when you’re doing that particular kind of thinking. How do we know this?

Because we can freeze it, to some degree, and then go back to it later.

Let’s contrast that, though, with msp t+1. At msp t+1, we are filled with the enjoyment we have of new experiences. Perhaps the scent of new car; perhaps the first little ‘zip’ when a traffic light turns green.

but what comes with those feelings? What is the counterpoint? Who are we ‘playing ping pong’ with now?

Well, at that point it isn’t an urgent worry but in some ways its at least important to track in one’s mind all the special little thrills that car is giving you. Often we’ll do this ‘to the disparagement,’ shall we say, of the other car we had (at time t now, remember, this just ONE day removed).

Why is this important?

Well, it’s certainly important from at least these perspectives:

1. In 24 hours, we’ve gone from rooting for both cars to
2. rooting even harder for one and “adding that to” considering the other in a more derogatory fashion.

Some are scratching their chins here, I bet, but let’s roll with it for a moment…

Aren’t you wanting to believe you made the right choice?
Aren’t you even more convinced that you made the right choice with each passing day *(at least until you — perhaps simply by chance or perhaps by misfortune — find out you have a lemon.)

I think you really are. In fact I know a little bit about confirmation bias — and it’s enough to tell you that I’m understating that last sentence: I know that you are.

But let’s stop here, for a moment, and take stock. Figure out what just happened:

1. Bought a car.
2. Started enjoying it.
3. Weren’t really ‘enjoying it’ quite exactly when we were making the decision, but feel like we’re enjoying things now. We’re “exploring features.”
4. As soon as we get into the process of exploring features, unless something goes seriously wrong (i.e., that lemon) we’re something like ‘happy as a clam.’ We think things like,
5. “Wow, this one is so much better than that other one was. I can ‘clearly see’ that now. So glad I made this choice and not that choice.” and we say things like,
6. “Hey Joe, look at my new car. Isn’t it great? It has this, this, this, and this.” but then, because we’re just not content with being happy with what we have and ‘letting’ others be happy with what they have we ADD
7. “If you’re going to buy a car, buy this kind. Not that kind. I don’t even know why they make those other ones anymore.” and even
8. “You’d have to be crazy to buy one of those kind anymore. What with solar panels and wind farms and stuff going in everywhere? That kind uses a fuel which costs you almost $0.10/mile. This kind you can drive for a fifth of that.” and then, if you’re especially diligent
9. “Here, I’ll show you my spreadsheets. How I calculated the savings over time.”

I dove deeper into that hole of introspection that I had to, but the point is carried:

You only disparage the alternate choice when you start enjoying the current choice.

{{{WARNING!! Especially deep thought ‘trench’ ahead. Recall your Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.}}}

You also only disparage the current choice when you’re ready to consider that another choice is better.

And that part, actually, isn’t shocking. The shocking part is this:

Before we make a choice, neither choice is bad. After we make a choice, we semi-automatically think one choice is bad and another choice is good.

It’s phrased loosely, but it carries the point; we know this to be true. You can argue it all you like, but the vast majority of the people in this audience will know which fundamental principle of nature I am referring to even if the ‘vector’ I supplied with my skills at the English language were insufficient to communicate it.

Yep. I know. DEEP. I warned you.

What can we ‘take’ from this? The above, and then this?

Good lord there is SO INCREDIBLY MUCH MORE additional room for thinking creatively out in this space:

The space of considering the m-superposition of our brains and then…hold your hat…

The m-superposition of our brains between this point and this point. Between this thing we’re considering and that one.

What I am saying here is pretty simple, though I’ve phrased it in a semi-complex fashion (keep in mind that this may as well require an entirely new set of terms if not perhaps a new language):

1. We can, actually, measure something of the ‘utility of spending one’s time in some m-superposition’ versus just making the decision and ‘getting it over with.’
2. This may (it will, but I’m trying to be modest about the way it’s stated) perhaps make decisions faster. It could also save us money.
3. It will (this might come in handy soon) “free up” mental resources to use on things we’d enjoy more — like playing Clash of Clans with your kids.
4. It will *(yep it will do this)* lead us to becoming happier and more productive, because we will necessarily be spending less time agonizing about puzzles which I already flat out defined as being impossible to definitively solve.
5. It will (probably) allow us to begin looking at our lives in a far less “transactional” way. <<<< this might be the most important social benefit

Ok, five is enough. Some of you are probably gasping or reeling if you’re really catching on to what I’m saying. The mathematicians are going,

Holy fucking shit how did that guy ever figure something this complicated out.

To them I would say what everyone already knows (brief aside to the non-mathematicians: here’s where we get to laugh at all the people who thought they were smart):

How did I do it?

By steps.

lol. Shoes are worn out like Gandhi’s, but by steps. Journey of a million miles, after all. <wink>

Let’s unpack 1 to 5 above. Then maybe I’ll launch this puppy of a piece of writing. Nowadays you have to be Howard Cosell to have people want to listen to you giving them the actual live game cast of what’s actually going on on this planet circa 2024.

Number 1:

Ok this one is one of my favorites, because this one is like — I dunno, the universal ‘miracle tonic.’ It’s like Oil of Olay for your brain. The first one (this was actually one of the first bits of the puzzle I ever came across, and this one is pretty friggin priceless)…the first one basically says this:

1. I’m agonizing over this decision.
2. I know damn good and well I’m going to agonize over it even after I make it.
3. I know it can’t be useful to agonize over impossible-to-determine (or nearly impossible to determine) answers.
4. The reason this is so is basically because my ‘infinite’ minds eyes will just keep right on discovering new levels of complexity no matter how ‘deeply I look into the matter’ <<<note the double entendre
5. Because I know that looking infinitely deeper just because I can is pretty worthless. It won’t buy you an ice cream cone, for example.

Once I saw those, it sort of became obvious that I had something of a grasp on the fact that *I* was the one making *myself* miserable.

Crazy to learn it from that direction, but I think we can all consider that fact in the books. As Mr. Holmes again said:

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

That one got carved so deep in my brain! Woo hoo boy let me tell you. That one was deep as the second degree burns on the inside of both of my thighs and the remembrance of setting the carpet in the family room on fire when I knocked the old-school kerosene heater over when I was up changing the channel from one cartoon to another.

Anyone who believes in God (some do, some don’t) sure as heck knows that if there is a God, He wouldn’t put an ‘obstacle’ like that in front of an innocent kid like me unless he meant for me to learn something a little bit more nuanced than, “be careful.”

And no, I am NOT joking. Just so it is 100% crystal clear.

That hurt like the living daylights were being extracted out of me through about the most tender part of my body that you can even get to. It was luckier than h-e double hockey sticks that I wasn’t also of the age that certain even more tender part of my body was at the right amount of vertical rise off the floor.

I didn’t live the kind of life I lived unless *someone* was meant to do it. It’s as simple as that. You can think what you will. Some will say something to the effect of…

“Wow, dude. That guy thinks like Jesus of Nazareth would probably think. That guy thinks to what looks like an excruciatingly painful degree.”

SOME people WILL say that. Or something to that effect.

DO YOU THINK I DO NOT KNOW THIS?

Yes I know it. What am I supposed to do about it? No one is going to be pouring olive oil on my head anytime soon I can tell you that much. I did one heck of a lot of things to make a wide variety of people awfully angry with me sometimes.

Sometimes they acted like they were flat out ready to kill me.

I mean, my grandmother wasn’t especially butthurt when I lifted her $50,000 Toyota Highlander in the middle of the night and drove it as fast as it would go down the train tracks in Leroy thinking I was already enlightened or something. She wasn’t butthurt but some of the other people in my family were. My brother Jeff was furious a few days after her death because at that point he didn’t think I had even apologized to her.

He said something to the effect that now I was never going to get the chance.

I am sorry if he’s not sitting while he’s reading this, because we’re both getting old now and don’t need a coronary-event-inducing infusion of stress into our systems.

Isn’t this an awfully good ‘apology’ to my grandmother — that is, if I hadn’t already apologized to her in my own way right after I got out of the hospital?

But perhaps we can’t call this an apology. Perhaps we can’t say that “this makes amends” for whatever I did or didn’t do on that day.

I usually think of an apology as a thing to be made about an issue after it is done, because one person didn’t agree on what the merits of the decision were. One person didn’t agree with the other, is what I’m saying.

I offer an apology when I have done something wrong. I do it when I do something wrong and then someone points it out to me.

Yes. I definitely *DO* try to do that. I could say, “it’s incredibly hard. the hardest. yep. it’s the hardest of the hardest things that i have decided to do with this one and only life I have to live. it’s hard because I wanted to be right about what I did at every moment of my life — straight through from the beginning to the end.

i never knew that it would happen that i would only be right sometimes and that most other times someone else would be right. i at the very least wanted to be right most of the time. i could deal with that. most of the time was fine. in school it was always on the 1 to 100 scale. all you had to do is beat your peers and you’d win. you could certainly lose to Jennifer Jabs or Kirt Wackford. Those two were class acts, and it was an honor to go to school with the both of them.

They both eat healthy, exercise regularly, care deeply for the planet, and probably both are very ‘strict’ vegans — whatever kind of nonsensical term that is which people apply to one another — ah…lost the train of thought for a second…they’re both as healthy as young oxen and will probably live to a hundred or more. They aren’t the ones whose hearts I am actually

worried about.

My family. My mother and father in particular. My brother Jeff, next, and then Cheryl, because she’s reasonably healthy but she could do better with the care of it. As we all could. As we all could.

Those last two four word sentences will ever only be attributed to my brother, whose wisdom is so vast that I count myself a dabbler in the theories of it, at times, when talking with him:

I do not know how he has come to know so very many — an impossible number — of incredibly difficult to figure out answers. He would be the one I’d be sending people to, if someone said, “who does that guy say we can learn from? Who will, I dunno…play a round of golf with us?” I’d say Jeff would do it. He’ probably damn well carry your clubs if you needed him to do it but now we have kids who it would be great to put in areas where they can learn something practical:

How to live your life…possibly over a game of golf, a dip in the ocean, some dog walking in a park…by just being around people and experiencing the joy of their company.

As we all could. As we all could.

Those are words I can hear him saying. I can hear him regardless of which state I’m driving through. Regardless of what kind of day I’m having and no matter which season of the year. I don’t have to call Jeff because Jeff already taught me the most important lesson he could possibly have taught me.

It is not nearly so impressive doing anything we can do — no matter how impressively we’ve mastered the skill of what we’re doing — it is not nearly so impressive, I say, as to never tell a soul you can do it.

Master that skill, the God in my writes: Master that skill, and then after that you can come talk to me some more.

That is, at least at is currently appears to me, the limit to which our current human consciousnesses can consider things. I suppose a person could stand there and point the flashlight around and say, “you sure? You sure there’s not more? there has to be another quick trapdoor to a deeper level.”

Nope. There isn’t. To the best of *my* ability to ‘calculate’ as a human, the complexity of the puzzle I just unraveled for you is effectively the nearest it is practical to achieve a complexity which still remains short of infinitely.

Plainer English: that’s like bouncing a laser between two mirrors trying to create heat out of nothing complex. You might as well not even bother calculating out how you could do it. “But…that would be an infinite energy machine if it could figured out…that’s one we probably ought to ‘look more closely into.’”

Freaking human beings and the way they usually think about things. Let’s make this REAL simple:

Theoretical is never, never, NEVER better than actual.

It IS never better. It’s worse. It’s almost, well…

It’s almost the literal definition of incalculably worse.

Why is actual so much better than theoretical? Well, it’s because actual — like, actual enjoyment of a movie, for example — in actual enjoyment of a movie versus theoretical enjoyment of a movie you’re actually THERE.

Like…well, it’s better to think of it like an amusement park than a movie. So going to Darien Lake and riding The Viper were the thing to do back in the day. Skiing at Swain or Kissing Bridge was a thing, and there was always some fishing you could do. My dad loved the bird watching.

I tell you! You messed with my dad’s birds and you better make sure you were in a place where he wouldn’t find you should he decide to come looking for you.

My dad was a dad who was not to be messed with. He’s squash your head like a peanut is what he would do. He’s make sure you never “forgot to put back his tools” ever again, I can tell you that much.

Do you know he (one day he did this, and you’ll be like, “no WAY. NO WAY your father did that to you! Did you tell someone about it?”

Tell someone? TELL someone? Who the FU(K was I supposed to tell? Was I supposed to phone the Pope or the President or something? You’re darn right I didn’t tell anyone. <<see there what I was doing was ‘leading you down a primrose path’. I did this to make sure that you remember what I told you at the very beginning…

ah…that’s it. We’re out of time for tonight, folks. Your fair writer has to turn in for the night.

Just kidding! I know you were enthralled by that cliff hanger — I was in the midst of describing what my father did to me one day as a punishment for breaking the law of the land…