The Illusion

Quantal thinking ... It's the bane of our modern existence. We oversimplify everything. Black and white people, red and blue states; everything reduced to on or off, 1 or 0. Yes the information we store and process in our brains, and more recently in computers, can be reduced to 1's and 0's, but does that accurately reflect reality? Isn't it more likely the result of how our primitive nervous systems work and aren't computers just extensions of our somewhat highly developed ape minds? Does quantal thinking warp our perception?

John Donne said, "No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main". It was more than an apt metaphor. Scientifically a human being is a system, which scienceclarified.com defines as, "any set of interactions that can be set apart mentally from the rest of the universe for the purposes of study, observation and measurement". Within the human system is a collections of subsystems: nervous, circulatory, respiratory, digestive, reproductive, and many others. None of these systems is isolated. An isolated system is one that is sealed off from its environment to the extent that neither matter nor energy can pass through its boundaries, but the fact is that there is no such thing as an isolated system. Some energy and matter always flows between a system and its environment, which includes other systems. Earth comes close to being a closed system, but the earth absorbs energy from the sun and stars and is subject to impacts by asteroids and meteorites. It reflects energy into space and loses hydrogen from one of its four main subsystems, the atmosphere. This exchange and overlap of all systems goes down to the subatomic level.

Quantal thinking became official when the Greeks came up with the idea of the atom. It's name is derived from the Greek word atmos, which means that which can't be split. It was a quantal concept. We now know that atoms can be split and that those subatomic particles can be split further. As our technology improves we keep finding smaller and smaller particles. I believe that will continue as long as our technology allows us to keep splitting matter into smaller and smaller components, because I believe that matter and energy; the entire universe we perceive, is continual. It is all one thing.

Everything we understand and perceive as real is actually connected.