Weird Science

Context: Why is quantum theory so strange? The weirdness could be in our heads

The disconnect between experience and the counter-intuitive products of (a) material logic is endemic to cognition and it is, in essence, an irreducible discontinuity. It may change form as theory and popular narratives of science co-evolve but the foundational peculiarity and epistemological uncertainty iteratively unveiled by physics is not so much a bug as a feature of language and narrative consciousness. I can not speak for physics or physicists but I suspect that along with a healthy dose of public humility as to the ultimate limitations of human minds, science in general represents a system of adaptive, abbreviated narrative communication that acquires value and utility in the extent to which it constructively diminishes possibilities.

We puzzle over why the world at inferred core deviates so profoundly from the phenomenological pivot of experience but also fail, often enough, to acknowledge that the system of language and (its corollary) narrative  subjectivity is hardly fit for purpose. The primary (and unacknowledged) feature of linguistically-inflected narrative experience is the production of more narrative, more language, more experience as information. There is only the most tenuous of connections between the world we describe and the ultimate nature of the world we inhabit because uncertainty, discontinuity, ambiguity and doubt embody the primary transmission medium for the description, its subjectivity and the linguistic framework it inhabits.

The extent to which discontinuity and difference or disconnection also embodies the essence of cosmological facts is likely as uncertain as those limited selves that seek to leverage this understanding. Reality can only ever be inferred but it is from within this Universe that we construct our models and rudimentary intuitions. This doubt and indefinitely-extensible, open nature and eternally partial comprehension as description of self might actually be the one solid connection and shared identity that both we and our Universal context possess.