The Cognitive Superposition Principle
What is the fastest thing in this universe? It’s the speed of light, at least in the physical realm. But what if there exists something faster that we never could have thought about before? (Hint : The answer’s in the question.)
In the realm through which we all experience this physical world around us. Let me go out on a limb here and just state the answer right away :
The speed of thought.
See, the past tense of the verb- ‘think’ is 'thought' which is also it’s noun form. What I mean to say is — that the ‘thought’ has already been thought of before you even finish uttering the word ‘thought’ completely! How fast was that?
No, I am not high.
Getting back, let me ask you another question :
Who generates these thoughts? Have you ever wondered? Who or what puts these thoughts into our mind like a proverbial, effective baggage claim at the universe’s busiest airport terminal : the mind?
Thoughts keep appearing in your mind like a carousel almost magically, right from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep. To make things even more interesting, your mind is not done processing information even when you’re asleep — in your dreams. Your body with all it’s motor functions paralyzed gives your mind an even more processing power and bandwidth to process thoughts and generate your dream experiences. It’s always trying out several permutations and combinations, to ‘backup’ your experience while you’re awake and generate questions based on that and also the answers to those, all while you’re in a state of altered consciousness. Almost like a set of Deep Generative Neural Networks being employed at backup centers under the seabed!
As the aforementioned analogies between a supercomputer and the human brain have been established by researchers since long, I now invite you to explore a thought process, we humans are recurrently found in. It’s the process that both enables us to think ahead about situations in our life and is the largest contributor to our anxiety.
I’ll briefly present an analogy that will help us to understand what I’m talking about.
Schrödinger’s cat
As a Quantum Physics dilettante, this mind-bending thought experiment devised by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger has always baffled me. Here it is, in short from Wikipedia:
A cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box.
If an internal monitor (e.g. Geiger counter) detects radioactivity (i.e. a single atom decaying), the flask is shattered, releasing the poison, which kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other.
What this basically says is : Until one looks inside the box to determine whether the cat is alive or dead, both the realities of the cat being alive AND the cat being dead exist simultaneously. It’s only after we look inside the box can one say for sure, whether the poor cat is alive OR dead.
Put it another away, it is our observation that forces the outcome to one of the two possible realities. That the wave function collapses to deliver one reality. Until the observation is made, both the realities exist in the state of a quantum ‘superposition’.
The Cognitive Superposition
With the concept of quantum superposition established, let me present to you my theory which I’m calling — The Cognitive Superposition Principle :
According to the principle,
The human mind recurrently generates multiple superposition-ed realities for an outcome to be experienced in the future ; and these realities only collapse into one only when the outcome is actually ‘experienced’ in the present moment.
Say, you’ve just been notified of that coveted job interview scheduled for next week. Upon hearing this, your mind instantaneously springs into action and recurrently presents to you two different realities superposition-ed within your brain (the box) :
- Anxiety has crippled you, making your legs shake while being seated opposite your interviewer. Drops of sweat have started appearing on your forehead and now you’re mumbling answers to the questions being presented to you. You’ve started stuttering and your ability to form cogent thoughts have vanished into thin air. And that’s it ; you’ve blown off your interview.
- You walk into the room as if you own the damn place, with your shoulders straightened back out and you make yourself seated comfortably opposite the interviewer. You lean back on the chair and you’re now ready to take on each question comfortably with finesse. With that, you have aced your interview.
More variations of these realities may appear, but you experience the outcomes of both the aforementioned realities; and none of them are real! You have felt both the fear of witnessing a bad interview and the joy of acing it — The first one provides you with a venti of anxiety and the latter one with a grande of (over-) confidence. And the box is still closed!
Your mind will continue to pester you with the anxiety-engendering thoughts of the 1st reality. In your mind, you’re vicariously ‘living’ both the realities until you actually end up walking into the interview room on the scheduled day. When you do actually walk in, all other thoughts ‘collapse’ and you end up in the present moment. And that’s when you actually appear for the interview. You open the box.
This is the only reality that matters. It is the only one that will be backed up in your ‘memory’ folder. The aforementioned two realities will collapse once you enter the room, the reality. So why do they exist?
You own your supercomputer. It’s made for you. It generates these thoughts and also gets inundated by them. This mind-bending ( literally ) ability of generating superposition-ed realities only serves one purpose — preparation. Your mind is prepping you for all possible outcomes for you to handle them with ease. But at the same time, your communication channel with your mind is not well established. You hardly talk with it. So it does not know how to let you know that it wants you to take it easy. Your lack of communication with your own mind is crippling your ability to enjoy the only truth, the only reality — the present moment. Right Now.
The past and the future only serve to provide you with nostalgia and hope, respectively. They actually never exist outside your mind. It’s all in your head, casting a dark, gloomy cloud over the present. Or as the genius put it -
The distinction between the past, the present, and the future is merely a stubbornly persistent illusion.
- Albert Einstein
Remember this : You’ve always experienced the past when you were in the present moment, then. Likewise, for the future. You can only experience anything in the present. In this 3-dimensional world, we cannot transcend time ; it is our only God — an invisible, abstract, omnipresent entity.
So how do we get around this anxiety fueled by this superposition of future outcomes?
Understand that this ability exists for you. Use it effectively, don’t let it consume you. Collapse the wave function. Drop all your conceptions and misconceptions for a moment. Drop them and relax. Step out of your mind if it starts to get on your nerves. (Irony alert!)
Transcend into a state of thoughtlessness — just silence. Let your mind rest for a moment. It’s like clearing your cache memory. Take a walk in the nature. Listen to your favorite music and become one with it. Go for a run. After some time, you’ll lose the sense of time itself. Exit the state of Eternal superposition. It’s not a healthy state to be in constantly.
Use your superposition abilities, don’t let them cripple you. ‘What If?’ can seriously disable you to enjoy.
Relinquish your control. It’s an illusion. The world does not revolve around you. In case you had forgotten, let me remind you, poignantly :
You are not the center of the universe. You might be the center of your own universe, but let’s table the discussion for multi-verses for now. Let things fall into place as they’re supposed to. Don’t interfere with them much. You’re not the doer.
Start living, not just existing.
Life begins when you step out of the small mind.
P.S. As a curious writer, this is an attempt at finding connections between the seemingly isolated fields of Quantum Physics, Neuroscience and Psychology to plant the seeds of wonder and curiosity in the minds of my readers. Hence, this article may not reflect any actual research whatsoever in these domains. These are purely my thoughts that I have penned down here. Please consider this as a product of conjecture ; and not a peer-reviewed, corroborated scientific research article.
