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Earthstar One's avatar

Impressed so far with your agency ocathalon Glenn!

In this one, you do theoretical physics a great honor in giving it a succinct yet revealing review. Unlike similar treatments I've seen, you create an open-ended feel. It's like you've punctuated each QM milestone with the question "and yet, does it mean what we think it means?"

That being my all-time favorite question, I give you high marks for clear treatment of a tricky subject.

Based on wider context cues, I infer you are aiming toward the following. It doesn't matter what you think this or that QM or otherwise means, what matters how you participate and relate to (such as sustained attention toward) what is meaningful to you.

To which I say yes/and. Yes those matter. And meanings are significant to how both communication and repair happen. Being able to attend communication as a source of continuity of experience among participants as well as through time is critical to not only attend to but repair shared reality.

I'll end as you did by saying there's much genius in your conclusion that "If the universe is relational, emergent, or unfinished, then maybe our agency arises from it. Maybe it lives in attention."

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Sudipto Ghosh's avatar

It has taken me three reads to wrap my head around this. You’ve joined stars in the sky that seem planar at first, but actually plot a multidimensional space-time—implausible, as the sci-fi reader in me, dumbstruck on the floor, would say. Bravo. This is astounding. A mere essay on Substack doesn’t do this material justice. Please don’t pass up the chance to turn it into something larger.

Another reason I held back from commenting was the need to read it again—just once more—so I could sit with the things left unsaid between paragraphs. I doubt I’ll be able to articulate all of them, but I suspect the comment window is closing fast, with the next wave of ideas approaching at light speed.

The most immediate question that hit me is this: if we’re operating with a sense of autonomy in a world that’s jumping freely, instantaneously, between its trillion versions—with or without us—then are our emotions, hesitations, and urgencies vibrations from alternate possibilities? Are we feeling the gravitational pull of what could have happened in another version of the world?

This extends beyond merely anticipating outcomes when we face a choice. Whitehead’s idea of the “creative advance”—an improvisation within limits—starts to feel very real here. What if our choices aren’t just decisions between available options, but are actually shaped by neighbouring versions of ourselves? What if emotions aren’t just reactions to circumstances, but signals from those other possibilities? A sadness that seems misplaced, a joy whose source we can’t locate—could these be residues of selves lived elsewhere?

And then there’s time, which we still seem to treat as linear, even though Dōgen, Heidegger, and Wheeler all gesture toward its strangeness. We continue to speak in a language that assumes experience progresses in sequence. But what if our awareness isn’t tracking time, but making it? Or being made by it? In either case, agency wouldn’t lie in the act of “choosing” within time, but in being *timed*—in responding, midstream, to the world’s call to presence. Our actions in time fold that time back onto itself, like kneading dough.

You’ve given us a sense of agency that isn’t about control, but about participation—about responsiveness to what is not yet formed. This isn’t just philosophical speculation. It’s an ethical stance. It’s a way to live with wonder. Attention, care, hesitation—these aren’t small things anymore. They vibrate with the full range of what might be.

I would hate for us to rest on the laurels of Eastern mysticism. There’s great wisdom there, no doubt—but it needs to be interrogated by every generation, in its own unique way, with new advances in thought and science. Only through that interrogation can we discover new ways of understanding, of speaking about it, and of stretching our language to meet the complexity of the experience.

We’ve both written about the limits of language. But even within those limits, we must examine the possibility of agency—and ask ourselves: what if, in another reality, there isn’t?

Do you feel the pull, Glenn?

I do.

Thanks to you.

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