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."
Earthstar, I’m deeply grateful for this reflection. Coming from you (as someone whose insight, discernment, and skepticism I so respect)… your words mean a great deal. It’s a delicate thing, writing about quantum frameworks without overreaching or flattening their mystery. I’m relieved (and honored) that this one landed for you in the way it did.
You named the core movement perfectly: “And yet, does it mean what we think it means?” I’m glad that landed as the opening it was intended to be. A deep bow to the idea that meaning is not fixed by description, but reshaped in each encounter. That’s the door I most hoped to leave ajar in this part.
Your articulation of where you sense I’m headed (toward a model of agency rooted not in what we know, but how we relate to what matters) … yes, you guessed it. Beautifully intuited. I sense that we don’t need to hold final answers in order to participate meaningfully. And sometimes, it’s our participation itself (attention as orientation) that reshapes the questions.
I gratefully appreciate your yes/and reflection that “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.” This is such a deeply layered and wonderful insight — one that I can imagine Bertrand Russell agreeing with fervently. Language, when attuned, becomes more than symbol; it becomes a bridge across moments, across minds. And at the same time, I also wonder whether some dimensions of reality might be shared even before they are converted into words and symbols. That perhaps we’re already held in a kind of pre-linguistic resonance — a felt continuity that doesn’t always require grammar to be known. Shared presence, like shared language, may carry its own form of coherence. And the interplay between the two: structure and intuition, symbol and silence — it feels like a mystery worth staying close to.
Much more to come on attention as a potential locus of agency in Part 5. Thank you for calling that out.
Also, thank you so much for reading with such care, for meeting the inquiry where it lives, and for reflecting it back with such clarity. I am honored by your thoughts.
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?
Sudipto — thank you for this incredibly generous reflection. Wow.
Reading your comment felt like stepping into a parallel world of its own. Your generosity in rereading, pausing, and reflecting with such care means the world to me. The questions you raise are seem more than casual contemplations. They seem to invite ideas into new territory, as of yet unexplored, and I’ll do my best to follow your lead into that space.
"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?" ... What a question! These are so fascinating to contemplate. I'm sure that the physicalist Everettian's, such as Sean Carroll, would be quick to point out that the MWI would hold that it’s not our decisions that split the world, but the interaction of quantum and macroscopic systems (such as a measurement collapsing a quantum state). Carroll has been clear: “We don’t create the world by our actions. Our actions are part of our world.” And yet, I can’t help but wonder: why privilege “measurement” as the threshold of reality-creation? Why assume branching only occurs when we notice? What if it’s happening constantly, everywhere, and “measurement” is just where it becomes observable? I’m no physicist, and I tread humbly here, but the premise that world-splitting might be continuous opens up precisely the sort of speculation your question invites: might emotions themselves be echoes, ripples, or gravitational tugs from neighboring realities? If so, it would radically reframe what we mean by presence. If not, it would still make for a good science fiction story (and maybe it has already).
"What if our choices aren’t just decisions between available options, but are actually shaped by neighboring versions of ourselves? What if emotions aren’t just reactions to circumstances, but signals from those other possibilities?" ... This makes me wonder about a kind of metaphysical entanglement... maybe not quantum, but existential. It reminds me of how imagination, intuition, and premonition function in certain mystical traditions: as faculties tuned into something adjacent. And if we tuned to those subtle signals, would we discover agency not as assertion, but as receptivity? It's fascinating and mysterious to contemplate.
"What if our awareness isn’t tracking time, but making it? Or being made by it?" ... I've been thinking a lot about time lately. And strangely, the more I think about it, the less I seem to know what I think about it ;)... Dogen's view that temporality is inseparable from being seems to signal something profound. And lately, I’ve been turning over a speculative idea: what if “past” and “future” aren’t fixed coordinates but relational densities of attention? That we don’t move through time, so much as sculpt it, giving it shape and texture by the quality of our presence. What looks like sequence might, at deeper levels, be something else entirely.
And your final provocation: “Even within those limits, we must examine the possibility of agency—and ask ourselves: what if, in another reality, there isn’t?” This may be the most sobering question of all. And one I return to often, especially when wonder collapses into uncertainty. Sometimes I feel the pull toward a kind of compassionate determinism. If there is no agency, then hatred dissolves. There is nothing to blame. I find relief in that. But so too, compassion risks losing its anchor. What does love mean without participation? And yet, even in those moments of doubt, something inside me resists the conclusion. I suspect agency is not grand, not obvious... but small, fragile, and real. I believe this not because it is proven, but because something in me feels it. In the pause before reaction. In the flicker of attention that interrupts automation. In the sudden refusal to follow a well-worn path. I don't know if those are illusions. I really don't. But even if it is an illusion, something about it still seems real.
Thank you again, Sudipto. Your comment is such a beautiful mirror that reveals a larger constellation of the questions that this work reaches toward. I’m so grateful to be wondering alongside you. We seem to be tracing the same gravitational pull.
Thanks for your careful response. The metaphysical entanglement not just with others but with other version of your own self proves the oneness theory so profoundly I feel. On the part about “Even within those limits, we must examine the possibility of agency—and ask ourselves: what if, in another reality, there isn’t?” I actually meant what if in another reality language has no limits on what it can express? What kind of a responsibility will it lay on writers and philosophers?
I have to say that your misunderstanding of that question was a more interesting trajectory to follow.
“…what if in another reality language has no limits on what it can express?” Whoa! Fascinating.
Similar to my attempts to conceptualize the geometric shape of dimensions beyond the third, I struggle to imagine how that would be possible. Not that it can’t, but it feels like there is so much meaning lost when we attempt to translate our thoughts and feelings into symbols, and then for someone else to “decode” them through their own lens. There seems to be a barrier in language (or symbols of any kind), past which certain information cannot pass. The “qualia” that cannot be expressed as “quanta.” I so often think of that barrier as a frustrating tension, but maybe that is the beauty of it, at least in this reality. As the true expression of symbols can only be fully understood from the whole, through the lens of every interpretation.
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."
Earthstar, I’m deeply grateful for this reflection. Coming from you (as someone whose insight, discernment, and skepticism I so respect)… your words mean a great deal. It’s a delicate thing, writing about quantum frameworks without overreaching or flattening their mystery. I’m relieved (and honored) that this one landed for you in the way it did.
You named the core movement perfectly: “And yet, does it mean what we think it means?” I’m glad that landed as the opening it was intended to be. A deep bow to the idea that meaning is not fixed by description, but reshaped in each encounter. That’s the door I most hoped to leave ajar in this part.
Your articulation of where you sense I’m headed (toward a model of agency rooted not in what we know, but how we relate to what matters) … yes, you guessed it. Beautifully intuited. I sense that we don’t need to hold final answers in order to participate meaningfully. And sometimes, it’s our participation itself (attention as orientation) that reshapes the questions.
I gratefully appreciate your yes/and reflection that “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.” This is such a deeply layered and wonderful insight — one that I can imagine Bertrand Russell agreeing with fervently. Language, when attuned, becomes more than symbol; it becomes a bridge across moments, across minds. And at the same time, I also wonder whether some dimensions of reality might be shared even before they are converted into words and symbols. That perhaps we’re already held in a kind of pre-linguistic resonance — a felt continuity that doesn’t always require grammar to be known. Shared presence, like shared language, may carry its own form of coherence. And the interplay between the two: structure and intuition, symbol and silence — it feels like a mystery worth staying close to.
Much more to come on attention as a potential locus of agency in Part 5. Thank you for calling that out.
Also, thank you so much for reading with such care, for meeting the inquiry where it lives, and for reflecting it back with such clarity. I am honored by your thoughts.
"Pre-linguistic resonance" Yes!
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.
Sudipto — thank you for this incredibly generous reflection. Wow.
Reading your comment felt like stepping into a parallel world of its own. Your generosity in rereading, pausing, and reflecting with such care means the world to me. The questions you raise are seem more than casual contemplations. They seem to invite ideas into new territory, as of yet unexplored, and I’ll do my best to follow your lead into that space.
"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?" ... What a question! These are so fascinating to contemplate. I'm sure that the physicalist Everettian's, such as Sean Carroll, would be quick to point out that the MWI would hold that it’s not our decisions that split the world, but the interaction of quantum and macroscopic systems (such as a measurement collapsing a quantum state). Carroll has been clear: “We don’t create the world by our actions. Our actions are part of our world.” And yet, I can’t help but wonder: why privilege “measurement” as the threshold of reality-creation? Why assume branching only occurs when we notice? What if it’s happening constantly, everywhere, and “measurement” is just where it becomes observable? I’m no physicist, and I tread humbly here, but the premise that world-splitting might be continuous opens up precisely the sort of speculation your question invites: might emotions themselves be echoes, ripples, or gravitational tugs from neighboring realities? If so, it would radically reframe what we mean by presence. If not, it would still make for a good science fiction story (and maybe it has already).
"What if our choices aren’t just decisions between available options, but are actually shaped by neighboring versions of ourselves? What if emotions aren’t just reactions to circumstances, but signals from those other possibilities?" ... This makes me wonder about a kind of metaphysical entanglement... maybe not quantum, but existential. It reminds me of how imagination, intuition, and premonition function in certain mystical traditions: as faculties tuned into something adjacent. And if we tuned to those subtle signals, would we discover agency not as assertion, but as receptivity? It's fascinating and mysterious to contemplate.
"What if our awareness isn’t tracking time, but making it? Or being made by it?" ... I've been thinking a lot about time lately. And strangely, the more I think about it, the less I seem to know what I think about it ;)... Dogen's view that temporality is inseparable from being seems to signal something profound. And lately, I’ve been turning over a speculative idea: what if “past” and “future” aren’t fixed coordinates but relational densities of attention? That we don’t move through time, so much as sculpt it, giving it shape and texture by the quality of our presence. What looks like sequence might, at deeper levels, be something else entirely.
And your final provocation: “Even within those limits, we must examine the possibility of agency—and ask ourselves: what if, in another reality, there isn’t?” This may be the most sobering question of all. And one I return to often, especially when wonder collapses into uncertainty. Sometimes I feel the pull toward a kind of compassionate determinism. If there is no agency, then hatred dissolves. There is nothing to blame. I find relief in that. But so too, compassion risks losing its anchor. What does love mean without participation? And yet, even in those moments of doubt, something inside me resists the conclusion. I suspect agency is not grand, not obvious... but small, fragile, and real. I believe this not because it is proven, but because something in me feels it. In the pause before reaction. In the flicker of attention that interrupts automation. In the sudden refusal to follow a well-worn path. I don't know if those are illusions. I really don't. But even if it is an illusion, something about it still seems real.
Thank you again, Sudipto. Your comment is such a beautiful mirror that reveals a larger constellation of the questions that this work reaches toward. I’m so grateful to be wondering alongside you. We seem to be tracing the same gravitational pull.
Thanks for your careful response. The metaphysical entanglement not just with others but with other version of your own self proves the oneness theory so profoundly I feel. On the part about “Even within those limits, we must examine the possibility of agency—and ask ourselves: what if, in another reality, there isn’t?” I actually meant what if in another reality language has no limits on what it can express? What kind of a responsibility will it lay on writers and philosophers?
I have to say that your misunderstanding of that question was a more interesting trajectory to follow.
“…what if in another reality language has no limits on what it can express?” Whoa! Fascinating.
Similar to my attempts to conceptualize the geometric shape of dimensions beyond the third, I struggle to imagine how that would be possible. Not that it can’t, but it feels like there is so much meaning lost when we attempt to translate our thoughts and feelings into symbols, and then for someone else to “decode” them through their own lens. There seems to be a barrier in language (or symbols of any kind), past which certain information cannot pass. The “qualia” that cannot be expressed as “quanta.” I so often think of that barrier as a frustrating tension, but maybe that is the beauty of it, at least in this reality. As the true expression of symbols can only be fully understood from the whole, through the lens of every interpretation.
I love that question to ponder. Thank you!
Beautifully written!
Thank you, Takim. 🙏