A thinking pattern

We think about our world in quite linear ways. For example, problem, action, outcome. Good equals economy equals GDP up. For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.

These ideas are very sticky even if we think the world is a lot more complex than this. Even if we have a view that we can have both the environment and the economy. Even if we step past action and reaction and realize that what’s going to occur is actually indeterminate until we measure it, until we pay attention and engage. A good example of indeterminate is voting—regardless of what the polls say it’s the action, voting, you and I undertake in connection with others that determines the outcome.

That’s not to say this is wildly random. Do the same thing, in the same way, with the same thinking patterns and it’s highly likely we-you-I will get the same outcomes. This occurs in our relationships, our families, and societies/countries. 

This is why thinking patterns are important. If we look at climate metrics, melting ice and extreme weather/fires, or justice and equality numbers where the issues can seem intractable, we could think we are out of time and answers. Make the problems bigger, including how we think and new understanding, and we may have answers.

Hold on! An answer?

We need to change the script and look at ourselves and our connected world in a more sophisticated way. We are all agents continuously intra-acting with ourselves and others and all things. Or, in a plainer language, we are actually all connected, entangled together.

It’s hard to explain such concepts—the old ways of thinking are strongly attractive. It is like trying to explain we’re actually a small circular planet far from the center of the universe to ourselves. Imagine how hard that would be if we were schooled all our lives that the world is flat. What we are saying will sound bizarre.

However, if we can explain it to our 6-year-old children/grandchildren maybe it will become sticky.  Bayo Akomolafe, in one of his letters to his daughter, Alethea, is a beautiful example. Bayo explains a quantum shift as a ball game. Hold on, quantum is truly bizarre!

Blindfolds and balls

Let’s play a ball game taking 100 balls and throwing them out the window at a freshly painted wall. 

Bayo writes: We do it blindfolded—just for the fun of it. When we open our eyes we’d expect that most of the balls would have gone through the window and hit the wall. We’d expect to see the stain marks of the balls on the part of the wall that is directly perpendicular to the window.

The results shouldn’t be markedly different if, instead of one window, we threw away all the balls—all at the same time with a heave-ho through two windows facing our painted wall. 

Like before, when we open our eyes, we’d expect that some balls didn’t go out of the room at all, but hit the doorposts. And we would expect that those that made it through one window or the other formed twice the previous pattern: 2 clumps of stains on the wall directly opposite the windows. 

But, what if instead of two neat ridges of stains, we find 10 ridges showing an undulating pattern of stains as if we threw the ball through 10 windows? We would conclude that something strange was happening—but how could discrete balls make a wavelike pattern on a wall?

Fright and insight

If you’re spotting a theme here you are dead right. Humans do strange multiple meaning things all the time. Perhaps an understanding of strangeness is going to help.

Quantum gets weirder. Back to Bayo: So what you may then decide to do is to throw each ball, one at a time to see what happens. So we cover our eyes again, take a ball, and throw it in the direction of the two windows. We don’t pick up another ball until we are sure the previous one has made its mark on the surface. What if we did this, one after another, each newly launched ball following the previous after a couple of seconds and then remove our blindfolds… only to find the same outrageous pattern? 

If I know both your grandmas well enough, I can bet my dimples cheeks that start to pray out of fright.

But it gets even stranger. What if—in a bid to resolve this fiasco—we ask one of your grandmas to stay by the windows, making sure she protects her face with a helmet visor so the balls don’t knock out her teeth? Her job would be to simply observe which window each of the balls are going through and not interact with them. 

We take the balls and start throwing again—all at once or one by one, it doesn’t matter—and then we open out eyes. Your grandma is really praying now. She’s spooked. We moved closer to the windows and look at the wall beyond them. Now, instead of the many fringes like before, we see two clumps of stains where the ball struck. It’s almost as if the balls knew grandma was watching and then decided to behave differently.

Indeterminate 

This strange complementarity, things change when they are observed, is an essence of quantum. While people think of the uncertainty principle a more useful understanding is that, using the ball example above, behavior could be like a particle (creating the two clumps) or a wave (the multiple ridges). What one of those two only becomes determinate depending on who’s in the whole system (grandmas watching or not).

Bayo links this back to an actual quantum demonstration: Particles (like photons) are sent through two slits. When we are without any knowledge of which slit they are headed through, instruments measure an interference pattern consistent with this light being a wave. But when I detect which slit the particles go through the pattern is a particle one. The implications? Matter is fluid. When we observe it/measure it the nature of it co-emerges. The nature of nature depends on the measurements made, says Bayo.

It is our intra-action with the light that ‘measures’. What we see at the time we do/see it. There are, outside of that, before and after, simply indeterminate states of potential.

Familiar ground

These are themes you will be familiar with. Humans are collective animals. We are part of, not separate from, our environment. We are entangled—at a simple level the emotional state of others affects us. For example a great concert, the All Blacks thrashing Australia or, in a time of acute crisis a group can achieve a great physical feats.

Similarly, our world is greater than the sum of its individual human parts. That’s obvious even if we exclude (we shouldn’t) nature. We are a network of relationships yet have created structures, politics and countries that include and transcend such relationships. 

For example, elections and referendums seem to have a life of their own. Never mind what the polls say the decision actually happens at the point of voting. It includes all of the systems around us—would you vote differently if grandma was watching?

A better operating system

So it is time for a better thinking pattern, one that acknowledges we are influential, influenced, complex and entangled. That the world and our politics are not so stuck as we might think they are. That positive change can happen very quickly and dramatically in our social and behaviour spaces (just as well when we think about the depth of our climate and inequity challenges). And that we-you-I matter immensely for making that occur. 

Those pieces are encompassed by quantum social science—very loosely an expansion of the ball example above. It is an updated, new level, thinking pattern. It shifts what is possible. Just as climate problems have scary-step-change vicious circles there’s a positive step change here too—we matter. You matter. What we feel is already determined is not as we create the past in the present and the present in the past. 

Consequently, creative positive solutions are possible on the scale required.