Breakdown of Newtonian Linear Bias

Rather than being either/or, it may be that history both repeats in patterns which make it seem recursive while it actually remains emergent at all times.

Is it possible Nietzsche was right after all about eternal return? He noticed something real. The same sequences of decisions, the same institutions, the same failures turn up again and again in the record. Empires rise on the same promises and fall on the same mistakes. Anyone who has lived long enough has watched an old argument come back wearing new clothes.

But noticing the pattern is not the same as proving the loop.

Consider an arrow released from a bow. To us the arrow flies straight toward the target. It does not. It spins along a spiral, and the spiral itself rides a curved arc. The straight line we see is a line we draw, an imaginary centerline running through the middle of the real motion. The straight line works for aiming. It fails the moment we mistake it for the flight.

We make the same mistake with history. We draw a single line through it and then argue over whether the line loops forever or runs forward forever. Both arguments fight over a line that was never there.

Mathematics has something to say about the loop. In 1890 Henri Poincaré proved that a closed system, one with a fixed amount of energy and a finite space to move in, must eventually return almost exactly to where it began, and then again, and again, without end. It is the strongest case anyone has ever made for eternal recurrence, and it is a real theorem.

Look closely at what it requires, though: a closed system and a finite space. Our universe is neither. It is expanding, and as it expands the room available to it grows faster than the room it fills. A system which keeps gaining room is under no obligation to come home. And even inside Poincaré’s closed box, the return is only ever close, never exact. The shape comes back. The same life does not.

Here is the nautilus again. Each chamber repeats the shape of the one before, and each chamber is larger. Recurrence in the pattern, emergence in the growth. Not eternal recurrence, then, but eternal emergence.

Why, then, does history so often feel stuck?

Quantum physics offers a surprising answer. Wojciech Zurek calls it quantum Darwinism. Out of all the possibilities a quantum system holds, only certain states survive their contact with the world around them, and those survivors copy themselves into that world over and over, like fingerprints left on everything they touch. Those are the states we all agree we see. Reality, in this view, is the record which survived, the version written down so many times that everyone can read it.

History works the same way. What we call history is not the whole of what happened. It is the record which survived being copied. When the surviving record is crowded with old, worn configurations, the same slogans and the same institutions copied endlessly, we feel ourselves pulled into the downward vortex, the gravitational weight of a period where nothing seems to move. When something new enters, a new instrument, a new question, a new way of seeing, new distinctions become readable for the first time, and we feel the upward vortex lift us.

Neither vortex requires the universe as a whole to be closed or open. Both live in the records we can actually reach. Whether the upward turn continues depends on whether we keep bringing new ways of seeing into the world, and that is a question for us, not for geometry.

This is exactly what the code breakers have always done. Shakespeare placed plays within plays, so the characters and the audience held different records of the same events. Joyce destroyed language to save it, until the old fixed meanings gave way and new ones formed. Pynchon held his narrative between paranoia and anti-paranoia long enough for the standing wave of the difference to become audible. Didion cut through the surface story until the hidden pattern showed. Brautigan and Thompson burned the inherited rules of style so that something else could be written down.

None of them rewrote history. They changed what we are able to read in it.

Engineered intelligence is the newest of these instruments. It lets one person read patterns which once took a lifetime and a library, and it brings distinctions into view that no one could see before. That does not settle whether we rise or fall. It only means the record is open again, and what gets written into it is up to us.

The Newtonian habit of drawing a straight line through a curved motion is still useful for aiming. It simply cannot tell us the shape of the flight. Here we enter the full paradigm presented by the quantum scientific revolution - a revolution predicted by systems architect & quantum code breaker, Thomas Kuhn.

Systems Architecture. Growing Up Quantum in a Newtonian Civilization

If indeed these classical and modern code breakers have taught me anything, a concept which I often doubt has occurred, and which drives the personal evolution which guides my writing, it is the following. As a 21st Century writer we inherit the whole of human history, science/philosophy, and systems architecture, often handed to us today on a silver platter by engineered intelligence.

This capability, this new stretch which may be accomplished at one’s lonely outpost of a desk, has saved me innumerable trips to a library, and is the untold story behind my work. I spent a lifetime in libraries, and I much prefer my lonely writer’s castle garret to the institutionalized bastion of the Dewey decimal architecture of the book stacks.

It is as if we creatives have been handed a rocket ship for the mind and spirit - a forcing house or crucible as it were. If indeed, any definable historical event serves to architect this 21st century renaissance, it is the advent of both Job’s and Wozniak’s digital transformation, and the latest developments from engineered intelligence, and it’s cousin, quantum computing.

As 21st century architects of the future, whether we are prepared, or are not, we now have the full responsibility of quantum systems architecture to contend with, or not. As with just about all else in life, the future does not wait patiently for us to catch up. Instead, the future comes roaring through the kitchen like some accidental run-away freight train.

In this case, the future came tearing through my kitchen, and forced a change in plans, and in my family’s well-intentioned lifestyle. Once we might have relied on as some liner version of common sense, but no longer. The universe, our little lives, and all philosophical imaginings had suddenly, and unexpectedly, transformed into a systems architecture of quantum mechanics.

Even a sassy version of an Alaskan Malamute puppy has appeared in our midst. Reminding us, through every passing nanosecond, that everything has changed, and that quite literally nothing is to remain the same.

She, quite epically named Dahlia, is not alone, but her arrival has been accompanied by a whole contingent of court jesters, played by Nashville session musicians. Lounging about the wrecked kitchen, drinking our coffee, and making great music in our hand-fashioned house/ home/ studio as if they belonged.

Here in the manuscript I veered off track myself and began trying to prove that history is not linear but utterly quantum in character. By following writerly advice, often attributed to Hemingway, to “kill your darlings” I jettisoned a whole chapter into my digital circular files. So poignantly true that the reader cannot learn something, that a writer has not managed to learn, first.

It is not that history is not totally quantum in character, but that I do not have to prove this, as history has already shown it to be the case. My major witness in this is none other than Ariadne herself. The same Ariadne who has been used and abused so many times, and then set back on a linear course so many times, we can scarcely follow the thread.

As Bob Dylan framed the question & answer in one phrase:

"There must be some way out of here"

Said the joker to the thief

There's too much confusion

I can't get no relief”

Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

These questions feel like a question to which we cannot find an answer. And, as if it were a question it is answered across Dylan’s work is a resounding NO.

He repeats the question and the answer so frequently, that we will simply contain it here, in these lines:

“Sayin', "Christ do I gotta be like that

Ain't there no one here that knows where I'm at

Ain't there no one here that knows how I feel

Good God Almighty

THAT STUFF AIN'T REAL"”

Bob Dylan, Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie

Lines from the song, written to Woody Guthrie, which creatively declares that going home again is simply not a veritable option.

The universe, the world, the very linearity of our little lives, has been transformed into a quantum state, more recognizable as the geometric intelligence of that nautilus shell, than the full pantheon of our own academic knowledge.

We learn to leave our baggage at the gate, the runaway freight train of our quantum future, has already arrived, unannounced, and has barged straight away right through the kitchen. Sign on the doorpost declares: NO BAGGAGE ALLOWED.

Nothing before now, could have prepared us for this impolitic freight train, nothing, that is, but the literary code breakers and home wreckers, whose unenviable task it has been, to relay the quantum newspaper.

The as yet unwritten headline screaming from the quantum newspaper is this:

Look Out Kid They Keep It All Hid

A headline quoted from one of Dylan’s most advertised songs -screaming across the skies, from a popular work, otherwise known as Subterranean Homesick Blues.

A headline which blares from every type of screen, for all the universe, like some systems architecture, which arrives to declare both some mythological patriarchal deity of a man, and some feminist distortion of a woman, DEAD.