๐ŒŽQuantum Poetics

Quantum poetics refers to the continuous creative and destructive action of nondeterministic (e.g. quantum, GPT) physics, in which entelechy is accompanied by gratuitous specification. The analogy to poetry is inspired by the observation that the measurement of the wavefunction can never capture its totality, like a poet can never send their full wavelike mindstate through a discrete bottleneck of words; but it is precisely this tragic constraint that motivates poetry.

quotes about quantum poetics

quantum_poetics_quote

This is the principle of quantum poetics. The content of poetry is limited not by the poetโ€™s vocabulary, but by the part of their soul that has not been destroyed by words they have used so far. Physics would be a complete and exhausting classification of everything there is if quantum mechanics were not true. The universe would be trapped in a perfect latticework prison and nothing would ever happen except the relentless ticking of the universeโ€™s clock. ...

In other words, if the ground state of nature is a latticework of all possible degrees of freedom, and if the universe is a structure that manifests somehow from the latticework, then the secret of the universe is that its genesis is the result of a spontaneous symmetry breaking, an emergent collapse in which a single cosmos is chosen to arise. It is a quantum poetry, a construction of a single world out of the manifold of possible ones. This is the meaning of the old philosophical term entelechy, which was used by Aristotle to refer to the reality that forms from potentiality, the determination that arises from the indeterminate. Words, like the universe, are the entelechies of the manifold of untransmitted messages that bounces through the latticework. (And poetry is the constructive process by which someone yearns to project some trace of the impossible totality of the manifold into a single reality, aspiring to capture a glimpse of the world in its totality without tiring its existence by trying to name it.)

โ€” Language Ex Machina