“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, April 18, 2012

A Photon is Withdrawn from Itself

When you try to send it back in time to interfere with itself, the probability of success diminishes to zero the closer you get to possible interference.

For a long time I've held that quantum theory, despite its dominant correlationist interpretation, is deeply congruent with OOO. To "observe" or "measure" at that scale means "to deflect with another quantum." The quantum to be measured is withdrawn.

But this is an even tighter loop. Here a quantum is trying to interfere with itself.

That it can't do so resembles the ontological gap between an object and an intentional object (Husserl), or between an intentional object and an act that studies that object (Husserl), or between the I of enunciation and the I of the enunciated (Lacan).

Split objects.



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