I ran across this article this morning on “
Quantum Poetics” and thought it worth adding to (and perhaps concluding) this thread. It discusses in more depth some of the ideas touched on above. A bit heady, but appearances by LW, Borges, Bohr, Bohm, Joyce and even David Foster Wallace keep it rolling along, I think.
The final paragraph is worth quoting in full, IMO:
The authority of physics is entirely justified for the kinds of explanations and powers it affords. But the idea that the language of physics alone speaks the ultimate truth about the world, dispelling the illusions produced by our everyday experience, for instance of space and time, or of consciousness, seems difficult to defend when that language itself depends on ways of speaking that belong fully to everyday experience. Talk of illusions is surely overrated and often no more than sensationalistic silliness. It would be wiser to say that the physical world, whatever it is like when expressed in the full complexity of mathematical physics, is unlike what it seems to us. And that is the point: The physical world isn’t like that to us, which means that if it matters that we understand human experience as fully as we might, including how we shape our personal, moral, and political lives, then the hope that mathematical physics alone discloses ultimate reality is misguided. This is so even while — and this is no small thing — physics offers one of the richest opportunities for wonder, to which the most deeply human response, besides seeking to understand, may well be either poetry or silent awe.
I hope others find it interesting.