In episode 19 of the Quantum Consciousness series, Justin Riddle discusses how our use of language for communication should be updated to account for life in an ever-changing quantum reality. We have been conditioned to think that we live in a physical world governed by physical laws; however, attempts to strictly define our reality using simple logical principles has failed (see Godel’s incompleteness theorem). This physicalist type of logic has also invaded how we use language to communicate with each other. We think that there must be a clear and objective way to define all of our words. We are told, “Before we can talk about consciousness, we must first define what is consciousness.” But no definition that we can come up with is sufficient to account for consciousness. Does this mean that we cannot talk about it? Or that we do not know what is consciousness? In this episode, we explore the problem with accepting that the dictionary is true, or accepting that tomatoes are fruits when you clearly would not put one in your fruit salad. Finally, we close the episode discussing David Bohm’s suggestion that we live in a holographic universe where the entire universe is reflected in each one of us. Within this grand context, our natural language is woefully inadequate to capture the ineffable truth of our reality. The best we can do is to more carefully explain with our words how our mind came to see things the way that we see them now. By more honestly portraying the functions of our mind, we can avoid making strong truth assertions about the world and avoid slipping into unproductive arguments with other people.
