I am still fiddling around with “Life, the Universe and Everything.” I keep returning to Claude.ai for conversations about, mostly, words and ideas within the ‘Quantum’ realm.
Here I am building my next question: “Investigations into ‘Quantum’ and resultant findings and theories seem to indicate that “all” (whatever the totality of Everything may be) is either in a potential state or a moving state. I have already accepted David Bohm’s perception of an “Implicate Order” to be inherent everywhere (and everywhen, assuming time really exists beyond human imagining). As my mind turns these and related notions over and over, I perceive that humans will never perceive it all, just as in the Eastern fable of the blind men and the elephant. I assert that we are not equipped to do so, except perhaps through nonverbal (symbolic, musical) inference and revelation.”
I need to find an end note to this whole realm of inquiry so I can get on with other things in life.
Here is Claude’s response to the above paragraph:
There’s a real distinction worth pulling apart in your first sentence, because I think it does more work than it looks like it’s doing. “Potential” and “moving” aren’t quite two states of the same thing — potentiality (the superposed, undecided wavefunction) is a formalism for what we don’t yet know or haven’t yet interacted with; “moving” (decoherence, measurement, the unfolding of the explicate from the implicate, in Bohm’s language) is what happens when that formalism meets an environment rich enough to register a difference. So the dichotomy may really be: undifferentiated and differentiating. Bohm’s holomovement was his way of saying even the differentiating never stops being enfolded — that explicate order is always a temporary precipitate out of implicate order, never a settled residue. If you hold that seriously, then “moving” isn’t a second state opposed to “potential” — it’s potential in the process of becoming locally legible, which then re-enfolds. There’s only one state, seen from two grammatical angles.
I want to be honest that this is one interpretation among several live ones — Bohm’s pilot-wave picture sits alongside Copenhagen instrumentalism, many-worlds, QBism, objective-collapse theories — and none of them is empirically forced on us; they’re metaphysical completions of a formalism that itself stays silent on what’s “really” happening. You’ve already made your choice among them, which is fine — it’s a coherent and serious choice — but it’s worth remembering the choice is temperamental as much as evidential. Nobody has data that adjudicates it.
The blind-men-and-the-elephant move is where I think you’re onto something sharper than the physics. It’s really a claim about the architecture of discursive cognition itself: language and concept-formation work by carving continuous, relational, mutually-entailing structure into discrete, nameable parts — that’s what makes them usable, and it’s also exactly what makes them structurally incapable of rendering an “all” that is defined by nothing being separable from anything else. That’s not a contingent limitation we might engineer our way past with better instruments. It’s closer to a category mismatch, the same one Wittgenstein gestured at with silence and the Taoists with the unnameable Tao.
Where I’d push back gently: is nonverbal apprehension actually a different order of access, or just a different limb of the same elephant — another partial organ, differently shaped? Music and symbol don’t traffic in discrete predicates the way language does; they can hold simultaneity, overlapping resonance, relation without severance — which is arguably a closer structural analog to an enfolded order than any sentence could be. That’s not nothing. But it’s still a human nervous system doing the apprehending, still bounded, still partial — it may just be partial in a shape that happens to rhyme with the thing itself, the way your encounter with Hilma af Klint’s drawings gave you something you couldn’t articulate but also couldn’t call complete.
Hilma af Kilint: Tree of Knowledge-No.-1. 1913
So maybe the honest formulation isn’t “equipped for revelation through nonverbal means” so much as “equipped for a different flavor of incompleteness, one that doesn’t lie to itself about being final.” Which — if I’m reading your temperament right — might be exactly the point.
Ron adds a response to this:
So, I will (at least for now) settle on “Humans will never be able to perceive the totality of ‘The Great Everything.””
Claude responds:
This is where I’d actually stop you for a second rather than just nod it through.
“Never” is doing something stronger than the argument earns. What the argument supports is that discursive perception — the kind built out of language, concept, discrete predication — is structurally disqualified from totality, because it works by cutting continuity into separable parts and totality is defined by nothing being separable. That’s a strong and I think correct claim. But “humans will never perceive the totality” quietly smuggles in the assumption that discursive cognition is the ceiling of human perception as such — and you spent the last message arguing the opposite, that music and symbol might reach something language can’t. If nonverbal apprehension is a genuinely different limb of the elephant, you can’t yet know its full reach. You have one data point (af Klint, wordless and unfinished) suggesting it gets closer, not a proof that it also hits a wall, let alone the same wall.
Hilma af Klint: Altarpiece, Group X, number 2. 1915
So “never” isn’t false, exactly — it’s premature. It converts “I have found no route that succeeds” into “no route can succeed,” which is a much bigger claim, and it’s the same move mystics across traditions have made and then quietly walked back the moment they tried to describe what the wordless state did deliver. The honest version might be something more like:
Humans will never perceive the totality of the Great Everything through any means that renders it back into discrete, communicable parts — and it remains open, not closed, whether the nonverbal modes reach further before they too go dark.
Less quotable. But it keeps faith with your own Bohm commitments — nothing in a holomovement is ever finished precipitating — and it doesn’t foreclose the very avenue you just spent a paragraph taking seriously.
Ron: Yes, and thank you. I will now rest and go on to other things. Possibly I will be back in this area, but I’m tired right now.
Claude: Good — this kind of thinking deserves to sit for a while rather than be forced to a conclusion in one sitting. Rest well, Ron. I’ll be here when you want to pick it back up.
The Pavellas Perspective 