Quantum Mechanical Beings
Quantum and human limits are alike.
Quantum Cognition, I learned the term reading my Quora feed and was interested to know more. It means to apply the ideas of quantum mechanics to decode human psychology.
Fascinated by the theory, standing on a bus around 7 a.m., a thought got stuck in my head. It wasn’t an out-of-the-world link between quantum and psychology, more like some childish quantum knowledge I applied in life.
Normalized wave function — What is a normalized wave function? Something from the quantum Mechanics class came to me. Yeah — I had a crush on quantum back then and felt the need to apply it everywhere. Normalization isn’t exclusive to quantum — it’s old; It has a beautiful application in quantum though. I mean, things appear and disappear in quantum randomly; So, we need to find them first to work with them.
Since Quantum Mechanics is probabilistic, we aren’t sure whether a wave function(wave associated with a particle) exists in a region. What we do is look for probabilities. If a definite probability exists in a region, thus normalization is satisfied, and the wave function is normalized.
Normalized wave functions are waves that are bounded within some region of space because their probability exists there. Non-normalized wave functions are unbounded because their probability might lie elsewhere too. So, I thought, does that apply to human behavior too? Can we be sure about human nature by defining limits?
Can limits be worth estimating the human potential and improve it?
Humans are also prone to space and time. We are both normalized and non-normalized; In a vague sense, we refer to human behavior within limits as being normal; Whereas there are people who know no limits. We refer to them as insane, lost, mindless, or perhaps geniuses?
Well! Einstein won’t agree, according to him, “The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”
It establishes that limits are an idea for the sane then, but don’t they confine us? Though it might seem like they do, they don’t. A saying goes like this,
“Those who accept their limits go beyond them.”
Isn’t that a contradiction to itself? How can one accept they have limits and yet exceed that itself? It’s because those who never outline their limits never know where they stand. They don’t know whether they are moving forward or frozen in time. Just like the normalized wave functions, human limits describe our probability of being in a certain state. The smaller the limit, the more we are certain of whether we lie there.
At work, my goals and aims might be unattainable at first. But marking my limits, I clearly define all that I lack and all that I need. In a relationship, my boundaries would tell whether an affiliation is constructive or destructive for me.
In-person, as a student of physics, I thought what limited me was my mathematical abilities. However, when I limited myself around a problem to sharpen my mathematical tools, I came to realize my concept lagged as well; otherwise, math is just a neat description of physics in equations. When I further limited myself, I found physics was the same as what I studied in high school, it just got some fancy notations as we went higher and higher, and I need to understand high school physics better.
Though being afraid of math, I did a degree in theoretical physics. I am not saying I get it all now. I struggled with basic mathematics in my thesis. However, I admire the beauty of mathematics more than I fear it. I anticipated it; I embraced it when I went beyond my limit. If I just would have kept the narrative that math is hard or I don’t like it, I would have never appreciated its intricacy.
The beautiful thing about limits is they are measurable. Or else what would you say is the start of an infinity?
What is the beginning of something that never ends?
To sum it up, “Anything countable is finite and will end.” And infinities are incomprehensible. We need a yardstick to measure, no yardstick, no way to measure. Our limits provide us the yardstick. Knowing yourself has a lot to do with what limits us, and we go beyond our limits when we keep embracing new ones ahead.
