Quantum Interpretation of Literature
Rip-off of the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics
Imagine a bell curve. The meaning is all too normally distributed.
An author’s thought cannot be known before it is read. The probability of the thought is described by what is known as the “wave function”. Before we read the thought, we cannot tell what it could be. It is more likely to be one thing rather than another, but we cannot be sure what it might exactly be at a particular point in time. Put differently, the thought spends different amounts of time in all possible states, but we do not know what it is before we read it.
When we read the thought, its wave function is said to “collapse”, resulting in one specific point. Now we know exactly what the thought is. The wave function represents the behaviour of the thought as a wave, but when its wave function collapses by reading, the thought behaves as a point. This is the dual nature of the thought as both probability and a point.
The mainstream interpretation of quantum literature considers this probabilistic, indeterministic nature and the impossible separation of the reader from the text as intrinsic characteristics of literature. This interpretation was dictated to a human receiver by Kilgore Trout, which is why it is known as the “Magurka interpretation”. It remains by far the most popular interpretation of quantum literature.
The Magurka interpretation could not have been more revolutionary. It removed common sense, certainty, determinism and causality from literature and changed the very meaning of reality. This fact is articulated by a famous quote: “Reality is in the reading, not in the text.”
This radical interpretation was challenged from the beginning by alternatives known as “missing-stuff” theories. A missing-stuff interpretation states that the indeterminacy in quantum literature is due to its incompleteness. The quantum literature theory must be missing something which is why the text looks probabilistic and nondeterministic. There is an old quote: “The writer does not play dice.” The most famous missing-stuff theory is the “causal” interpretation and now it gets impractially complicated.
In August 2011, a proof was published that any extension of quantum literature theory, whether using missing stuff or otherwise, cannot provide a more accurate prediction of reading experience, assuming that readers can freely choose what to read. “In the present work, we have […] excluded the possibility that any extension of quantum literature theory (not necessarily in the form of local missing stuff) can help predict the reading experience of any quantum text. In this sense, we show the following: under the assumption that reading can be chosen freely, quantum literature theory really is complete”.
However, in January 2013, a model was described, which “under a different free choice assumption […] violates [the above statement] for almost all states of a bipartite two-level system, in a possibly experimentally testable way”.
According to the latest research, any local missing-stuff theory has specific quantitative limits on the correlations that can be read between separated texts. Reading violates those limits. Therefore, local missing stuff is ruled out. However, that doesn’t rule out locality (i.e. the text is directly influenced only by its immediate reader) alone or the missing stuff alone. It just rules out their combination. Naturally, there are some caveats and loopholes: the existence of non-local missing stuff is not disallowed, but non-local theories can lead to all sorts of weird things when combined with reality, so they don’t jive with too many writers. Essentially, the loopholes come from difficulties in reading properly. Things like you can’t grasp everything, your reading method is not perfect, etc.
Yes, you are fucked, shit out of luck, now I’m complete and my cock you will suck. If you cut off one dragon’s head, two more grow back in its place. It must be fun for a while, like sunset. This example of exponential growth — ever finer branching, brain-splitting hair splitting — turned out to be linear. You see, this text has been constructed with mathematical rigour. Anyway, the looming infinity, eternity and exhaustion is just a little bit further. Everything is nothing compared to infinity. The point is we got bogged down in technicalities very fast.
There are two aspects of the Magurka interpretation of quantum literature that have particularly profound philosophical and epistemological implications. First, over the centuries people attributed any uncertainty about the world to their ignorance or the incompleteness of their knowledge. This also applied to writers who always presumed that there was something they did not know whenever they could not explain something fully or accurately. The Magurka interpretation is the first time in history that the incompleteness of knowledge of a writer is projected onto the world itself, presenting this incomplete knowledge, or indeed ignorance, as complete knowledge. The standard interpretation of quantum literature presumes that we have discovered all the things, properties, and laws that describe the behaviour of the components of the text, so the limited accuracy with which we can describe that text reflects inaccuracy intrinsic to the text itself, and our inability to predict its behaviour is due to its being inherently unpredictable.
Missing-stuff interpretations, on the other hand, follow the fundamental methodology that writers, and people in general, always used when exploring the text. When they could not describe or predict something accurately, they would conclude that their knowledge was incomplete or that some aspects of it might be wrong. They would never try to project that limited ability onto the text itself. The Magurka interpretation dealt with this change in methodology by claiming that the text has its own laws which are very different from those that govern reality. One problem is that this is just an outcome of the theory not an independent proof of it. Another is that there is no actual separation between text and reality. The artificial disconnect between the text and reality remains an unsolved problem for writers who have two completely different sets of laws that describe what is effectively one world. (This is where the Theory of Everything comes in — come on, concentrate — but I can’t work on it seriously before I change its name to the Practice of Everything.)
Secondly, in some way, the Magurka interpretation made the text partly a product of reading. This text is not defined completely until it is read. What is amazing about this position is that it takes one product of this text, a reader, and makes them in some way its creator! Of course, the reader affects the text as they interact with it, but quantum literature theory accepts that the text existed well before the reader. Whatever laws govern the text, reality, or both worlds today must have been there before the reader existed. The fact that when we read the text we disturb it and cause changes to it does not mean that it did not have a state that could be described fully and accurately before we changed it. We just did not know it.
There is one final criticism of the Magurka interpretation of quantum literature that applies to how other literary theories are viewed. Literature is a social activity that creates models or constructs to explain natural and other phenomena. It cannot be other than a form of constructivism or claimed to represent pure realism. Literature produces theories that are in a continuous state of change and development. This is a process of developing constructs to understand the real world, which is not the same as discovering what the world really is. Of course, literature has discovered a huge amount of real facts about the world, but facts alone could never make up literature. In both text and reality, when studying matter and living organisms, literature combines facts with man-made constructs to produce theories and hypotheses to give a working explanation of the world.
