Minds are mountains, mountains are minds—what is common between them? What is enlightenment in the transcendent complex? What shall I call it?
Some great timeless questions:
– How long is the shore of Lake Powell?
– If a raindrop falls exactly on the continental divide, what determines which ocean it will end up in? Are there alpine lakes with two outlet drainages?

Golden mean doesn’t work for really explaining ordinary things. What is the right volume of music? Can you define, exactly, what is the band of “right” volume? No, you can’t. You have to start identifying relationships between fuzzy bands and mental states. Essentially, you have to go after some more elusive contingency or harmony between mental state and music volume. Statistical quantities are normative, nominal, subordinate. I want to apply this to causation and the wave-particle duality. If we look at the continental divide raindrop problem, we might say that there is an extremely small imbalance in momentum, that would determine which side of the continental divide the raindrop falls into. But if we consider subsurface water as a nondualistic, common source for both drainages, then that complicates the problem. As soon as we analyze the nitty gritty of how hard it is to actually define infinitessimal bands of “fitness,” the golden mean logic begins to appear somewhat imperfect. In this manner, I believe there are identifiable causes for things that seem on the surface to be tiny imbalances, but are actually stemming from deeper, unpredictable, undefinable causes. Complex relations, of the same sort as the historical tall sail ship that has had every piece replaced multiple times—is the ship the same ship? Just as using the undefined “soul” as a background concept for personhood in a legal context is useful and fitting. How do you define a person if everything about them is constantly in flux, more or less? Well, you can ascribe a unity that you don’t understand. You can call them a soul. We should acknowledge a mysterious aspect, both because it’s useful for avoiding fixating on the confusion and because it ensures epistemic humility, holding openness for what is not understood (whether it is simply confusing or it is inherently incomprehensible). Same thing with wave-particle dualities. We should really focus in on the complex, transcendental aspect of that duality and try to understand quantum causation in like terms, rather than treating ontology and causation as statistical conundrums. We should not simply give up with the math and take the position of anti-structure because we can’t understand it. Tao is never the mere opposite of yang. Tao is yin and yang, neither yin nor yang. We gotta apply that logic to quantum physics, I’m sorry, I know I didn’t get trained as a physicist, but this is a critical point. The strongest logic for the mysterious in existence has been developed by the mystics. We don’t have to necessarily agree with their narratives, but we should take very seriously the meta-patterns that emerged through their philosophies. I’m a fan of the line of thinking behind the hidden variable interpretation. Even though it was “disproved” last year, I don’t think they quite appreciated the logical framework behind it. The logic of ascribing value to mysterious complexions is very very strong in all other cases. We should not toss it out for physics. Maybe the hidden variables argument was wrong, but the ideas informing it and the way of thinking about it are important to recognize. Most empirical scientists operate under a normative framework of mathematics, in that the patterns themselves are determinative of the behaviors. But if you distinguish between an idea and the formulation of an idea, not idolizing the formulation and instead adhering to the pure idea, then you have some strength there. This is what didn’t happen with the hidden variables argument. They cast out the idea with the formulation, but people like David Bohm were all about distinguishing between the idea and its formulation. It’s a weird mental shift. But it’s key to seeing a layer further into reality.