"Nature is not local." — John Bell, 1964
A classical computer never doubts. Every bit is a verdict: zero or one, yes or no, present or absent. Billions of such verdicts per second, and the entire digital world is born from their clarity. But the universe is built differently. At its fundamental level — where electrons, photons and atoms live — nothing is final until it is observed. Before measurement, a particle exists in a superposition of all its possible states simultaneously. It is both zero and one and everything in between. A quantum bit, or as it has come to be known — a qubit.
This is not merely a metaphor — it is an experimentally confirmed fact that demolishes our intuitive picture of reality as something determinate, fixed, and independent of the observer.
But the longer you look at this, the stronger a suspicion grows: what if quantum mechanics is not only describing electrons?
I. The Tyranny of Two States
The architecture of an ordinary computer stands as a characteristic embodiment of Aristotelian logic. The law of the excluded middle. A or not-A. No intermediate state is permitted, no indeterminacy is allowed. This very binarism made digital computation possible: if a bit can only take two values, then reliable systems can be built from such bits.
Our everyday mode of thinking works the same way. We want to know: is this right or wrong? Is he smart or stupid? Is this idea good or bad? We continuously sort reality into categories, assign labels, deliver verdicts. One might characterize this mode of thinking as a useful tool, for without it no practical activity is possible. But in the end, it remains only a tool.
The tyranny of two states arises when we assign to a tool properties that do not belong to it. We simply forget that a tool is not a permanent and indispensable fixture — it is needed only in specific conditions, and its role extends no further than its function.
Quantum mechanics arose precisely from a collision with reality that refused to fit this scheme.
II. Superposition: Being Everything at Once
In 1801, Thomas Young performed the double-slit experiment. He directed light through two narrow slits onto a screen and observed the characteristic interference pattern — alternating bands of light and shadow. This was expected: waves interfere. What was unexpected came later. When the experiment was repeated with individual photons — one at a time, at long intervals — the pattern persisted. Each photon, passing through the apparatus alone, behaved as if it were passing through both slits simultaneously.
If you place a detector to find out which slit the photon passed through — the interference pattern disappears. The photon "chooses" one slit. The act of observation changes the system's behavior.
Before us is a fundamental property of quantum systems, not an artifact of the measuring device: before interaction with the observer, a particle exists in superposition — in the simultaneity of all possible states. The wave function describes not a trajectory but a probability cloud. The collapse of that cloud to a single determinate state happens at the moment of interaction with the observer — or with any other classical system large enough to "decohere" the quantum state.
Honesty is essential here: physicists still argue about what the "collapse of the wave function" actually means. The Copenhagen interpretation says the question about the state before measurement is meaningless. The many-worlds interpretation claims there is no collapse — the universe branches. The de Broglie–Bohm interpretation posits hidden variables. We do not know what is actually happening. We know the mathematics, which works with extraordinary precision. The philosophical meaning of that mathematics remains an open question.
But here is what matters: superposition is not uncertainty in the sense of ignorance. The image of a coin tossed into the air is deceptive here — the coin has already "chosen" a side, we simply cannot see the result yet. With a quantum particle, everything is fundamentally different. Before measurement, it exists in a state of ontological indeterminacy — in some real sense inhabiting both sides simultaneously. Not a hidden outcome, but genuine multiplicity prior to the act of observation.
III. Entanglement: Apart but Not Divided
Einstein harbored a deep mistrust of quantum mechanics — and it had nothing to do with the mathematics, which worked flawlessly. What troubled him was what it did to reality. In 1935, co-authoring with Podolsky and Rosen, he published the famous paper known as the EPR paradox, pointing out that quantum mechanics predicts something physically impossible: "spooky action at a distance" (spukhafte Fernwirkung).
If two qubits are entangled — that is, their wave functions are correlated — then measuring one instantaneously determines the state of the other, regardless of the distance between them. A millimeter. A kilometer. Light-years. The distance is irrelevant. The correlation is absolute and instantaneous.
This can sound like abstraction, so let us try it through an image. You place a pair of gloves into two boxes — one right, one left — without looking inside. The boxes are sealed, and one is sent to the other end of the Earth. You open your box: the glove is left. Instantly, without any communication, the other box's contents become certain: right. Classical logic explains this easily — the outcome was determined at the moment of packing. In the quantum case, nothing of the sort. Before the box is opened, neither glove "is" right nor left — it exists in superposition. Your act of observation does not merely register what already happened. It literally creates the state of the second particle — instantaneously, across any distance.
In 1964, John Bell formulated a theorem that allowed this to be tested experimentally. In the 1980s, Alain Aspect conducted experiments that confirmed it: quantum correlations genuinely violate Bell's inequalities — they are impossible within any local hidden-variable theory. In 2022, Aspect, together with Clauser and Zeilinger, received the Nobel Prize for this work.
The conclusion: the universe is non-local. At the quantum level, correlations exist that cannot be explained by any local mechanism. Parts that once interacted remain connected, however far apart they drift.
Honesty again: quantum entanglement does not allow information to be transmitted faster than light — causality is not violated. But it points to reality being organized differently from a collection of independent, locally interacting objects.
David Bohm, one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, called this the "implicate order": beneath the visible, "explicate" reality lies a level at which all parts of the universe mutually implicate each other. No part is entirely independent of the whole.
IV. Interference: How the Computational Miracle Is Born
A quantum computer uses superposition as a computational resource — the capacity to process an exponentially larger number of states simultaneously, while a classical processor works through them strictly one at a time.
A classical computer with N bits can be in one of 2^N states at any moment. A quantum computer with N qubits can be in all 2^N states simultaneously. Three hundred entangled qubits represent more states than atoms in the observable universe. Computation becomes a parallel exploration of the entire space of possibilities at once.
But here a problem arises: when you read the result — you measure the system and get one state. How do you extract the right answer from an ocean of parallel computations?
The answer is interference. Quantum algorithms are designed so that correct answers are amplified by constructive interference while incorrect ones are cancelled by destructive interference. Before us is the architectural amplification of the right path's signal through the interference of all others — a fundamentally different computational strategy, unavailable to classical machines.
A good everyday analogy: noise-canceling headphones. They do not simply block sound physically — they generate a sound wave that is the exact inverse of the incoming noise, and the two waves cancel each other through destructive interference. A quantum algorithm does the same thing, but with computational "paths": unwanted results are annihilated through mutual cancellation, while the correct one is amplified.
This is what makes quantum computation not just faster than classical, but qualitatively different.
V. The Human as Qubit
Let us set aside the strictness of proof. What follows are observations — structural resemblances that may open a new angle of vision.
The superposition of identity. A person who has not yet decided who to be, what to do, what to think about a specific question — exists in a state that structurally resembles superposition. They simultaneously carry several possible selves: strict and gentle, believing and doubting, settled and nomadic. Social pressure — the observer — "collapses" this superposition into one determinate state. "Where do you stand — for or against?" The question demands collapse.
Jung understood this differently but in similar terms: the psyche contains opposites, and the task of individuation lies not in eliminating one pole but in their integration. The shadow is not an enemy to be defeated — it is part of the superposition that cannot be ignored without losing wholeness.
Entanglement in relationships. People who have interacted deeply — parents and children, partners, teacher and student — remain connected in ways that mechanistic psychology describes poorly. A change in the state of one is immediately reflected in the other, even when they are physically separated. Psychotherapists work with this phenomenon under the names "projection," "transference," "countertransference" — not as disputed concepts but as observable clinical reality.
Is this quantum entanglement in a physical sense? Almost certainly not. The brain operates at temperatures at which quantum coherent states decohere in femtoseconds — far faster than any neural process. This is an important limitation, to which we will return.
But the structural analogy — non-local correlation between connected systems — describes something real in human psychology.
Collective interference. Ideas, spreading through culture, behave like waves: some are amplified, others cancelled. Markets are an interference pattern of millions of private judgments. Cultural movements grow through the constructive interference of narratives. Panic spreads by the same mechanisms as enthusiasm.
Wave dynamics at the level of collective cognitive systems — that is not quantum mechanics. But the fact that the universe uses the same mathematical structures across different scales — from photons to ideas — is not an accident. Something deep in the nature of information and complexity lies behind it.
VI. Honest Limitations
Here it is necessary to stop and speak plainly.
First. Quantum biology exists as a genuine field of science. Researchers document quantum effects in photosynthesis, in the mechanisms by which birds navigate Earth's magnetic field, and possibly in the workings of smell. Acknowledging these effects in biology, however, is not the same as endorsing "quantum consciousness." The Penrose–Hameroff hypothesis, known as Orch OR, claims that consciousness is linked to quantum computations in neuronal microtubules. The hypothesis remains deeply contested: there is no experimental confirmation, and most neuroscientists do not accept it.
Second. Popular "quantum mysticism" is one of the most widespread abuses of genuine physics. "Quantum healer," "quantum positivity," "quantum success" — behind all such labels stands the same move: using technical terminology to confer an aura of rigor on what lacks rigor entirely. The phrase "your thoughts quantum-influence reality" has no relation whatsoever to quantum mechanics. What we have is wishful thinking in a physics costume.
Third. The analogies proposed above — the superposition of identity, the entanglement of relationships, collective interference — are structural metaphors, not literal descriptions of quantum phenomena. The psyche is not a quantum computer in a physical sense. Relationships are not governed by Bell non-locality. Cultural waves are waves in information space, not in the space of quantum probabilities.
Why employ these analogies at all, then?
Because they point toward something real, even if through an imperfect bridge. Reality at the quantum level demonstrates principles — superposition, non-locality, interference — that radically diverge from the classical mechanistic picture. Taking these principles as an epistemic reminder rather than a literal mechanism helps avoid the error of reductionism: the error of assuming that reality is exhausted by its classical description.
A map that honestly marks its blank spaces deserves more trust than one that claims completeness.
VII. The Observer
One question remains that quantum physics has posed but not resolved: the role of the observer.
In standard quantum mechanics, measurement — the interaction of a quantum system with a classical instrument — "collapses" the wave function. But where is the boundary between "quantum" and "classical"? Isn't there a loop here — since a classical instrument is itself made of quantum particles?
Some interpretations (von Neumann, Wigner) proposed that the final collapse occurs in the consciousness of the observer. Most physicists today reject this as a vitalist residue, explaining decoherence in purely thermodynamic terms. But the problem has not disappeared — it has been reformulated. Niels Bohr wrote: "We depend on what we observe, on our manner of asking questions."
Recognizing that knowledge is not a neutral act is not mysticism. The observer is always included in the system being observed. In physics this became a formal principle. In ecology it is called the observer effect. In psychology — the phenomenon of transference. In philosophy — Gadamer's hermeneutic circle.
A human being is not a dispassionate recorder of reality. They are a participant whose presence changes what they observe.
This does not diminish the possibility of objective knowledge. It complicates the idea of what objective knowledge is.
Closing Image
A quantum computer is a fragile creature. For qubits to maintain superposition, they must be isolated from the entire world: cooled to temperatures near absolute zero, shielded from the slightest electromagnetic noise. Any contact with the environment — decoherence. Superposition collapses into an ordinary bit.
Human beings are the opposite. We are superposed by nature, but the social environment continuously demands collapse: take a position, decide, choose a side. Education, career, culture — these are decoherence systems that from a living probability cloud form determinate identities.
This is not conspiracy and not tragedy. Determinacy is necessary for action. A ship that cannot choose a course will not reach port.
But sometimes — in moments of crisis, of falling in love, of meditation, of profound loss — superposition returns. You no longer know who you are. All certainties blur. This frightens. And it is precisely in this space of indeterminacy that something new is born.
Quantum computation is only possible in superposition. Before giving an answer — the system must spend some time being everything at once.
Perhaps this is true of us as well.
Ayobowan.