stream of consciousness on cognition, science, philosophy again
october 6 2026
I’ve been enjoying films lately. In the past week, I’ve watched Snowpiercer, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Thing, American Psycho, Donnie Darko… some other random movie with practical effects… these have all challenged my media literacy in beautiful ways.
Why do I say beautiful? I mean, a piece of art so expansive, like film, has a way of touching the ineffable.
It is that struggle that compels people like myself to write. Well, many people that I cannot compare myself to are similarly compelled. It must be some instinct of human cognition. Communication is critical to our united species…
I find it beautiful to communicate other shared attributes without words. There are so many ways to communicate beyond the “rational”.
I am studying introductory quantum mechanics for a graduate program. I often find myself reminiscing of the philosophical discussions within my “History of Heaven” class, a course for my minor in Chinese, of all things. I fell asleep so many times in that class… not intentionally of course! I was just so tired. The conclusion felt like an explosion of truth for many students, I believe. Revelations that were too difficult to put into words, maybe because I (and I would wager, most others) were not hanging onto the careful language our professor used throughout the semester. That said, I find myself revisiting major concepts from that class that appear in media of all kinds. Yes, from these films to my specialized education.
And so I feel, on the tip of my tongue so to speak, the desire to generalize, and express that generalization. My mind seeks writing and self-reflection to reach this, to formulate this generalization.
I know communicating is my goal and I want to go back to communicating with others, to stop writing here. But there is something (or some things?) tethered to the idea of “self” that requires me to conceal these thoughts to this document.
No one knows exactly what I’m doing right now. And I have no definitive way of knowing what anyone else in the world, even my closest companions, are existing right now until I use up to every aspect of my being to assess them. This lesson can be expanded extremely thoroughly from a philosophical lens, whose emphasis of each sense becomes increasingly important with recent trends in deception (outputs of “genAI” as we know it as today).
However, or rather, additionally, this is an extremely important concept in my study of quantum information science to this point!
I have, over time, reiterated to myself what was once felt revelatory; that mathematics descended from the same philosophical, idle men who expressed logic in other fields we deem subjective. Of course, this leads to too many thoughts of, well, they still worked hard to come up with airtight assertions! Look at how molecular theory improved medicine! (I remember last night’s viewing of Donnie Darko, and the scene of discussing a biology assignment). And then, I return to how often my professors in physics and electrical engineering will say things like, we just threw things at a wall and used trial and error to get here. This is all leading me to say, I believe we have some limitations to our realm of understanding.
Which then reminds me of another concept I hung onto from that History of Heaven class.
We, as humans, simply cannot imagine a color outside of our boundaries of perception.
We are not limitless in our imagination, truly.
The impossible are only formulated in reference to the possible. This is proof by contradiction—something we often perform in quantum mechanics.
This makes me concerned for the validity of quantum mechanics! What have the limitations of human perception prevented us from discovering? Grand and real implications of subatomic research, branched from/to quantum mechanical logic, have been realized—see nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). And so, I also believe further research will lead to real applications. But, there seems to be something missing that we cannot prove. Actually, it has only been disproven—apparently, the missing variable posited by Einstein to quantum mechanics (?) was disproven recently. Is this just a result of perception-related limitations?!
I keep thinking about how we found out that some shrimp have the ability to see colors outside of our range. We used human-derived frameworks to assess a mode of perception that, when compared to the shrimp (and we must have something in common for that comparison to be possible) lies outside of own. It’s just… frustrating to imagine our species’ limitations are simple reality for others. Hah! I’m kind of over that very quickly. Of course, I’m used to personal limitations being compared to others of my own species, and I feel very little frustration in that lack of equivalence. After all, many things can be learned… and those that I cannot learn, I can approximate, and land really close to exceeding my limitations (take makeup, for example, that others in my species can be fooled by). But, beyond the interaction with others, beyond interaction with beings who possess cognition comparable to humans, where is that assessment?
Now I’m remembering my education toward my “concentration”—cognition. We learned that, generally, humans tend to identify objects first by shape, and then by detail. It’s easy to imagine how mismatches in comparison can occur after knowing this.
Approximation in one perspective (normal human perspective) lands really close, but not as close from the other perspective (say, a cat)…
Why is this part of cognition also evident in mathematics?! Frequentist and Bayesian approaches to probability come to mind.
Again, this looks like a limitation to me. And when it concerns something outside of the “self”, it feels frustrating. Thoroughly so.
I return to the comfort of films, where I can do just a little thinking to see that there are some things that can be shared without using language as the approach. There are a great many tools that are products of human perception.
Can other ways of expressing the ineffable be used to make discoveries in other fields? Say it is so! With how much philosophy can be compared to science, can we express science through other means? Like, different objects can peel the same apple. Does this make any sense?
In experiments, we must apply objects that exist in forms that can be assessed beyond a single venue of perception. Objects cannot simply just be seen—they must prove their existence in other ways that we sense, can assess, can place onto our axis of existence.
What other forms of existence can some object take?
I should really get back to my puzzles. (By puzzles, I mean studying. I have a midterm for quantum computing coming up and a quiz tomorrow that’ll probably be on quantum entanglement, behavior of 2 qubit states by means of linear algebra, and I hope not quantum teleportation.)
Well, my writing is NG but I needed to type it out. My silly mind and its limitations. Edit: Please interact with this and discuss with me! I don't update this website because I don't know javascript or whatever, and i dont feel like polishing the lang here, discuss the material only w me pls