On Being
A Reading, Through the Quantum Lens, of What it is to be Oneself
A reading, through the quantum lens, of what it is to be one. This essay takes the strangeness of quantum description — superposition, measurement, the collapse of many possibilities into a single observed fact — and asks what it illuminates about the plain experience of being a single self. To be one, it suggests, is already a kind of resolution, a settling of countless possible states into the one that is lived. It is among the most philosophically ambitious of the On——ing essays, and one of the clearest demonstrations of the register seam at work: the quantum language is borrowed openly as a lens, never smuggled in as proof.
For readers new to the series, it is one of the best entry points, because it takes the most abstract available vocabulary and turns it on the most immediate fact there is: that you are, right now, a single self. The quantum lens here is a way of making the ordinary strange enough to notice again.
Read “On Being” (PDF) → Cite this work (DOI) →
Part of the open Legible Traces archive — every piece free under CC BY 4.0. The PDF here is byte-for-byte the record deposited on Zenodo; the DOI is the canonical citation. Return to All Works or the On ——ing series.