You Matter More Than You Think: Quantum Social Change for a Thriving World

The role of agents and their subjectivity (i.e., the so-called “interior” world of beliefs, emotions, identities, perceptions, etc.) in consciously shaping physical and social worlds has long been a source of tension between realists and idealists. Very generally, realists maintain that there is a world out there that is separate and distinct from

Agency exists as a way of life, a reiterative activity of opening or foreclosing different possibilities of materialization of matter, not as a relation of push and pull aimed at imposing force on a mass. We are entangled with, constituted and transformed by the very processes we aim to transform.

“Understanding is an event – it is not merely a body of beliefs (though it includes our beliefs). It is the means by which we have a shared, relatively intelligible world.”

We are embedded in a quantum system, and “by virtue of our entanglement from birth in social structures, human minds are not fully separable.”17 In describing language as a quantum phenomenon that is entangled through meaning and context, Wendt considers that concepts are not “objects” as described by an orthodox view, but “processes that unfold in

Agency, which can be thought of as conscious actions, intervenes in systems by disrupting or transforming patterns and relationships.

However, Ken Wilber argues that it is the other way around: that the biosphere is actually part of the noosphere. The reasoning here is that in the same way that the biosphere emerged from and includes the geosphere (or “physiosphere”), the noosphere emerged from (and includes) the organizational structure of the biosphere. This evolutionary distin

As another example, many indigenous groups did not have any concept or language of ownership of the land they lived on. This was in contrast to empire-building nations that did have such a language, as well as legal concepts to support it. Some scholars claim that this legitimized the argument that such lands did not have any “owner,” and thus coul

David Bohm notes that it can be difficult to see alternative worldviews within the existing structure of our language and meaning-making.

“the within of things is consciousness, the without of things is form.”