Quantum (Un)certainty
Time Is the Only Thing That’s Real
Forget everything you think you know about measurement.
In Lucy, Scarlett Johansson’s character delivers a truth that physics has been circling for a century:
“Film a car speeding down a road. Speed up the image infinitely, and the car disappears. So what proof do we have of its existence? Time gives legitimacy to its existence. Time is the only true unit of measure. Without time, we don’t exist. Time is unity.”
We’ve codified existence to bring it down to human size. One plus one equals two. But one plus one has never equaled two. Numbers are human inventions -scales we created to forget the unfathomable scale.
Without duration, nothing exists. Not matter. Not you. Not your potential.
Your life is a timeline you’re actively constructing -whether you realize it or not.
Uncertainty Fractures Reality
Here’s where physics meets psychology.
In quantum mechanics, particles exist in superposition -multiple states simultaneously -until observation collapses them into a single outcome. The act of measurement doesn’t just reveal reality. It creates it.
Rick and Morty’s “A Rickle in Time” dramatizes this perfectly. After spending six months in frozen time, the trio’s existence becomes unstable. When time resumes, Morty and Summer’s uncertainty about their place in the universe causes something extraordinary:
The timeline fractures.
Not metaphorically. Visually. The screen splits into two panels. Then four. Then -as their anxiety compounds -sixty-four simultaneous realities, each showing a slightly different version of the same moment.
A Fourth-Dimensional Being appears and explains what they’ve done: they’ve turned their reality into a “shredded mess of possibilities.”
Rick doesn’t split. Why?
Because Rick knows exactly who he is.
| State | Reality |
|---|---|
| Uncertainty | Interference patterns, fragmented timelines, multiple selves |
| Certainty | Collapsed wave function, singular path, coherent identity |
The Neuroscience of Certainty
The bridge from physics to lived experience runs through your prefrontal cortex.
Decision-making happens in this region -the seat of impulse control, consequence evaluation, planning, and prioritization. Like any neural pathway, it requires neuroplasticity to develop.
The placebo effect proves that expectation becomes biology:
- Patient believes a pill will work -> brain releases real endorphins and dopamine
- The healing isn’t imagined -it’s manufactured by belief
This mechanism extends beyond medicine:
- Certainty lowers your threat response. The amygdala quiets. Cortisol drops. Resources shift from defense to creation.
- Uncertainty triggers the opposite cascade. Brain scans for danger. Decision-making centers go offline. You become biochemically paralyzed.
When you decide with conviction, you’re issuing a biological command that reorganizes your entire nervous system toward a goal.
The Surrogate Prefrontal Cortex
When a controlling parent manages every decision, they become what researchers call a “surrogate prefrontal cortex.” The child’s brain remains reactive rather than proactive. The neural pathways for confident choosing never form.
Martin Seligman’s research on learned helplessness explains the result: if a child learns that their actions don’t change outcomes, the brain eventually stops trying.
The internal logic becomes: “My input doesn’t matter, so why exert the energy?”
| Parenting Style | Parent’s Role | Long-term Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Authoritarian | The Decider | High dependency, “atrophied” choice-making |
| Permissive | The Servant | Poor self-regulation |
| Authoritative | The Guide | Strong executive function, high self-efficacy |
The Weight of Unresolved Promises
Here’s a layer most people miss: certainty isn’t just about future decisions. It’s about clearing the past.
Think of your mind as a computer with limited working memory. Every decision you make -every task you commit to, every question you promise to answer -gets loaded into RAM.
When you resolve it, the memory clears. When you don’t, it stays resident.
Unresolved promises are unclosed Chrome tabs.
They run in the background. They consume resources. They slow everything down. And the more emotionally charged the promise, the more RAM it demands.
- You said you’d call your mother. You didn’t.
- You committed to finishing the project. You abandoned it.
- You promised yourself you’d change. You haven’t.
Each one sits there. Waiting. Draining.
In programming, unresolved promises throw errors. In the mind, they throw anxiety.
Samskaras: The Grooves in the Mind
Yogic philosophy has a name for this: Samskara.
Samskaras are deep-seated psychological imprints -mental “grooves” carved by past thoughts and actions.
The River Analogy: Imagine a field where water flows. Every time it rains, the water follows the same path, eventually carving a deep trench. Soon, the water must flow through that trench. It has no choice.
Your habits are samskaras. Your automatic responses are samskaras. Your guilt is a samskara -a groove so deep the mind keeps falling into it.
Unresolved guilt is one of the strongest samskaras. It creates a cycle: the pain of the past leads to the desire to numb out in the present, which creates more guilt, which deepens the groove.
The mind becomes an emotional ball of yarn -intertwined, knotted, impossible to untangle without deliberate intervention.
Clearing the Grooves
Alcoholics Anonymous understood this intuitively.
Step Nine involves making direct amends to people we’ve harmed. This isn’t a simple apology -it’s a rectification of the past.
The Yogic equivalent is Pratipaksha Bhavana: an opposite action that weakens negative impressions and creates new, positive ones.
Both work the same way:
| Concept | Mechanism |
|---|---|
| Samskara removal | Conscious, virtuous action replacing the groove |
| Step Nine Amends | Direct restitution dissolving guilt’s hold |
| Result | Chitta Vritti Nirodha -the quieting of mental turbulence |
By making amends, you perform “psychic surgery” on your samskaras. You’re not just saying sorry. You’re actively filling in the old, destructive grooves so you can walk a new path.
The Protocol: Clearing Working Memory
You can’t build a coherent timeline while running 47 background processes.
The Protocol:
-
Audit your open tabs. What promises -to yourself, to others -remain unresolved? Write them down.
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Visit each one. Don’t avoid. Look directly at it. Feel the weight.
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Decide. For each item, ask: Can I resolve this now, or am I past it?
- If you can resolve it: do it.
- If you’re past it: close the tab. Consciously. Deliberately. Release it.
-
Make amends where needed. Not to feel better about yourself -to dissolve the groove’s power over your present.
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Notice the lightness. Each closed tab frees working memory. Each resolved promise quiets the noise.
This is the hidden prerequisite for certainty. You can’t collapse your timeline into one coherent path while your mind is fragmented across a hundred unresolved threads.
Creating Your Timeline
Here’s the synthesis:
Choosing is not selecting between options. Choosing is creating a timeline.
But you cannot create a coherent future while carrying an unresolved past. The weight of broken promises, the grooves of old guilt, the unclosed tabs of abandoned commitments -they fragment your attention and split your reality.
The work is twofold:
- Clear the past: Close the tabs. Make amends. Fill in the grooves.
- Collapse the future: Decide with certainty. Issue biological commands. Build your timeline.
Both require the same thing: the courage to decide.
The Collapse
The universe doesn’t reward confidence or punish hesitation. It simply responds to patterns.
Uncertainty creates interference. Your cells wait for instructions. Your prefrontal cortex goes quiet. Your timeline blurs into a shredded mess of possibilities. You exist, but barely -a superposition of selves that never collapsed into one.
Certainty creates coherence. The wave function collapses. The timeline solidifies. Neural resources organize. The grooves smooth out. The tabs close. You become real in a way you weren’t before.
Rick survives because he knows who he is. The timeline fractures around those who don’t.
Time gives legitimacy to existence. Certainty gives legitimacy to your timeline.
The question isn’t whether you can choose your future. The question is whether you have the conviction -and the cleared working memory -to collapse it into existence.
“A problem well defined is a problem half solved.”
Definition is certainty. Certainty is collapse. Collapse is reality.
Clear the tabs. Close the grooves. Choose.