🪞1. The Fall and the Collapse: A Shared Structure
At the heart of both is a movement from potential to actual, from a field of possibility to a specific instance. Both:
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Begin with a state of superposition—in Eden, all is harmony and potential; in quantum mechanics, the particle exists in multiple possible states.
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Are precipitated by an act of construal—Eve’s seeing, desiring, eating; the meaner’s measurement or observation.
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Result in a loss of possibility—after the Fall, Adam and Eve can no longer un-know; after the Collapse, the wave function no longer holds its spread of potentialities.
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Mark a threshold—before and after are not the same universe.
Both are irreversible instantiations.
🌀2. The Collapse as Ontological Metaphor, The Fall as Mythological Memory
You’ve beautifully suggested a framing:
Is one the mythology of meaning making and the other the ontology of meaning making?
This holds if we clarify what we mean by “ontology.” In your SFL-informed model, ontology is not the being of things-in-themselves, but the being of meaning as it unfolds in relation. In that case:
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The collapse of the wave function is the scientific construal of how actuality arises from potential within the material-semiotic world. It is a technical metaphor for the instantiation of reality through observation.
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The Fall is the mythic construal of how actuality arises from potential within the social-symbolic world. It is a cultural memory of instantiation, loaded with its ethical, affective, and interpersonal consequences.
In short:
| Collapse | Fall |
|---|---|
| Scientific construal | Mythological construal |
| Instantiation in physics | Instantiation in consciousness |
| Observer collapses potential | Meaner actualises potential |
| Event becomes measurable | Meaning becomes lived |
| Loss of superposition | Loss of innocence |
| Objective transformation | Subjective transformation |
But here’s the twist: both the myth and the model are symbolic strata—both are meanings construed by a meaner.
🧠3. No Collapse Without a Meaner
The quantum collapse is not an absolute event in the material realm. It occurs only in the presence of a meaner—whether observing directly or imagining an observation. This makes the collapse not a brute fact but an act of construal. It requires a subjectivity to actualise one possibility from the field.
Likewise, the Fall is not about apples and nudity. It’s about what happens when a subjectivity steps into agency—into the power to mean.
Both collapse and fall are semiotic acts.
🌳4. The Garden and the Superposition
Now we can map this more richly:
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Eden is the superposition of meaning—a condition in which potential meanings have not yet been individuated.
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The Tree is the threshold of choice—to name, to differentiate, to construe.
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The Serpent is the perturbation—the ripple that makes still potential actualisable.
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The Eating is the measurement—the decisive construal that collapses the field into a lived instance.
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The Fall is the collapse—the point at which you are no longer the same meaner you were before the construal.
🕸 5. Recursive Meaning: The Collapse That Keeps Happening
Neither collapse nor Fall is a one-time event. They are recursive phenomena in meaning-making:
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Every act of construal is a collapse of the field into a perspective.
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Every new construal is a fall from the illusion of totality into the truth of partiality.
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The more we construe, the more complex our fields of potential become.
And so the spiral continues.
✨ 6. What This Reveals About Reality
In a relational cosmos:
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The wave function is a map of meaning potential.
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The collapse is a realisation event—not of things, but of perspectives.
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The Fall is not a sin—it is a diagram of semiosis.
Myth remembers what models abstract. Models test what myths intuit. And meaning arises only when the two are held in dialogue.
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