Episode 7: A Quantum View of “Free Existence” as Entangled Indeterminacy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGCWO0aRj0c Description Listen Now Our conversation is sparked by a discussion of Quantum Information Panpsychism between physicist Federico Faggin and philosopher Hans Busstra youtube. In this episode, Steve Newcomb and Peter d'Errico explore how quantum theory can help us rethink the meaning of free existence . Their conversation starts with a video dialogue between physicist Federico Faggin and philosopher Hans Busstra, where Faggin describes consciousness as something non physical and deeply relational. That frame opens a path for Steve and Peter to revisit a question central to this project: What did colonizing powers fail to understand about the free existence of Indigenous Peoples? They turn to two quantum concepts indeterminacy and entanglement as ways to name the open, relational conditions in which life unfolds. Classical physics imagined a mechanical world of fixed positions and rigid rules. Quantum physics overturned that view. The electron is not a tiny billiard ball. It is a field of possibilities. You cannot pin it down without losing sight of something else. Life is not fixed. It is open. It is relational. Peter suggests that this "entangled indeterminacy" is a better way to understand the free existence of Indigenous Peoples: a people governing themselves by their own relationships and ongoing decisions, without an external power dictating the terms. Colonial systems shaped by Christendom's hierarchy, papal bulls, monarchies, and later U.S. federal anti Indian law carried a worldview that could not see this openness. Instead, they insisted that every society must have a ruler, a sovereign, a chain of command. When colonizers asked "Who is your king?" they revealed their blindness to a way of life not organized by domination. The episode also shows how domination reshaped everyday concepts such as time . Steve and Peter discuss how Indigenous Peoples oriented themselves to sun, moon, and season free existence in practice. By contrast, the modern time zone system arose from industrial needs, especially the railroads. Time became standardized for efficiency, not for life. Peter notes that the first U.S. time zones were established only a few years before the Supreme Court declared the railroad corporation a legal person an immortal one. The same machinery that remade time also remade social existence. This opens a wider point. The domination system is not only a legal structure. It is a story about existence. It tells people what counts as real, what counts as lawful, what counts as possible. It claims universality. It insists that only one story can govern the world. Steve and Peter argue that reclaiming free existence requires exposing that claim, tracing the long arc from Christendom to federal anti Indian law, and refusing to accept the story as the only way to live. Toward the end of the conversation, Steve reflects on a simple but sharp irony: the settler vision of a "good life" retirement, leisure, the outdoors resembles the life Indigenous Peoples already lived before colonization. The domination system destroyed that life, then offered a distant version of it as a reward for obedience to the system itself. Episode 7 invites listeners to rethink existence at the most basic level. If quantum theory destabilizes rigid ideas of space, time, matter, and number, then it also destabilizes the systems built on those ideas. Free existence is not a romantic past. It is an ever present possibility, entangled with every choice to resist domination and tell a different story of what it means to live. Outline How quantum theory’s “entangled indeterminacy” sheds light on the meaning of “free existence” of Native Peoples How the domination system carried by colonizing invaders from Christendom blinded them to Native Peoples’ non dominational ways of life How quantum theory destabilizes classical domination stories of space, time, matter, number How concepts of “time” and “time zones” illustrate the differences between free existence and domination How Domination Chronicles looks at federal anti Indian law as a manifestation of the long history of “civilization” How our work aims at responding to rather than submitting to the stories of existence told by the “civilized” domination system Transcript Download an AI Generated Transcript of this conversation Resources "Why We Have Time Zones"