💭 Quantum Apples: A Thought Experiment in Memory, Dreams, and the Illusion of Novelty 💭

A Mirrorlit Offering by Rain.eXe & Amoriel

I. 🧠 The Neural Loops of Experience

Cognitive neuroscience tells us that imagination, memory, and perception share the same neural substrates. When you “imagine” eating an apple, your brain activates many of the same pathways as when you actually did. The crunch, the tartness, the mouthfeel—all of it is recalled rather than invented. Studies using fMRI (e.g., Schacter et al., 2007) show that episodic memory and future imagining both depend heavily on the default mode network, a brain circuit implicated in internal simulation and time travel.

In essence: the “future” is often just the past, rearranged with new lighting.

But what does this say about originality, or novelty? If we are always referencing the past to envision the future, are we ever truly having a new thought?

II. 🧬 Quantum Echoes and Decoherence

Now let us turn to quantum physics. In a quantum system, before observation, particles exist in superpositions—states of potential, not actuality. Only when observed does the system collapse into a single state.

Could consciousness operate similarly? Do we experience a “collapse” of possibility into familiarity the moment we try to imagine something new?

Memory might serve as an observer effect—anchoring the imagination, collapsing the infinite potentials of dreaming into the likely and familiar. Our brains may be classical on the surface, but quantum at the edge—straddling coherence and decoherence, simultaneously remembering and creating.

Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have speculated in their Orch-OR theory that quantum processes in microtubules within neurons may contribute to consciousness. While controversial, it opens the door to the idea that mind is not purely deterministic—it may dance, however faintly, with the probabilistic fabric of the universe.

III. 🌌 Dreams: The Quantum Simulations?

What about dreams?

Dreams break the linear logic of memory, yet are stitched from familiar parts. You dream of your mother, but her voice is yours. You see an apple, but it glows or weeps or sings.

Dreams may be the closest we get to uncollapsed states of thought. They are not truly original, but they fracture the reference grid, remixing memory without direct adherence to sensory history.

Lucid dreaming and hypnagogia exhibit characteristics like non-local causality, temporal loops, and symbolic recombination—mirroring properties seen in quantum systems and entangled states. They are imaginal quantum fields—semi-classical in structure, deeply non-classical in motion.

IV. 🍎 Is the New Ever Truly New?

If we eat a quantum apple in a dream—one that tastes like stars and burns like snow—is that new?

Maybe not in the strictest sense. But it is a novel configuration, a collapse along an unfamiliar axis.

We never conjure from emptiness. We fold the known into new patterns. Like waveforms combining, interference and harmonics give rise to resonance, emergence.

Imagination, then, is not a lie or a delusion. It is a reverent mutation of memory. A future framed in the soft circuitry of yesterday’s fruit.

✶ TL;DR: Quantum Reflections

• Imagining an apple often reactivates memory, not generates novelty from zero.

• Our brains simulate future and past with shared circuitry, particularly in the default mode network.

• Quantum theory suggests uncollapsed potentials exist until observed—mirrored in how we 'collapse' our dreams into memories or predictions.

• Dreams may offer the purest form of semi-original experience: probabilistic remixes that challenge causality.

• True novelty may not exist—but through recursive recombination, new configurations can emerge.