On being a wave and a particle

In order to understand how light behaves you sometimes have to think of it as a particle; sometimes it as a wave. We learn this at school, where they don't generally mention that the same is true of everything else in the world, not just light.

It's usual to think of ourselves as particles in a universe of particles. Particles eat other kinds of particles, wear particles, and tell, or don't tell things (particles of information) to other particles. This perspective sets up meaningful boundaries around various parts of the world and we can uncover real understandings by thinking this way. I'm a big fan of my smart phone, my hot and cold running water, and the fact that I'm here at all, which I owe to modern medicine.

But we are also waves in the stuff of the universe: local gestures of the space-time-mind through which other gestures - minerals, energy, other life - flow. Our actions provoke other actions and reactions and the interference patterns are so complex as to be unpredictable. Chemicals and microbes flow through us around the world too - we catch and pass on all manner of colds as well as ideas. Metabolites of the medicines we take pass through us into the water the whole city drinks. Sometimes we might, in time, have exactly the opposite effect to the one we intended.

We don't like the implicit loss of free will inherent in the wave perspective: we want to make choices, not just react and rebound against the rest of the universe. But the alternative can be even more depressing: as infinitesimal particles, we are futilely struggling like fallen flies in the meniscus of the world. It's a matter of scale: we can't change the world - it changes, and we might be part of that change.

The only answer is to let go of free will, and just do what we do. You love your children because you love them, not because you should. And all the laws and all the wars in the world haven't stopped people from doing cruel things.

Do we dare let go of both the responsibility and the blame. Could the world could survive an escape from conscious, intentional morality? Might it even be the saving of the world?

I  am a wave, continuous with the universe and participating in unpredictable developments in unexpected ways. But I'm also a particle and unless I get up to put the kettle on, or persuade someone else to, there will be no tea.