Recently Aaron Francis wrote You can't trust a nice guy about the nuanced difference between nice and good. It's a great read. Meaning like this is something I get tripped up all the time. It reminded me of The Schism, what I call the gradient of meaning. For someone like me who's obsessed with meaning, this can be the difference between ounces and parsecs.

Both of those are measurements but they aren't the same thing.

My wife and I were talking about all the work I'm doing lately and she's been right by me letting me bounce ideas off her and keeping me grounded. Recently I had an experience that reminded me of The Schism. It's like a misunderstanding. Mine, other peoples. I just didn't understand it at the time.

During my logging to test the app I'm building I got in the habit of just brain dumping everything that came into my head. I was using it to test some theories about AI and use that in my app. I ended up discovering that I likely wasn’t just dealing with ADHD—I was probably autistic too.

I was using it to look for patterns in my ADHD. I wanted to see if I could finally figure out a way to control my chaotic mind. I ended up learning that I had built a tool that could keep up with my mind and that changed everything for me.

When I'm interacting with people and talking about ADHD there's a moment when I say I have ADHD and someone says "Me too, I forget stuff all the time!" and I feel it like a gut punch. What I meant in that moment was: "I feel like nobody understands me. I feel different and I don't understand how. I have this deep despair that I can't put into words" and what comes out is "I have profound ADHD" and they say "I forget sometimes".

I didn't know why it bothered me so much because of my blind spots. But through my logging and research the pattern emerged and I saw it clearly. And I finally understood the nature of The Schism.

I was studying quantum mechanics for a story, and I kept getting stuck on one question: Is the Wavefunction real? Some said yes—it describes a real physical process. Others insisted it’s just math, a tool to predict outcomes. That might seem like semantics, but for me, it wasn't. I wasn't just asking for a definition—I was trying to understand if it existed in the world, or only in our minds. Whether it's a "rock" or "love," a thing or an idea. Even in science, the Schism shows up—where meaning collapses under the weight of interpretation.

I never could get an answer that satisfied me. One person would describe it factually as a real thing. Others would say it's math that describes behavior. The literature in quantum mechanics doesn't agree on this, so how can someone like me possibly move past this? I decided to ask ChatGPT point blank, is the Wavefunction a thing or an idea. Is it real.

And the answer shows the fullest range of problem with The Schism. When asking if something is true, what I'm asking is ontological (objectively real, it exists beyond ourselves) or epistemic truth. It's easiest for me to think of that as "rock" vs "love". A physical thing vs an idea. This overlaps with people thinking literally. To add to this complexity something doesn't have to be physical for me to consider it "real". If the Wavefunction is a process or function, that's still real. We may not be able to see it's physical mechanism but what it does might be real.

It got worse. When I dug into it more I found out that it's undecided in the quantum mechanics community whether the Wavefunction is real or just a math equation that describes behavior. Both of those things are real but the meaning is lost in The Schism. It has a very real consequence for people trying to understand and explore topics like this. If you're familiar with the observer effect this will be obvious to you. Some people think the observer means a person or conscious being. But that's not what it means. And that difference is everything. It's not a small detail.

Sometimes this difference doesn't matter. If you show me a rock and tell me its granite I will have no follow up questions. There's no confusion there for me. For stuff with more depth though, it means the world to me.

I don’t know that there’s a fix for this. Maybe there shouldn’t be. But I’m acutely aware of it now, and I’m trying to show up better because of it—not to be right, but to be understood.

Have you noticed this in your life? The friction between words and meaning?

If we’re always translating, how often do we mistake the echo for the source? How many of our conflicts—personal, philosophical, even scientific—are really just a Schism in disguise?

Photo by Paul Lesur on Unsplash