All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into new forms. The spoken word was the first technology by which man was able to let go of his environment in order to grasp it in a new way. (Understanding Media)¹

the ratio² among sight and sound, and touch³ (…) offer[s] precisely that place to stand which Archimedes asked for: “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” The media [as defined by the elementary structure of this ratio] offer exactly such a place to stand, for they are extensions of our senses, if need be into outer space. (Effects of the Improvements of Communication Media, 1960)

inputs are never the same as (…) outputs! This pattern of non-lineality is evident in every human activity. (Take Today, 137).⁴

Reading Heisenberg has made me feel that my media studies are at the state that nuclear studies had reached in 1924. But my heart sinks, because those nuclear studies were being urged forward by eager teams, and media studies enjoys no such support at all. But I am bold [enough] to say that many of the same techniques and concepts are needed for advancing media studies as were used for nuclear studies. But there is the huge difference, that media studies involve human lives far more profoundly than nuclear studies ever have done, or ever can do. (McLuhan to E.T. Hall)⁵

The signature suggestion of McLuhan’s undergraduate mentor at the University of Manitoba, Rupert Lodge, was that philosophy — and by extension truth and reality⁶ — comes in three irreducible flavors: realism, idealism and pragmatism:⁷

If philosophers are to come down from their ivory tower and be of some practical use in the world — as is so often demanded nowadays — one great difficulty which they must somehow surmount is the difficulty occasioned by their internecine differences. There are, roughly speaking, three schools of philosophy (…): realism, idealism, and pragmatism. Each has many branches, concerning which, qualifications might have to be introduced; but taken as wholes, the three are fundamentally distinct. (…) Each of these schools exploits a particular kind of explanatory hypothesis. Realism exploits what Aristotle called the “material cause,” idealism the “formal cause” and pragmatism the “efficient cause”. These lines of explanation as followed by the three philosophical schools, are not only different. They are divergent. The methods, backgrounds, and outlooks of the three schools become increasingly different. Even where they all use the same words, they understand them in distinctive senses. They compete with each other over the whole field of experience, and, as far as they can, negate each other’s explanatory efforts. To the practical mind, philosophers appear to be engaged in a sort of triangular duel.⁸

Lodge was interested in the “practical use” of his ideas in education, business and throughout society, taking his three different possibilities more or less at face value. The central questions for him were: how to recognize the basic forms? how to interrogate their influence throughout the life of the individual and society?  how to put to use the ever-present possibility of other approaches? McLuhan took over the importance of these questions, but also intuited that the further exploration of the implications of such pluralism might be of critical importance in a global village where truths and worldviews were increasingly in deadly conflict with one another and with the physical environment. This would lead him in the direction of what might be termed a quantum theory of information and communication.

The central implication of Lodge’s threefold proposal, McLuhan eventually found, was that no human experience can be continuous on its preceding moment or input. As he recorded in Project in Understanding New Media: “Early in 1960 it dawned on me that the sensory impression proffered by a medium like movie or radio, was not the sensory effect obtained.”⁹

If input and output were connected in some continuum, a plurality of different fundamental approaches to experience would not be possible.

No fundamental approach can be based on a previous one since in this case it would no longer be primary — it would be secondary on that earlier basis and itself not basic at all. Instead, a fundamental approach must be able to bootstrap itself as its own cause on its own base or ground. Further, this possibility of bootstrap auto-ignition must be synchronic — always available and always active — since, were this not the case, experience would at least sometimes be continuous on previous moments. At such hypothetical times, the activation of the supposedly fundamental approaches would be repressed or cancelled by continuity. Here again they would not be fundamental at all.

The upshot is that human experience, at its deepest level, must take place as a kind of perpetual auto-ignited sparking of some one of the fundamental possibilities of approach. Above this level, just as in the physical universe, there may be all sorts of predictable regularities having to do with, say, the typical compound formations of the fundamental possibilities and their properties. But at the level of contesting fundamentals, constraints comparable to those of quantum physics must be in force.  For example, it must always be uncertain in principle what sort of experience will follow on a chronologically prior one. So experience at any moment may be specified, but not its trajectory. Or typical trajectories may be identified, but the particular moments constituting them cannot be specified without interrupting the continuity of those linear trajectories (aka, ‘world lines’).

Hence, the ‘location’ and the ‘momentum’ deriving from the fundamental dominants of human experience — media — may be specified, but not both together and at once.

McLuhan’s vocabulary can be understood only in this context. Thus, ‘probing’ and ‘exploring’ in his work have to do with an exercise of thought that is exactly not continuous. They arise freely out of the ineluctable “gap” in every moment of human experience between input and output, “the medium [that] is the message”, and represent the attempt to find a new way to consider, and perhaps to solve, suddenly, some problem.

Because McLuhan saw that quantum physics had encountered these sorts of problems, he foresaw that the conceptualities deployed in it could be helpful in the investigations of quantum communications.  As he said in his letter to Hall cited above:

many of the same techniques and concepts are needed for advancing media studies as were used for nuclear studies.

The reverse is also possible:

many of the same techniques and concepts are needed for advancing nuclear studies as were used for media studies.

But the potential synergies between quantum physics and quantum communications go far beyond “techniques and concepts”. Especially, the inter-working of the two could establish truth once again as the ground and calling of human beings and so put an end to the reign of nihilism.

Nihilism would be ended by demonstration that quantum communications can aid in the specification of physical reality (from quarks to the universe).¹⁰ For such demonstration in the hard science of physics would rebound on the domain of communications in the supposedly soft social sciences and humanities to reveal their capacity for truth.

Life in truth would be re-established on this earth — only now on “the authority of knowledge“.