ENIGMA 2

We do know, however, that the legendary poet Orpheus was crucially related to (some of) the mysteries. After all, he belongs to the select group of superhuman heroes who managed to enter and leave Hades, the Netherworld, alive. While he got famous for his failure to bring back his his dead wife Euridike, we overlook the fact that he himself got into and out of it. How? His singing was irresistable. He enchanted and entranced not only human beings but gods, animals and even plants as well. In a moment of shared presence, the powers of the shaman Orpheus were unlimited. But they failed him as soon as the force of his presence and vision got distracted into a worried look back. This was fatal for him twice. The first time he lost his beloved Euridike on their way from the world of the dead to the world of the living. He was not able to pay the price which the gods of Hades had demanded: not to look back in doubt before arriving in the upper world. Euridikes shadow vanished before she could transform into flesh and blood. (Is this prefiguring the fate of Schroedinger's cat and the tale of quantum physics: by looking we make her dead or alive: once we have looked, there is no in-between state, we force "reality" into a decision?)

We can interpret this as a criticism of an oversimplified notion of information or facticity. Whether Euridike (or the famous dead-or-alive cat) is there or not cannot be answered with a digital yes or no. To be or not to be is not the question here. The question is: who is looking where and when at what. In the underworld Euridike is just a shadow. Back in daylight "real life", she would be there, as the gods promised, if her existence would have been presupposed with absolute trust. Isn't that how we create realities? But there is a threshhold. The act of looking viz of taking measurements (e.g. in quantum physics) ends the one-ness of the world: the one-ness of Orpheus and Euridike or the ambiguity between particle and wave: open potentials are sacrificed for the creation of a fact. This reduction of uncertainty which we produce in every act of perception is usually valued as information. We need to live in a world of facts, a world of shared information. Information is something that could answer potential questions. That's why we think information has something to do with knowledge. But these two notions are only losely related. When I know something I do not need any kind of measurement or control. Of course, certain acts of measurement can lead to a certain kind of knowledge, but most of the knowledge we have we do not even know we know it because we have no doubt. At the other hand, information, as e.g. available in data banks, is not necessarily know or believed by anybody: most of it is not actually present in any human consciousness. Since it can become known or has been known at a given moment, we consider and treasure information as potential knowledge like money as potential wish-fulfiller in a bank-account. In the Orpheus story things went the other way round. It wasn't information turned into knowledge, but knowledge (i.e. trusting: she is there) decayed into information: is he there, yes or no. The question killed Euridike, i.e. it killed an open potential - or: it killed his /their love.