As I mentioned above, we collect in our basket only the mushrooms we already know. That metaphor is heavily loaded in my view, because it points to a fundamental limitation of familiarity-based cognition. I appreciate your concept of quantum coherence precisely because of its cross-disciplinary resonance and the direction of thinking it opens.
However, the second part of your response, where you speak about Bach, is completely confusing to me. The question of Bach and mathematics is valid as a question, but not as an answer, because it produces a large amount of correlational data without explaining the underlying reasons why Bach is considered “mathematical.” This is what I call a failure of the second level: a state in which we develop fluency around a phenomenon, and that fluency masquerades as understanding. Worse, it often blocks the very impulse to ask about underlying causes.
You see, most people operate at a very effective but very simplistic relationship between reality and its reflection. This is what is called object-level understanding. At this level, objects of reality have names, have properties, and in life we map those properties onto experience. This mapping gives us orientation, predictability, and practical competence; it is how we learn that fire burns, that a chair supports weight, that a word points to a thing.
The second level emerges when consciousness becomes capable of observing not only objects, but its own understanding of those objects as a non-involved witness. This metacognitive monitoring is a very powerful stance of consciousness, because it permits observation of data and observation of how that data is interpreted, applied, and acted upon. Thoughts, assumptions, emotional colorings, and narratives can be seen as objects rather than as the self, allowing a person to distinguish perception from interpretation and evidence from conclusion.
However, the second level carries a subtle but serious limitation. While it allows reflection, it often substitutes recognition for understanding. At this stage, people competently recognize nouns and attach adjectives and verbs to them, forming descriptions that feel meaningful and complete, yet they rarely examine why those nouns are connected to those attributes at all. Linguistic fluency, conceptual familiarity, and internal coherence are mistaken for comprehension, even when the underlying causal or structural relationships remain unexamined. The reference to nouns, adjectives, and verbs here is purely illustrative; language is used only as a convenient model for demonstrating relational understanding, not as the subject of the argument itself.
This limitation can be captured by the mushroom-basket metaphor. Cognitively, we tend to collect only what we already recognize, filtering experience through familiar categories and leaving the unfamiliar untouched. The danger arises when the basket is mistaken for the forest, when what is known begins to define what is even visible. Third-level awareness begins when attention turns to the selection mechanism itself, why these recognitions and not others, and what structures determine what can enter the basket at all.
The third level of metacognitive monitoring emerges precisely at this fault line. It appears when a person develops the natural capacity to judge the quality of their own understanding. At this level, one no longer asks only what do I think or how am I interpreting this, but do I actually understand why these concepts are connected. Recognition and fluency are no longer trusted as evidence; understanding must demonstrate causal or structural necessity rather than merely produce elegant correlations.
This is the level toward which figures like Richard Feynman consistently pointed. His insistence that knowing the name of something is not the same as understanding it reflects a third-level awareness that models, explanations, and symbols are interfaces rather than reality itself, a stance shared, across very different domains, by many people included somebody like Terence McKenna, Joseph Campbell, Alan Watts, Bach, Wagner, Camus and Carl Jung.
Jung, however, stands apart as an extreme case. He carried third-level metacognitive monitoring to an almost inhuman degree by consciously observing the myth-producing mechanisms of the psyche while they were operating within him. Very few minds have sustained that position without collapse, which is why his work remains both dangerous and foundational.
At the third level, metacognitive monitoring becomes structural rather than episodic. One observes not just thoughts or biases, but the epistemic scaffolding that generates entire worldviews, using explanations without reifying them and symbols without realizing them. Wisdom here is no longer the possession of correct beliefs, but fluency across models combined with disciplined humility toward all of them.
Why am I writing about this on a high-end audio site? This is a very good question, and the answer may shock you. Audio, ironically very much like music as its own discipline, exists perfectly comfortably at the first level of metacognitive monitoring. At the second level, music is still fine, but audio begins to look structurally unsound, revealing a huge number of gaping holes, which makes it even dangerous to touch. At the third level, the most amazing things happen: audio completely ceases to exist, and, very ironically, music disappears as well. They still exist as nouns and as practices of understanding, but they completely lose self-importance and value and become just part of the general mosaic of reality. What remains is something like binary noise, which denies any stable understanding or pattern recognition.
And this is where the magic happens. The anxiety and discomfort a person feels when faced with the fact that stable understanding is impossible suddenly become a powerful privilege. Ambiguity becomes more powerful and more humane than familiarity or knowledge ever were. Even if many audio people regard my position as completely absurd, and even if only a very few recognize what I am pointing toward, I have no identity invested in defending it; my only commitment is to follow thought wherever it unfolds.
Jarek, I have absolutely no opinion about you, nor any need to love or hate you based on whether you love or hate Bach; this conversation is, ironically, not about Bach at all. You may not understand what I am pointing to now, but if something changes for you in the future and you discover a genuine love or appreciation for Bach and begin to wonder why, you are welcome to contact me, and I will offer you a fully developed structural explanation—one you will not find in the thousands of books written about this composer.
"I wish I could score everything for horns." - Richard Wagner. "Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts." - Friedrich Nietzsche