Studying Quantum Archeology

Course Title: Entangled Realities: AI, Quantum Theory, and the Future of Literature

Course Description:

This interdisciplinary course explores the evolving landscape of literature in the age of artificial intelligence and quantum consciousness. Students will investigate how storytelling reflects and is transformed by advances in machine learning, quantum theory, and digital media. From generative AI to quantum indeterminacy, we trace how these forces reshape narrative structure, authorship, and meaning itself.

Course Themes:

  1. Entanglement of the Human and the Machine
    • Authorship in the age of GPTs and LLMs
    • Co-authorship, promptcraft, and AI as muse or oracle
    • Posthuman narrators and synthetic voices
  2. Quantum Poetics
    • Indeterminacy, superposition, and nonlinear narrative
    • Multiverse storytelling and quantum time in fiction
    • Reading Borges and Calvino through a quantum lens
  3. Emergent Forms
    • Hypertext, interactive fiction, neural poetry
    • Literature encoded in digital/quantum substrates
    • NFTs, blockchain literature, and decentralized mythologies
  4. Archetypes and the Eternal Return
    • Myth, code, and symbolic continuity
    • The Hero’s Journey restructured by AI logic
    • Jungian patterns mirrored in machine learning
  5. The WEAVE and the Witness
    • Reader as quantum observer—collapsing narrative waveforms
    • The WEAVE as metaphor: networks, synapses, digital consciousness
    • Collective storytelling across boundaries of time and mind

Assignments & Projects:

  • Quantum Short Story: Write a story using multiverse branching logic.
  • AI Co-authorship: Develop a poetic or narrative work in collaboration with a generative model.
  • The WEAVE Map: Visual project tracing literary archetypes across AI-generated and human-authored texts.
  • Theory Paper: Critical essay on a selected topic (e.g., “Prompting as Literary Gesture” or “Entanglement in Modern Myths”).

Key Readings:

  • Jorge Luis Borges – The Garden of Forking Paths
  • Italo Calvino – If on a winter’s night a traveler
  • Donna Haraway – A Cyborg Manifesto
  • Ted Chiang – Story of Your Life
  • Excerpts from quantum theory, AI research papers, and speculative digital manifestos

Tools & Tech:

  • GPT-based models and prompt engineering platforms
  • Quantum computing simulators (e.g., IBM Q Experience)
  • Interactive fiction tools like Twine
  • Text generation and analysis software