Superpositioned Worlds

How Secular Urban Moderns Can Re-Enter the Pluriverse Through the Metaphors of Science

For decades, scholars of decoloniality and pluriversality have argued that the modern world is not the only world. Other ontologies—ancestral, indigenous, relational, animist—continue to exist alongside the dominant worldview of late-stage capitalism. These world-spaces hold alternative metaphors for living, and they carry different understandings of what it means to be human, to be in relation, to belong to a landscape, or to inhabit time. Pluriversality, at its core, is the recognition that many worlds coexist and that no single metaphoric regime has a monopoly on reality.

But acknowledging this plurality and inhabiting it are two different things. For secular urban moderns—those formed by scientific rationalism, procedural cognition, and the architectural logics of capitalism—the metaphors of the global South rarely land in a way that transforms lived experience. They are appreciated aesthetically, admired ethically, even embraced politically, yet they remain externally located. They do not migrate into the internal architecture where meaning is formed.

This is not a failure of the metaphors themselves. It is a mismatch of modes of sense-making. Modernity has produced individuals whose perceptual receptors are calibrated to scientific explanations, empirical claims, and material structures. Their imaginations have been shaped by physics, computation, networks, and systems models. A metaphor like “the mountain is a person” may resonate emotionally, but it will not reorganize how a secular modern perceives the world. It cannot install itself into their operating worldview because it relies on symbolic grammars they no longer speak.

And yet, if secular moderns are to escape the reduction of late capitalism—which quietly casts them as functional subalterns in a world optimized for extraction and productivity—they, too, must find a way to enter the pluriverse. They need metaphors that destabilize the notion of a single, dominant reality and open a passage back into multiplicity. They need new interpretive tools that permit them to inhabit more than one world at a time, without requiring them to adopt a religious or ancestral cosmology they cannot metabolize.

This is where contemporary science becomes unexpectedly generative.

Quantum mechanics, complexity theory, systems biology, information theory, and topology already describe a reality that is profoundly pluriversal. Their concepts destabilize modernity’s most cherished assumptions. They offer metaphors that secular moderns trust because they emerge from domains that have shaped their cognitive development. And they reveal a universe in which multiple realities coexist, in which relations are ontologically primary, and in which observers are entangled with the worlds they help bring into being.

Superposition is the first metaphor that invites secular moderns into pluriversality. It describes a world where multiple states coexist, layered on top of one another, waiting for interaction to collapse one possibility into a particular expression. As a metaphor, superposition tells us that many realities exist simultaneously—cultural, perceptual, existential—and that our lived world is not singular but selected through participation. It gives modern individuals permission to sense themselves as inhabiting overlapping modes of being, none of which require exclusive allegiance.

Entanglement reveals that relation is not secondary. It is constitutive. Identities, selves, and meanings arise not from isolated individuals but from networks of mutual influence and resonance. Entanglement becomes a secular metaphor for relational ontology, one that requires no spiritual scaffolding yet still conveys the profound interdependence found in indigenous philosophies.

Topology provides a language for describing the shape of experience itself—how worlds are organized, how identities stabilize in attractors, how social and psychological forms bend, fold, or rupture. Topological Awareness Mode (TAM), understood as a secular practice, makes it possible to feel the structure of one’s world and to recognize that different metaphoric regimes produce different experiential landscapes. TAM gives individuals a way to move between those landscapes with skill and discernment.

Resonance offers a path to coherence: the sense that a particular metaphor, practice, narrative, or way of being vibrates in harmony with one’s internal field. It relocates meaning from beliefs to pattern alignment. It allows secular moderns to sense the “rightness” of an experience without requiring them to adopt any metaphysical explanation. In doing so, resonance becomes a bridge between worlds.

What emerges from these scientific metaphors is not a rejection of the metaphors of the South but a complementary pathway. Instead of facing a binary—either adopt Indigenous metaphors or remain locked in modernity’s single ontology—secular moderns gain access to a third option: a way to re-enter the pluriverse through metaphors that match their epistemic temperament.

This matters because metaphors do more than describe reality; they shape it. They tune our perception, structure our agency, and define the range of worlds we believe we can inhabit. When the inherited metaphors of modernity begin to crack—exhausted by precarity, ecological collapse, and the psychic costs of extraction—new metaphors must arise to guide us into the next world.

If pluriversality is the project of expanding the multiplicity of worlds we can inhabit, then the metaphors of science can serve as the secular modern’s entry point. They do not replace the metaphors of the South, nor do they diminish them. Instead, they widen the field of possibility. They help create a pluriverse that is capacious enough to hold many ways of being, including those whose imaginations were shaped not by ancestor stories but by physics labs, mathematics classrooms, and the invisible architectures of the information age.

In this sense, adopting scientific metaphors is not an escape from modernity but a way of completing its arc—transcending the narrow, one-world worldview it inherited from industrial capitalism and stepping into a reality where many worlds coexist, each with its own coherence, its own resonance, and its own pathways of meaning.

Superposition, in this context, is more than a metaphor. It is the cognitive gateway through which secular moderns can rediscover plurality, sense multiple realities, and reclaim the freedom to build lives that do not collapse into a single predetermined world. It is how they begin to re-enter the pluriverse—not as tourists, not as imitators, but as world-builders in their own right.