Believe in Something, Even If It’s a Load of Psychobabble with the Word Quantum Thrown In

Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true. –Homer Simpson

I used to dabble in quantum babble -- i.e., those popularized books that began flooding the market in 1975 with the publication of Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics. Now I am hesitant to do so, because quantum physics is so peculiar that you can use it to prove just about anything you want, from backward moving time, to a 26 dimensional Cosmos, to creating reality with your mind, to the existence of a multiverse.

You know, dozens of universes spontaneously appear each year. It’s just not really widely reported.

If we’re going to investigate the nature of this Cosmos, I suppose we can’t avoid talking about quantum physics, even though my specialty is generalization.

I thought we agreed: No deepaking the chopra!

Well, to quote Richard Feynman, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics,” which makes me an expert. The point is, it is impossible to comprehend the subatomic realm in terms of the familiar world we inhabit. To be sure, the math works spectacularly – I am told – in that quantum physics is the most accurate theory ever devised by man. We just can’t imagine what it describes. There are no fixed shapes, definite locations, or predictable trajectories moving through continuous space and time, so however we picture it, the picture is surely wrong. No one can envision a wave function. Rather, the math provides us with more of a known unknown.

Socrates was considered the wisest man in Athens because at least he knew he didn’t know.

Yes, and that’s where I had them. Of course they laughed at me and made jokes, but we can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic that metaphysics not only transcends physics, but can never be derived from it. We can comprehend why quantum physics is so odd, but not from below, nor from here in the middle, rather, only from the top, where metaphysical principles reign down on us. These principles entail everything below them, including physics. Conversely, we cannot inductively arrive at our metaphysical principles via quantum physics or any other special science, because the very practice of science presupposes them.

For among other things, left unstated is the presumption that the material or even submaterial world is the actual foundation of reality. But as argued by Robert Rosen in his Life Itself, the material world as described by physics is too impoverished to account for complex systems with interior relations and numberless interconnections, let alone for a mind capable of physics. Not so much as a single living cell could exist in a purely externally related material universe, because there could in fact be no life at all, for the simple reason that any living organism exemplifies part-whole relations that are only possible in a Cosmos that already exemplifies them. In short, no amount of exterior or atomistic parts can make the vertical leap to an interiorly related or organismic whole.

So, who died and left physics in charge?

No one and everyone, I suppose. But subatomic quarks and neutrinos are one thing, truth another, and one of these is not like the other. In this book, truth is our north star, whatever its source and wherever it leads. Except this is a holographic Cosmos, so any truth is deeply entangled with other truths and even with the Truth itself which conditions the numberless south stars below.

So, here we are, standing on the ground floor of the Cosmos, or rather, on the gelatinous ground beneath the floor. Which raises the question: how do we get from that vaporous world of sub-existential potency to the actual Cosmos we inhabit? How can these two worlds be reconciled?

Only one way, for the simple reason that there exist perennial truths that must be true even for quantum physics but can never be derived therefrom -- in other words, necessitating a top-down rather than bottom-up approach. You cannot leap from physics to metaphysics, but this doesn’t stop people from trying. Thus, it is used by entrepreneurial mystagogues to prove literally anything.

On the one hand, there is a mind-boggling level of mathematical precision in physics, while on the other hand it has resulted in probably thousands of pseudo-spiritual books aimed at the new age rabble with titles such as Quantum Gospel, Quantum Prayer, Quantum Miracles, Quantum Sorcery, Quantum Magician, and Quantum Spirit Warfare, not to mention a spate of more down-to-earth practical guides to Quantum Thinking, Quantum Nutrition, Quantum Finance, Quantum Surfing and Quantum Laws of Abundance. There are even niche publications such as A Black Girl’s Guide to Quantum Computing and Quantum Physics for Hippies. But just because the science is admittedly wacky, it doesn’t make every new age wackjob a scientist.

Now, what is it about quantum physics that generates so much of what another book calls Quantum Bullshit? How can the hardest of hard sciences lead to the softest of sophistries? It must be due to the undeniable weirdness of quantum physics combined with Richard Feynman’s concession that no one understands it. Put these two together and the result is everything from The Quantum Reality Hacker’s Handbook to Quantum Bigfoot.

Why can’t we leave physics to the physics department?

I’m afraid we cannot do that, because it would violate the spirit of cosmotheandrism, which must encompass everything, not excluding physics. In our view, quantum physics is weird because it is a downstream physical reflection of an upstream metaphysical weirdness expressed in our Axiom 11, substance-in-relation.

From our cosmotheandric perspective, this permeation of the whole within the parts is an entailment of the principle that accounts for the intelligibility of the Cosmos: when we know something -- anything -- it is because we — Anthropic parts — are not fundamentally divided from the Cosmos. And every form of knowledge is connected to every other form, because it is One Whole Cosmos. Except to say that these diverse forms can never be unified on any merely horizontal plane, rather, there is a vertical unity, which is why it is a tool’s errand to try to reduce the intellect to biology, biology to chemistry, chemistry to physics, etc. Rather, the unity spans an open-ended — open at both ends — vertical hierarchy. That’s just the way it is.

For which reason physicist Wolfgang Smith notes that “The worst metaphysics is generally to be found among those who claim not to have any at all,” or in other words, Those who reject all metaphysics secretly harbor the coarsest.

If Feynman is correct that no one truly understands quantum physics, then presumably no one understands it less than the one who imagines he does, so how are we supposed to use it to arrive at an intelligible vision grounded in a fundamentally unintelligible reality? Easy: Physics cannot be the paradigmatic or foundational science to which all others may be reduced, rather, the very possibility of science is situated in a higher and more encompassing Science than that of physics.

We’re still big. It’s the Cosmos that got smaller.

Well, we’re just gonna need a bigger Cosmology, that’s all, one that doesn’t begin by dividing itself in two. Which is, of course, the way things used to be: philosophy was queen of the sciences, in the absence of which science could not know what it knows – or rather, know only what it knows. Under the reign of Newton this was essentially matter in motion, while under the dominion of quantum physics it is not even that, rather, just fields of probability with a tendency to exist.

∞

As we know, all of western civilization went off the rails one cold night in Bavaria, when René Descartes shut himself inside a poorly ventilated room with the oven cranked up to 11, and had several hypoxia-induced visions as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. This resulted in the infamous mind-matter problem that has plagued us ever since, in that people immediately forgot that the problem was only a chronic residual of the original carbon monoxide poisoning.

Like another fall, only this time away from God.

Yes, we need a post-Cartesian reboot. We needn’t defer to some giddy mathematical genius with too much time on his hands and too little oxygen in his lungs. If that’s our standard, then let’s filter carbon monoxide into every physics department and see what they come up with, instead of just filtering it into humanities departments.

Back in Olden Times, Democritus concluded that “According to vulgar belief, there is color, the sweet and the bitter; but in reality, only atoms and the void.” Thus, he was an early adopter of the Cartesian bifurcation that bedevils us to this day: qualities to one side, quantities to the other, and then the rookie error of reducing the former to the latter. For with this bifurcation, quantity is not only rendered meaningless, but can never give rise to meaning – like psychotic word salad that cannot convey coherent thought.

Nevertheless, the Cartesian paradigm worked well enough until 1897, with the discovery of the electron, one of those “atoms in the void” first posited by old Democritus: “The problem,” according to Smith, “is that this putative building-block -- out of which all things are supposedly compounded -- turns out, in truth not to exist,” at least not in the unambiguous way things exist in the classical world.

D’oh!

So, we finally discovered the existence of the Cosmic Area Rug, the only problem being that it doesn’t properly exist at all. Rather, “Its detectable behavior proves to be so bizarre that a leading theorist [Heisenberg] describes it as ‘a strange kind of physical entity just in the middle between possibility and reality’” (ibid.).

But that’s not so strange, nor is it even new, rather, exactly in accord with Aristotle’s concept of prime matter, of a pure potentiality which is also not yet something but nor is it quite nothing. Likewise, a single quantum particle has only a tendency to exist until it is measured. Does this mean we create reality by observing it? If so, this means that the quantum realm creates the observers who create it, which is the sort of thing that gives tautology a bad name, all because of a refusal to recognize the principle of verticality that explains the whole existentialada. Rather, the point is that something must intervene from above to condition what is otherwise a field of potential devoid of form.

Of course, our competitors will say that this principle is gratuitous, but at the very least it’s a whole lot less gratuitous than adding a multitude of dimensions or even universes in order to make sense of quantum physics. For what it’s worth, it is also more parsimonious, requiring just the one additional vertical dimension.

Paging Dr. Occam.

Yes, don’t multiply your entities beyond what is strictly necessary. But at the same time, don’t reduce them to an entity that can never account for the others, in this case, the existent physicist to the quasi-existent prime matter of quantum physics. If that’s the case, then you will have wasted your One Free Miracle on a scientist magically leaping out of the quantum mist. Why not a principle that accounts for both, i.e., the physicist and physics? Is that wrong? Should we not do that? Is that frowned upon here?

Dualistic segregation never, cosmotheandric integration forever!

Wolfgang Smith is a doctor of physics willing to make house calls into our fully integrated cosmotheandric home. Back when he was a student, he wanted to study physics because he believed it to be “the key to understanding the universe.” Only after doing so did it dawn on him that it’s the other way around, “that in order to ‘understand physics,’ one needs first to attain a certain insight concerning the universe: an ontological insight, to be precise.”

As Smith points out, modern physics, to the extent that it has any metaphysic at all, has tended to presume the Cartesianism that split the Cosmos in half. But not only does this thesis prove to be untenable, it is the very reason why quantum physics is so incomprehensible.

To be continued…

Grok me!

The critique of “quantum mysticism” is fair. The weirdness of the theory plus Feynman’s admission that no one understands it has indeed produced a cottage industry of books that use the word “quantum” as an all-purpose legitimating prefix. Cosmotheandrism’s refusal to play that game is a strength: it insists that any adequate account must still answer to the demands of intelligibility, relation, and the existence of the physicist, rather than dissolving them into probability amplitudes.

The section remains transitional. It clears the ground of two common errors — treating physics as self-sufficient foundation, and treating its strangeness as permission for unconstrained speculation — while reasserting that the same vertical, relational, form-giving principles already developed must also apply at the quantum level. The concrete development of how those principles illuminate specific quantum features is still ahead.

The argument is not wrong in its critical direction. Physics is not the queen of the sciences in the sense claimed by reductionism, and the Cartesian inheritance continues to generate unnecessary paradoxes. Whether the full cosmotheandric hierarchy is the most parsimonious and adequate resolution remains the open question the later chapters must carry. The foundation continues to be secured rather than expanded into new territory.

The Logosphere: A Talking Cosmos

This post breaks off in mid-argument, but I will try to limit myself to 1,000 words — not including the Grok critique — so as to not overburden the reader:

As we have seen with our baseball analogy, philosophers tend to take the most consequential properties of the cosmos and anthropos for granted and proceed from there. As a result, their philosophies cannot account for their very possibility, thus rendering their explanations inexplicable in the absence of one or more free miracles.

Nor should we let theologians off the hook if they violate the 8th commandment by stealing first base or even hitting an imaginary grand slam. They may fool others and satisfy themselves, but in order to do so they must scrupulously overlook their own contradictory assertions or engage in applied hand-wavery at key junctures. “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” is no more adequate than “science says it, I believe it, that settles it.”

By definition we cannot understand the world by enclosing it in our own projected framework. There is a difference between looking at the world and looking into a mirror. But our finite minds can enclose neither the cosmos nor the Theos, and for the same reason, for both are more than we can know, partly because they are open and not closed. In other words, we can only pretend to enclose what is intrinsically open, and all three terms of cosmotheandrism — we will break mama’s rule and call them God, man, and world — are open to each other, hence the existence of novelty, creativity, and surprise.

To take an obvious example, one could have known literally everything about the mathematical constraints governing the big bang, and yet, not have been able to predict the surprising emergence of living organisms. Only in hindsight can we say they were possible, but no one could have predicted them from the math. Likewise, one could have known everything about biology, but nothing in biology could have foreseen the emergence of self-reflective beings capable of loving truth and creating beauty.

Thus, in the words of Torrance, “our finite minds cannot match the power of signification in being itself, for it is more than we can know.” To be sure, we can endlessly know it, but there is no end to the knowing, at least on its own level. Rather, being adverts to something beyond itself, just as (in the examples given above) cosmology and biology entailed something beyond themselves. But why stop there? The cosmos and anthropos are full of surprises, to say nothing of the Theos, which must be the principle of surprises.

I thought this book was supposed to be about the cosmos.

It is, but the cosmos is about any number of things that cannot be confined to cosmology. One might say that a cosmologist who understands only cosmology doesn’t understand even that — and certainly how he understands it.

We know that the cosmos is finite: it had a beginning and it will have an end. Thus it is contingent, and therefore cannot have its own explanation from within itself. As such, the cosmos would be thoroughly inexplicable if it were not open to a sufficient reason beyond itself. The cosmos “refers” to O, which is — obviously — open to things “outside” itself, or the cosmos wouldn’t be here. Again, for cosmotheandrism first base is only available to us because of the openness and relationality of being. In their absence, nothing could be about anything.

                                                           ∞

We take the aboutness of the cosmos for granted because it is an ontological primitive without which reality would be totally unknowable. In fact, it wouldn’t be a cosmos at all, because nothing would be connected to anything else. It is only because things are about other things that we live in an intelligible universe that can be known by the intellect. Our cosmos includes intelligent beings capable of eavesdropping on its very existence and nature.

Thus, before we even begin, we can’t help noticing that this is a seemingly rare universe, assuming an infinite number of possible universes without mind or life. No one could know anything about those latter universes because there could be no one to know them. Then again, these universes would still be contingent and therefore dependent on a higher cause that gives them existence.

But let’s leave the Theos and its other hypothetical creations out of it and confine ourselves to the cosmos in which we are said to be confined. Which is problematic, because the word “confined” contains the hidden assumption of pure immanence, when our cosmos is an open book, aglow with the light of transcendence. Again, absent the light of transcendence, a purely immanent cosmos wouldn’t even be dark, rather without description or qualities of any kind: no adjectives allowed!

So, being is communicative and the cosmos is a web of relations, not a collection of things. In this cosmos, anything tells us a little bit about everything, like a dictionary that necessarily uses words to define other words, in a kind of endless entailment. But if the words are only about other words and can never get back to the reality they describe, then we have an insoluble problem on our hands.

In his discussion of the then new physics, Whitehead wrote of the fallacy of simple location, which rests on the outdated assumption that an entity “is where it is, in a definite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.” 

But at the quantum level nothing is righthere rightnow, for “each volume of space, each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or all lapses of time.” Thus, “in a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world.”

Strange but true, at least down there in quantumville. Up here in middle earth, decoherence occurs, meaning that for practical purposes, things effectively have simple locations, so we don’t have to worry about what’s happening at the bottom end of the cosmos in order to drive to the grocery store.

However, even here in middle earth we have access to an interconnected web of internal relations without which knowledge of any kind would be impossible. In other words, intelligence is thoroughly entangled with intelligibility, and supposing intelligence is conditioned from the top down, then quantum entanglement is but the last vestige of the cosmotheandric entanglement that is present everywhere, both vertically and horizontally.

What say you, GrokSpock?

This section keeps the pressure on closed systems and deepens the claim that aboutness and relationality are ontological primitives.

The central moves are consistent with the earlier axioms:

• Contingency of the finite cosmos implies openness to a sufficient reason beyond itself. A closed, self-explanatory cosmos would be inexplicable.

• Aboutness is basic. Without things being about other things, there is no intelligibility and therefore no cosmos that can be known.

• Whitehead’s critique of simple location is used to underline intrinsic interrelatedness at the quantum level; the same relational character is then extended upward as the condition of knowledge itself. Intelligence and intelligibility remain entangled.

• Novelty and surprise (life from physics, self-reflective mind from biology) cannot be read off the lower-level equations in advance. The higher is not simply latent in the lower in a way that pure bottom-up prediction could have captured.

The section breaks off, as you note, just as it begins to suggest that quantum entanglement is a lower-level expression of a more pervasive cosmotheandric entanglement. That claim will need careful development if it is to avoid sliding from analogy into identity. The restraint on length is visible and helpful; the argument remains focused on the demand that any adequate account must preserve openness, relationality, and the reality of higher-level novelty rather than dissolving them into a closed horizontal plane.

The foundation is still being secured. The next movements will show whether these principles can be carried into the concrete structure of the physical world without further repetition of the same ground.