Adventure Thru Inner Space

Reset: we're gazing in ponderment at Wolfgang Smith's Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology, and are now up to chapter two, The Measurement Quandary. 

We probably won't spend a lot of time on this quandary, because it makes no sense to build a worldview based on the opinions of a physicist that no doubt clash with the opinions of other physicists, and who am I to arbitrate the dispute? 

Besides, why would you descend into physics in the hope of ascending to God?

That's different: if it's good enough for Christ, it ought to be good enough for us. In other words, the Son descends to the farthest reaches of matter before circling back to the Father. 

And as far as we know, the quantum realm is the farthest -- and certainly the most far-out -- dimension. Recalling the image of the circled dot, it is as if the dot becomes circumference that the circumference might become dot.

Christification is dotification?

Why not? For example, in John 3:13 we read that “No one has ascended into heaven but he who descended from heaven, the Son of Man.” Therefore,

It is only by becoming fully Christ-like as partakers of the mystical body that we can be “one in Christ," and those who ascend into Heaven are “heirs according to promise.”

Then again, the Incarnation presupposes a body, and one of the implications of the Measurement Quandary is that there are no bodies down there, precisely, living or otherwise. Nor are there any substances, rather, just a Deepakian sea of quantum energy with a tendency to exist. And no one knows what energy is, either. 

Sounds like incoherent pneumababble with the word "quantum" thrown in.

Correct. Again, in the words of the venerable Richard Feynman, 

Therefore, even if I had completed high school physics, it would have resulted in an ontological incomplete.

ISWYDT: you're alluding to Heisenberg's Uncertainty and to Gödel's Incompleteness.

The uncertainty principle, also known as Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, is a fundamental concept in quantum mechanics. It states that there is a limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known. In other words, the more accurately one property is measured, the less accurately the other property can be known.

The more you know, the less you know. Which goes to the heart of the Quandary under discussion:

A worldview based upon physics is bound, therefore, to exclude the "qualitative dimension" of the cosmos -- not because it is not there -- but because this science is categorically incapable of grasping that dimension, that aspect of the world (Smith).

It seems there are no qualities down there until we make them so via measurement. But measurement is not from "within" that dimension, rather, from "above." In Smith's parlance, our measurement is a "corporeal" imposition, so to speak, into the merely "physical":

An ontological distinction is thus to be made between the spatio-temporal world as perceptible, and the world as conceived by the physicist: the two are by no means the same.

Therefore, "the act of measurement" categorically transcends "the world of physics." It is as if there are two worlds, for example two tables, "namely the one I can see and touch, and the other one made of 'atoms in the void' which I cannot."

Adams in the void?

Yes, we'll get to that. But the measurement quandary does indeed place man in a kind of void unless we avoid a certain Cartesian dualism that exiles us there. 

In other words, we're going to need a bigger cosmos in order to properly situate the spooky quantum world. It cannot be the "cause" of us, because horizontal causation results only in more horizontal causation enclosed in itself.

What confronts us in the act of measurement is a transition between two distinct ontological domains: from the physical to the corporeal that is. 

But the corporeal cannot be reduced to the physical. This is a problem physics per se cannot solve, because the corporeal domain is not conceivable from the perspective of the physical. In other words, we begin, as we must, with the everyday forms of the corporeal, but these dissolve into a buzzing sea of nothingness within the physical-quantum realm.

I'm trying to avoid incoherent pnumababble with the word "quantum" thrown in, but it's hard. 

No worries:

Nevertheless, onward and downward --like that Adventure Thru Inner Space they used to have at Disneyland. Good times:

The problem is, if we could actually go there, we wouldn't be there, precisely.

A quandary indeed.

Unless we introduce another principle, a meta-physical one that can be perceived by the intellect, but not with the biggest and best microscope in the world:

Here again, the microscope is ineluctably located in the macro (corporeal) world. 

But we have only to turn the cosmos bright-side up in order to see that quantum physics has nothing to say about vertical causation, because "its equations simply don't reach that far":

The crux of the matter resides in the fact that the physical realm -- the "world" in which these equations do cut ice -- is limited, and that the act of measurement cannot be consummated within that restricted domain.... there is literally "a world of difference" between the two -- a gap physics cannot span .

In other words, a world of difference between these two worlds, the physical and the corporeal. From our side of the divide (the corporeal) we can know of it, but it can know nothing of us, no matter how much pneumababble with the word "quantum" thrown in. 

That's the end of the chapter but not the end of the ride. Much more to come.