Category: Reading

Deconstructing the intuitions underlying physicalism and illusionism

Reading | Metaphysics

Arthur Haswell, BA | 2025-02-07

The idealist metaphysical and economic implications of von Neumann’s mathematics of quantum theory

Reading | Metaphysics

Matthew Cocks, PhD | 2025-01-24

John von Neumann was one of the most extraordinary figures of the twentieth century. In a 1999 biography, Norman Macrae wrote that von Neumann “was a prodigious child and a prodigious student, and through his brief fifty-three years grew steadily more prodigious. In each century there are a handful of people who … write a few equations on a few blackboards, and the world changes” [1]. In a more recent review of von Neumann’s life entitled The Man from the Future, former editor at Nature, Ananyo Bhattacharya, relates how

At the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was based from 1933 to his death in 1957, von Neumann enjoyed annoying distinguished neighbors such as Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel by playing German marching tunes at top volume on his office gramophone. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of time, space and gravity. Gödel … was equally revolutionary in the field of formal logic. But those who knew all three concluded that von Neumann had by far the sharpest intellect. [2]

Von Neumann’s intellectual contributions were many and varied. He applied his mathematical gifts to a wide range of disciplines and was revolutionary in many of them. He is probably best known for his contributions to mathematics and computer science, as well as central involvement with the Manhattan Project. His work in all these areas helped shape the modern world.

But whilst his legacy is, as Bhattacharya observes, “omnipresent in our lives today” [3], it may be through innovations in areas other than computing and military technology that von Neumann has the potential to have an even greater societal impact over the coming decades. In particular, in the perhaps seemingly unrelated fields of theoretical physics and economics.

At different stages in his career, von Neumann was heavily involved in the development of economic theory and to this day is credited with making substantial contributions to the discipline. Indeed, his daughter Marina von Neumann Whitman became a noted economist and was the first woman to serve on the United States President’s Council of Economic Advisors [4].

Von Neumann’s 1928 paper, ‘On the Theory of Parlour Games,’ is today recognized as the founding work of game theory and, although the paper only briefly considers economic issues, it laid the groundwork for the extensive application of game theory to economic matters. Von Neumann later returned more explicitly to the connection in 1944 with the publication of the highly influential co-authored, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.

Addressing a separate area of economics, von Neumann’s 1937 paper, ‘A Model of General Economic Equilibrium,’ was revolutionary in shaping present day economic methodology. Bhattichari notes that because of the paper “Mathematicians, inspired by von Neumann’s achievement, poured into economics and began applying fresh methods to the dismal science. By the 1950s the subject was transformed” [5].

Around the time of his 1928 paper on game theory, von Neumann was concurrently turning his mathematical attention towards the problems in physics resulting from the 1925 discovery of quantum mechanics. His 1932 Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics presented the first rigorous mathematical framework for quantum theory. Bhattacharya notes that, to this day, the formulation “remains definitive … [von Neumann] presented the theory as coherently and lucidly as anyone could” [6]. Physicists Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner have called quantum theory the most successful in the history of science, writing:

Quantum theory works perfectly … [It] has been subject to challenging tests for eight decades. No prediction by the theory has ever been shown wrong. It is the most battle-tested theory in all of science. It has no competitors … [7]

However, in formulating the theory, von Neumann seriously put to question prevailing assumptions about the nature of reality, arriving at the extraordinary conclusion that the mind plays a direct role in the physical world. In the contemporary context, the relationship between physics and consciousness has been receiving renewed attention, but the specific rationale behind von Neumann’s original perspective on this issue often seems to go overlooked. Either his formulation is not mentioned at all, or his conclusion is simply noted without an explanation, before the discussion then moves on.

But von Neumann’s theoretical thought process is remarkably straightforward for the lay person to grasp. He discusses the issue in the final chapter of the book, which focuses on the now famous ‘measurement process.’ In this chapter, von Neumann describes how the prediction of the flow of events in the physical world cannot proceed without including a ‘measurement,’ or more fundamentally, an ‘observation.’ To use an analogy, without incorporating the observation it would be like trying to mathematically model the flow of water out of a hose pipe without acknowledging the existence of the hose pipe.

Physicist Nick Herbert has noted that we see in the chapter a “severe test for his professionalism” [8], as von Neumann follows the mathematical logic to arrive at his conclusion. Henry Stapp, who collaborated with some of the founders of quantum mechanics, has stated that he considers von Neumann’s logic in the chapter to be “impeccable” [9]. The final conclusion comes not from a vague extrapolation or speculation (as sometimes characterized) but, as Herbert summarizes, “from one of the world’s most practical mathematicians deducing the logical consequences of a highly successful and purely materialistic model of the world” [10].

Starting on page 419, von Neumann considers the situation of measuring a temperature using a standard thermometer. He then proceeds to effectively pursue a search for the ‘observer.’ He begins with the measuring device itself (the thermometer) and, having incorporated all the physical processes taking place in the thermometer fully into the mathematical model (in principle at least), notes that it remains necessary for the theorist to say that the thermometer “is seen by the observer” [11].

He then follows mathematically the sequence of physical events from the thermometer to the person’s eye, through the eyeball to the image formed on the retina, incorporating all these processes into the model. Having done so, he notes that it continues to be necessary to say “this image is registered by the retina of the observer” [12]. He then persists, following this logic right through to the chemical reactions in the individual’s brain. But, as he notes, “no matter how far we calculate— … to the scale of the thermometer, to the retina, or into the brain, at some time we must say: and this is perceived by the observer” [13]. That is, he continues, “we must always divide the world into two parts, the one being the observed system, and the other the observer” [14].

Having pushed the boundary between the two as far as he can, he finally concludes that “it is inherently entirely correct that the measurement or the related process of the subjective perception is a new entity relative to the physical environment and is not reducible to the latter. Indeed, subjective perception leads us into the intellectual inner life of the individual …” [15].

Despite his statement that “we must always divide the world into two parts,” the analysis implies metaphysical idealism, not dualism. Reflecting upon the application of the theory, von Neumann states that “experience only makes statements of this type: an observer has made a certain (subjective) observation; and never any like this: a physical quantity has a certain value” [16].

Discussing the use of the word ‘observation’ in quantum theory, astronomical physicist Richard Conn Henry has said that “unfortunately the word ‘observation’ carries an implication that they must be observations of something. But the observations are not of anything. They are just observations. Period” [17]. In a short 2005 essay in Nature, Conn Henry bluntly laid out the metaphysical implications, writing that “The only reality is mind and observations … The Universe is entirely mental” [18].

It is well known that many early quantum physicists concurred with von Neumann on the fundamental role of the mind in quantum mechanics. Famously, Max Plank admitted publicly to regarding “consciousness as fundamental” [19]. Sir Author Eddington similarly wrote that the “substratum of everything is of mental character” [20]. And von Neumann’s friend Eugene Wigner reflected that “it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness” [21].

But over the course of the twentieth century these metaphysical implications became ignored and obscured within the physics community, and therefore with the public at large. It is well documented that a culture of what physicist David Mermin called “shut up and calculate” [22] became prevalent amongst physicists, and to this day even the mention of consciousness can be taboo in many physics departments. David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen have identified that consciousness has also been sidelined by physicists due to the difficulties of being mathematically precise and potentially the association with Eastern religious traditions [23]. A range of other more materialist ‘interpretations’ [24] have therefore been developed over the decades and received greater attention.

But a wider acknowledgement of the implications of von Neumann’s formulation of quantum theory, in combination with other emerging evidence pointing in a similar metaphysical direction [25], would likely lead to a profound cultural shift in worldview [26]. It therefore becomes a pertinent question as to how such a fundamental societal shift could influence another of von Neumann’s areas of interest: economics.

Most commentators agree that the development of modern economics has been largely underpinned by a materialist metaphysic. From the start, economic thought was heavily influenced by the method of the natural sciences and the Newtonian mechanistic worldview. Carol Leutner Anderson has written that “the historical development of both capitalism and socialism shows them to be metaphysically linked to the concept of a reality as revealed through scientific discovery” [27].

The founder of modern economics, Adam Smith, was strongly predicated in this direction, reducing the study of society down to its smallest parts—in his case, that of the self-seeking individual. Smith once wrote:

Human society, when we contemplate it in a certain abstract and philosophical light, appears like a great, an immense machine, whose regular and harmonious movements produce a thousand agreeable effects. [28]

Economist Lewis Hill has observed how David Ricardo’s “secularized rationalism,” Karl Marx’s “dialectical materialism,” and the influence of the positivist philosophical tradition in economics carried forward a materialist approach [29]. Donald Oswald has discussed the “creed of classical science” that influenced John Stewart Mill’s view of reality and that, in Mill’s view, “the basic intelligibility of nature is guaranteed by its conformity to mechanical principles” [30]. Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen has observed how the Marginalist Revolution of the late 19^th century depicted “the economic process as a mechanical analogue” [31] and Barry Smith has written about how Carl Menger and the influential Austrian School of economics subscribed to a “commonsense realism” [32] and scientific realism.

However, as mentioned, there were notable exceptions. In parallel with his Newtonian approach, and like Newton [33], Adam Smith held a broader metaphysical worldview. Smith was, after all, primarily a moral philosopher. Jerry Evensky writes about how “Smith sees the world as the Design of the Deity, a perfectly harmonious system reflecting the perfection of its designer” [34]. Lewis Hill suggests that, taken within the larger context of his writings, both Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty” and famous “invisible hand” analogy can be understood to reflect the metaphysical assumptions more explicit in his other writings. Hill concludes that Smith’s “metaphysical preconceptions gave his economics direction and purpose” [35] and suggests that the discipline later lost sight of these metaphysical roots.

More recently, Bernardo Kastrup has argued that the dominant materialist metaphysics in the West is “highly symbiotic with our economic system,” underpinning society’s love affair with material goods and motivating the drive towards material success. He writes that “The materialist worldview has caused many of us to project numinous value and meaning onto things” [36].

How economics would be conceived differently under idealist assumptions, therefore, is an open question and would depend upon the consensus form of idealism reached. But a few clues may perhaps be found in the philosophical literature. For instance, in the writings of the British Idealists of the late 19^th and early 20^th century. Significantly influenced by German Idealism, they were particularly noted for the way in which their metaphysics directly influenced their writings on social, political, and economic issues.

In some respects, the British Idealists took economics back to its Smithian roots by giving central concern to issues of morality and ethics. The Idealist Edward Caird wrote that “Economic science is of equal extent with moral science” [37]. The Idealists saw moral development as inextricably bound with an individual’s progress towards ‘self-realization,’ broadened to take in, as W. J. Mander writes, “our wider potential for full human personhood” [38]. David Boucher and Andrew Vincent have summarized:

Idealism was often an intensely moralistic philosophy … It emphasized both the responsibilities of individuals to seize the opportunities to make themselves more virtuous, and of the owners of capital to transform their workshops into schools of virtue. [39]

Daily work therefore was seen as a means towards self-realization. Whilst not considered one of the British Idealists, the connection between daily work and character growth was also brought out by the famous Cambridge University economist Alfred Marshall, who was influenced by idealism. Simon Cook observes that “Marshall’s specifically economic ideas were developed against the background of an idealist philosophy” [40]. Whilst Marshall’s metaphysical leanings are not explicit in his writings, they are potentially detectable, as can be seen in the definition given on the first page of his famous 1890 textbook:

Economics is the study of mankind in the ordinary business of life … It is on the one side a study of wealth; and on the other, and more important side, a part of the study of man. For man’s character has been moulded by his every-day work … more than by any other influence unless it be that of his religious ideals … [41]

This immediate focus on the role of economic participation in the development of an individual’s character stands in contrast to the more technical definitions provided in contemporary economics textbooks.

Whilst the British idealists were deeply concerned with the alleviation of poverty and other social ills, they did not eschew private property, and indeed even saw property ownership as a means towards self-realization. For instance, the influential idealist T.H. Green supported private property as “a way of manifesting and developing ourselves as persons” [42].

A cultural shift towards idealism could, therefore, potentially see the overarching purpose of the economy called into question more explicitly than at present, with the relationship between economics, morality, and personal growth given more central attention [43].

Idealism could also lead to a revised relationship with material possessions, which would have significant implications for consumption patterns. In his 2016 book, Quantum Economics, theoretical physicist Amit Goswami takes von Neumann’s conclusions at face value and discusses an ‘Economics of Consciousness.’ He suggests that a post-materialist economy would see a reduction in material consumption as the population focuses more on its “higher needs” [44], and people would also seek greater meaning from their daily work [45]. This, he writes, would lead to a more sustainable economic model and general rise in overall well-being.

Philosopher Robert Koons has also considered how a post-materialist political economy could evolve [46]. He argues that materialism is at the root of both Marxism and modern liberalism and that both the right (libertarianism) and left (egalitarian) wings of liberalism have their origins in the materialism of the early modern period. This, he suggests, has led to a dominance of economic models in political theory.

Koons argues that materialist assumptions have led to a conception of political theory as fundamentally a theory of conflict. If human beings are conceptualized as fundamentally material systems, then there is no reason to assume a natural harmony between them. This, he says, is distinct from the Aristotelian view, which sees a human essence; the meaning or significance of being human, which leads to a natural formation of friendships and cooperation in society.  Once the confidence in natural harmony is given up, then society is forced to the opposite extreme of seeing conflict as natural. The constant possibility of conflict then leads to a range of actions to prepare for this possibility—such as the accumulation of power, reputation, and resources.

Koons discusses how the early non-materialist philosophy of the feudal world revolved around ideas of harmony, multiple centers of authority, and local custom. Consequently, under an alternative to materialism (Koons favors an Aristotelian model, but is open to idealism as a possibility), he expects that this could lead to more localism or variation from place to place, more traditional customary ideas, a more complex web of political and social institutions, production that’s both less market driven and less bureaucratic—more local and familial in nature—and an emphasis on small-scale sustainable technologies.

And so, however a post-materialist economy would ultimately pan out, it seems clear that it could look quite different to the one we see today. Whilst undoubtably revolutionary, John von Neumann’s contributions to economics were primarily aligned with the materialist tradition of the discipline, extending and advancing the mathematical and mechanistic approach. But it is perhaps through his work in theoretical physics that he could indirectly have his most significant and long-lasting impact. The cultural transformation that would likely result from a wider acknowledgement of the metaphysical implications of his 1932 Foundations could fundamentally transform how the economy is conceived, structured, and lived.

 

References

[1] Norman Macrae (1999) John von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More, American Mathematical Society, pp. 3-4.

[2] Ananyo Bhattachrya (2021) The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann, Allen Lane, p. xi.

[3] Bhattachrya (2021), p. xiv.

[4] The 2012 book launch talk at the Columbia School of International Public Affairs for her memoir The Martian’s Daughter: A Memoir can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dfg_vsnTRBA

[5] Bhattachrya (2021), p. 151

[6] Bhattachrya (2021), p. 60-61

[7] Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner (2011) Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, Oxford University Press, p. 269 and p. 54

[8] Nick Herbert (1987) Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics, an Excursion into Metaphysics, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, p. 156

[9] Conversation with Henry Stapp, Beyond Science and Religion podcast.  Available at: https://webtalkradio.net/internet-talk-radio/2012/10/07/conversations-beyond-science-and-religion-henry-stapp-and-the-mindlike-reality/

[10] Nick Herbert (1993), p. 157

[11] John von Neumann (1955) The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press. [Originally published in German in 1932], p. 419

[12] John von Neumann (1955), p. 419

[13] John von Neumann (1955), p. 419

[14] John von Neumann (1955), p. 420

[15] John von Neumann (1955), p. 418

[16] John von Neumann (1955), p. 420

[17] Conversation with Richard Conn Henry, 25 August 2014, Beyond Science and Religion podcast. Available at: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/conversations-beyond-science-and-religion-the-mental-universe–14298531

[18] Richard Conn Henry (2005) ‘The mental Universe’, Nature, Vol. 436, Issue 29, p. 29. Perhaps remarkably, in a 2014 interview, nine years after its publication (see [16]), Conn Henry noted that he was not aware of having received any public criticism for the article.

[19] Plank, M., interview in The Observer, 25 January 1931, 17 (column 3)

[20] Eddington, A. (1928) The Nature of the Physical World, Macmillan, p. 281

[21] Wigner, E. (1961) ‘Remarks on the mind-body question’, reprinted in Wheeler, J.A. and Zurek, W.H. (eds) (1983) Quantum Theory and Measurement, Princeton University Press, p. 172

[22] David N. Mermin (2004) ‘Could Feynman have said this?, Physics Today, Vol. 57, Issue 5, pp. 10-12.

[23] David Chalmers and Kelvin McQueen (2021) ‘Consciousness and the collapse of the wave function’, in S. Gao (ed), Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics, Oxford University Press, p. 4.

[24] For a discussion see: Christopher A. Fuchs and Asher Peres (2000) ‘Quantum theory needs no “interpretation”’, Physics Today, Vol. 53, Issue 3, pp. 5-6.

[25] For example, see: Edward Kelly, Adam Crabtree and Paul Marshall (eds) (2015) Beyond Physicalism: Towards Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality, Rowman and Littlefield; Etzel Cardena (2018) ‘The experimental evidence for parapsychological phenomena: A review’, American Psychologist, Vol. 73, No. 5, 663-677; Bernardo Kastrup (2019) The Idea of the World: A Multidisciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality, John Hunt Publishing; Marco Masi (2023) ‘An evidence-based critical review of the mind-brain identity theory’, Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 14; Carlos Eire (2023) They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Yale University Press

[26] For a classic discussion on the relationship between science and culture see: Margaret Jacob (1988) The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution, McGraw-Hill

[27] Carol Leutner Anderson (1982) ‘Economics and metaphysics: Framework for the future’, Review of Social Economy, Vol. 40, Issue 2, p. 216

[28] Cited in Kim, K. (1997) ‘Adam Smith: Natural theology and its implications for his method of social inquiry’, Review of Social Economy, Vol. 55, No. 3, p. 329

[29] Hill, L. (1979) ‘The metaphysical preconceptions of the economic science’, Review of Social Economy, Vol. 37, No. 2, p. 191

[30] Donald J. Oswald (1987) ‘Metaphysical beliefs and the foundations of modern economics’, Review of Social Economy, Vol. 45, No. 3, p. 285

[31] Georgescu-Roegen, N. (1971) The Entropy Law and The Economic Process, Harvard University Press, cited in Martin, D. (1990) ‘Economics as ideology: On making “the invisible hand” invisible’, Review of Social Economy, Vol. 48, No. 3, p. 282.

[32] Smith, B. (1990) ‘Aristotle, Menger, and Mises: an essay in the metaphysics of economics’, History of Political Economy, Annual supplement to vol. 22, p. 268

[33] For a discussion see Part 1 of: Meyer, C. (2020) Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, HarperCollins

[34] Evensky, J. (1987) ‘The two voices of Adam Smith: moral philosopher and social critic’, History of Political Economy, 19, pp. 447-448

[35] Hill, L. (1979), p. 191

[36] Bernardo Kastrup (2014) Why Materialism is Baloney: How True Skeptics Know There is No Death and Fathom Answers to Life, The Universe, and Everything, Iff Books, p. 8

[37] Colin Tyler (2017) Common Good Politics: British Idealism and Social justice in the Contemporary World, p. 39

[38] W.J. Mander (2016) Idealist Ethics, Oxford University Press, p. 155

[39] David Boucher and Andrew Vincent (2000) British Idealism and Political Theory, Edinburgh University Press, p. 22

[40] Cook, S. (2009) The intellectual foundations of Alfred Marshall’s economic science : a rounded globe of knowledge, New York : Cambridge University Press, p. 3

[41] Alfred Marshall (1997) Principles of Economics, Prometheus Books, p. 1

[42] W.J. Mander (2011) British Idealism: A History, Oxford University Press, p. 237

[43] For discussions on economics and morality see: Amartya Sen (1991) On Ethics and Economics, Wiley and Samuel Bowles (2016) The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives are No Substitute for Good Citizens, Yale University Press

[44] Goswami, A (2015) Quantum Economics: Unleashing the Power of an Economics of Consciousness, Virginia: Rainbow Ridge Books, p. 171

[45] For a recent overview of the literature on meaningful work see: Blustein, D, Lysova, E. and Duffy, R. (2023) ‘Understanding decent work and meaningful work’, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 10, pp. 289–314

[46] Robert C. Koons talk at Texas Tech University, 22 January 2014, ‘The Waning of Materialism and the Future of Western Civilization’. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZLHKlwue20

Spacetime may be a mere perspectival model within a universal mind

Reading | Physics

Ben Werner, M.Sc. | 2025-01-10

Introduction

This essay discusses several paradoxes within physical theory that can be resolved with the concept of macroscopic “quantum spacetime”—specifically, complex projective space, which is the geometric space of quantum wave functions. Whereas this argument does not contradict general relativity as a theoretical model of spacetime, if the actual geometry of spacetime is in fact complex projective space, the implication is that non-dual consciousness must be the substratum of the universe, within which a macroscopic quantum wavefunction forms the universal noumena behind individual subjective experiences.

The most familiar of the paradoxes discussed in this essay is quantum “spooky action at a distance.” Each of these paradoxes can be conceptually resolved by adopting a view that Euclidean spacetime—in which we construct our classical concept of the universe from a human perspective—is a model within a macroscopic complex projective space. The statement that Euclidean geometry may be constructed as a model within a more fundamental projective geometry is matter-of-factually true from a geometric-theoretical standpoint [1]. And the statement that the geometric basis of quantum wavefunctions is complex projective space is also matter-of-factually true [2]. However, the core idea proposed here—that complex projective space is the actual spacetime within which the universe exists at all scales, including the human scale—is not an accepted fact. Whereas this idea does not conflict with presently accepted physical theory (because Euclidean spacetime may be constructed as a model within complex projective space) it does contradict the implicit assumption behind the development of physical theory: that a physical reality exists independently of the subjective observer. This contradiction derives from the fact that, if we suppose complex projective space as the actual geometry of spacetime, then Euclidean spacetime can only appear from a point of perspective i.e., as the experience of a subjective observer.

For readers unfamiliar with projective space, a recommended foundational resource is [1], wherein projective, Euclidean, spherical, and hyperbolic geometries are developed alongside each other. Whereas the dimensions of real projective space are orthogonal real number lines, the dimensions of complex projective space are complex numbers, wherein the orthogonality of dimensions is due to the orthogonality between the real and imaginary components of complex numbers. An understanding of (complex) projective space may be developed through several different approaches. Within the context of this essay, the following concepts are particularly meaningful:

• Projective space is the geometrical formalization of a space ‘seen from all perspectives at once.’ Accordingly, Euclidean space can be constructed as a model within projective space, equivalent to taking a single point of perspective within the projective space. Projective space is the more elementary geometry, with fewer axioms than Euclidean space.
• There is no meaning to distance (and hence separation) within projective space. This fact aligns with complex projective space being the geometric basis of quantum wavefunctions (and “spooky action at a distance” due to entanglement). There is no meaningful way to define or visualize separate objects within projective space.
• Complex projective space can be understood as a geometry intrinsic to complex numbers, rather than an amalgamation of number and geometry as with the construction of “orthogonal number lines” in Euclidean geometry. This aligns with a metaphysics where consciousness is fundamental, wherein seemingly ‘unconscious’ ideas can form the basis of structure and physical laws that govern an objective world.

The following sections describe several paradoxes within physical theory—and experiments—that can be conceptually resolved by assuming that the observed universe appears within (macroscopic) complex projective spacetime. These paradoxes have only appeared in physical theory within the last few decades, as a result of the effort to ‘fill in the gaps’ of a grand unified theory, unifying quantum and classical models. The resistance of physical theory to grand unification may be because we have left out something essential, namely, the structure of the conscious space within which the universe appears.

The paradoxes discussed in this essay are:

• The paradox of entanglement of photons over vast distances.
• The paradox of static virtual fields (the fact that electrostatic and magnetostatic fields have an imaginary wave number).
• The paradox of the missing negative mass/energy (the fact that we do not observe negative mass/energy yet are surrounded by it according to physical theory).
• The paradox of instantaneous virtual field propagation (the experimental observation that changes in virtual electromagnetic field components propagate instantaneously).

 

The paradox of entangled photons over vast distances

This paradox (mentioned in the introduction) is often framed by the extreme example of light emitted from a distant galaxy—perhaps billions of lightyears away—which, according to quantum mechanics, might represent entanglement (non-separability) between a system in the distant galaxy and a system on Earth. Within a conceptual model of a universe set within Euclidean space, quantum entanglement seems to imply some kind of instantaneous field propagation connecting the two systems—a possibility excluded by special relativity and the limiting speed of light. Special relativity seems to explain this paradox away with the assertion that, from the frame of the light wave, the universe is flat and hence there is no separation between the two systems. However, the paradox remains as long as we believe that the resting frames of the two systems (modeled as three Euclidean dimensions of space plus a fourth dimension of time) are fundamentally as real as the frame of reference of the light wave.

Conceptual resolution of the paradox: A 2D projective plane may be constructed from a 2D Euclidean plane by co-identifying each pair of antipodal points along the edge of the 2D Euclidean plane. Similarly, we can transform the model of a light wave traveling through 4D Euclidean spacetime into the same light wave within complex projective space by co-identifying the point in time when the light wave is emitted with the point in time when the light wave is absorbed. This aligns with a principle of quantum mechanics which states that the emission and absorption of a light wave is a single event. Accordingly, the paradox of entanglement of photons over vast distances can be conceptually resolved by assuming that the fundamental spacetime of the universe is (macroscopic) complex projective space. In this view, the universe exists as an entangled whole, even while we experience a perceptual model of a universe of separate objects set within Euclidean spacetime. This idea aligns with an instinctual feeling that a ‘universal-now’ exists in a meaningful sense, in spite of our being taught—per special relativity—that such universal-now is not an actual reality. However, there is no conflict between an actual universal-now and special relativity, provided that we clarify that the universal-now applies to an entangled universe of non-separate wavefunctions. If we want an objective experience of a distant galaxy, we must still transmit that experience via light waves and/or travel through space at less than the speed of light to said galaxy. How a person might experience an entangled universe in the universal-now, and whether there is any way to communicate or visualize such an experience, is a separate matter. The implication of the concepts proposed in this essay is that such an experience would be more fundamental to our capacity as conscious entities than reflecting on a mental model of a universe set within 4D Euclidean spacetime.

 

The paradox of static virtual fields

For internal consistency within quantum-electrodynamics, the photons associated with electrostatic and magnetostatic fields are defined as virtual photons, in contrast with the real photons associated with electromagnetic waves [3]. While the wave number of a real photon is always a real number, the wave number of a virtual photon is an imaginary number, implying that, while real photons have real energy, virtual photons (in a certain sense) have imaginary energy. An interpretation that the energy of electrostatic and magnetostatic fields is imaginary presents a paradox, because an observed (real world) quantity can only be imaginary with respect to some other quantity with which it is in relative harmonic motion. For example, a simple pendulum has a kinetic energy and a potential energy, each of which can be measured as a real quantity, just as the energy of electrostatic and magnetostatic fields can be measured as a real quantity. However, if the pendulum is swinging back and forth, its potential and kinetic energy are imaginary with respect to each other. Similar examples can be given for the quantities that describe anything that is rotating, oscillating, or vibrating. Therefore, it is a paradox that electrostatic and magnetostatic fields are static and imaginary. The implication of this paradox is that, if we are measuring a quantity that is static and imaginary, then we as observers, or something about the act of observing, must be characterized by a motion that is rotating, oscillating, or vibrating (in spite of the fact that we are not conscious of such a motion in our normal sensory observation of the world). The notion of a hidden harmonic motion is reinforced by the fact that we are ‘bounded’ by harmonic motion: at the quantum scale, everything is characterized by vibration; at the speed of light, only light waves exist; and at the cosmological scale, there is a beginning and an end to the flat spacetime within which our objective experience happens, perhaps in a repeating fashion, where the end of one universe may be the beginning of another universe [6].

Conceptual resolution of the paradox: The paradox of static virtual fields can be resolved with the concept that the fundamental space in which electrostatic and magnetostatic fields exist is complex projective space, which is itself the space of quantum wavefunctions. An analogy of surfing ocean waves might be helpful to develop this concept. It is easy to see that, if we are riding an ocean wave, the wave will appear static to us, even though it is moving from the perspective of someone standing on the shore. Visualizing static virtual fields within a quantum wavefunction is more difficult, because a wavefunction is not an observable object like an ocean wave. Electromagnetic waves are themselves quantum wavefunctions, and even though we are accustomed to visualizing them as waves moving through space, the invariance of light speed with respect to one’s frame of reference means that we can never observe a light wave as an object. The same fact holds true for quantum wavefunctions describing stationary particles: the wavefunction itself is never observable. However, just as we can register the effect of an electromagnetic wave in the oscillating electric and magnetic fields of an antenna, static electric and magnetic fields can be thought of as registering a macroscopic quantum wavefunction. Whereas the non-observability of a light wave can be attributed to the invariance of light speed, the non-observability of a macroscopic quantum wavefunction could be attributed to the asymmetry in how we experience space versus time: within our Euclidean view of spacetime, we perceive a macroscopic extent of space at any moment, but we only perceive a microscopic extent of time at any moment.

Since a quantum wavefunction encompasses equivalent scales of space and time within complex projective space, we can only measure or perceive the components of such wavefunctions that fit within our Euclidean view of spacetime, which, again, consists of a macroscopic extent of space but a microscopic extent of time. An experience of a ‘complete’ macroscopic quantum wavefunction could only happen in complex projective space, which would be an experience ‘outside’ the passing microscopic moment in Euclidean time. Projective space is defined as space “seen from all perspectives at once,” which would be to say that all points of perspective are entangled (non-separable) within a macroscopic quantum wavefunction. Therefore, such an experience would be coincident with a dissolution of the subject-object division; that is to say, with a shifting of identity away from a single point of perspective. Such a ‘movement’ would not be the movement of something observable like a physical pendulum, but rather a hidden (normally ‘unconscious’) movement intrinsic to the co-existence of Euclidean spacetime (supporting a subject-object division) and complex projective space (in which a subject-object division is impossible). This may be the hidden movement implied by the paradox of static virtual fields.

 

The paradox of missing negative mass/energy

Negative mass/energy is sometimes referred to as “exotic” because it is never directly observed, even though its existence is necessitated by our physical models. At the cosmic scale, the most current measurements of the expansion rate of the universe tell us that the universe is essentially flat [7], meaning that the positive spacetime curvature correlated with observable positive mass/energy must be balanced by a negative spacetime curvature of an unobserved negative mass/energy. The overall shape of the universe, as the whole of spacetime, seems to be a balance of positive and negative curvature. Furthermore, since photons and anti-photons are the same thing, anything moving at lightspeed is balanced positive and negative energy. And at the smallest scale—the Planck scale—quantum theory predicts that the vast majority of energy present in quantum vacuum fluctuations are virtual particles, which are intermediaries between positive and negative solutions to the energy-momentum relation. The paradox, therefore, is that the universe appears to be fundamentally a balance of positive and negative mass/energy, and yet we only observe positive mass/energy at the human scale. We seem to be literally ‘bounded’ by a balance of positive and negative mass/energy at the micro and macro limits of the universe, and at the limit of light speed.

Conceptual resolution of the paradox: The non-observability of quantum wavefunctions can account for why we do not observe negative mass/energy directly at the human scale, in spite of the ubiquity of negative mass/energy in counterbalance to positive mass/energy at the boundaries of our objective experience. In order to frame the meaning of negative mass/energy within physical theory, we can turn to the recent synthesis of information theory and physical theory, which indicates the equivalence of mass/energy and information/entropy [8, 9]. From this frame, we can see that negative information/entropy, and hence negative mass/energy, does not describe particles and objects; instead, it describes the entanglement of particles and objects within a larger whole—i.e., within a quantum wavefunction [10]. From this perspective, it makes sense that we cannot objectively observe negative mass/energy. An experience of negative mass/energy implies a direct experience of the entanglement (the non-differentiability) of all things within our field of experience. Such a non-dual experience, equivalent to a dissolution of the subject-object division, is not an objective experience of discrete objects framed within a Euclidean spacetime governed by a chain of cause-and-effect, but rather, an integration of subject and object within a macroscopic complex projective space pointed to by this paradox in present physical theory.

 

The paradox of instantaneous virtual field propagation

It is well known that nothing with real mass/energy can travel faster than the speed of light. If anything with real mass/energy were to travel faster than the speed of light, it would violate causality—i.e., a coherent order of cause and effect. However, it may not be well known that changes in virtual fields do propagate instantaneously. This has been demonstrated in frustrated internal reflection experiments [4, 5]. Such changes in virtual fields do not constitute radiated light—they are fields associated locally with a physical object. Within the framework of quantum-electrodynamics, such fields are equivalent to the electrostatic and magnetostatic fields. We are familiar with instantaneous quantum phenomena over distance, such as quantum tunneling and quantum coupling. These instantaneous quantum phenomena are understood not to violate causality because the states on either side of the phenomenon (such as the states of two quantum-coupled particles) are mutually causal—i.e., they cannot be known independently. The paradox of instantaneous virtual field propagation is the implication of a mutually-causal relationship between macroscopic objects that are charged or magnetic (objects that possess electrostatic or magnetostatic fields) and something else, in spite of the fact that observable objects always appear to obey classical laws of cause and effect in relation to their environment.

Conceptual resolution of the paradox: If we were to identify a moment in which the substance of the particles and the objects they now compose were in mutually-causal relationship, it would be at the point of the Big Bang (and perhaps equivalently within black holes), where the curvature of time equals the curvature of space, such that space and time are non-differentiable. After this moment—or rather, as time appears to the observer as a Euclidean dimension orthogonal to space—the objects populating space appear disentangled from each other, acting on each other through a chain of cause-and-effect. ‘Re-entangling’ these objects would imply running time in reverse (in violation of the Law of Entropy) through an impossibly complex and intricately-coordinated series of events, or alternatively, by forcing them together into a black hole. This essay presents an argument that, in a certain sense, the objects we observe are already entangled within a macroscopic complex projective space that is within our capacity to experience at any moment as conscious entities. The implication of instantaneous virtual field propagation is that an objectively observable component of a macroscopic quantum wavefunction is present within Euclidean spacetime in the form of electrostatic and magnetostatic fields.

 

Bibliographical references

[1] Stillwell, John (2005). The Four Pillars of Geometry, Springer Press, ISBN 978-1-4419-2063-8

[2]  Ashtekar, Abhay and Schilling, Troy A. (1997). “Geometrical Formulation of Quantum Mechanics” arXiv:gr-qc/9706069v1

[3] Peskin, M.E., Schroeder, D.V. (1995). An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, Westview Press, ISBN 0-201-50397-2

[4] Nimtz, G. (2011). “Tunneling Violates Special Relativity”.  Foundations of Science, 41: 1193-1199. arXiv:1003.3944  Note by B. Werner: The interpretation in this citation that tunneling violates special relativity is not correct, given the interpretation that the energy in the instantaneous field changes are purely imaginary. However, the data is nonetheless relevant to the argument presented in this essay.

[5] Eckle, P. et al.  (2008).  “Attosecond Ionization and Tunneling Delay Time Measurements in Helium”.  Science, 322: 1525.

[6] Gabriel Unger, Nikodem Poplawski. (2019) “Big bounce and closed universe from spin and torsion.” Astrophys. J. 870, 78. arXiv:1808.08327

[7] Planck Collaboration, (2015) “Planck 2015 results. XIII. Cosmological Parameters.” Astronomy and Astrophysics. arxiv.org/abs/1502.01589

[8]  Bekenstein, Jacob D. (1981). “Universal upper bound on the entropy-to-energy ratio for bounded systems”. Physical Review D (Particles and Fields), Volume 23, Issue 2, 15 January 1981, pp.287-298. 10.1103/PhysRevD.23.287

[9]  Shoichi Toyabe et al. (2010). “Information heat engine: converting information to energy by feedback control”. Nature Physics 6, 988-992. arXiv:1009.5287

[10]  N.J. Cerf and C. Adami. (1997). “Negative entropy and information in quantum mechanics”  arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9512022v3

The sky is in here, not just out there: How outdated language insulates us from reality

Reading | Astronomy

Harriet Witt, BA | 2024-12-06

Once the dashboard of our everyday perception is fully compatible with the Copernican Revolutionary perspective, we’ll look back and laugh at the many millennia when we thought the sun rises in the east, passes overhead and sets in the west. Today we know that the sun’s daily path across our sky is apparent motion. What actually happens over the course of the day is that we see the sun from a progression of perspectives, as we’re being rotated from west to east around our planet’s axis. When we face the sun on the western horizon, watching it appear to go down, we’re actually being back-rolled away from the sun by our Earth’s rotation. The action is with us, not with the sun. Sadly, our everyday language does not yet convey this Copernican perspective.

For many millennia, we believed that night falls—that the sky grows dark—at day’s end. Now we know that this darkening is apparent. What actually happens is that our planet rotates us away from the sun and into her shadow—into the darkness that people call “night.” The action is with us, not with the night. Sadly, our everyday language does not yet convey this Copernican perspective.

For many millennia, we believed that years come and go. Now we know that the so-called passing of years is apparent motion. What’s actually happening over the course of a year is that our planet is orbiting us around the sun in a 595-million-mile journey. Sadly, our everyday language does not yet convey the facts that a ‘year’ is a pre-Copernican word for an orbit, and that we wouldn’t experience years if our planet weren’t orbiting us through them.

With our language lagging behind our science, we have yet to embody the Copernican Revolution.

Words are the containers into which we pour our thoughts. So long as we continue pouring our thoughts into pre-Copernican language containers—i.e. speaking in terms of sunrise, sunset, nightfall and years passing—we perpetuate the notion that we live on a motionless Earth, with the universe revolving us. This static, hubristic mindset compromises our ability to solve the dynamic problems of climate change.

Nobody in our society is tasked with ‘languaging’ the Copernican perspective for living on a planet with climate change. This task is what I’ve come to think of as “Copernicus 2.0.” I borrowed this term from one of my astronomy students at Maui Community College. He used it to describe the experiential brand of astronomy that I teach. Over the decades that I’ve been developing this material with input from my students, “Copernicus 2.0” has evolved into a curriculum with thought experiments and somatic exercises. My goal is to better align our thinking with our moving, living planet.

The context for this is the following: In 1980 I started teaching astronomy under the starry sky at an environmental education center serving the Atlanta area schools. By day I taught a class called “Hello Gaia!” It was inspired and informed by NASA’s work with Dr. James Lovelock in the 1970s. The methods that Lovelock developed for addressing NASA’s questions about life on Mars catalyzed him to write his 1979 book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Since I taught “Hello Gaia!” in a forest, I was able to share and explore with my students a dynamic, holistic perspective that was too controversial for many university academics at the time.

“Hello Gaia!” was equally inspired and informed by Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Thanks to Fuller, I became aware of the language lag between the Copernican Revolution and the speech patterns of our everyday lives. By continuing to use pre-Copernican terms like ‘sunrise,’ ‘sunset,’ ‘nightfall’ and ‘years passing,’ we numb ourselves to the dynamism of the only planet in the known universe that supports human life. Fuller addressed this problem with an in-depth exploration of the “Spaceship Earth” metaphor. He also advised us to replace the obsolete words ‘sunrise’ and ‘sunset’ with scientifically accurate words. Instead of saying ‘sunrise,’ say ‘sun-sight,’ because the sun isn’t coming up; our rotating planet is bringing it into view. Instead of saying ‘sunset,’ say ‘sun-eclipse,’ because the sun isn’t going down; our rotating planet is eclipsing it. Because Fuller inspired and informed “Hello Gaia!,” I’ve been building on his language foundation ever since.

Very unexpectedly, in 1988, my husband’s work brought us to a small Pacific island that’s closer to Samoa than it is to California. This place, Maui, has been home ever since. Because I was born and raised in metropolitan New York City, our move impacted me much in the way that an asteroid impact reshapes the course of a river. Here in the jungle, the value of my Rutgers University Phi Beta Kappa key plummeted to zero. I was ashamed of my ignorance about the Polynesians, whose skill at “way-finding” enabled them—over the course of centuries—to become native Hawaiians. For longer than anyone knows, way-finders have been successfully navigating thousands of miles of open ocean with no need of the maps or technology that Western science mistakenly claims are necessary.

What’s at the root of this mistaken claim? Finding the answer meant digging deep—questioning Western science in a way that I’d never done. It also meant looking at Homo sapiens through a lens that I—a descendant of northern Europeans—had never done. This was painful in the short run, but powerful in the long run.

I learned that, throughout the initial 99% of Homo sapiens’ existence, we were hunter-gatherers, relying on the sky as our calendar, clock and compass. Recently we invented the time-keeping devices that we depend on today. Our dependence on these clever conveniences has had consequences: It has disconnected us from the daily and seasonal cycles of sunlight by which our master body clocks regulate our health and well-being. It has also weakened the pattern-recognition skills that kept us in sync with nature’s daily and seasonal cycles throughout the 99% of our existence when our nighttime calendar-clock was the predictable arcing of constellations across our sky.

Fortunately, some indigenous people—including some native Hawaiians—retain these pattern-recognition skills, so they still know how to live by the calendar-clock of the sky. Several years ago, a group of them, in Honolulu, created an online curriculum—using state-of-the-art graphics—to share their knowledge. With the help of these online classes, I’m now aware that during the 99% of our human existence when the sky was our calendar-clock astronomy was about correlating the natural cycles we saw in the sky with the natural cycles we experienced on the ground. This meant that our astronomy was experiential. It also meant that we enjoyed an intimate relationship with the cosmos. Today, our earth-and-sky pattern-recognition skills are so atrophied that we’ve lost this intimacy. Now we conceptualize our universe as remote and impersonal, with no place or purpose for people—unless you qualify as an astronaut.

During one of our online Hawaiian classes, the teacher asked: “Have you ever seen any dates or times written on the sky?” As I suddenly realized that I’d never questioned the reality of dates and times, my face turned red. Eventually, as I did the work of questioning, I learned that the dates and times we rely on today are artifacts of the ingenuity that gave us indoor clocks and calendars. Even though these dates and times are artificial, they’ve become hardwired into the perceptual apparatus of industrialized humans. Since our perceptual apparatus shapes our thinking, it shapes the way we deal with climate change.

As we struggle with climate change, we’re recognizing the limitations of commodifying nature for the personal profit of a select few. We’re also learning to stop asking, “How can we arrive at understanding by breaking matter down into smaller and smaller pieces?” Instead, we’re learning to start asking, “What keeps life-on-Earth functioning as a whole, dynamic system?”

I can think of no way to adequately address this latter question without facing the following fact: Even though dates and times are artificial constructs, they’ve become hardwired into our perceptual apparatus because they’re integral to our system of 24 time zones. This system was fabricated by railroad corporations in the 1800s to facilitate train scheduling and increase profits.

According to this system, today’s date is the same in both the northern and southern hemispheres—despite the fact that these hemispheres are always experiencing opposite life conditions, because they’re always experiencing opposite seasons. For example, on June 21^st at the north pole it’s daytime 24/7. Simultaneously, at the south pole, it’s nighttime 24/7. Life at the north pole is frenetically reproducing, while life at the south pole is dead or dormant. On September 21^st at the north pole, darkness is starting to dominate. Simultaneously, at the south pole, daylight is starting to dominate. Because this system of calendar dates is how we’re scheduling our lives, we’re disconnecting from nature—and from our own nature.

Nature’s annual cyclical change in the amount and angle of sunlight is what we commonly call ‘seasons.’ Seasons are critical to life on Earth because our Sun’s light is transformed into our Earth’s life by photosynthesizing plants. With this transformation of light into life, astronomy becomes biology.

This astronomy-biology interface is the realm of Copernicus 2.0. It demonstrates that, when we regulate our lives—and therefore our thinking—by a railroad system, we disrupt the natural synchrony between our planet and her living systems. This disruption of our biological rhythms has psychological and physical consequences, which American Scientist magazine has called “social jet lag” in a cover story about the problem. This disruption is also presenting us with a question that’s being addressed by the science of chronobiology: What becomes possible when we do pay attention to nature’s cyclical time and align our actions with it? This is the context in which my students and I have been developing Copernicus 2.0. As an example of this material, I share with you a thought experiment which addresses the issue of calendar dates. It is as follows.

By this time tomorrow, we will be 1.63 million miles from where we are now, thanks to our Earth orbiting us around the sun. By this time a year from now, we will have completed a 595-million-mile journey and we’ll be back at the point in our annual orbit where we are now. The fact that we can measure a year in miles has significant implications for our understanding of time and space. Equally significant is the fact that, by this time a year from now, we’ll be completing a 595-million-mile orbital annual journey and will be back at the point in our orbital relationship with the sun where we are now. This point in our orbit where we are now is indicated by today’s date on our calendar. Even though this is a point in our orbital space, our schools are teaching that a calendar date represents a point in time.

How did a point in space come to be labeled as a point in time? Could this labeling be the result of the pre-Copernican belief that years somehow “come and go?” Can we address this confusion regarding space and time without considering the fact that dates, times, and time zones are merely artifacts of industry?

Like Bernardo Kastrup, I look forward to the day when the term “Copernican Revolution” is no longer just about accurate celestial mechanics, but also about you and me as actively involved passengers-participants in our planet’s 3.5-billion-year experiment with life.

The surprising reality hidden beneath language and thought

Reading | Psychology

Steven Pashko, PhD | 2024-11-29

Language, for all its power, cannot capture reality; it only offers an abstracted representation of what is. This limitation originates from the fact that words and concepts transform what they describe. Though indispensable in structured systems—like logic, science, and mathematics—concepts simplify and distort essential details that are crucial to understanding reality in its entirety. The moment we label, name, or define something, we reduce it to a manageable mental symbol, changing what it is. This change may help us communicate, but it fails to convey what can be directly experienced. For a few examples of these alterations, let’s recall that words cannot express:

1. The uniqueness of individual things, like a particular squirrel;
2. A unified whole, something without segmentation or background, where no ‘parts’ exist;
3. Direct sensory experiences, such as the sweetness of honey or the scent of a rose.

When we use language to transform lived experience into generalizations, we turn the specifics of reality into broad categories. This categorizing process yields troubling consequences beyond errors of depiction: it generates artificial biases and separations. For instance, generalizations about people or groups—whether based on limited exposure or culturally inherited labels—create societal divisions, like ethnocentrism or racism. These generalizations fuel a dualistic ‘us versus them’ mentality, embedding in us a worldview where everything is defined by its difference from something else. Yet, who knows what someone with a different appearance or from a different culture can teach us. Further, such thinking distances us from what is truly essential in life: the direct, unmediated experience of human existence itself. Compare, for example, the experience of love to reading a description of it. The latter may inform us, but it does not capture the authenticity of the actual experience.

 

Two competing realities: experiential and conceptual

Psychologist Seymour Epstein [1] explored how humans navigate life through two distinct realities: one based on direct experience and the other rooted in thought. He referred to these as “experiential” and “cognitive” systems. Later, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman [2] expanded on this idea, discussing the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self.” More commonly, and perhaps to the point of their origin, we might think of these systems as “perceptual” (or experiential) and “conceptual” (or cognitive).

Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga [3] adds that these two information systems likely originate from the brain’s structure, with only one side having the machinery that processes language. This separation of anatomical systems hints that direct sensory experience operates [4] largely independently of language, functioning as a pre-conscious process. Perceptual intelligence, which helps us gauge value, beauty, and risk without verbal mediation, works instinctively and reflexively. It is this perceptual ability that makes us cover up when we’re cold or helps a golfer line up a putt more through perceptual awareness than mental calculation. Unlike the slower, deliberate nature of linguistic thought, perceptual intelligence allows for quick value judgments, essential for both survival and aesthetic appreciation.

 

The pull of language over experience

Language is crucial for communicating ideas, sharing knowledge, and handling complex tasks, yet it often overshadows the unexplainable wisdom of perceptual reality. Many people experience an undercurrent of unease—a sense that something’s wrong with how they appreciate the world—though they can’t exactly say what’s bothering them [5]. In The Matrix [6], the character Morpheus articulates this conviction:

What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.

This pull towards the inexpressible may explain why people are drawn to experiences that transcend thought, such as art, music, meditation, or physical activities. In these moments, people often report a sense of “peace,” “flow” or being “in the zone”—states where their sense of self, time, and language disappears, leaving only direct experience. This sense of awareness without thought connects us to a deeper part of ourselves that is obscured by our constant internal chatter. It may also be the reason why people seek solace through religion—from the Latin “religio” and meaning to connect back to what’s most fundamental.

 

Two systems, one reality: Insights from philosophy and psychology

Epstein [4] distinguished the perceptual and conceptual systems by their unique qualities. The perceptual system is holistic and non-verbal, relying on associations, images, and emotions rather than logic or rules. It provides a direct connection to the world, interpreting it through feeling and sensory impressions. Of course, like the conceptual system, it can be fooled. For example, the sun doesn’t actually rise in the east. By contrast, the conceptual system is analytical and structured, using abstract symbols like words and numbers to interpret reality. This cognitive system enables us to plan, strategize, and structure our understanding of the world. Neither one of these two systems is perfect. Each has pitfalls that must be identified and avoided. However, by failing to acknowledge and use the perceptual system, humanity runs the risk of mistakenly believing that reality can only be described through a materialist lens.

The dual-system framework mirrors ideas in ancient philosophy, particularly the Advaita Vedanta tradition. Philosopher Sankara [7] described two layers of reality: the empirical (material) and the ultimate (non-dual). In his view, empirical reality is conditionally true, while the ultimate reality—without concepts or distinctions—is absolutely true. Sankara proposed that sensory and perceptual experience can reveal a unity that the conceptual mind cannot capture: that of an underlying wholeness that escapes our attempts to label or categorize.

 

Bridging science and spiritual insight

The perspectives of Epstein, Kahneman, and Sankara reveal two parallel ways of knowing:

1. Conceptual reality, which arises from the abstractions of conceptual thought, creates a materialistic understanding of self and world.
2. Perceptual reality, which is direct, timeless, and beyond language, offers a seamless experience of existence that exists prior to labels and categories.

The non-dual, perceptual view enables us to glimpse a stable sense of self that transcends any particular role or identity. Philosopher René Descartes [8] famously wrote, “I think, therefore I am,” defining selfhood through thought. But our identities, shaped by roles like ‘parent,’ ‘activist,’ or ‘executive,’ are ever-changing and provisional. Are we truly different people in each role, or is there a more fundamental, enduring self? The answer lies in the non-verbal perceptual self, which remains consistent amid life’s changes. This deeper self, overshadowed by our conceptual identities, holds the key to a stable understanding of who we are.

 

The quest for an enduring self

Many of us chase a stable self-concept or worldview, especially when we try to ground our identity in changing, external factors. This chase certainty can feel like a never-ending cycle, driven by the shifting nature of thought-based identities. However, this search subsides when we turn inward, to explore the question, “What is my perceptual identity?” By shifting focus to this unchanging self—rooted in direct, non-verbal awareness—we connect to an authentic reality prior to words. This perceptual identity is stable and continuous, unaffected by the changing roles and experiences around us.

In quiet moments, many people sense this deeper self—a feeling of simply ‘being’ rather than constantly ‘doing’ or ‘becoming.’ This experience isn’t defined by our achievements, roles, or possessions, but by an inherent awareness that remains unaltered despite life’s fluctuations. Practices like meditation, especially when done with strong determination for the goal of detachment from both voluntary and involuntary thought, can reconnect us with this fundamental self-identity, and allow us to appreciate the reality that words fail to grasp.

 

Finding balance: Language and perceptual awareness

In our quest for meaning and self-understanding, language remains a valuable tool, but we must recognize its limitations. By balancing our conceptual and perceptual selves, we can live more fully, appreciating life beyond the distortions of thoughts and words. In doing so, we reconnect with the dimension of existence we have long suspected: one that’s whole and prior to the concepts of time and location.

 

References

1. Epstein, S. (1973). The self-concept revisited. Or a theory of a theory. American Psychologist, 28, 404–416. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/h0034679
2. Kahneman, D., & Riis, J. (2005). Living, and thinking about it: Two perspectives on life. In F. A. Huppert, N. Baylis, & B. Keverne (Eds.). The science of well-being (pp. 285-304). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
3. Gazzaniga, M. (1989). Organization of the human brain. Science, 245, 947–952.
4. Epstein, S. (1994). Integration of the cognitive and the psychodynamic unconscious. American Psychologist, 49, 709–724.
5. The Biggest Questions Ever Asked. New Scientist “What is Reality?” https://www.newscientist.com/round-up/biggest-questions/
6. The Matrix (1999). Wachowski & Wachowski, Warner Bros.
7. Dalal, N. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/shankara/#TwoTierReal
8. Descartes, Renee (1641) Meditations. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05January 2016.

The lost music with which the world worlds

Reading | Philosophy

Arthur Haswell, BA | 2024-11-22

The perils of smuggling metaphysics into science

Reading | Philosophy

A. A. Adedire, BSc, BA | 2024-11-10

Science is one of man’s greatest endeavors, characterized by its empirical methodology, stalwart practitioners and their histories, extensive accumulated knowledge, and resulting transformative technologies. Science is distinguished by its consistent, unyielding ability to humble the spirit of humans by forcing them to confront the vast expanse of their own ignorance. It is one of humanity’s steadfast tools that have proven potent in preventing our own folly and, indeed, in preventing our own demise. The demarcation of what does and does not constitute science has long been debated in various philosophical fields. However, juxtaposed with other avenues of inquiry, its definition becomes clearer. Science, as a systematic enterprise, is defined by reliance on observational and experimental evidence, the use of scientific hypotheses or proposed explanations of phenomena, the establishment of scientific theories or well-substantiated explanations of phenomena, self-evaluation through peer review, reproducibility, falsifiability, objectivity, and its cumulative knowledge.

In large part, this systematic enterprise attributes its success to its methodology. The scientific method is distinct from scientific values such as reproducibility, falsifiability, and objectivity, as well as from the body of knowledge it produces. Instead, it is a set of empirical precepts that lead to the acquisition of this knowledge. With some variations among fields, the scientific method involves proposing explanations of phenomena through observational evidence, then rigorously testing these explanations through iterative experimentation. Those explanations or hypotheses that survive are upheld and may become comprehensive, well-substantiated theories, which may again be subject to further refinement. The relationship between science and the world is also a point of contention that has long been debated. However, as an instrumental framework, science provides an intricate, elaborate description or prediction of the world and its behavior rather than a complete definition of what the world is.

As such, this is a limitation of scientific inquiry. Science provides a description or prediction of reality and how it behaves but does not give an all-encompassing definition of what reality truly is. The latter is the domain of metaphysical ontology, which is a branch of philosophy and not a mode of scientific inquiry. This important distinction cannot be overstated. Science, as a powerful tool of discernment, can lead to a more refined, objective description of reality through its ability to discard ontological claims, but it cannot wholly define reality. The claim “the world is made of physical matter” is an ontological assertion. The burden of proof lies with the claimant to produce evidence substantiating the claim. Scientific inquiry can be used to refute this ontological claim through an iterative empirical methodology, but science itself cannot produce its own ontological claims to fill the vacuum left by rejection.

A foundational limitation of all scientific inquiry is that it rests on general assumptions about the subject of study, such as the consistency of natural laws or the non-random behavior of systems. These assumptions themselves may or may not be subject to direct empirical scrutiny; however, unavoidably, attempting to scrutinize every assumption would lead to an infinite regress. Science is confined by the scope of what can be observed, measured, and tested. It is also limited by its predictive power, as complex, chaotic systems may not be easily resolved. Scientific inquiry is subject to interpretation, bias, ethical and practical considerations, and paradigm dependence. Here, “paradigm dependence” is meant in the Kuhnian sense: the way a question is asked is subject to the current scientific framework in which it is being asked, as certain general assumptions are granted as evident. Hence, scientific values are meant to mitigate these limitations—reproducibility addressing predictive limitations, falsifiability addressing ontological limitations, and objectivity addressing interpretive limitations.

Physicalism is a philosophical worldview asserting that all that exists can be reduced to quantifiable physical interactions, while acknowledging immaterial fields or forces that supervene on the physical. As historians have recounted, it traces its origins to Greek and Roman atomists countering the philosophical claims of Parmenides, the originator of Western metaphysical ontology. It is a philosophy built on each successive epoch’s interpretation of Greek and Roman naturalism, and it was developed through scholarly edification based on internal consistency and past refutations. In a word, it does not bear the characteristic hallmarks of a science: self-evaluation through peer review, reproducibility, falsifiability, objectivity, and cumulative knowledge. It is first and foremost a philosophy that can be sharply demarcated from scientific inquiry.

Physicalism defines what reality truly is, and through this definition, it proceeds to fit the observed behaviors of reality onto its invented definition. The acquiescence of physicalism within the broader cultural milieu allows for the smuggling of assumptions into scientific inquiry, which are then, in a circular manner, considered to be validated by science itself. This disastrous interplay perpetuates a continued myopia in distinguishing between the ontological claims of physicalism and the assumptions of scientific inquiry. Science, as a tool of discernment, can be brought to bear on the claims of physicalism but will never provide a ready-made ontology, as this is by definition non-science.

It can be said that philosophy begins where empirical observations are limited, and science begins where they are abundant. However, the two disciplines often inform and complement one another. The nature of philosophical inquiry is inherently speculative and conceptual, as it grapples with broad, often abstract questions that frequently lie beyond the realm of direct observation and empirical testing. Philosophy is distinct from science, but its tools are invaluable. Philosophical theories are evaluated not through experimentation, but by assessing their logical consistency and their strength of argumentation. Philosophy was forged in the crucible of reasoned wonderment about the ordinary and through the close examination of what is perceived as nature’s givens. Ontology itself gestated in the writings of pre-Socratic thinkers and was only fully conceived as a singular insight through deep introspection, sharing in this respect much with religious mysticism. This introspective approach to understanding reality has led to various ontological theories throughout history, each attempting to provide a comprehensive framework for understanding humanity and its place in the cosmos. Among these, physicalism stands out as the natural metaphysical ontology. As such, its core tenets must be clinically scrutinized. Let us not be coy as to what it is: a philosophical worldview.

Again, physicalism presents itself as a natural ontology, grounded in the observation of a world that has clear spatial and temporal boundaries. This world is unified and operates according to natural laws. Although this world is experienced subjectively, its properties and phenomena are verified objectively through empirical measurement. Furthermore, these assumptions about the world are reinforced by the cumulative nature of analogous experiences. Consequently, physicalism is often seen as supported by the physical sciences. Indeed, a key argument for physicalism is the argument from the success of the physical sciences, which proceeds as follows: The physical sciences have consistently provided reliable, verifiable, and predictive explanations of the world. Over time, disciplines that were once thought distinct and governed by separate principles have now been shown to be interconnected and reducible to more fundamental physical principles; the biological sciences have become integrated with the chemical sciences, and the chemical sciences have become integrated with the physical sciences. Historically, poorly understood phenomena once thought to be non-physical, along with their accompanying outmoded explanations (such as vitalism, luminiferous aether, and energeticism), have been superseded by the physical sciences, which do not find it necessary to invoke non-physical explanations. Therefore, physicalism must be true due to the distillation of various scientific disciplines into more fundamental physical principles and its demonstrated success in describing the natural world.

However, the argument from the success of the physical sciences faces numerous problems. A fundamental limitation of scientific inquiry is its reliance on assumptions about the nature of the world, such as the constancy of natural laws. These assumptions within physical science are themselves ontic presuppositions of physicalism. So, the argument that the success of the physical sciences supports physicalism begs the question, assuming the conclusion in its premises. The sciences are not monolithic in their working theoretical conclusions; accordingly, some aspects do not substantiate physicalism or may even contradict it. For instance, quantum mechanics introduces concepts that challenge classical notions of physicalism and physical realism, such as non-locality, wave-particle duality, and entanglement. There could be aspects of reality that are non-physical, do not fundamentally supervene on physical matter, and elude measurement. Indeed, there are known phenomena that resist reduction to purely physical terms, such as consciousness and meaning. As perennial philosophical insights have suggested, humans could be deceived by the apparently physical nature of reality.

Physicalists may acknowledge the possibility of non-physical aspects of reality but maintain that there is no empirical evidence to support such claims, arguing that the physical world is causally closed. This means that every physical event has a sufficient physical cause. Thus, the inclusion of non-physical causes is deemed superfluous, as these causes are empirically inaccessible. Physicalists defend their position’s simplicity in reducing the world to a single substance. Additionally, they argue that non-physical ontologies struggle to explain how the non-physical interacts with the physical. Physicalism avoids this problem by positing that all interactions are physical, thereby providing a clear, concise, and internally consistent account of causation.

The strength of these converging lines of argumentation is contingent upon how matter is defined. Physicalism’s central assertions are compromised by its failure to provide a robust definition of physical matter. As an ontology, physicalism defines physical matter as the fundamental datum of reality, which is distinct from the definition given by classical physics, where “matter” refers to that which occupies space and has mass—the latter being an element in a broader empirical framework used to describe and predict how reality behaves. Given physicalism’s definition of matter, several questions arise: Are there multiple kinds of physical matter or only one? Is matter eternal? Is it discrete? Does it have a minimal constituent? Is it capable of expressing multiple forms? Are its properties intrinsic? Are these properties expressed through its interaction or merger?

Furthermore, this philosophical worldview is superficially simple. Physicalism does not reduce the world but rather doubles it by positing two distinct realms: subjective experience and an external world. As one perceives the world through the faculty of awareness, there are only two things of which one can be assured: the very act of awareness and its intentionality—its aboutness or directedness. The world as a tangible external is not a given—this being a topic of lively philosophical debate, notably reaching its climax in 1637, marked by the famous Cartesian dictum. Physicalism posits a palpable external world alongside the subjective perception of the world, even though the latter is the only true given; it then proceeds to denigrate perception and elevate an invented reality conjured from nothing. It hijacks the language of science, having usurped its foundational assumptions, by claiming that all dimensions of measurement, once divorced from the contaminants of subjectivity, represent a true reality, a pure reality finally sanitized.

And yet, the subjective, qualitative experience of being persists as an irreducible phenomenon. The “what it’s like” quality of experience suggests a process beyond mere physicality. How does the ostensibly inert, mechanical world produce the richness of qualitative perception? The various objections to physicalism (e.g., the hard problem, the inverted spectrum, Mary’s room, and the explanatory gap) hinge on this single point of contention: can physicalism provide a complete account of consciousness? While physicalism purports to offer a simple, coherent, and natural worldview, it faces significant rebuttals. Enduring philosophical objections suggest that physicalism falls short in fully explaining the most immediate aspect of our existence: consciousness itself.

The mystery of death

Reading | Metaphysics

Natalia Vorontsova, MA | 2024-11-03

Scientists and doctors entered the room of a meditating monk in a Buddhist temple. As they conducted tests and recorded the monk’s physiological data, they noticed a pleasant odor and a strong sense of well-being enveloping them. The situation itself looked nothing unusual, just a person resting in a lying position, except that the monk had no blood circulation, no heartbeat, and a flat EEG for several days. This state of preservation lasted for 30 days, with no changes in the physical condition of the body as would be expected after death. The end of this state was marked by the rapid onset of signs of physical decay. Often the process is so accelerated that fellow monks have little time to perform an after-death ceremony [1].

This is known in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as “tukdam”—a meditative state attained at the time of death in which the practitioner gains ultimate realization of the fundamental nature of the mind and exhibits a delay in the normal timeline of typical after-death processes [2]. In known recorded cases, tukdam has lasted between 2 and 30 days [1]. According to Buddhist tradition, it is a meditation on ‘the clear light’ that allows the mind to gradually unfold and eventually dissolve into a state of universal consciousness no longer correlated with to the body. Only then is the body free to die [3]. It is said to be a process that every human being experiences at least once in their life, at the time of death [5].

Are we always in infinite consciousness or mind-at-large, having a localized human experience, striving to know itself [4]? Or are we just finite bio-robots whose biochemical and bioelectrical brain processes produce a local epiphenomenon called consciousness? If we knew what happens to us after we die, the answer to this fundamental question would be self-evident. Obviously, monks in the tukdam state do not come back to life to tell the tale, and it must be said that ‘the clear light’ meditation does not often result in tukdam. However, Tibetan monks practicing 8-stage Tantric mediation who reach the final 8th stage of ‘clear light’ describe each stage to researchers in great detail, including the process of dissolving into the larger field of consciousness itself [5]. Can mainstream science dismiss these experiences of consciousness as hallucinations, defined medically as delirium? Undoubtedly, especially since brain activity is registered in meditative states. However, near-death experiences (NDEs) show that many people have effectively died and returned to share their richest, most profound, and most transformative experiences from the time when they had no brain activity at all. Can they also be considered hallucinations? Medical professionals, such as cardiologist Dr. Pim van Lommel, who have studied NDE cases extensively, stress that hallucinations cannot occur in a brain that shows no measurable activity [6].

Cases of out-of-body experiences during NDEs, where clinically dead people can see and hear things happening around them, also do not support the hallucination hypothesis. The idea of misfiring neurons and the odd release of neurochemicals due to extreme oxygen deprivation doesn’t hold water either. Let’s look at one of the cases from Dr. van Lommel’s practice. A man was brought to the emergency room in a state of clinical death, and a nurse had to intubate him. This meant removing the dental prosthesis and putting it on the nearest crash cart. The man was successfully resuscitated, and when he regained consciousness a week later, he recognized the nurse, asked for his dentures, and described exactly where the nurse had placed them in the emergency room. This particular patient was brought to the emergency department in a coma and then admitted to the cardiac intensive care unit while still in a coma. He couldn’t possibly have seen the nurse, or where his dentures were placed, let alone hallucinated everything so precisely. There are also remarkable cases of blind people who, during NDEs, were able to ‘see’ or rather perceive their surroundings, including colors they had never seen before, and were able to describe everything in detail after regaining consciousness [6] [Editor’s note: our Director, philosopher Bernardo Kastrup, has once speculated on how this could be possible]. This can hardly be explained by spurious neuroelectrical activity and the release of neurochemicals in the dying brain.

One researcher of NDEs in young children, Dr. Donna Thomas, points out an uncanny resemblance to NDEs in adults. This research is particularly valuable because although children describe the same experiences as adults, they have no prior knowledge of these phenomena; it’s not yet part of their mental landscape. Their minds are not conditioned by knowledge or concepts, and they often struggle to find the right vocabulary to name these experiences or put them into words. In such cases, art is needed to let children draw what they have seen and experienced during NDEs. Even physiological and psychological changes in children after an NDE—such as enhanced creativity, unusual sensitivity, electrical sensitivity, and synesthesia—are also reported by adult NDErs [7].

Can science find a plausible explanation for these phenomena within the materialist paradigm? Researchers who adhere to the materialist metaphysical view of reality and who have studied these phenomena have concluded that we must accept that science cannot explain everything. That is disappointing but hardly surprising. For, if the underlying assumption is that matter is primary, fundamental, and it produces consciousness, then veridical NDEs and other non-ordinary states of consciousness indeed cannot be accounted for. It should however be noted that, from the point of view of physics, what we call ‘matter’ is actually much closer to an information structure than to ‘things’ as we—being another information structure—experience them [9]. And if consciousness, including all our subjective experiences or qualia, is generated by our brain activity and is therefore secondary, then for both tukdam and NDEs, matter seems to obey some alternative and as-yet-unknown laws of nature. Thus, in the tukdam state, the body does not exhibit the well-researched and established stages of decay after death. In the case of NDEs—despite the state of clinical death and the complete lack of brain activity—people give real, coherent, and verifiable accounts of perceptions that occur while bypassing their normal physical senses.

What if, metaphysically speaking, the tables were turned? What if consciousness or mind-at-large is the primary and fundamental basis of reality, which most children experience during their NDEs as “loving nothingness or living darkness” [7]? And matter, as a form of dissociation, is secondary, much like the waves that are separate from the ocean, with their distinct shapes, sizes, and dynamics of existence, yet remain part of the ocean [8]? We may then apply Dr. Federico Faggin’s new theory of quantum information-based idealism, according to which consciousness is the ability of a quantum system that is in a pure quantum state to experience its own state in the form of qualia, living matter is partly a quantum and partly a classical system, and inanimate matter consists purely of classical states [4, 9]. Then it seems that rigorous meditation practices allow practitioners to tap directly into the field of consciousness or mind-at-large—a quantum reality with all those crazy properties. Similarly, when brain activity temporarily ceases during NDEs, a much larger part of what exists in consciousness becomes accessible.

Perhaps in the future, post-materialist science will be able to study and explain phenomena such as tukdam states and NDEs. At present, scientists cannot measure what happens in the last 4 stages of the 8-stage Tantric meditation. They have to rely on the detailed accounts of the monks [10]. So, for now at least, death remains the biggest elephant in the room.

 

References

1. Svyatoslav Medvedev: Neurophysiology of meditation, consciousness, postmortem experience | Noosphere Podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYf9Ze8Uc3U
2. https://centerhealthyminds.org/science/studies/the-field-study-of-long-term-meditation-practitioners
3. https://bigthink.com/health/thukdam-study/
4. Faggin, Federico. Irreducible: Consciousness, Life, Computers, and Human Nature. Essentia books, John Hunt Publishing 2024.
5. Alexander Kaplan: Psychophysiology of meditation, brain, tukdam state | Noosphere Podcast. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQU1ylh1qOY
6. Consciousness Beyond Death, interview with Dr. Pim van Lommel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVsBFOB7H44
7. Thomas, Donna Maria. Children’s Unexplained Experiences in a Post Materialist World: What children can teach us about the mystery of being human. Essentia books, John Hunt Publishing 2023.
8. Kastrup, Bernardo. Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell: A straightforward summary of the 21st century’s only plausible metaphysics. iff Books 2024.
9. Interview with idealist physicist and inventor of the microprocessor, Federico Faggin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVS3-NDUC0M&t=80s
10. Scientific debate: the brain and meditation. Alexander Kaplan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nRfFepS8yo&t=443s
11. Groundbreaking Consciousness Theory By CPU Inventor | Federico Faggin & Bernardo Kastrup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssE4h70qKWk&t=45s

Freedom from free will: Good riddance to the self

Reading | Free Will

Kadira Pethiyagoda, PhD | 2024-10-20

Hootie & The Blowfish’s 1995 song Time still evokes memories for me of my surroundings when it first hit: wafting, amidst diesel fumes, from the radio of the poorly air-conditioned van snaking around the hillsides of Nuara Eliya, Sri Lanka. Its mournful, dejected, and regretful nostalgia was clear to even a 15-year-old who as yet had nostalgia but no regrets. Those would only be accumulated in the following decades. Education, relationships, career, politics, height—an endless list, punctuated by a few that are both cardinal and cyclical.

This may sound familiar to others who assign themselves exceptional degrees of agency—a personality trait suspiciously suitable to late-stage capitalism. You can achieve anything if you set your mind to it, and if you don’t it’s because you didn’t set your mind to it. Or you did set your mind to it, attained it, and then squandered it. And that’s the stench that lingers longest. That’s why, in the years following, despite considering Germany, Bavaria, Austria, as the most beautiful landscapes on earth, you could not visit. That’s why it’s hard to watch Sound of Music, see the Wallace Collection’s Germanic ground floor armory collection, or discover how Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were inspired by a guy who was inspired by German fairytales. Because you could have gone there before, at some earlier time, as something better than you are now. Could have.

 

Science and free will

As with many causes of suffering, persistent regret might be alleviated by many tools, from self-compassion to meditation and other Eastern teachings. One potential tool that has been remarkably underutilized is the very nature of reality itself, understood from, at least (but not only) a scientific perspective. We believe scientists when they tell us truths, like reduce cholesterol to avoid heart disease, or sugar to avoid diabetes, or that carbon monoxide might kill you, or reduce CO2 emissions to reduce climate change. In physics, the truth of how atoms behave has impacted society at the highest levels—the nuclear bomb delineating Great Power geopolitics for almost a century. Even science’s most cutting-edge truths—fields like quantum physics—are seeing application in computing technology. But a truth that has more fundamental relevance than any of these—relevance to the meaning we give to life itself—has garnered barely any attention, let alone application. This is the truth of no free will.

The conventional wisdom across all relevant fields of science is that there is an absence of any evidence that free will exists. And evidence against free is found in realms ranging from neuroscience, to philosophy, to evolutionary biology and anthropology. Neuroscientists such as Robert Sapolsky would say that a Sri Lankan-Australian graduate choosing to leave Australia’s diplomatic service earlier than batchmates is due in large part to a plethora of evolutionary and cultural factors. From Lanka’s soft communitarianism to the Australian upper-middle class inheriting the British ruling class’s ‘stiff upper lip,’ cauterized over generations of dispatching boys to brutalizing boarding schools so that they could be posted overseas and administer empire in solitude.

This author’s epiphany came in his early 20s and was based simply in logic: that every decision is the product of the body we were born with and the experiences we have had—neither of which are within our control. If one accepts the universe is governed by cause and effect, with no interference from magic, supernatural forces, then all our choices are governed by things that came before it. A line of causation leading back through the mists of time to factors billions of years beyond our control.

 

The physics of time

The most convincing, and therefore reassuring, evidence for the lack of free will, I found in physics. Like a Philips Head screwdriver after a month of butter knives. Stemming from Einstein’s insights, general relativity, the fact that what one experiences as ‘now’ is different according to location and relative velocity—all beautifully explained in Brian Greene’s PBS documentary. An alien on the other side of the universe, if cycling towards us even at a “leisurely pace,” has a ‘now’ that is hundreds of years in our future. And because of cosmic democracy—that their now is just as real as our now—the future is just as real as the present. Which means it already exists. Which means it’s already set. And which means we don’t have to worry anymore.

As a youth I thought time equaled change, change equaled movement (at the tiniest particle levels), and for there to be movement there must be space and/or more than one thing, which wouldn’t have been the case during the singularity/pre Big Bang. Physicists, almost universally, hold that time is an emergent property of the universe, not a fundamental one. The mathematics reveals that if time is ejected from the equations, they still work. Not a three-dimensional universe that changes, but a four or more-dimensional block in which nothing happens. Happenings are simply a trick of the savannah-grown mind. As per Einstein’s famous consolation, “for us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

And with that the undoing of millennia of guilt, of blame, of judgment. ‘Could have’ has no meaning. ‘Deserve’ has no meaning. All we do, all we have ever done, was laid out already since the Big Bang, or before. To pursue her and not her, to choose this diplomatic posting and not that, to stand as a candidate in this seat and not that, to support this war and not that—all pre-determined.

Accepting this, not merely intellectually but instinctively, makes the past appear different. It doesn’t look like life as recognized before. No longer a three-dimensional place where one could have moved left instead of right, gone down this path instead of that. Rather, it is a tightrope, from which one could never dismount; it is as free as a bull driven through the streets of Pamplona toward the bullring; as a cog spinning in the direction it was always going to spin; a tightrope so thin it is one-dimensional; no width; as thin as height in a two-dimensional flatland; as thin as the present moment.

And all those erstwhile regrets, no longer having space to reside in the past, are forced into the future, where they transform into possibilities. The forests of Bavaria, from the fairytales of childhood and the Disney of adolescence, were not a destiny to be realized as a diplomat in your late 20s. And thus, it was not destiny-denied by choosing the New Delhi posting instead of Berlin or because of later leaving the service altogether. All of these decisions were already cast. They were cast when yearning for South Asian community in Canberra, when missing the advice of a colleague away sick that day, when Sri Lankans were kind, when Indian girls were prettiest, when inside one of University’s cool crews, when born into a collectivist culture, when the Bolsheviks overturned the order, when the British subdued the Kandyans in 1815, when Buddha preached compassion to animals 2500 years ago, when water came to earth 3.8 billion years ago, and when this recognizable universe of something and negative something formed from nothing 13.8 billion years ago (perhaps).

All these things (except perhaps the last) were things that Brian Greene’s alien could consider as his ‘now,’ depending on how fast he peddled his bike away from us. And cycling toward us, he could see the results of all those causes; results that could never have been any other way. Germany, Bavaria, international intrigue in Europe, was never to happen back then. Not opportunities wasted. Just things not experienced. Yet. All that emotional juice is squeezed from a self-blamed past to an unrevealed future; one that, despite being predetermined, is a place where, for all we know, it could happen.

Before this realization, the only way worthy of entering Germany would have been as a diplomat, so to befit the foregone opportunity; the only way to rectify the earlier mistake. But now you can travel there as what you are now. And what you are now, is enough. Because you could never have gone there as a diplomat anyway. You could even stay in backpacker accommodation and it would still be more than you have ever sacrificed. Because you have not sacrificed anything; you have not foregone anything. Because you had no choice. And with that comes gratitude for the life that actually was given, and was pretty damn cool.

 

The fear

Society’s current configuration has meant resistance to concepts of determinism and no free will. Free will desperados have sought refuge in physics itself: namely, the trippy truths of quantum physics, that particles (which make up matter) exist in multiple states (superposition) until each interacts with something else, at which point it collapses into one of those states, the chosen state being not fully predictable; and that measuring a particle here can impact, instantly, the measurement of a different particle elsewhere (nonlocality). Quantum physics suggests that the universe is ultimately unpredictable. But whether one’s decision is the result of a plethora of factors stretching back millennia or random quantum events inside neurons, the decision is not governed by you, the self’s freedom simply being usurped by unpredictable forces rather than predictable ones.

The need to find some minute cranny into which free will can be shoehorned, like the God-of-the-gaps argument, reveals a fear across Western society at the loss of this fundamental assumption. Free will is actually as difficult to prove and easier to disprove than the existence of an Abrahamic god. Yet, while the latter was the target of thousands of hours of YouTube ridicule by ‘New Atheists,’ Google ‘free will’ and top results are articles rebutting the majority scientific view, almost like when the media hates a public figure and they disseminate the person’s opponents’ counter-statements against them without even broadcasting the public figure’s original comments. As Einstein said, “if the moon, in the act of completing its eternal way around the earth were gifted with self-consciousness, it would feel thoroughly convinced that it was traveling … of its own accord.”

 

No self

From a mental health perspective, while for a protagonist personality acceptance of no free will is a welcome cooling of passions, it may not seem beneficial for all. But what it points to is something that does have the potential to ease suffering for all: the absence of a self.

In bygone eras, society’s judgments of individuals, and people’s own self-worth, rested partly upon things like ancestry or skin tone. Today, judgment is cast on fewer criteria: one’s moral choices, achievements and transgressions. It’s not what you were born with but what you do. The ‘successful’ are revered and the evildoers condemned. Individuals base much of their personal worth on their attainments in life—the remaining essence of what makes you, you. But science reveals these to be just as outside one’s control, and therefore just as fatuous a reason to judge someone, as who their father was. Like the God-of the-gaps or free will, the ‘self’ looks to have been routed from its last refuge.

Not all see this as a shocking or even negative revelation. Nor is it a materialist retreat from spirituality; rather, the opposite. Most of the world’s spiritual traditions, just as they are more deterministic, are also less individualistic. They subscribe to a more external locus of control than Protestant-rooted, Enlightenment-shaped contemporary Western culture. Of these, Buddhism offers perhaps the most developed arguments for why there is no self. Anattā consists of the view that no permanent essence, no soul, exists in any phenomenon, including Homo sapiens. This concurs with the evident reality that atoms and energy are constantly entering and leaving one’s body via food, breath, evaporation, etc. We are obviously not the same physical set of particles we were at birth. So, too, our constantly changing mental configuration. The ‘you’ who then made the now gut-wrenching decision was different, so there is no point blaming the ‘you’ of now. The ‘you’ of then was just as different from the ‘you’ of now as a ‘you’ in another universe, or one of the many ‘yous’ in this universe who seem different and whose actions have an impact on you, such as your partner or the Prime Minister. Like a jigsaw puzzle with all black pieces, when the pieces are jumbled they seem separate, individual. But when slotted together correctly they disappear into one whole, a whole which itself is nothing.

Accepting no-self undercuts a principal cause of suffering: the ego—evolved from millennia of chasing rewards and fleeing threats. Understanding that there is no ‘me,’ and no me separate from the environment, loosens the grip of desires and attachments to fleeting phenomena that fuel dissatisfaction. This aligns with other dharmic traditions like Hinduism, which emphasizes the oneness of all things in the universe.

At the macro level, appreciating that all beings are morally equal, not simply at birth but always, is more conducive to a more compassionate, harmonious society. Some may fear a hopeless nihilism that results in a more compliant populace vulnerable to oppression by those in power. But the current system of treadmill-chasing after confected prizes and status as atomized wage-slaves already ensures system-compliance under the banner of meritocratic democracy.

If the establishment or ruling class itself imbibes determinism and no-self, society can become more egalitarian and prioritize relief from suffering where it is most needed. An erstwhile military industrial complex investor, unmotivated by money-status-achievement will be less likely to bribe politicians for the next war and order the newsman to promote it. From each according to his ability to each according to his needs because there is no such thing as earned merit.

 

Conclusion

The Buddha once uttered something like “there are more tears shed than there is water in all the world’s oceans.” 2500 years later, Hootie asked “Time … why you punish me?” The answer is our complete misconception of both ‘time’ and ‘me’: the illusion that the future is different from the past, and that ‘I’ exist separate from the world. We cling onto an ever-crumbling precipice, making ‘choices’, regretting some and taking pride in others; all things that Brian Greene’s alien, with his ‘now’ cycling back thousands of years, would have seen coming. And perhaps he would see our tears as we would see the tears of a pig regretting birthing her baby in a factory farm for a lifetime of suffering, or a bull regretting going the wrong way when being stabbed in the bullring. The alien would know, as we do, that it’s not their fault.

Enter Experimental Metaphysics

Reading | Quantum Physics

Hans Busstra, MA | 2024-10-06

When I booked an Airbnb in Vienna I hadn’t thought of its exact position, but during my stay I would find out that it was situated directly underneath the beam of entangled photons that the lab of Anton Zeilinger, nobel prize winner in physics of 2022, shoots off to a telescope situated on a hillside 10 kilometers outside the city. In what is called Bell’s inequality tests, Zeilinger and his team have definitively shown that, on a fundamental level, our universe is non-local: measuring the state of one particle will instantly determine the state of the other, no matter how far apart they are. Zeilinger’s work is part of what might be called a new promising discipline in physics: ‘experimental metaphysics.’

Most physicists tend to regard the profound implications of quantum mechanics as ‘small’: quantum theory, though tremendously accurate in predicting the microscopic world, breaks down when we zoom out. So we don’t really have to worry about philosophical questions like Schrödinger’s cat or Einstein’s unease with the measurement problem in quantum mechanics when he said: “I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it.”

Meanwhile, you won’t find many physicists who will argue against Einstein by stating that quantum mechanics is not disturbing, and that it did not create a metaphysical crack in our Newtonian worldview. Single particles don’t behave as little predictable billiard balls as we used to think, but show wave-like behavior and their individual path cannot be deterministically be predicted. More disturbingly, since quantum mechanics we cannot think of ourselves as observers in the classical sense anymore. Measurements influence or perhaps even ‘create’ results. Given all this, the question is whether pondering metaphysics is productive for physicists. Does pondering metaphysics build us computers or bombs?

After the Second World War, a ‘shut up and calculate’ mentality became the norm in most physics departments. So much work had to be done in just applying quantum mechanics to all different branches of physics and chemistry, that funding went to building technology with quantum mechanics.

‘Shut up and calculate’ goes nowadays under the friendlier name of FAPP, acronym for ‘For All Practical Purposes.’ If physicist John Wheeler was philosophically right when he said that the ‘glass’ between us observers and a supposedly objective outside world had been broken, the cracks in the glass can be glued with an FAPP attitude. Macroscopic objects are never perfectly isolated from their environment—as particles are in double slit experiments. Hence, the moon is not in a superposition to us. Even when no one is looking at it, the gravitational interaction with the earth, which causes tides in the ocean, counts as an ongoing ‘measurement.’ So For All Practical Purposes we can assume that macroscopic objects are always being ‘looked’ at.

While an FAPP mentality sounds reasonable for day-to-day physics, one can wonder if it will lead to real fundamental innovations in physics. Historian and physicist David Kaiser has convincingly argued that if it weren’t for John Stuart Bell’s philosophical trouble with quantum mechanics, we wouldn’t have had quantum information theory and quantum computers—perhaps the biggest technological breakthrough the theory has to offer yet.

During a time in which the ‘shut up and calculate’ mentality was dominant, Bell wrote his famous paper “On the Einstein, Podolski, Rosen, Paradox,” in which he made a metaphysical concern of Einstein, put forward in the so-called EPR paper of 1935, testable. Interestingly, Bell’s paper was written outside of academia during a sabbatical from his work at CERN, and it would take more than five years before the physics community would realize its importance.

In the EPR paper, on which Bell built, it was argued that quantum theory could not be a complete description of the world, because if it were, it would imply “spukhafte Fernwirkung”—spooky action at a distance. Instead, Einstein assumed that there would have to be so called hidden local variables, hidden causes not yet described by quantum theory, which would explain the ‘spookiness’ away as reflecting merely the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. Simply put: entangled particles at other ends of the universe had to have made some ‘agreement’ in their past—through a local hidden variable—that would explain why they so perfectly correlate when measured at vast distances.

If we look back, what’s interesting is that it was metaphysics that led Einstein to write the EPR paper: “I cannot seriously believe in it [i.e., in the completeness of quantum theory] because the theory cannot be reconciled with the idea that physics should represent a reality in time and space…” The should in this sentence is telling, because it reveals Einstein’s metaphysics of a ‘reality in time and space,’ where ‘in time and space’ can also be described as a metaphysics of ‘locality.’

The genius of John Stuart Bell was that he made the assertions in Einstein’s EPR paper empirically testable by working them out mathematically. If, as Einstein argued, hidden variables governed quantum behavior while adhering to locality, the statistical correlations between entangled particles would respect a certain maximum (called a ‘Bell’s Inequality’), whereas quantum theory predicted that this maximum would be violated. By working this out mathematically, Bell paved the way for putting ‘spooky action at a distance’ to the test. And Einstein was proven wrong.

Bell’s work inspired experimentalists to decisively rule out the local hidden variables Einstein inferred. In 1972, John Clauser performed the first Bell Inequality test showing ‘too high’ correlations between particles separated over large distances. In 1982, Alain Aspect closed loopholes in the earlier experiments and, in 2001, Anton Zeilinger performed a Bell test over a distance of 10km. These three experimentalists received the Nobel Prize in 2022 for their groundbreaking contributions to quantum entanglement and non-locality.

During a conference celebrating the 60th anniversary of Bell’s paper and 20 years of IQOQI, the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information that Zeilinger co-founded, I visited Vienna to see what the current metaphysical debate is amongst physicists. The first thing I noticed in Vienna was that, in the foundations of physics, physicists don’t mention FAPP. For all practical purposes, it would be crazy to ponder about quantum thought experiments with human observers in superposition—something almost completely impossible to achieve—but at this conference such scenarios were exactly at the core of what was presented and discussed. At the conference, the annual Paul Ehrenfest Award for the most important papers in the foundations of physics was awarded to three physicists who can all pass as experimental metaphysicians: Caslav Brukner, Eric Cavalcanti, and Renato Renner.

Like John Stuart Bell, they come up with what is called ‘no-go theorems,’ a type of proof that shows that a certain set of assumptions cannot all be true. Bell’s paper was a no-go theorem proving that, under quantum theory, you cannot both assume realism and locality—as Einstein had wished. Now, what’s new in the work of Brukner, Cavalcanti and Renner is that they very much focus on observers. Since non-locality is now proven, we might ask ourselves the question: How does this play out for different observers? Can two observers at different ends of the universe, both performing a quantum measurement, afterwards ‘agree’ upon what they both saw? Perhaps not.

Is this new? In a sense not. Thanks to Einstein, we already became acquainted with reference frames: different observers might experience time and space in seemingly contradictory ways. But here’s the thing: the theory of General and Special Relativity could ‘patch’ those different observations, and not in a FAPP way, but rigorously. Though there is no ‘God’s eye view’ to witness the  experience of different observers in Einstein’s universe, the mathematics holds everything perfectly together so we can rest assured that there is an observer-independent physical universe, which is, in a sense, more real than our observations of it.

But after spending a week in Vienna, which I will report about in much more detail in upcoming videos and writings, I’m becoming more and more convinced that quantum mechanics cannot give us an observer-independent reality. And what I found absolutely striking is that all three of these award-winning physicists take a strong subjective approach. According to them, quantum mechanics is not a theory about what nature really is, but about our knowledge of nature.

What the theory can give us is experimental metaphysics. No one would have ever thought that philosophical ponderings on non-locality, often phrased more poetically as ‘interconnectedness,’ could ever be put to the test. But thanks to Einstein and Bell, they could. To better understand our place as conscious observers in this universe, the experiments must become vastly more complex than just measuring entangled photons, but that’s no reason at all to not formulate those experiments.

If metaphysics is indeed becoming experimental, the distinction between philosophy and physics will start fading. Stephen Hawking is often quoted as saying, “Philosophy is dead.” I always thought he was the typical ‘shut up and calculate’ genius. But when I recently looked up his actual quote, I found out it was being used totally out of context, because he did not dismiss philosophy as such, but just that of modern philosophers who hadn’t caught up:

…almost all of us must sometimes wonder: Why are we here? Where do we come from? Traditionally, these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead…. Philosophers have not kept up with modern developments in science. Particularly physics.

I’d say it’s time for philosophy departments worldwide that study quantum mechanics to team up with the experimental metaphysicians. Who could formulate this research agenda ahead better than John Wheeler, when he said:

We used to think that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, we the observer safely hidden behind a one-foot thick slab of plate glass, not getting involved, only observing. However, we’ve concluded that that isn’t the way the world works. In fact we have to smash the glass, reach in.