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Yet if aesthetics is to be the guide – and one cannot dispute that for many scientists and mathematicians it has proved, historically, a reliable one – for me there is even greater beauty in the idea that reality can appear both discrete and continuous depending on how it is observed; and that nonetheless continuity has ultimate priority.
What makes quanta behave like particles is that only one field quantum can occupy a given state at a time (due to the so-called Pauli Exclusion Principle). This immediately imports the necessary degree of discreteness.
The true substance is energy, which appears in changing forms. This is entirely in keeping with the view that reality is a dynamic, ever-changing, flowing process, not an assemblage of things; a view which is to be found in the wisdom traditions of East and West, and is given in the world as delivered to us by the right hemisphere, and not the left.
An extra-powerful type of correlation, intrinsic to quantum mechanics, entanglement seems to be more primitive than space.’
That was in Chapter 22; and there I reflected that if it makes sense – and I have no idea if it does – to view the interaction that gives rise to the observation of entanglement as a sudden shift in a whole Gestalt (right hemisphere take), such as a field, rather than a change in one discrete entity causing a change in another discrete entity sequentially (left hemisphere take), entanglement would no longer require faster than light communication over unlimited distances between particles. Every part of the cosmos would be necessarily connected in some form to every other part.
‘Isolated material particles are abstractions’, wrote Niels Bohr, ‘their properties being definable and observable only through their interaction with other systems.’
What emerges here for me is further confirmation that we need both discreteness and continuity, both the knowable and the unknowable, the graspable and the ungraspable together; that the second in each pairing is ontologically prior to the first; and that here, as elsewhere, betweenness is the most important element.
It is the quantum vacuum fluctuations that give rise to inequalities in the cosmic background radiation. And this asymmetry or inequality in the cosmic background radiation was necessary for the universe to come into being at all. Without it, the quantities of matter and antimatter would have ‘cancelled one another out’.
Perfect symmetry is an abstraction from reality. Any symmetrical system is highly vulnerable to small inequalities.
Complete order would prevent adaptive changes; unconstrained disorder would render self-organisation impossible.146 The so-called ‘edge of chaos’, where chaos and order are maximally present to one another, is the most fruitful condition of an open system, including the creative potential of the human brain.147 As Nassim Nicholas Taleb argues in his book Antifragile, a certain vulnerability is bound up with the potential to survive: the attempt to do away with it leads to extinction.
‘The same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all her forms are also responsible for the structure of our minds.’
It is already an important perception that the difference lies in the how, not the what. As soon as we escape the spell of thingness, and see that what we are dealing with is different modes of being, rather than different entities, we have begun to make an inroad into unknowing.
Only a tiny part of our psychological – our mental – life enters our full consciousness so as to form a subject of reflection, that of which we are aware we are aware.
And it is not as if what goes on outside the spotlight is inferior stuff. I discriminate, reason, make judgments, find things beautiful, solve problems, imagine possibilities, weigh possible outcomes, take decisions, exercise acquired skills, fall in love, and struggle to balance competing desires and moral values all the time without being reflexively aware of it. Note that these are not just calculations, but rely on my whole embodied being, my experience, my history, my memory, my feelings, my thoughts, my personality, even – dare I say it? – my soul: ‘psyche’ in the broadest sense.
Self-conscious thought ‘becomes biologically important’ when, due to the peculiarities of a particular case, ‘the guidance of life by habit, instinct, and impulse breaks down’.
This is reminiscent of Whitehead’s admonition, quoted earlier, that ‘operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle – they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.’13 It is clearly far more efficient to limit the contents of awareness, rendering responses wherever possible automatic.
Self-consciousness may not be necessary, and may even interrupt, the ability to integrate sensory information, to assess emotion and motivation (including the integration of one’s mental states with that of others – we rapidly and unconsciously weigh what others know, want and see) and to achieve a global ‘take’ on a situation.
To claim that consciousness is non-existent is self-exploding, since it requires consciousness both to make, and to make sense of, the claim: and to state that consciousness exists, but is an illusion, is no better, since an illusion requires a consciousness in which such an illusion might occur.
Stating that matter ‘just does’ give rise to consciousness is to invoke what is called brute emergence, and ‘brute emergence is by definition a miracle every time it occurs.’
And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continuous evolution. If evolution is to work smoothly, consciousness in some shape must have been present at the very origin of things.
Neuroscientists VS Ramachandran and Colin Blakemore conclude that ‘consciousness, like gravity, mass, and charge, may be one of the irreducible properties of the universe for which no further account is possible.’
Complementarity – the principle that objects have certain pairs of complementary properties which cannot be observed or measured simultaneously – is most commonly thought of in relation to position and momentum, but has further applications within physics.
The world I know is the world as I know it.
The first is that the way in which we approach Nature governs what we find (science gives not an account of nature tout court, but an account of nature ‘as exposed to our method of questioning’).
The second is this: that the conclusion we should draw is – not that all that we can encounter are representations of something we cannot know – but the precise opposite: that we do actually deal with reality and know it, just with an aspect of it that we partly call forth ourselves by our approach. The fact that we play a part in its being what it is does not make it unreal.
We look for it in the field, and do not see it, not realising it is itself the ground on which we stand to search: as the eye sees itself nowhere in the picture of the world it brings into being.
‘This is a participatory universe.’90 The phrase is somewhat in line with Bohr’s reflection that ‘the new situation in physics has … forcibly reminded us of the old truth that we are both onlookers and actors in the great drama of existence.’
the new theory elevates our acts of conscious observation from causally impotent witnesses of a flow of physical events determined by material processes alone to irreducible mental inputs into the determination of the future of an evolving psycho-physical universe.
Contemplation of the world in a spirit of openness and humility fundamentally enlarges our being, where dogma and complacency simply narrow it.
A theme of our explorations has been the status of things. Things, it seems, emerge from our descriptions of experience: they do not constitute it. Whether a thing enters our world or not depends on the scale at which it is seen,
And as Theise and a colleague, physicist Menas Kafatos, put it elsewhere: ‘No single scale of observation can reveal the whole; at the moment selection is made of a scale of observation, the features of other levels of scale are hidden from view.’
Hence his remark that ‘physics is mathematical, not because we know so much about the physical world, but because we know so little: it is only its mathematical properties that we can discover. For the rest our knowledge is negative.’
I recently came across this quote from Bohm: ‘when one analyses processes taking place in inanimate matter over long enough periods of time, one finds a similar behaviour [to living processes]. Only here the process is so much slower…’121 And what gives us the impression of increasing complexity in evolution is the way consciousness, more than matter, becomes – increasingly complex.
Experience – mind – is always a betweenness. And I believe all reality is like this. Outer and inner should not be separated; if they are, they become separately inert, since everything arises from their being together.
We have seen that one aspect of nature, both animate and inanimate, is its tendency to repeat patterns at different levels of the same whole: fractality.
Those needs and drives that we know at one level as explicit are implicit at other levels; there is no absolute, merely a relative, difference in kind as the scale changes.
When animals intend something, they move their muscles; when plants intend something, they grow and change their form.
It seems that plants, like animals, use complex calcium-signalling networks and ‘neurotransmitters’.
‘brains and neurons are just one possible, undeniably sophisticated, solution, but they may not be a necessary requirement for learning.’
it is deeply perverse to deny that they experience suffering, as I believe it is to deny outright the possibility of suffering to any living being.
According to Matthew Fisher, Professor of Physics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the nuclear spin of phosphate atoms could serve as rudimentary quantum bits (so-called ‘qubits’) of information in the brain, since such phosphate atoms, bonded with calcium in Posner molecules (clusters of nine calcium atoms and six phosphorus atoms), can prevent coherent neural ‘qubits’ from collapsing into decoherence (non-quantum states) for long enough to enable the brain to function somewhat like a quantum computer.
Unpredictability is a physical reality embedded in the fabric of the quantum world.
The dogma that while matter can affect mind, mind cannot affect matter is irrational and baseless. The brain can be altered by changes in the mind, which accords with an array of neuroscientific findings, just as the mind can be altered by changes in the brain.
Clearly the danger is that one defines as ‘normal’ only the things that one happens to believe now: and everything else becomes, by definition, abnormal, paranormal, supernatural, irrational.
The immediate cause of movement is always an action potential in a motor axon, which is unconscious. ‘The proper question is whether the conscious processes can play any causal role’ in that chain.243 And they manifestly can.
In the sense examined by Libet, consciousness is just the individual’s attentional spotlight; but it passes over a massively larger field of awareness, existing at many levels.
There can be no question that reality is more than we can see or measure or know precisely.
When functioning well, the brain ‘canalises, and also limits, the life of the mind.’
as embodied, imaginative creatures, we never were separated or divorced from reality in the first place. What has always made science possible is our embodiment, not our transcendence of it, and our imagination, not our avoidance of it.
‘Man’, he said, ‘is that part of reality in which and through which the cosmic process has become conscious and has begun to comprehend itself.’
