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by
Heinrich Päs
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January 31 - April 30, 2023
Eriugena’s work looks like a metaphor for decoherence, where the separation of the universe into subject, object, and environment constitutes a local perspective onto the world and in this way can lead to the emergence of time and localized, classical objects—and, of course, of good and evil, since without time nothing happens, so nothing can be considered evil.
“Book of Nature” that offered an equally good or even better glimpse of the divine than scripture.
The idea of unification (i.e., that a minimal set of natural laws governs everything that happens, has happened, and will happen in the universe) is an obvious heritage of conceiving nature as “One.”
Like Ficino and Giordano Bruno, da Vinci imagined Earth or even the universe as a living creature, an organism. For Leonardo, the human body was “a lesser world,” a miniature embodiment of the entire universe: “As man has within himself bones as a stay and framework for the flesh, so the world has the rocks that are the supports of the earth. As man has within him a pool of blood wherein the lungs as he breathes expand and contract, so the body of the earth has its ocean.”16 To him “every whole is greater than the part,” while “the whole [still is present] in every smallest part”: “each in all
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While Copernicus’s model didn’t allow for a better fit with observational data yet, as it missed the concept of elliptic orbits later found by Kepler,
In a decidedly Platonic attitude, Kepler believed that “in all acquisition of knowledge it happens that, starting out from those things which impinge on the senses, we are carried by the operation of the mind to higher things which cannot be grasped by any sharpness of the senses.”
Kepler believed that “in all acquisition of knowledge it happens that, starting out from those things which impinge on the senses, we are carried by the operation of the mind to higher things which cannot be grasped by any sharpness of the senses.”
Kepler had realized that just as there are five regular polygons, there are five harmonic intervals in music, and he tried now to employ musical intervals to describe the relations of planetary velocities.
In Spinoza’s universe, everything that is, is necessary and determined; there are neither miracles nor contingencies. Even God has no choice about what to do with the universe; nor did he even exist before the world:
Oldenburg who founded the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, the first journal dedicated exclusively to science, and installed the process of peer review to scrutinize the academic quality of contributions by fellow scientists,
“Isis shows herself without a veil, but man has a cataract.”
Space and time, for example, were described by Kant as a pair of glasses through which we perceive the world.
Schelling demanded that a true religion should exhibit itself in stones and moss, flowers, metals,
Schelling took Kant’s important insight about the perspectival nature of human knowledge… and turned it upside down.”89 As Schelling put it, “Empiricism extended to include unconditionedness is precisely philosophy of nature.”
“dynamic atoms” at the foundation of nature, which do not exist in space and “cannot be viewed as part of matter”91 but are rather “constituent factors of matter”92 whose effects and products “are presentable in space.”93 The dynamic atom itself “is nothing other than the product itself viewed from a higher perspective.”
“as soon as a human sets itself apart, in opposition to the outside world… he separates what Nature had unified, he separates object from observer… and finally (by observing himself) himself from himself,”
“many of the discoverers of energy conservation were deeply predisposed to see a single, indestructible force at the root of all natural phenomena.”
Schelling’s friend and collaborator Hegel later applied their common idea about the reconciliation of polarities to history and politics. Interpreted from a materialistic perspective by Hegel’s student Karl Marx, this concept became a cornerstone of the theory of Marxism.
“Is nature unnatural?” asks science writer Natalie Wolchover, who worries that “the universe might not make sense.”
Schrödinger’s defining life by its functionality rather than by its material basis. For Schrödinger, a living organism had to be understood as an information-processing routine rather than an object in space and time.
the foundational elements comprising nature as informational patterns imprinted into a material basis or foundation, the “midwife of being.”
what is more real, the forest or the trees? The living organism or the atoms it is made of?
on the most fundamental level of description, there exists only one single object: the quantum universe.
“The core tenet of historical monism is not that the whole has no parts, but rather that the whole is prior to its parts.”
accepting strong emergence, on the other hand, is not too different from believing in miracles. After all, if phenomena on a higher, more complex level are not even in principle describable on a more fundamental level, then the fundamental level does also not constrain the space of possibilities of the higher level.
It means that by zooming in to increasingly small distances and high energies, we have lost sight of the whole—that by splitting the world apart, we have discarded the links that hold the universe together.
the profound puzzle of why the same laws of physics seem to govern all parts and the entire history of the universe is usually explained by the assertion that everything in the cosmos is made up of the same set of particles, known as quarks and leptons. Taken at face value and subjected to critical scrutiny, this is no explanation at all. After all, nothing explains why the particles themselves behave the same way at different locations and times in the universe.
particles are not independent of each other but all part of a unifying field.
entanglement creates correlations that appear as a miracle, a ridiculously unlikely coincidence, unless the related subsystems are understood in the context of the whole. If one were just looking at these components without knowing about the total, entangled state, one might be just as perplexed about this anticorrelation as particle physicists are about the fine-tuned cancellation among the contributions to the Higgs mass.
“Since the days of Isaac Newton, the ant’s-eye view has dominated fundamental physics. We divide our description of the world into dynamical laws that, paradoxically, exist outside of time, and initial conditions on which those laws act.”
From the bird perspective, there is no environment triggering decoherence; thus, presumably, the universe will be experienced as a single quantum object.
“Space-time tells matter how to move; matter tells space-time how to curve,”
space-time may dissolve into a foamy structure “made up not merely of particles popping into and out of existence without limit, but of space-time itself churned into a lather of distorted geometry.”
“with spacetime churned into quantum foam, space and time in fact lose their meaning. When we blend the two greatest theories of the twentieth century, quantum theory and general relativity, we have to conclude that time is a secondary concept, a derived concept,”
“Time is what happens when nothing else happens.”18 Instead, as Barbour mused, time may be “nothing but change,” implying “that time does not exist at all, and that motion itself is pure illusion.”
In Chapter 3 we got to know decoherence as an agent of classicality and a generator of matter. In the same way decoherence becomes now a generator of time.
they discovered that time would actually emerge once an observer focused only on a part of the fundamentally timeless whole. The process of decoherence would create an approximate, emergent time when irrelevant tiny density fluctuations or gravitational waves were neglected. The rest of the universe, observer included, would feature an emergent time parameter, they found.
While undeniably time for us is a basic experience, it isn’t understood as a fundamental property of the universe anymore.
When we first introduced entropy, we pointed out that it is something like a measure of ignorance; or, expressed the other way around, the less entropy occurs in a description of nature, the less information about its inner workings is discarded and the more fundamental the description.
What we usually experience as the passage of time is the evolution of less probable toward more probable macrostates, which typically amounts to destruction and equilibration.
Now, since entropy increase characterizes the passage of time, this suggests that time itself is nothing else but entropy increase. In such a view, entropy constitutes what we perceive as the arrow of time. If, as argued above, entropy is a feature of a coarse-grained and somewhat arbitrary perspective onto the universe, and if the quantum universe as the fundamental description of nature has vanishing entropy, it thus appears likely that the quantum universe as a whole is timeless. This is exactly what has been found in quantum cosmology.
“irreversible phenomena… arise from our incomplete information concerning the system, not from any intrinsic behavior of the system.”
hypothetical white hole (one that can be escaped but never be entered)
Such entropic forces are macroscopic effects driven by the tendency to maximize entropy that don’t have any microscopic equivalent. Osmosis, for example, pulls liquids against the force of gravity through membranes in order to balance the concentrations of substances dissolved in these liquids. Now gravity, Verlinde proposed, may be an entropic force itself. Gravity can, according to Verlinde, “emerge from a microscopic description that doesn’t know about its existence.”
A crucial assumption that Verlinde adopts from the holographic principle in black hole physics and string theory is that there is only a finite amount of information corresponding to a given spatial volume. “Space is in the first place a device introduced to describe the positions and movements of particles. Space is therefore literally just a storage space for information,” Verlinde explains.
and zero entanglement between two quantum field theories effectively pinches off the connection between the corresponding space-time regions: “We can connect up spacetimes by entangling degrees of freedom and tear them apart by disentangling. It is fascinating that the intrinsically quantum phenomenon of entanglement appears to be crucial for the emergence of classical spacetime geometry,”
the intrinsically quantum phenomenon of entanglement appears to be crucial for the emergence of classical spacetime geometry,”
“entanglement is the fabric of space-time,”
“Spacetime… is just a geometrical picture of how stuff in the quantum system is entangled.”
Entanglement—correlations originating from oneness—has replaced length “as the world-making relation,”
