This is my response to the all-important question posed by Father Adam MacMillan on social media – a medium insufficient to a proper response. Fr. MacMillan asked:
“No it doesn’t have meaning at the quantum level, but why is the quantum level the fundamental level? What if the fundamental level is the human level, and it gets less fundamental in either direction? Hence why relativity and quantum don’t reconcile?
How human consciousness relates to fundamental reality and the irreconcilable natures of quantum physics and relativity have been the leitmotif of my own thinking going back decades to conversations with Leon Lederman at Fermilab in ‘81/‘82. Lederman’s life work was the pursuit of the Grand Unification Theory. Arguing from Poincaré’s Four Geometries and Wigner’s Epistemological Law of Empiricism, I maintained that such a theory was impossible. In the intervening decades my thinking on this has broadened and increased my conviction of this position. From what you wrote, I assume we agree on that fundamental irreconcilability, but differ on the role of a god/creator, and how our consciousness plays into this mystery.
If your suggestion is right that human understanding is the fundamental level, it would seem to follow that our correct view of existence should be capable of understanding it all levels. If our perspective is the fundamental truth, then everything should accord with it. But it doesn’t, which to me suggests that our limited conditions of objective thought are at fault. Let me suggest another approach to this.
The emergence of Quantum Mechanics a century ago was a detonation far more devastating than the atom bomb. Far more than just two cities, it obliterated any possibility of a “worldview”. Before going further, however, it is important to note that QM is a purely classical interpretation of a nonclassical reality. It is a measured quantification of probabilities seen from our emergent consciousness of classical events that points to a reality that violates our very conditions of thought. Rationality in the form of the principle of non-contradiction, locality (and now the very notion of space and time), and causality fail to penetrate the impermeable wall of decoherence. That is why the Copenhagen Interpretation remains the only viable approach. Bohr was a staunch Kantian who refused to project objective categories of thought onto the noumenal. Any attempt to describe quantum reality would necessarily be a projection of our conditions of thought onto an inconceivable reality, and therefore necessarily be wrong. Transcendental Illusion. Thus: shut up and calculate.
We can, therefore, only know of this reality negatively: without causality, without order, without time or space, etc. When we do attempt its description, it is necessarily with inadequate metaphors bound in space and time. Waves, quantum fields, superposition, events, etc. Even the name of “quantum” physics is inapt, as quanta don’t exist as separate entities (number), but simply in our measure of a quantum energy spike along a wave. We simply have no entry into this reality, which has had the unfortunate effect of much of physics descending into its own retreat to metaphysics. In too many cases physics has become the modern Scholasticism, with mathematics as its holy scripture creating ever more fantastical structures, and ending in meaningless conversations of how many worlds can fit on the head of a graviton. In short, the imposition of Ideas rather than knowledge from experience. Bacon would be aghast.
It seems to me the case that our consciousness, at least our objective reasoning, is an adaptation from mammalian consciousness to reduce the environment to carefully selected objects in a small subsystem we can manipulate for advantage. It has nothing to do with ultimate reality, and everything to do with survival. Objective thinking was of practical origin and that remains its primary characteristic; and reduction is the mechanism. Reduction from quantum superposition to eigentstate; from entanglement to causality. And from sensation to object, and from object to idea – all out of harmony with the underlying reality. In front of us (an unavoidable spatial metaphor not to be taken literally) is this incomprehensible reality known to us only as the tiniest reduction that we experience as space, time, color, and substance. We are literally blind to almost everything “in front of us”. Our “world” operates as it does because we interpret the energy we sense as small subsystems. Going back to Wigner, when we expand beyond that limited time, space, and chosen events the order dissipates and chaos recovers what belongs to it. As in the cases of QM and Relativity. A more contemporary expansion of this would be Carlo Rovelli’s Relativistic Interpretation where time and understanding rely on “Ignorance” of almost everything in existence.
But there is another aspect of human consciousness where you and I meet again, although with different interpretations: The more primordial mode of esthetic experience. It is here your most important question of all finds its rightful ground: “What if the fundamental level is the human level?” But of course we are – how could we be otherwise?
We are fundamentally entangled with all the rest of existence and not separate from “nature” in the way subject/object representation leads us to believe. In the less reductive event of esthetic experience we are aware of an immediate connection, and profoundly. The sensation of color or music is a direct response to the flow of energy that entangles us, and far more powerful than a concept of measurement and calculation. Or an Idea. You and I both search for a path to the holy, and we both look to human experience to provide that path. But as I see it, the trick is to resist metaphysical projection, by which I mean attributing our representational conditions of thought where they have no application. The idea of a creator, or a beginning at all, is such a projection that uproots us from the ground of experience. The hints that quantum reality provides deny such projections, and the insistence of a god, or creator, or rational explanation is the error of our impudently telling existence what it is. To listen esthetically/non-metaphysically, however is to listen to what existence has to tell us. This is what we need to learn to hear the fundamental reality in which we are already a part. “Too late for the gods, too early for Being”.
Perhaps still too early, but there are hints left for us along the way. Authentic esthetic events that point to a fulfilling of our true nature. Beethoven, Shakespeare, Blake, and Van Gogh immediately spring to my mind. Wittgenstein was resigned to our being limited to just pointing at the mystery, but I insist music, poetry, and art are our true modes of pointing – which is not really pointing but a mutually entangled communication.
And here we finally meet at the most profound experience: love. But then I’m an unapologetic and unreconstructed hippy from the Summer of Love, when Being did shine through for a brief moment and the music become so think in the air we couldn’t help but sing. But too early, and soon we retook shelter in the dark. We weren’t ready. That revelation, however, remains as one more trace pointing the way.
Which leads us to our final question of intentionality. I suspect it is so as our being is an instance of fundamental existence striving to experience itself, with man being one stop on that journey. And that is the fount of the holy drawn from the very essence of fundamental existence in which we share as part of fundamental existence. At at the font is overwhelming love, which we are yet too weak to be.
Too Late for the Gods 