The originating quantum physicists, such as Wigner, Heisenberg, and Bohr, for example, were strong enough to face and deal with the philosophical dilemmas that arose from their observations and discoveries.
In Heisenberg’s “The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics”, which was a response to Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology”, he demonstrated that QM had obliterated subject/object metaphysics, introduced the unfathomable role of consciousness, and the impossibility of any rational model to be sufficient to fundamental reality. He concluded with the statement, deeply unsettling to naive realists such as Carroll, that physics can no longer claim to be a study of nature, but is confined to a study of how physicality is known through human conditions of perception and thought.
In Wigner’s writings from 1949 to 1961, Wigner (a seminal Nobel-Prize winning mathematical physicist) took a critical look at physics adopting mathematics as its language. Building off of Poincare’s “Four Geometries” and his own account of the approximate nature of number as a pragmatic adaptation of the primarily esthetic nature of mathematics, he demonstrated that mathematics was a game with invented axioms and rules, and chosen problems (or events) with which the mathematician enjoyed displaying his cleverness. In adopting mathematics as its mode of expression, physics also became a parlor game of sorts, with axioms being presented as “fundamental laws of nature”, limited to carefully chosen events, and clever solutions invented out of new rules and axioms increasingly removed from anything in reality, such as complex numbers. This led to his Empirical Law of Epistemology, which showed any rational system to be approximate due to the approximate nature of numbers, and tightly limited in space, time, and chosen event. As these limits are exceeded and new events are introduced, entropy inevitably increases and the system breaks down. And as was the case case with Heisenberg, Wigner also didn’t shy away from the mysterious role of consciousness in the process.
Today, we mostly find physicists more desperately limiting chosen events and dismissing those things that they cannot explain in order to create somewhat fantastical theories, all of which are no more than groundless metaphysics. The best exception to this sad state of affairs is probably Carlo Rovelli, although even he doesn’t rise to the level of the originators of early 20th Century.
Carroll complains of amateurs nosing around in physics, but he doesn’t even rise to amateur level in the philosophy that underpins his questions and answers. He could only be characterized as naive. None of us has any understanding of consciousness or the arational nature of quantum reality on the other side of the density matrices. He has a naive assumption of concerning the ability to describe fundamental reality with mathematics or any systematic explanation. He has no idea what Heisenberg meant about physics no longer able to claim a study of nature. From such a position, it would be foolish to proclaim any unitary theory of existence.
This is from a closed-group online discussion with a Christian Nationalist concerning the totalitarian nature of the metaphysical framework of Christianity. Due to the non-public nature of the conversation, I present only my response.
This first response focuses on your first few paragraphs concerning the nature of totalitarianism, Because of the excessive length of the past replies, I will limit this response to those paragraphs because it is the nature of totalitarianism that needs to be addressed before we can adequately address all that followed.
You start with an assertion that there is a distinction between illiberal and totalitarianism, but fail to tell what the difference is, so I will just set that aside and discuss your attempt to tell us what totalitarianism is, and your claim that it doesn’t include Christianity.
Your reference to Arendt and Conquest gives us a superficial description, but tells us nothing about the nature of totalitarianism. I started with Heidegger’s thoughts on this because the nature of something tells us more and might even cause some correction of the superficial description. I had asked you to critique that ground of my position and to try to justify logic as a mode of explaining reality, but you failed to do either. You simply repeated you assertion that my. “View that Christianity is totalitarian for positing objective truth, beauty, and goodness is simply not true. Furthermore, if your reason for this is appealing to a relativist axiology and epistemology, that is even more contentious”. Your introduction of axiology to characterize my thinking here is further evidence that you failed to grasp my meaning, but perhaps we can correct that misunderstanding as part of what follows.
All you presented beyond your simple denial and a superficial definition was a reference to a difference between illiberal and totalitarian, and a comment that Locke and Smith were both Christians, While the latter point is certainly true, I can only guess at what relevance you thought it might bear here. Perhaps you meant to imply that Christianity can’t be totalitarian if certain liberal thinkers were Christians, but that is an obvious fallacy. I never implied that all Christians were totalitarian as there is a difference between the totalitarian nature of the metaphysical construction of Christianity, and individuals who identify as Christian. Differences in interpretation can certainly occur individually, and it is important to note that starting with the Enlightenment most of those differences concern a liberalizing thrust that is condemned by those who describe themselves as traditional or orthodox. And rightly so, as this liberalization indeed strays from the Western metaphysical construction of Christianity.
I am convinced that your absence of a critique on the Heideggerian demonstration of the totalitarian nature of metaphysics and the inadequacy of logic to describe reality stems from your lack of knowledge about it. I did ask you read a short essay of Heidegger’s, but there is no indication that you have. This and what you refer to as contentious relativism cannot be fully rendered in this post, but I will give a brief outline of it. We can then dive further into any aspect as required.
1. Heidegger saw the danger of metaphysics in its reductiveness. What had earlier been physis was split into physics and metaphysics, where physics is reduced to mere superficial interchangeable objects, and Being is displaced to an imaginary metaphysical realm beyond the mere physical. Logos, which was the experience of meditation on Being in its fullness in this world, was reduced to “the cheap acid bath” of logic. This cheap acid bath, ungrounded by the fullness of of Being, was free to spin off any sort of pretense of answering the mysteries of Being and nature of reality. These were systematic constructions that claimed to produce a unitary explanation of reality, and with evermore complicated designs. What this was in essence was a determining subject imposing a logical order on a manifold and largely hidden reality, as opposed to the pre-Socratic logos of receiving truth through physical thought experience. In short, this was what Heidegger frequently refers to as subject/object metaphysics, where our connection to Being is severed, resulting in our perception of the world reduced to an imposing subject experiencing the world as object in opposition. A forcing of order instead of a “Letting” of reality.
Heidegger’s method is not one of propositional logic due to its inadequacy to describe reality, but rather through thoughtful (poetic) presentation of experience and its traces left in language itself. This brings us to totalitarianism. Keep in mind that Heidegger wrote entire books about what I am about to summarize in a couple sentences and I would be happy to expand on any of this, but this will need to suffice for the moment.
Totalizing is a word often used to describe elevating an idea to such primacy that it obliterates all else. This necessarily occurs in any metaphysical construction through a unifying explanatory idea. The construction itself presents itself as a totality of existence. The primary idea enacts a totalization to maintain the apparent unification of reality. From within the metaphysics the obliteration of all but the idea through the totalization blinds the inhabitant of the metaphysic to the multiplicity of reality and therefore to the error of the metaphysic itself. This inevitably leads to clashes with other metaphysics, and more importantly, with reality itself. It is a short step from this totalization under threat to totalitarianism. For Heidegger, Christianity was once such a threat, but saw in his time the major totalitarian threats as Communism and Nationalism. Today, Christianity has reappeared as an ally of Nationalism.
The totalizing idea of Christianity is a perfect god which forms a reductive notion of one truth, one good, one beauty. Over the centuries an elaborate metaphysical structure has been constructed from this idea. When it was able to, it enforced totalitarianism on its subjects, and in various instances seeks to again. That is simply the nature of totalizing metaphysics. Communism and Nationalism are prime examples.
2. Over the past 140 years what Heidegger points to as the full manifold nature of reality beyond any logical reduction has born born out in physics and neuroscience. Again, entire books are written on this as well as the entire field of modern physics, but here I will simply cite some of the most important examples from physics.
In the late 19th Century Poincare wrote his “Four Geometries” where he showed that perfectly consistent geometric systems could be devised from contradictory premises, giving a hint of the arbitrary nature of systems. Between 1949 and 1962, Eugene Wigner elaborated on this, showing mathematics (and formal systems in general) to be an esthetic game where mathematicians posited arbitrary maximums and rules and showed their cleverness in their manipulations. Very little of this had any relation to reality but was an esthetic game. Number itself was only an approximation and a rational construction. He demonstrates how physics through its adoption of the language of mathematics, itself became an esthetic game employing non-physical things such as complex numbers. By including entropy into the mix, he devised his Empirical Law of Epistemology, which shows all rational systems to be arbitrary as to chosen events, approximate from the nature of number, and limited in scope (space and time). Inevitably in every such system as chosen events (information) increases, or the temporal/spatial frame of reference increases, the order begins to pull part and entropy increases back to the primal chaos of reality.
At the same time, Heisenberg picked up this same theme and again showed any order to be a result of consciousness. The implication for Heisenberg was that no unitary explanation of reality was ever possible, and more importantly, physics no longer could claim to study nature, but rather was a study of our conscious interaction with nature. Today this idea has been further devolved by Carlo Rovelli through his Relativist Interpretation of Quantum, depending heavily on quantum field theory starting with quantum fields of energy as primary and constantly spewing chaotic spin (quantum) foam from which temporal complex organizations arise. Any system or experience of time is necessarily connected to perspectival consciousness entangled with the universe and engaged in an extreme reduction which he calls blurring.
This is the state of our knowledge of physical reality in the 21st Century and needs to be addressed head on. It does not suffice to merely dismiss it as contentious.
This is an introductory thought on the need for a new philosophy for the quantum age, in response to this question to me on Twitter:
Isolated quantum systems observed in their eigenstates appear to be in thermal equilibrium because their momentum/energy has been transferred. What links the moments? What is the link here, between quantum coherence and the statistical features associated with thermal dynamics?
What is the link here, between quantum coherence and the statistical features associated with thermal dynamics?
I want to be sure we’re not conflating things here. Did you mean the probabilities of perceived wave collapse or in the process of entropy increase? Let’s start with wave collapse to Eigenstate. What we’re up against here is our lack of the language to properly discuss this, which mostly shows in our conflation of terms used differently in coherence and decohered environment, such as real, cause, event, probability, world, universe, wave, energy, etc. And along with that is the continued attempt to understand the quantum in classical terms. As Anton Zeilinger has noted, Kant was the philosopher who grounded the world of classical physics and we now need a Kant of the Quantum. I would include relativity too, but this leaves us in uncharted territory forging our own paths.
On the quantum side we can know almost nothing except what we observe in collapsed particles, which hints at superposition, entanglement, arationality, and lack of causality, spacetime, and entity. We cannot conceive this and any attempt to do so will be wrong because any such conjecture will necessity be in the form of our subjective sensibilities of space and time and governed by our innate reason, which cannot grasp a state of arationality and lack of spacetime. We inevitably revert to spatial/temporal metaphors. We take all that to mean all possibilities exist in timeless, spaceless relation of superposition, but it is important to keep in mind we can only refer to it negatively. We cannot validly describe anything positive about its nature. This is what I refer to when I speak of fundamental reality, and refuse to repeat the error of metaphysics by imagining it any further.
What we observe on our side of the gate of decoherence are probabilities of finding particles upon decoherence. These probabilities are expressed in density matrices which illustrate our imagining of how particles are allowed to pass through the gate into the decohered environment. There are various theories of how this works, but we know that the possibilities are guided by what is yet possible in the decohered environment and initiated by an observer. But even at this, things become hopelessly murky and lead to a lot of bad metaphysics; and this murkiness begins with the nature of the observer. Wigner, among others, believed that it is our consciousness that initiates decoherence, and there are echos of that in Penrose; but most physicists today resist that idea. I believe their resistance is motivated by the felt need to maintain the physical world as separate from our consciousness and objectively knowable. The stability of their profession as it is known today depends on it, but I believe Wigner was probably right. More on that later.
We now know that particles are just localized increased energy along the waves of quantum fields. These quantum field waves are the most fundamental existence we know on our side of the gate, and we need a term other than fundamental existence to distinguish it from the fundamental quantum existence. We can’t yet call it fundamental reality, however, or we run into confusion of the definition of “real” in physics, which is having two measurable properties – the minimum requirement for a real entity. Leggett has demonstrated that reality does not exist at this level. All we have are energy waves and the ephemeral and chaotic quantum foam it continuously spews and reclaims. Everything we encounter is a temporary self-organization of the various frequencies unique to each field out of this churning chaos. Everything emerges from this sea of foam and waves. And everything eventually returns to its chaos. This tends to refute metaphysical inventions such as many-world theory, which sees superposition as something more than mere possibilities of particles appearing, and instead takes it to the level of the famous cat – an entire world existing in quantum state, and each world itself splitting off with every new event into complete other orthogonal worlds. This imagines that our reductive representational world actually changes fundamental reality (as I defined it above). I suggest rather that the only change occurs on our side of the gate. Where spacetime and causality do not exist, there can be no change. What we experience is merely a mental construct from a greatly reduced array of possibilities in the decohered environment. Other worlds may exist, but only as the construct of other conscious beings with no connection to ours. Nor does panpsychism or cosmic consciousness exist – at least not at this fundamental level, as consciousness itself is an emergent self-organized energy event. That is the error of metaphysics, which physicists increasingly fall into while feeling their way through the murkiness. It seems more the case that decoherence only occurs at the particle level, and we make of it what we will through emergence. Again, more on that to come.
But the murkiness still remains, all due to the murkiness of the nature of the observer. From here we can’t see our way to what it means to emerge from chaos and return because the nature of the self-organized order itself is somehow entangled with our perception of it. And that’s the case all the way back to initial decoherence. Even when we measure a particle, we are entangled with the apparatus. We cannot know of any wave collapse without our participation in the collapse. And there is no unmotivated justification to claim such a collapse ever happens without our participation.
As Zeilinger noted, Kant was the philosopher of the world of classical physics, and much of what he wrote is outdated by the 20th century discoveries; but not his epistemology, with which modern neuroscience is very much in accord. What if we are to take seriously his prescient demonstration of the subjective nature of space, time, and reason, our world as representation, and the illusions created when reason is applied beyond sense data? In the updated version, our consciousness is an evolved reductive mechanism that takes raw sense data, reduces it to what is most important for survival in the immediate environment, and draws it in the imagination through, color, extension, Individuation, and sequence as it orders certain chosen events into a picture of a world amenable to our actions and predictions. This is our objective/rational universe, and exists only in our mental representations. If humanity were to perish, so would this entire universe. What would remain is that unknown fundamental reality.
This rational/objective mode is not our only means of knowing, and not even the most profound or true. I will explore that in the next entry to this blog. But for this mode, our reality is defined by pragmatism – true is derived from the useful. And the useful is determined locally among a few chosen events. Expand the frame of reference and its usefulness disappears along with the constructed logic of the associations. Entropy increases as we head back to the quantum foam.
But rather than this insight clearing the murkiness, the mystery of existence becomes yet darker. At the center of this is consciousness of the observer. By all appearances, consciousness is a very recently-evolved energy event. Everything we can encounter is an energy event. We measure the energy of conscious states. If we cut off the supply of energy, consciousness dissipates into the environment – available for new events. As such, consciousness cannot be fundamental – we have never observed it apart from a highly evolved living organism, despite the fanciful metaphysical inventions of some. But then, there is nothing more irresistible to the metaphysician than consciousness, in which inheres the same mystery as quantum reality. Only a small part of our mentality is revealed, and as in fundamental reality, the more that is revealed, the more we become aware of the immensity that remains concealed. Our concealed mentality makes the decisions for which our rational consciousness takes credit after the fact. If there is a personal identity, it lies in the unconscious, unknown to us. We meet ourselves only in dreams where spacetime is twisted and rationality is tethered. And then, only fleetingly. We are as much a mystery to ourselves as is fundamental reality. We only see what is passed through the gate, and from that we construct an identity. We know ourselves as a novel we write daily until the day we die.
The great mystery veiled in our murkiness lies within this consciousness. It brings about decoherence in quantum entanglement. It is – we are quantum. Penrose has proposed that our entanglement with an event creates our consciousness – an event of mutual relationship between fundamental reality and our uniquely organized energy event. Our mentality begins with this great reduction from All to our tightly limited universe, and proceeds through the further reduction of attention to limited portions of sense date, which are again reduced to object, concepts, and ideas in the Kantian sense. But the real secret lies in that initial reduction from fundamental reality. To what extent are space, time and causality real or merely imagined sensations – existing only our minds as do colors? Is there something of fundamental reality that actually exists as space, time, and causality in emergence from the quantum foam, or merely just our way of creating sensation?
To answer this we would need to step outside of our consciousness, which makes the question unanswerable. But the inevitable breakdown of all rational systems over time, as new information overwhelms the arbitrarily chosen events at the beginning and expands the frame of reference to the breaking point, suggests that all that determines our universe is no more externally real than the color red. But that doesn’t mean it is purely our invention either. Our sensation of red is determined by a set frequency of light.
The murkiness here only darkens. Our sensations are caused by something in which we stand in mutual relation. Our consciousness is more than a computation machine, but rather a special type of event entangled with everything else. It is energy, as is everything we encounter. But fundamental reality always conceals more the more it reveals. Even if we accept energy is the essence of consciousness and our universe, the enigma merely shifts to the nature of energy. Defining it as the capacity to do work, or measuring it does nothing to answer that question, and we come no closer to primal truth without coming to terms with that mystery. We have merely chased it all the way to the gate, but struggle to ask it the right questions.
Increasing the accuracy of particle measurement, spinning theories of everything, or inventing wild metaphysical tales will never illuminate this murkiness. The Kantian model will continue to provide pragmatic benefit, but has outlived its claim to discover the truth of reality. That is only to be found in a deeper understanding of our own consciousness in relation to a larger chaotic reality. An esthetic rather than ascetic sounding of the vibrations we are in relation to the reality antecedent to the idea. A radical rethinking of what we are, reality, and what it means to know.
Logic is as primitive as the most primitive human. A gross simplification to something a limited mind could grasp. The next step in our thinking would be to move beyond the computational mechanism of reducing the world to atomistic facts and placing them in a logical order. We know there is no one unitary space time, no one privileged perspective, and no possible systematic explanation of everything. The next phase is to enhance our ability to understand the world in accord with relativity. A world in constant flux seen equally validly from many perspectives. An awareness that there are no atoms, just relations of events, and events are never static. We already have this ability to a degree, which is what we see in great art, poetry, and music. The perspectival play and motion of art. The relational play of harmony in music both in the movement of melody an tension of chords. The music of poetry in its harmony among words and layers of meaning within the word.
In doing so we disentangle from the treacherous web of the most skillful and pernicious of the Sophists. Philosophers lie, and so we must think like poets.
As I mentioned before, I am writing a book on the modest topic: what is a universe? Universe is the real scope of your thinking here, so I will start with a few remarks on that topic. We are accustomed to thinking of a universe as the all-encompassing reality, and distinct from ourselves. We can muse about the existence of other universes as separate self-encompassing realities, like ours but with differences. Or we can posit another metaphysical realm that governs our universe, but in all these cases the universe is seen to be what exists prior to us. Really, what we view as the universe only exists in our minds. Of course, there is an existence outside our minds, but whatever that is, it is not our universe.
To be conscious is a radical act of reduction and creation. To start, our reality consists solely of a decohered environment, an unimaginably tiny slice of what lies beyond the gate of decoherence. What lies beyond that gate is the totality we can never know, but denies the properties of our universe. Consciousness begins with that fundamental reduction. Even with that, we can only perceive what interacts with the electromagnetic spectrum or imagine that for which we detect gravitational effects. Most of what exists does not so interact and we remain blind to it.
The acts of reduction and creation continue in our understanding. Our brains receive electrical impulses as raw material for sensations – the creation of perception of an event. The sensations are perceived in space and time, which itself is an artifact of our universal creation, not fundamental. In so doing we abstract from the sensation to ever higher concepts. Abstraction is the mental act of reduction. Our universe is a gross reduction imagined in our sensibilities and mentations. We construct small or temporary orders – a universal mise-en-scene updated by generations to suit contemporary tastes. It is our home; the comfort, support, and familiarity of where we dwell. In that sense it is reality for us; and we are right to take it seriously, rearrange the scenery and make it our own. But error and hubris also lurk in that sense. If our world changes in the reduction to Eigenstate, then fundamental reality also changes in the same way as our world, and we dream of multiworlds, like ours but different and orthogonal. The error is to think our reality is fundamental reality. We confuse the two as a matter of course.
Reality in totality, if such a word were apt, is different. If we were to die off as a species, our universe would die with it. Perhaps there would survive dog worlds, or rat worlds; but not our universe.
The talk of a universal mind falls into this error. What reality would it see? Our universe? Would it grasp the universal chaos as chaos, or amuse itself with endless creations of illusory patterns and orders? What about all the reality outside our universe? Would it include quantum reality?
But then, how do we understand consciousness? The only consciousness we know is reductive and ensconced in space and time. It cannot be separated in one isolated and static moment outside time because it consists of time itself. Our world is one of becoming – of waves, not atoms. There is no now without a then. That precludes deconstruction into atoms of facts.
It seems to me you are imagining something quite different from consciousness. Consciousness is more invention than grasp. We don’t even know our own selves. Most of our mental activity is unconscious or preconscious. That larger hidden activity is really us, but we have never met except in dreams, where space and time become are distorted and logic has no sway; and even then only fleetingly. The self we know is a novel in progress, being written daily until the day we die.
As for singularities as primordial concept exploding into extension, it find that interesting and bears future discussion, but I would at this point just add that the current consensus is that the universe, whatever that may be, did not inflate from a singularity but rather erupted from a flux in the chaos of a quantum field. Both Hawking and Penrose have moved in that direction. But then, the systematic explanations of physics come and go, all of them wrong but the best offering up world-changing insights. At least within the boundaries of our universe. The difference in our universe between singularity and quantum in relation to your interesting idea is that there is no mass in the endstate of maximum entropy, and infinite mass in a black hole.
We are fundamentally quantum beings in quantum relationship with the rest of reality.
This enables free will as a function of quantum indeterminacy
Our universe is actualized through an observer out of fundamental quantum reality.
Our consciousness is a reversal of entropy. (You stated that life itself was the reversal, but I see life as a limited and temporary self-organization of energy, the same as all other events, that eventually dissipates into the general environment. It is our consciousness that decreases entropy in the event of decoherence as the first in a series of reductions.)
The core of our disagreement comes about where you wrote:
– The onset of creation is akin to a blueprint, a conceptual framework based on a transcendental function. – The universe unfolds according to this virtual fractal template (think Mandelbrot)”.
– The next creative step requires energy and specific motion to become actualized. – The observer required by the Copenhagen interpretation (collapse) is a specific limitation. – It is actualized through the observers described in “creation” – we interact with a quantum interface at the cellular level continuously. 👇🏼
Our original question concerned creatio ex nihilo, to which I responded with a clarification of “thing” and a model from which things emerged through decoherence as self-organization of energy that precedes things. Reality is divided by the impenetrable wall of decoherence into classical and quantum realms. We can never conceive of quantum reality because it denies our evolved categories of understanding: time, space, reason. We can only “know” what appears to us after decoherence. Information theory is one viable approach to understanding our decohered universe, but tells us nothing about origins, which stubbornly lie on the other side of the wall. This eliminates the possibility of appeal to a “transcendental function”.
If such a blueprint or conceptual framework exists, it only does so after decoherence, as it depends on mathematics which cannot exist without spacetime. It also leaves open the question of its ontology – whether is is an order we subjectively impose on reality or is an actual feature independent of our consciousness. I contend that any question of origins not only lies forever beyond our grasp, but is a nonsensical question. Absent spacetime, origin is not a valid concept. Speculation transcending our representations of the decohered universe will never rise beyond ungrounded metaphysical assertions. They can never be true as they all rely on our imposition of evolved conditions of thought onto the quantum realm which denies them. This is true for Mutliverse, Multiworlds, gods, and even the current attempts to look for geometric order in the chaos of quantum reality. The Copenhagen Interpretation of no interpretation at all remains the most intellectually honest, if eternally unsatisfying. I stand with Feynman that we need to accept ultimate incomprehensibility of fundamental reality and focus on what is present in our decohered environment.
From a philosophical perspective, this forces us into the mystery of decoherence as the presentation of things in the world, whether as Heidegger’s Golden Horizon or Zurek’s density matrices, pointer states, and redundant copies of information. Either can tell us important things as long they resist metaphyisical speculation attempting to transcend our decohered environment. Any attempt to describe fundamental quantum reality by means of our innate conditions of thought can only result in error – Kant’s transcendental illusion.
Information theory can have value as a mathematical and metaphorical explanation of mechanics within our decohered environment, but also has serious problems as you present it. The first is that it contradicts the most fundamental reality we have discovered within decoherence: quantum fields. Quantum fields exist as wave energy upon which particles appear and disappear into our environment like foam bubbles on the wave of the sea. You presuppose a metaphysical blueprint preexisting these waves. There is no ground for this assertion. Rather, all we can start with is energy waves and particles that exist as local points of quantum increases in energy. It is from this chaotic quantum foam that things emerge as events of self-organizations through the interplay of the quantum fields. It is more likely that the inherent possibilities in each chance encounter of fields (event) determines what appears to us, not a predetermined blueprint.
The term “information” is itself problematic. It can be used in multiple senses, but originates with a sense of learning by a consciousness observer. Uses other than that are metaphors that play on that sense. Generally, physicists use it in the sense that events among entities (or systems) leave traces that can be read. Therefore, information can arise as relations among systems, not the entities themselves. This blurs the role of consciousness in information, as seen in the continuing disagreement over the role of our consciousness in decoherence. To assert information without our observation is to propose the ungrounded metaphysical assertion that things can have an awareness; or to merely describe a physical event metaphorically.
Here I’d like to expand Donald Hoffman’s metaphor of consciousness as a graphic interface, which is really a grossly simplified version of Kant’s epistemology cloaked in contemporary imagery. The incomprehensible stream of 1’s and 0’s are reduced through a logic analogous to our innate conditions of thoughts to pixels on a screen, which we intuit as icons analogous to representations. The icons have no real existence outside the representation, but also are not totally arbitrary – they are determinations from real information – the 1’s and 0’s. Human consciousness is thus a highly reductive adaptation for the purpose of simplifying our environment to something we can manipulate and predict to our advantage. It has proved useful within a very thin sliver of reality, but wide enough to allow us to avoid predators, capture pray, and plan for future events such as rain or cold. It knows nothing, however, about the ultimate realities of 1’s and 0’s.
Those curious beyond mere survival, however, have the opportunity to study the screen itself and discover the fundamental pixels. In so doing they can map out relationships, measure and label shapes, discern colors, etc. And from that they can even begin to derive some of the logic that creates these measures and patterns, analogous to our deriving mathematics and logic. But we can also see the error of going beyond that to projecting onto the 1’s and 0’s themselves, whose existence we know nothing about. (A point of breakdown in this metaphor is that the computer code has a designer, whereas there is no ground for assuming this in reality).
At the core of this is reduction, which defines our universe. Perhaps, as Penrose speculates, consciousness itself is created at the moment of entanglement and reduction to Eigenstate. That moment of decoherence is the initiating reduction of quantum chaos to an entity in our decohered universe. Going further, this massive sea of quantum foam must be processed through our understanding through further reduction as icons or representations. And it is the relationships among these that we represent to ourselves as systems, and time as the eventual disordering of these systems. As more entities enter the environment in Eigenstate, the more entropy increases. Further, the more events taking place within our perceived system, the more “information” is introduced and entropy increases.
As Rudolf Clausius demonstrated with his deck of cards, the order of a system is arbitrary, and each arbitrary system has its own degree of entropy and its own time. In all of this there is one common factor: our reductive consciousness. The implication is that what we think of as the universe is really the analog of the computer screen. Only real in our imaginations, but representations stemming from a real physical reality with which we entangle. We are at the same time that with which we entangle and the inhabitants of our representational universe that can elicit the illusion of separation – the error of subject/object metaphysics that underlies our understanding yet today. With this realization, there is no valid reason to think our representational universe actually changes coherent quantum reality, just as the icons cannot change the code. Fundamental existence remains as it is outside time, causality, space, beginning or end. Entirely incomprehensible to us representationally (scientifically or metaphysically). To posit multi-worlds, or multi universes, for instance, is to misunderstand what a universe is. It is transcendental illusion to posit another world like ours splitting off at an orthogonal at decoherence because the universe only exists as such as our representation. Perhaps there are other reductive beings representing their own universes, but not as an orthogonal, as even Hilbert Space is confined to a study of our own pixels.
This is my response to a fundamentally important question from the Twitter handle Dr.D.
“The idea that no time, no information and no mathematic(s) exists outside of ST (spacetime) is an argument for creation ex nihilo, isn’t it?”
It would be easy for me to simply say no, not necessarily, but it wouldn’t be a valid answer until we first more closely examine the question.
The first and most difficult problem is the word “nihilo”. In Latin it means “small or insignificant thing”. We find similar ideas throughout Western Languages, such as English “nothing”; German “nichts” from Old German ni + wicht (“not a thing”, cognate of English “naught”); Spanish “nada” from Latin res nata (a thing of insignificant or trifling birth); Norwegian “ingenting”, again “no thing”. I could go on, but this should make the point that it has long been ingrained in our most basic thought of existence that reality consists of “things” and the absence of reality is dismissed as “no thing”. “Ex-nihilo” resides in that same understanding of existence as “something out of nothing”. Below I’ll explore the difficulty in that understanding that leaves us struggling to describe reality as revealed in the 20th Century revolutions of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
The second problem is the question of “argument”. That causation, entities, number, information, etc. don’t exist outside space time is in itself not an argument, although it can have implications. It simply is the observation that those things require succession and extension, which are solely modes of time and space. We cannot have number, or position, or event without spacetime. And with no event, there is no information. This is critically important, however, because it is becoming accepted among physicists through experiments and observations that spacetime does not exist in the most fundamental level of existence we know of – quantum coherence. That implies that these things only emerge after decoherence in our environment. Easily said, but this ultimately brings us to the ultimate mystery: The impenetrable wall of decoherence. But that is a much longer and fascinating story.
If we are to inhabit a world of thing and nothing, we need to take a moment (or millennia or two) to ponder the nature of a “thing”. There is an odd, although rarely noticed, confluence between Romance and Germanic Languages (and perhaps others) of the original sense of “thing”. In today’s everyday sense “thing” refers usually to a static object – a definable entity. It has lost its original sense of “gathering”, hints of which still reside in words such as Scandinavian “Allting”, which is the gathering of the parliament, or more infamously as the Italian Cosa Nostra – our gathering of our thing. The greatest poets, however, remember that “The play is the thing”.
A thing is the play of a gathering, which confronts us with a surprising confluence among the latest notion from quantum physics as emergence from an event of the self-organization (gathering) of quantum field energies; Heidegger’s thinking of thing as the gathering of elements of Being out of an event (Ereignis); and the originating notion of gathering. All describe the emergence of a thing as an originating event. We might be tempted to say: a thing from no thing, our own being confined to the reductive metaphysical prison of thing as existing object, and no-thing as unreal.
Hence arise the dilemma and present crisis of physics itself. Coherent quantum existence is real, but contains nothing of “thingness”. Our universe emerges from it as a thing, but not from another thing; and yet an existent reality. The first order problem, and source of all metaphysics as an error, is the complete unknowability of this quantum existence, making any speculations senseless. We are able to say no positive notions of this quantum existence, but only what it lacks. It lacks spacetime, but that gives us not even a glimpse of what that existence is. Similarly it has no causality, individuation, rationality. But what it actually is cannot be said because we cannot conceive it. Our conditions of thought evolved for practical survival through reduction of sense data to simplified and selective representations in space and time. We literally cannot conceive the absence of space and time, which becomes apparent in our sole reliance on spatial-temporal metaphors. Waves, fields, electron clouds, quantum foam, and even the word “quantum”. Our entire universe, of which we are a part, is but an extreme reduction of reality, a blurring out of everything not necessary to a perception of a subsystem. Subsystems are arbitrary in nature, determined for practicality and dependent on perspective and our conditions of thought. They are also all we can know. Physicists tell us we only know about 5% of what makes up our universe, the rest being non-sensible dark matter and energy. That is hardly even the tip of the iceberg, to use a temporal-spatial metaphor.
Origins beyond our our spatial/temporal bounds and conditions of thought will remain nonsensical to us, as will anything like an ultimate reality or origin. That might be bad news for physics and those who persist in the errors of metaphysics, but great news for those who live to experience the freedom and joy of our brief lives. Our lives at core are songs, dance, and love. Precise measurement emerges only as a practical means to sustain that experience. The joy comes from the eternal mystery.
The Christian apologist and thinker Craig Reid posted a video a few months ago of which I have only recently become aware. Titled “What is the Status of Immaterial Objects Given Atheism”, he presents a challenge to the twenty or so smartest atheist thinkers, of which he includes me, although seemingly as an afterthought:
Happy to be included, I don’t consider myself primarily to be an atheist thinker, but a thinker who is an atheist. My focus is on how to bring about a post-metaphysical approach to reality, not on theology. I lost interest in the question of god long ago. Moreover, I hold philosophy of religion in low regard and wouldn’t necessarily suggest seeking the answers from its practitioners, who largely remain remote from the most urgent thinking of today.
Craig starts his video with this:
Craig starts off with the question: What is the status of immaterial objects given atheism? I find this an odd question. It starts with the non-compelling presumption that there are immaterial objects, and then tries to make this into a theological question. This question properly concerns metaphysics, not just theology. As we will see, his chosen example of an undeniable immaterial object turns out not to be as applicable as he thinks. He goes on to further clarify:
….
He focuses on the laws of logic as his example of lack of verifiability, immaterial, invisible, and transcendent, and therefore not consistent with atheism at all. Actually, his description of logic is neither consistent nor inconsistent with atheism, as he actually concedes at one point:
It remains possible for an immaterial truth to exist without a god, but that isn’t the most salient issue at play here. What this all turns on is the ontology of logic. Craig claims to make an ontological argument, but in his argument ontology is diminished to the simple question of does it exist or not. But that question omits the all important ontological issues of what and how? Despite his claim, nobody doubts the existence of logic. The question is: what is it and how does it work? Central to this is the applicability of logic to reality. (And of course, we would need to explore the question of what is real.)
Craig seems to naively adopt the rationalist belief in the transcendental existence of Ideas independent of a thinking subject – a view long since dismissed among most serious thinkers. By the way, the philosopher Bas C Van Frassen gives an accessible account of the failure of science and philosophy to show a sure relation between logic and reality other than as a purely utilitarian tool for survival, and not ultimate knowledge, in his essay “The False Hopes of Traditional Epistemology. But the point here is that Craig is wrong to claim that critics of rationalism simply deny the existence of logic, but rather the question centers on the what and how.
What follows is a grossly abbreviated and simplified response, but should anybody wish to go more deeply into this, either in conversation on this channel, or privately, I would be happy to do so.
Craig reprises the no longer important debate between rationalism and empiricism and mixes a position from both sides. In assuming innate knowledge of transcendental truths he hearkens back to Plato’s remembered Ideas. His focus on logic draws on the empiricist tendency of Aristotle to reason from physics, which supposes a rational universe and the infallibility of reason. Both, however accept logic as a valid method for understanding the universe. Rationalists employed deduction from primary transcendent ideas and empiricists primarily employed induction from observation, but until Hume came about there was little question of the ability of logic to describe the world as it is. Craig himself appeals to this necessity to describe the world as it is, so let’s start there.
The first mistake is to assume we have a stable and correct view of the world as it is, which even a brief overview of philosophy and physics should easily correct. Because no such thing is possible it is necessary to understand that past philosophical views arise historically according their contemporary state of scientific understanding. Aristotle is remarkable for his thought within the best scientific understanding of his day, which was his own physics; but his physics has necessarily become obsolete over millennia. That means we need to formulate our positions today on what is known at the edges of quantum physics and relativity. To that point, I find amusement in the efforts of those attempting to rescue Thomism, for example, from current knowledge rather than acknowledging that if Aristotle were writing today his works would be entirely different from what we know of him. Aristotle was a man in time doing the best possible with what he had, and his philosophy is not timeless truth. And so is the case for thinkers today. For me, modern physics is most fascinating for what it cannot answer.
Kant’s attempt to rescue objective knowledge from Hume’s skepticism necessarily conceded so much ground that metaphysics itself finally foundered. Reason and its subordinate categories of the understanding, along with the intuitions of space and came to be seen as innate a priori structures of human consciousness. Their purpose was to make a representational order out of the jumble of sense date we receive from our surroundings. This representational world was something drawn in our imagination, and not reality in itself, but it sufficed for us to maintain ours survival. The ontology thus appears: 1. Existence? Yes. 2. What? Innate structure common to all human subjects. 3. How? Reduction of chaotic sense data into recognizable representations somewhat obedient to our logical manipulations.
Implication? Reason is empty without sense data. Intuition without reason is blind. Thus transcendental reasoning falls by the wayside as groundless and necessarily leads to transcendental illusion, or the illusion of reason, which Kant illustrates in the four antinomies.
But this leaves us in existential quandary. How good is our vision emerging from reason applied to sense data? Hume started us on the necessary skeptical inquiry concerning the applicability of our reasoning to reality as it is. Kant compromised by considering our representational creation as our proper world, where we live forever oblivious to the noumenal.
This position reached a crises mid 20th Century with quantum mechanics. Philosophers such as G.E. Moore and Hans Reichenbach strove mightily to save science from this chaos, much as Kant tried to secure if from Humean skepticism, and as Thomists try to rescue Aristotle. But others, such as Wigner and the later Wittgenstein were already acceding to the inevitable. Wigner’s Epistemological Law of Empiricism describes all rational/mathematical systems to be approximate, arbitrary as to chosen events, and bounded tightly to limits of space and time. Once we transcend those limits the logic of these apparent system pulls apart. Even worse, drawing from Poincare, multiple systems can equally describe the same spatial/temporal events. In a similar manner, Wittgenstein’s neatly ordered world of atomistic facts in logical relationships exploded to bits, and came back to together as commonly-shared word games.
Kants representational world finally showed itself as a useful, pragmatic fiction, but one that formed the basis for survival. And so today we look at the ontological question for reason from the viewpoint of our best science. From evolutionary biology, logic is an evolved trait that was largely responsible for our successful adaptation. From neuroscience, it is largely as Kant described, an innate structure to order the confusion of sense data and enable more or less intricate reasoning of probabilities in order to anticipate and plan. From physics, it is our reductive capacity that somehow participates in wave collapse – the only known mechanism for the reversal of entropy, which creates our world. This capacity reduces information, but complexity is then reintroduced into the environment over time, fueling the inescapable and relentless increase in entropy by which we approach the fundamental chaotic state of nature. Or as Carlo Rovelli explains in his relativistic interpretation, the blurring of reality to a minuscule subset we view as a subsystem in space and time – a creation through ignorance in the most literal sense.
No, nobody is claiming logic doesn’t exist, and we all necessarily use it because that is the innate mechanism of our consciousness. But it fails your test of describing world as it occurs. It creates the representational world we know, but is useless in the face of ultimate reality and has no existence outside of our thoughts, much as the color red only exists as our sensation. In any case, it has nothing at all to do with the question of god.
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.
Worldview. Explanation. Value Proposition. These are the themes of a recent essay and video by the apologist, SJ Thomason, titled: “What Does Atheism Have to Offer? The Atheist Value Proposition”.
Instead of countering her claims, examples, and arguments, all of which have already been done to exhaustion, I aim to look at the foundation of her approach, which rests on the notion of “worldview” – a seemingly innocuous word at first glance, but behind which stands the germ of the false arguments of Christian apologists. We will see how explanation and value-proposition naturally grow from this originating error. To do so I’ll take a close at the three areas where she cites me specifically: worldview, the nature of reality, and morality.
Worldview
Recently, a Christian called Ken Ammi debated Jeff Williams on my channel. https://www.youtube.com/live/l3N0GNO9FdE?feature=share Jeff was adamant that atheism is not a worldview. Unlike Christianity, which claims the common core in the belief in Jesus’ resurrection and our salvation based on His sacrifice, he said that “there simply isn’t” a common core. He also said we have no objective morality, yet, he said, we do have morality and a moral sense. Hmm.
This is SJ’s first reference of me in her essay and video, and here I’ll address the underlying issue of worldview. I’ll return to the question of morality at the very end.
If worldview were merely the fundamental misstep of Christian apologetics, I wouldn’t bother with it here. I long ago lost interest in the question of gods, including Christianity. But as Martin Heidegger demonstrated in “The History of Beying”, “Introduction to Metaphysics” and “The Age of the World Picture”, worldview is a constituent element of modern life – our prevalent fundamental grasp of the world. He perfectly encapsulates this in “The History of Beyng” as follows:
“Da-sein must find its way into Beyng and leave history to Beying.
Beyng, in its dignity does not require domination.
The First Commencement has become more inception and more primary, and for this very reason, Beyng no longer essences as φύσις. Above all, “metaphysics” is without soil or ground. Yet for this reason, its progeny dominates: Worldview.”
For those not familiar with Heidegger’s Ontology, let’s look closely at these few words.
Da-sein means “Being-there” in German, which Heidegger means as the essential nature of humanity – the part of Being that finds itself conscious of being in the world and, when authentically engaged, in thrall of the event of experience of Being in the world. But our history in the West is one of forgetfulness of Being and not enthrallment as we reduce our world to mere objects of manipulation and superficial measure. Being no longer essences as physis. The world becomes objectified as practical raw material.
That objective reduction is an attempt to dominate Being itself. This reduction is a falsification of the manifold nature of Being by projecting our rational constructions onto it. We insult the dignity of Being through our insolent attempt to instruct Being of its nature whereby we reduce reality to our preferred specifications. The opposite path would be to let Being instruct us and swell beyond our limited rational constructs.
The first commencement is Western Metaphysics, begun at the time of Socrates. It is the time when the full experience of Being as physis is removed from sensual experience and split in two: physics as the objective, rational, and reductive understanding of the material world; and metaphysics as the transcendent and immaterial realm of Being. By ripping Being from the ground of experience in the world, the world becomes desolate (and even sinful) and truth becomes groundless – a mere act of rational imagination. Our experience of physis reduces to physics just as Logos reduces to logic.
Being groundless, metaphysical worldviews can be anything at all. In their groundlessness they claim to explain the universe – it’s beginning and nature. There can be multiple contradictory emergent worldviews, each reductive (thus confining), and each internally coherent. Coherence is easy to achieve when we dispense with the requirement of grounding. But none achieve any real explanation, and all close off the most important questions. Christianity is a worldview. So are Islam and Hinduism. And so is scientific reductionism. Christianity, being a European metaphysical invention (Neoplatonic, later Aristotelian through Thomism, The ROMAN Catholic Church) and unrecognizable to the originators of the Near Eastern mythology it appropriates, is merely the flip side of the same coin as naturalism. For those entrapped in metaphysics, it is impossible to imagine Da-sein without a worldview.
We see this in SJ Thomason’s opening:
Over the past few hundred years, the move to “secular rational modernism” has supplanted “traditional religious” views in many parts of the West. Atheists sometimes think Christianity will one day be toppled and atheists of the past century such as Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse Tung certainly gave that effort their best shot. Other atheists decry the morally atrocious actions of these dictators – whose actions led to the untimely deaths of over 100 million innocent lives. Many of these atheists favor the idea that science will one day topple theistic belief systems – and God. So let’s examine science and God.
To Thomason, everything is a worldview. If Christianity has a worldview, then so must atheism. While in reality there is no single atheist worldview, our current age ensures there will be worldviews among atheists. Certainly Marxism is a worldview inhabiting the reductionist metaphysics of Hegelian dialecticism. As such, it reduces the world to material and power. Much bloodshed ensued. Christianity is a worldview claiming to explain the creation of the universe, the nature of god and man, morality, and truth. It is also a reductive metaphysical construction that precludes the necessary fundamental questions by insisting it already has the answers. Much bloodshed ensued. If we are to ascribe atheism to Communism, we must then also take into account the atheism of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek and ascribe Monetary Theory, Supply Side Economics, and Free Market Libertarianism to atheism also. Also not without bloodshed. And Naturalism is a worldview – or more broadly, scientific reductionism and the metaphysical insistence that the universe is orderly and rationally explicable. Far too many in the sciences also fail to perceive the fullness of Being.
But that would simply be furthering Thomason’s inability to see outside her confinement to the Christian Worldview, where the world is reduced to Christian/non-Christian.
All of these worldviews fail due to the lack of being grounded in what Being presents in the events of experience, and all offer equally false claims of universal explanation. This lack lies at the foundation of modern drift and sense of loss, or even anxiety. Desolation. We are ripped from the ground that nourishes us.
At the heart of metaphysics lies the myth of subject/object duality – Da-sein depicted as an individuated immaterial soul opposite an observed material world. The individuation is absolute: a rational end-in-itself. And not just that, but an end-in-itself with an all-explanatory worldview. The all-explanatory feature stifles questions, allowing the weeds of dogma to grow. And dogma fueled by Will-to-Power (the last stage of metaphysics) leads to bloodshed.
Explanation
So what makes atheism so attractive to some so-called rationalists, materialists, or naturalists? Does it explain our most important questions of life? Is it the truth? What is its value proposition? Or alternatively, does Christianity offer tremendous explanatory power for life? Is Christianity the truth? What is Christianity’s value proposition? Truth is that which conforms with reality. Let’s examine the two worldviews in the context of life’s biggest questions.
Notice the emphasis on practicality. The crude business jargon of “value proposition” is given first priority, followed by a vague notion of truth. This is the legacy of subject/object physics where the world exists for our domination, and the world view must first of all provide practical benefit. Truth thus comes about as that which supports the benefit. Thomason gives us the naive and superficial definition of “that which conforms to reality”, but is unaware she already constructs reality as that which is useful in her worldview.
The “value” of a worldview is its ability to provide answers to what in reality are uncanny and inexplicable mysteries, but always in accord with one’s preferences. The earmark of metaphysics is its lack of grounding, enabling a myriad of contradictory explanations, as evidenced by not only the Biblical creation myth, but also Enumu Elish, Gaia emerging from Chaos, and many others. All are groundless and explain nothing at all, unless we mean “explain” to mean no more than a coherent narrative. But none conforms to any reality outside the groundless suppositions of the worldview.
Worldviews are essentially incapable of describing ultimate reality, and that goes for scientific reductionism as well as religious myth.
Yet some atheists such as Jeff Williams will push back on even the most basic foundations upon which we’ve built our scientific theories by questioning the rationality of our universe: We can only pray that he and others like him come to their senses.
As I said earlier, scientific reductionism and Christian worldview are two sides of the same metaphysical coin: a firm yet ungrounded assertion that the universe is fundamentally ordered and rationally understandable. To the Christian and the naive realist the very questioning of this tenet is nonsense. They must cling to this belief at all costs, or all is lost. If the world is fundamentally arational, then the mere coherence of a narrative becomes worthless – the proposition loses all explanatory value.
This is where it becomes interesting. Science itself in the last hundred years has crashed into the impenetrable wall of decoherence, and as in the particle crash of a supercollider, decomposed into mysteries literally inconceivable to our rational minds. Fundamental reality is known to us only negatively – as a lack of our very conditions of rational thought. It is without space and time. Without causality and number. Superposition violates the law of noncontradiction.
Einstein is often said to be the last physicist entitled to belief in a rational worldview, heavily influenced by Spinoza’s metaphysics of a mechanistic world created by a perfectly rational god or nature. Confined to this worldview, Einstein famously rejected the obvious implications of entanglement and indeterminacy as he insisted there must be hidden variables that, when discovered, would restore our faith in a rational universe. John Bell offered a theorem that promised to disprove hidden variables, and Anton Zeilinger, Alain Aspect, and John Clauser shared the 2023 Nobel in Physics for giving definitive experimental proof of Bell’s Theorem. Like it or not, fundamental reality is arational and all our systems of understanding are limited constructs.
Worldviews are not only ungrounded, but in opposition to fundamental reality. They explain nothing at all.
The question of God’s ontology so vexes the atheist that they try to shift the burden of proof for God’s existence to the theist by claiming the definition of atheism is a lack of belief in God. Thus, the theist must address the atheist’s lack of belief by demonstrating evidence for their own beliefs. Thankfully, we have answers. God has given us both generalized evidence for His existence in nature, the cosmos, our design, our rationality and our teleology (or purpose).
Worldviews collapse because they assume a rational universe, but also due to a lack of grounding. This is the obvious weakness of Christianity, but also all worldviews. Christianity cannot present its god, and necessarily resorts to sophistry and empty claims. Notice the degraded use of “Ontology” by Thomason. Non-metaphysically, ontology is philosophy in its fullest sense as a deep questioning within the experience of Being in its manifold nature. In the spirit of metaphysical reduction, however, she uses it merely as a pretentious way to ask if something exists. Unable to ground this existence in experience, she blatantly attempts to shift the burden of evidence.
Morality
He also said we have no objective morality, yet, he said, we do have morality and a moral sense. Hmm.
As the “Hmm” signals, within her worldview my statement about morality is incomprehensible. Within the imprisonment of subject/object metaphysics, there are only two alternatives: Either there is an immaterial objective moral law recognized by our immortal souls (Christian metaphysics); or there is no morality at all and everything is allowed in the sinful world of the senses. (Reductive physicality – nihilism).
Hume is probably the most famous of the moral sentimentalists, and he recognized something fundamental in human nature: we have an innate sense of morality that can be refined over time. That is, morality is subjectively determined, but not entirely arbitrary. It is guided by certain innate sensations and common, in the same way he share an innate ability to reason. When we make a moral judgment, it is immediate in the gut, not an effect of mediated syllogistic reasoning to a standard.
The history of Christian morality itself shows this refinement of moral sentiment, as once biblically approved genocide, stoning of heretics, and slavery are now morally repugnant to most believers. The change over time defies any claim of objective law, which must be immutable.
The universe is arational, and so is morality. But here arationality does not imply empty, but rather overfull. So much more than we can reason.
To follow the question of morality requires overcoming of worldview: to grasp its nature we need to abandon subject/object metaphysics. Fundamental reality is not atomic but entangled. All is connected and in mutual relationship. The key to finally grasping morality is through empathy and love – our primary modes of experiencing fundamental entanglement. The loss of individuation without annihilation. Complementary being in the world. Superposition.
The Second Commencement
For Heidegger, the Second Commencement follows a complete rejection of the past 2500 years of subject/object metaphysics. It rejects rational systems and reduction. It exchanges esthetic knowing for objective representation. He saw himself as no more than somebody clearing the way for this new beginning, but who were to be the brave new explorers of Being? Certainly not the academy and its mean pretense to philosophizing. Heidegger saw the role and capability of the academy as no more than transmitting the past – a past no longer vital. And philosophers lie.
So we turn to poetic thinkers, artists and musicians. A beginning that isn’t new at all, but a return to the pre-metaphysical approach of physis – a poetic non-reductive physicalism perhaps.
Heidegger wrote at the time of intellectual PTSD, full of anxiety and dread. The vertiginous moans of Nietzsche’s madman echoed with the deaths of god and the illusion of a predictable rational universe. This was the desolate time when we are too late for the gods and too early for Being. But it would be wrong to identify the Madman with Nietzsche, who knew better and commanded us to laugh and dance. And in perfect irony, collapsed in a surfeit of empathy embracing a beaten horse.
But this is the 21st Century, and we have had ample time to reorient. Empathy and love beckon us away from subject/object confinement, and its systematic dogmas. Systems are mechanized death. Life is a temporary dance to the tune of entropy. Make it a joyful sound. Embrace the weirdness, whose call beckons from the heart of Being. Surf the waves.
Empathy, love, and joy shared. Or at least so says this unreconstructed 60’s Hippy.
This is a response to an essay by Robert C Koons that was recently reproduced in a collection entitled: The Hard Labor of Christian Apologetics. (1) The essay by itself is available here:
Robert C Koons is a professor of philosophy and Christian apologist. Note I did not include philosopher on that list, as apologists differ from philosophers in the most important aspect. A philosopher starts with questions and begins a path along which he hopes to discover the truth. This ultimate truth is, of course, never found but the great philosopher does bring us new and amazing treasures along the way. The apologist begins with a claims of truth and packages it in an attempt to sell it to us, much as any other salesman. (I do not mean to suggest that there are no great philosophers who are also Christian. For example, I greatly value my classes with Paul Ricoeur during my graduate years and admire Kierkegaard.)We have today several well known apologists who package their offerings in the trappings of philosophy, and I would include Koons among them. We can see this at work in his opening paragraph:
“Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in the history of science. In some form, it is here to stay. The quantum discoveries of the 20th century transformed our understanding of the natural world. In fact, the quantum revolution is a theologically wholesome development, reconciling our scientific view with the possibility of human agency and knowledge.”
As foreshadowed, Koons will attempt to resurrect Thomism through an attempt to resurrect the Aristotelian metaphysics forming the intellectual foundation of Aquinas’s metaphysics; all to the sole purpose of resurrecting the intellectual justification for Christianity so severely damaged over past centuries. His pitch here is to acknowledge the decline of Christian justification with the advent of classical physics born of the scientific method, and the subsequent displacement of classical physics by the discovery of quantum reality. He builds from these uncontroversial facts to the surprising claim that our quantum discoveries are in accord with Aristotle’s physics and metaphysics, who was right all along. Therefore, Christianity is saved:
“The Greek philosopher Aristotle (382-322 BC) had a theory of nature that offered a number of advantages from the Christian viewpoint. While Aristotle recognized a profound difference between human beings and other “substances” (i.e., fundamental entities), based on our unique rationality, he avoided dualism, and he conceived of human aspirations as continuous with the striving of all natural things to their essential ends (i.e., teleology), providing an objective basis for norms in ethics, aesthetics, and politics.”
He proceeds from this to claim that quantum physics accords specifically to Aristotle’s notions of teleology, four causes, and the possibility of objective knowledge, all of which, however, have no applicability at all to the most elemental reality we yet know: quantum field theory. Koons asserts:
“The quantum revolution of the last 100 years has transformed the image of nature in profound ways, reviving Aristotelian modes of understanding. Physicists first discovered in the early 20th century that the energy of isolated systems cannot vary continuously but must jump from one discrete level (quantum) to another. This apparently modest discovery has profound implications for all of science. It actually constituted a kind of “Scientific Counter-Revolution,” reviving the Aristotelian conception of nature in at least three ways: rehabilitating teleology, unseating the microscopic world from its privileged position, and securing the ontological autonomy of chemistry and thermodynamics (and potentially also the autonomy of biology and psychology) from mere physics.”
Teleology
Let’s begin by clarifying the meaning of teleology and how Aristotle believed it to exist; important to do because Koons will attempt to expand that meaning:
a: the study of evidences of design in nature
b: a doctrine (as in vitalism) that ends are immanent in nature
c: a doctrine explaining phenomena by final causes
New Latin teleologia, from Greek tele-, telos end, purpose + -logia -logy —
Aristotle understood this as nature’s design of specific intent in everything that exists. For example, a rock always returns to its lowest position when dropped because in its essence it is meant to be there. Koons then claims, mostly unargued:
“Classical mechanics can be formulated in either of two ways: in terms of differential equations, based on Newton’s laws of motion, or in terms of integral equations, relying on the conservation of energy (the Hamiltonian method). The Newtonian model is completely bottom-up, but the Hamiltonian is Aristotelian, being both holistic and teleological. The total energy of a closed system is a holistic property: it cannot be reduced to the properties of the system’s constituents,”
He starts with a true statement concerning the difference between Newtonian expression of motion through the application of calculus from discreet measure and Hamiltonian calculation of energy from motion in total in a closed system, and that they result in the same answer but describe different perspectives on reality. It is also true that only the Hamiltonian method can be applied to quantum events, but that in no way implies teleology. Just the opposite, Hamiltonian calculation is necessary for reasons that will undercut Koons’s later arguments: there are no components or substances at the quantum field level. There is only exchange of energy among the interacting quantum fields, requiring a holistic measure. No components or essences, just interplay of the oscillations of quantum fields. There is no way to apply the concept of intention in an indeterminate world of quantum superpositions of events, with events being this interplay among the fields – which is what the Hamiltonian is measuring. Anything resembling intent would be our emergent perceptions in our decohered environment. Carlo Rovelli describes this elemental reality in “The Order of Time”:
““On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most “thinglike” are nothing more than long events. The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace of Neolithic humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, an example in a book about time, a metaphor for an ontology, a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception—and, gradually, an intricate knot in that cosmic game of mirrors that constitutes reality. The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.
If the world were, however, made of things, what would these things be? The atoms, which we have discovered to be made up in turn of smaller particles? The elementary particles, which, as we have discovered, are nothing other than the ephemeral agitations of a field? The quantum fields, which we have found to be little more than codes of a language with which to speak of interactions and events? We cannot think of the physical world as if it were made of things, of entities. It simply doesn’t work.” (2)
Which brings us back to Aristotle’s rock at rest in its intended place on the ground, and the law of conservation of momentum that describes this situation. What if we launch that rock into space, free from Earth’s gravitational field and atmospheric friction? Now its intended design appears to be eternal motion through the cosmos. What quantum reality teaches us is there is no intention, just momentary co-relations of events that come and go. Everything depends on momentary perspective and relations. Relativity, not teleology.
In other works, Koons has tried to equate potential energy with teleology, such as the example of heat having the teleological designation to boil water, even when in a waterless point in the universe. Besides conflating possible events with teleology, this claim will just further complicate his troubles when we get to causation itself.
This problem of causation appears as Koons transitions to “The measurement problem”:
“A quantum particle doesn’t typically have any position or momentum at all: it has merely the potential to interact with macroscopic systems in various locations. Thus, the quantum world cannot be a complete basis for the macroscopic world.”
He thinks to solve this mystery through the application of Aristotle’s notion of potentiality:
Aristotle offers a ready answer to this puzzle. The microscopic constituents of macroscopic objects exist only as potentialities for interaction. They are only virtually present, except when they are activated.
However, this answer rests on several crucial errors:
1. Koons asserts that the decohered environment is what is physically “real” and the quantum level is mere ideal (virtual) potentiality. (3) In fact, quantum computers work on the principle that superpositions exist physically (not virtually), and the intent is to have the superposed states work solutions simultaneously prior to decoherence. The power of quantum computing rests entirely on the physical existence of entanglement and superposition.
2. From the above assumption Koons views the quantum state as in service to our decohered environment, waiting for causes to allow them to become real, much like Pinocchio’s desire to become a real boy.
3. He ignores the most important advances in coming to an understanding of decoherence of the past 30 years.
Let’s start with Wojchiech Zurek’s theories of Existential Decoherence and Darwinian Interpretation. (4)
Zurek begins within the question of whether decoherence is entirely a physical process, or whether is is entirely epistemological reduction, and ultimately proposes a combination of the two:
The overarching open question of the interpretation of quantum physics—the “meaning of the wave function”—appears to be in part answered by these recent developments. Two alternatives are usually listed as the only conceivable answers. The possibility that the state vector is purely epistemological (that is, solely a record of the observer’s knowledge) is often associated with the Copenhagen Interpretation (Bohr 1928). The trouble with this view is that there is no unified description of the Universe as a whole: The classical domain of the Universe is a necessary pre- requisite, so both classical and quantum theory are necessary and the border between them is, at best, ill-defined. The alternative is to regard the state vector as an ontological entity—as a solid description of the state of the Universe akin to the classical states. But in this case (favored by the supporters of Everett’s Many Worlds Interpretation), everything consistent with the universal state vector needs to be regarded as equally “real.”
The view that seems to be emerging from the theory of decoherence is in some sense some- where in between these two extremes. Quantum state vectors can be real, but only when the superposition principle—a cornerstone of quantum behavior—is “turned off” by einselection. Yet einselection is caused by the transfer of information about selected observables. Hence, the on- tological features of the state vectors—objective existence of the einselected states—is acquired through the epistemological “information transfer.” (2)
He had earlier described a density matrix analysis for “Schroedinger’s Cat” and the mechanics of how decoherence physically could take place as a reduction of the two off-diagonal cones:
Figure 3: Evolution of the Density Matrix for the Schro ̈dinger Cat State in Figure 2. (a)This plot shows the density matrix for the cat state in Figure 2 in the position representation ρ(x,x′) = φ(x)φ∗(x). The peaks near the diagonal (green) correspond to the two possible locations of the particle. The peaks away from the diagonal (red) are due to quantum coherence. Their existence and size demonstrate that the particle is not in either of the two approximate locations but in a coherent superposition of them. (b) Environment-induced decoherence causes decay of the off-diagonal terms of ρ(x, x′ ). Here, the density matrix in (a) has partially decohered. Further decoherence would result in a density matrix with diagonal peaks only. It can then be regarded as a classical probability distribution with an equal probability of finding the particle in either of the locations corresponding to the Gaussian wave packets.
The point I wish to make here is that he starts with a purely physical quantum reality. The perturbation occurring when introduced into the (decohered) environment reduces the off-diagonal cones, creating a probability distribution (impossible prior to introduction into the environment due to the absence of causality in elemental quantum state) which will almost instantaneously decohere into the most probable, (or even solely possible) eigenstate within the timeline of that particular environment.
He couples this with observation by a subject as an element of this process, but solely from the physical decoherence within a brain:
In particular, the process of decoherence we have described above is bound to affect the states of the brain: Relevant observables of individual neurons, including chemical concentrations and electrical potentials, are macroscopic. They obey classical, dissipative equations of motion. Thus, any quantum super- position of the states of neurons will be destroyed far too quickly for us to become conscious of the quantum “goings on”. Decoherence, or more to the point, environment-induced superselection, applies to our own “state of mind”.
One might still ask why the preferred basis of neurons becomes correlated with the classical
observables in the familiar universe. It would be, after all, so much easier to believe in quantum physics if we could train our senses to perceive nonclassical superpositions. One obvious reason is that the selection of the available interaction Hamiltonians is limited and constrains the choice of detectable observables. There is, however, another reason for this focus on the classical that must have played a decisive role: Our senses did not evolve for the purpose of verifying quantum mechanics. Rather, they have developed in the process in which survival of the fittest played a central role. There is no evolutionary reason for perception when nothing can be gained from prediction. And, as the predictability sieve illustrates, only quantum states that are robust in spite of decoherence, and hence, effectively classical, have predictable consequences. Indeed, classical reality can be regarded as nearly synonymous with predictability.
Behind this is the the principle that probability can only be conceived according to the number of bits of information, which required an evolutionary adaptation that greatly reduced perception to the minimum necessary bits to create an orderly sketch of the environment – just enough to guess correctly often enough to survive, and remain blind to everything else. The reduction of chaos to a semblance of order requires what Carlo Rovelli will later call “blurring” in his Relativist Interpretation, whereas decoherence, as the somewhat arbitrary depiction of a closed system in the environment, creates the initial arrow of entropy, as Zurek (and Max Tegmark) went on later to explain as:
Entropy can only increase when interacting with the environment
Entropy can only decrease when it interacts with a subject
The point of the exposition above is to clarify the understanding of physical reality and what is fundamental. When Koons claims that the quantum reality alone cannot explain classical reality, he falsely assumes it is the classical that is real while the quantum remains virtually ready to become real. Koons is certainly correct when he says “the quantum world cannot be a complete basis for the macroscopic world.” Certainly, something is added, but nothing physical or teleolgical. Rather, it is our subjective reduction of fundamental reality. As Rovelli said above: “a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception.” Or as Zurek put it, the immediate decoherence in the information transfer from quantum state to our decohered brain.
This is a fundamental example of how Aristotelian metaphysics obscures the nature of fundamental reality. Of course, Aristotle could not possibly have had any inkling of any of this, and necessarily speculated solely from his own decohered environment. But as these speculations pertain only to the representations constructed in space, time, and causality, he offers no entree into a more fundamental reality that is arational, non-causal, and without spacetime. Fundamental reality is simply impenetrable via Aristotle.
Causality
Koons then focuses on the “causes” of decoherence from the perspective of our decohered environment, willfully remaining within Aristotle’s unwillful ignorance. Let’s again return to Rovelli’s “The Order of Time” as he describes causality as now understood:
“In our experience, the notion of cause is thus asymmetrical in time: cause precedes effect. When we recognize in particular that two events “have the same cause,” we find this common cause in the past, not in the future. If two waves of a tsunami arrive together at two neighboring islands, we think that there has been an event in the past that has caused both. We do not look for it in the future. But this does not happen because there is a magical force of “causality” going from the past to the future. It happens because the improbability of a correlation between two events requires something improbable, and it is only the low entropy of the past that provides such improbability. What else could? In other words, the existence of common causes in the past is nothing but a manifestation of low entropy in the past. In a state of thermal equilibrium, or in a purely mechanical system, there isn’t a direction to time identified by causality.
The laws of elementary physics do not speak of “causes” but only of “regularities,” and these are symmetrical with regard to past and future. Bertrand Russell noted this in “a famous article, writing emphatically that “The law of causality . . . is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.”103 He exaggerates, of course, because the fact that there are no “causes” at an elementary level is not a sufficient reason to render obsolete the very notion of cause.104 At an elementary level there are no cats either, but we do not for this reason cease to bother with cats. The low entropy of the past renders the notion of cause an effective one.
But memory, causes and effects, flow, the determined nature of the past and the indeterminacy of the future are nothing but names that we give to the consequences of a statistical fact: the improbability of a past state of the universe.”
“Causes, memory, traces, the history itself of the becoming of the world that unfolds not only across centuries and millennia of human history but in the billions of years of the great cosmic narrative—all this stems simply from the fact that the configuration of things was “particular” a few billion years ago.105
And “particular” is a relative term: it is particular in relation to a perspective. It is a blurring. It is determined by the interactions that a physical system has with the rest of the world. Hence causality, memory, traces, the history of the happening of the world itself can only be an effect of perspective: like the turning of the heavens; an effect of our peculiar point of view in the world. . . . Inexorably, then, the study of time does nothing but return us to ourselves.”
The important considerations here are:
1. There is “no magic force of causality”, but rather our representation arising from increase in entropy.
2. Causality does not exist at the level of elementary physics, but rather emerges as part of our constructive determination of the world after decoherence.
3. It always exists in relation to a perspective, not as elemental reality (our rock now cruising the cosmos). Causation emerges with our representation of increase in entropy, and “does not but return us to ourselves.”
This accords well with Zurek’s Existential Interpretation, where only quantum states that do not conflict with events in the decohered environment (absent the off-diagonal cones) can eigenselect, reinforcing the appearance of classical causality. And as with Rovelli, decoherence is impossible without a reductive subject, not something entirely objective.
This renders Aristotle’s “top down”, and “bottom up” irrelevant to the understanding of fundamental reality. There is no purpose and no design, just the appearance of order and causality due to our blurring of all but a tiny slice of reality, representing it as a subsystem, and intuiting time and causality as the inevitable increase in entropy – the inevitable recision of the appearance of order back into primordial chaos.:
The interplay of entropy reducing through a subject and increasing with quantum information exposed to the environment.
Conclusion
Koons concludes:
“Quantum mechanics re-affirms what Aristotelians have known all along: that the world’s ultimate constituents are not the extremely small and simple particles of physics, but much larger, composite bodies with irreducibly holistic and teleological properties and powers. This puts us firmly on the path toward recognizing that even more complex bodies–namely persons and other living organisms–can also be metaphysically fundamental entities, with irreducibly biological and psychological properties and powers.”
But quantum physics tells us no such thing at all, but rather that the world is elementally waves within fields which we represent at emergent levels to be “things”. There are no metaphysical entities at all, and no such thing as irreducible properties, but rather temporary interplay of these waves within fields. As Zurek describes in his Evolutionary Interpretation, things appear to be permanent when they are nearest pointer states (where a quantum position and decohered position are nearest to being equal in the border area) because pointer states are resilient to perturbations of the environment. This causes multiple copies of information from multiple perspective, permitting a survival much as in Darwinian evolution. This has nothing at all to do with irreducible properties or purpose, but merely the accidental correlation between the coherent reality and the pointer state in decoherence.
No metaphysics is capable of penetrating fundamental reality because all metaphysics are projections of reason, number, space, and time – our fundamental categories of representational thought – onto a realm where these simply don’t exist. In attempting to do so, we tightly seal ourselves off from the proper questions and approaches. We have constructed dichotomies that have only led to error.
1. Metaphysical/physical (or material/immaterial) – there is only the physical which at bottom is energy as oscillations in a field.
2. Macroscopic/microscopic – size as the imposition of our intuition of space on a reality that knows nothing of space. Coherent quantum reality infuses all of existence, not confined to our concept of microscopic. Quanta themselves are just temporary excitations along a wave.
Even if we were to posit a dichotomy of what we can know representationally/reductively and what remains hidden in quantum superposition and entanglement, we would be closer to our situation but still overly reductive. It really comes down to degrees of reduction. In addition to our rational mode of experience, we also experience esthetically, which is itself less reductive. Is it also more direct? As Zurek explained, we sit in a photon-rich environment where we perceive nothing directly. Photons are conveying secondary information about whatever they last encountered. We only know things through perturbations caused by probes. But are we more directly knowledgeable through sensation? Emotion? Music? Germinative poetic metaphor as opposed to reductive scientific metaphor? Less reductive, to be sure, which opens up this middle space heretofore obscured by the dichotomy of material/immaterial. And necessitates the rethinking of who we are as elementally quantum beings entangled in a reality at bottom chaotic, void of spacetime, and impervious to our representational modes of cognition. In light of that, what really counts as knowledge, and how do we approach it?
The honest approach is to refrain from metaphysical/theological speculations; to refrain from attempts to retrofit obsolete ideologies. These approaches are merely an anthropomorphic attempt to tell the universe what it is from our own illusions. This is the ultimate failure of all reductive approaches, even the science of physics itself which, as Heidegger demonstrated, is itself an offspring of metaphysics. Physics does serve the crucial function, however, of pointing to the prevailing mystery, within which beckons the most questionable. If ultimate reality cannot be described reductively, we need to advance our abilities to think non-reductively (esthetically); i.e. to allow reality to instruct us in our esthetic thinking of what is presented in experience. An approach where we ourselves expand rather than reduce the world. An approach germinative rather than reductive.
(2) In the everyday use of the term. The Leggett Inequalities proved that quantum states are not only nonlocal, but also non-real. This is often misunderstood as not existing, when Leggett is merely using the technical definition of not having two or more measurable characteristics. It does not deny the fundamental waves or energy of quantum fields and their entangled interplay.
This is a response to a Twitter conversation concerning metaphysics and authenticity that was too long to post there:
It’s interesting that we are looking at the same problem but from different perspectives. In such situations it’s sometimes possible for each to learn from the other. The problem in focus here is the loss of meaning and disconnection from the authentic. Here is how that problem appears from my path:
As humans we have two innate and essential modes of being: technological and esthetic. The technological mode enables our survival and the esthetic mode provides our motive to survive. When in balance, we experience our primordial connection to the world and live somewhat harmoniously. We have been out of balance for so long we forgot about the essence of our nature and the world we inhabit. We lost our connection to the essence of Being when we surrendered it to an imaginary transcendent metaphysics. This metaphysics misconceived Being as static and rational, and unavailable to experience as it resides beyond in an immaterial realm. This left technology an open field for dominion; rendering everything in the sensible world as objects for our manipulation – material devoid of essence under our rational control. Stripped of its worth which we lost to the imaginary realm of ideas. Under this hegemony of technology, the esthetic comes as a bit of an embarrassment, humbled by the triumphs of reason and the technical.
There was a time when humanity worked the earth in an integral partnership, with respect and appreciation of its essence interconnected to ours. That has been lost to technicalization, where both land and labor are reduced to objects, commodities, by capitalist corporatism or the socialist state. We no longer stand in any authentic relationship to that which enables our existence, and this loss reduces worth to mere cost.
The problem, however, isn’t technology but our esthetic loss which is the only means of grounding technology and ourselves. Until metaphysics disappears from our modes of thinking, this problem remains unsolvable.
A fatal metaphysical error was to imagine Being as rationally simple and unchanging, thereby blocking our appreciation of a mysteriously manifold world of infinite becoming, but – and this is the critical point – becoming only within the possibilities inherent in the manifold essence of Being itself. Much as the phenomenal world is constantly in flux, but possibilities confined to the superpositional events available to determination at wave collapse. We evolve only within the possibilities resident in our DNA, but DNA thought wholistically.
We are closer to the determination of our essence as it manifested following the formation of agricultural civilization because we still have a hint of memory from that. And yet reside in such a world. And it is within that memory that we have the most immediate path to the remembrance of Being itself. But there is far more to our essence than we can imagine, and that forms the basis for future evolution. The essence of Being is not static but eternally playing out its possibilities and we are in no position to categorically rule out extreme changes in the future. What determines our possible authentic relationship to the essence of the world today will be different tomorrow. The key to our survival is not to reject change, but the more urgent need to reconnect the technological and esthetic.
If we keep in mind I am referring only to poetic metaphor, we should see it is the opposite of a concept. A concept results from a process of abstraction from messy sense data. It removes all that confusion to create a few defining principles. The removal of that messiness of sense data gives a clean principled concept reduced to to a few defining characteristics that fit all entities in the category. That clean and orderly definition can almost give one a sense that the reductive concept is the reality. Maybe reality exists in an immaterial realm of perfection. In fact, maybe it is god thinking this perfection, while we’re stuck in this fallen and sinful world of confused senses.
Let’s think of a tiger. It’s yellow with stripes, growls, and lives in specific areas of the world. It’s a clean concept abstracted from a confusion of sense data from actual tigers encountered in the world. The concept we have doesn’t accurately picture any one tiger we could meet – all tigers will differ from the concept to a degree. A Siberian Tiger differs from a Bengal Tiger, individual Siberians differ from each other. And what counts as a tiger? Saber Tooth Tigers are very different from today’s tigers. And what of their progenitors? Physical reality is mucky and confused, so let’s ascend to the dry aerie of concept.
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
WTF? The spelling of tiger, already archaic and a bit strange when Blake wrote it, throws us off kilter at the very first word. Something odd here. And nowhere in most of our concepts of tiger is the animal aflame. From the first, this image cracks our concept and forces us back to the sense data.
There are many interpretations of this image, some of them partially correct and even in conflict with others equally partially correct. But none can exhaust the meaning. Its oddity is what attracts and holds our attention, but we can never quite resolve the strangeness. The mystery behind the image.
In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
In the eyes of the tyger we stare into a terrifying, proud, aggressive, and awesomely beautiful aspect of Being itself, met in our gaze. The Being whose essence presents itself as this tyger. And in that tyger, we stare at our own essence derived from this Being. Beyond mere definition. Subject/object metaphysics dissolved as we sense that nature is not separate from us, but rather we are as integral a part as that tyger. Nature is not separated from us as an external object, but rather we are the same stuff: we burn with that same fire. The same fire at the center of the stars from which we came.
Not only can we never exhaust the meaning of that image, but that image doesn’t exhaust Being itself. Blake also gives us its counterpart. Who made the little lamb?
For He calls Himself a Lamb. He is meek, and He is mild, He became a little child.
A later poet will update from a different aspect as he speaks of “Some infinitely gentle and infinitely suffering thing”. Another unfathomable aspect of Being, even stranger along side the tyger; equally essential. Nor do those two inexhaustible images exhaust Being.
The metaphor has its counterpart in music and art. In the greatest works of Beethoven, we have the delicate run in the treble, gentle and at play. Below growls the tyger in the bass, suddenly shifting the foundation; discord threatening the structure above. Organization, play, and dissolution; eternally.
This is where we meet truth: in the thrall of physical experience, even more immediate and non-reductive in music than in the metaphor. To do so, we first surrender our pretense to truth as deduction from ideas, or as objective analysis, and accept a wholly different type of understanding. In the metaphor we take part in the event. We come to see an aspect of the essence of Being. We see it within ourselves, and we sense who we are, what the world is, and our place in it. Worth infinitely more than all the definitions in the dictionary, theories of spacetime, or musing of angels dancing on pins.
We learn to seek the holy right here, around and within us, without the sere inventions of god or the immaterial.
The most difficult part of learning is unlearning – a necessity few of us rise to. We invest our identities, years of work, family and heritage in beliefs assumed prior to our ability to question. Unlearning means surrender of all we have and casting ourselves into the risk of the unknown. The vertigo of Nietzsche’s Madman as we struggle to reorient ourselves.
But if we fail to unlearn? We burrow in the dark caves of metaphysics, hiding from the sun and uncounted stars right above us. We persist in the worst treachery metaphysics imposes on us: We try to tell the universe what it is rather than listen to the universe as it unveils itself in song, poetry, and art. What we invent is such a degradation of the awesome mystery of this physical reality of which we are part. We dream in the familiar grays of our dark shelter, hiding from the swirl and blare of colors above. We mince our words, measure our world in pints, throttle the exuberance of life with the morbid machine of ideals and deduction.
In such a state we speak falsely. We tell an arational universe it is governed by reason and causality, much to its initial amusement but later to its disgust as it turns away from us. In our refusal to unlearn we forfeit our birthright of connection to the mystery. In so doing, our lives become meaningless as we invent substitute fictions.
Sometimes, a ray of light sneaks past the threshold of our darkness:
“Fundamental reality has not proven itself to be beyond cognition or beyond logos. Counter-Intuitive places the the limit to our intuition, but we don’t use our intuition isolation. Intuition is not a closed system.”
You are half right, but in that shining half outside the gray shadow is the promise and the danger. If by cognition we mean objective representation and reason, then fundamental reality is undeniably beyond our cognition, and it is futile to deny it. The universe will never conform to our preference. Instead it laughs and dances away. But logos?
But we can’t speak of logos until we have done serious unlearning. Until we rehydrate the word beyond its current sere condition. Until we replant it into the fertile ground where it once thrived.
But then we have to first relearn “ground”. Not it’s desiccate hulk as an idea serving as premise. No, ground as that dirt under our feet from which the truth grows – in all its threatening fecundity, organic odor, its muck. Its wonder.
So how do we resuscitate logos? First by understanding its opposite. You ask if CERN fails to adequately define quanta? I can’t answer that until we throw away “definition” – another metaphysical error. Instead I say that physics must necessarily fail to tell us anything beyond measure and relation of objects. Quantum, wave, field, energy: all are mere metaphors for what we cannot grasp objectively – reality on the other side of the divide of wave collapse. Fundamental reality defies space, time, and causality, but we can’t represent without those categories, so we resort to temporal-spatial metaphor. And metaphors, when taken literally, will always lead to error and block off the deeper truth.
Having discarded definition, are we any closer to logos? Yes, if we accept that words are not for defining but rather for exploring as organic beings themselves. Manifold, physical in sound, always becoming, emanating from the ground below us. That is logos: the revelation of the deeper truth which defies your reason and a priori ideas; ironically the same limitation you denounce in science. But to hear its poetry, we first must recognize its music is physical. It manifests itself right in front of us and dares us to follow. Physicality announces its vibrancy. It reveals the essence that science cannot observe in even its most sensitive devices. But here is the most important bit of unlearning of all: Essence is a derivative of Being, and being authentically means physical manifestation. Before metaphysics, including Christianity – that early Medieval European metaphysical invention, logos was the the unity of Being and the physical. Essence is at the heart of what is presented to us from the ground of Being. We lost our souls when we allowed metaphysical thought to displace essence to an imaginary metaphysical plain, subject to all our desecrations.
Which leads us to the final question: Intention. Might we perceive intention in the universe? Maybe. I suspect so. But if we look for that intention in an imaginary plane instead of right underneath us, right in front of us, in range or our hearing, we will forever remain ignorant. Why would intention need to spring from anything other than essence of Being right here, right now, in the presence of our entanglement?
I recently commented on a Twitter thread on my concern over rising Christian Nationalism, and pointed out that the time that the Church ruled Europe was the darkest period of Western History. That thread is found here:
Is it acceptable to hold to a religious belief system based off of personal expierences?
That took me to a unique blog by a person named Tim O’Neill, who seems to pass himself off on Twitter as a historian, although in the Q&A section of his blog he admits he is not. The title of the blog, “History for Atheists”, is curious as the target audience appears to be Christians looking for support in their online arguments. O’Neill’s brand appeal is as an atheist who is a bit embarrassed by other atheists and busies himself with correcting their historical ignorance. He often carries on about claims from atheists that he is really a theist posing as an atheist – probably more than he should. I want to be clear that for me the question of whether he is an atheist targeting a theist market or a theist in disguise makes no difference at all. I wish only to focus on the quality of his arguments and manner of presentation.
After reading the above article on that blog, I responded on the Twitter thread that O’Neill was not a credible source and made another reading suggestion, which I will comment on at the end. This brought Mr. O’Neill into the thread where he demonstrated remarkable bluster but little, if any substance – a characteristic I found to permeate the blog article. After a pointless exchange I said I would write a more considered explanation of why O’Neil is not a credible source. What follows is that explanation.
We can judge a great deal of Mr. O’Neill’s substance and intellectual honesty from just the opening paragraph:
The concept of “the Dark Ages” is central to several key elements in New Atheist Bad History. One of the primary myths most beloved by many New Atheists is the one whereby Christianity violently suppressed ancient Greco-Roman learning, destroyed an ancient intellectual culture based on pure reason and retarded a nascent scientific and technological revolution, thus plunging Europe into a one thousand year “dark age” which was only relieved by the glorious dawn of “the Renaissance”. Like most New Atheist Bad History, it’s a commonly held and popularly believed set of ideas that has its origin in polemicists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but which has been rejected by more recent historians. But its New Atheist adherents don’t like to hear that last part and get very agitated when they do.
This paragraphs portends the key defects we find throughout O’Neill’s presentation: Bluster, overstatement, strawmanning, and insult. To start, he insinuates that the idea of an oppressive Church rule during the medieval era is wrong by association with New Atheism and their “bad history”. Very few familiar with my thinking would ascribe the reductionism of New Atheism to me, but I would also hold that Church Rule was oppressive, corrupt, and retarded the growth of intellectual progress. In other words, he starts with poisoning the well and bluster.
O’Neill then claims the support of authority by appealing to “more recent historians”, which he opposes to “polemicists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”. This is the worst sort of appeal to authority. He implies there is a consensus among recent historians where no such consensus exists. Nor were most eighteenth and nineteenth century historians polemicists. In fact, polemicists are more likely to found in the revisionist, often Roman Catholic, commentators, who work today to cleanse the reputation of the Church. The most that we can say is what he claims as consensus remains a matter of dispute among historians, but that more accurate depiction would deflect his thrust.
Even more telling is the way he framed the alleged atheist error.
The first element of his characterization of the atheist “myth” is the claim that Christianity violently suppressed ancient Greco-Roman learning. While there were things the Church violently suppressed, I know of no serious claim it was Greco-Roman learning. To the contrary, Christianity was constructed on the framework of Greek metaphysics, with the Neo-Platonism of Augustine and the Aristotelian metaphysics of Aquinas and the Scholastics. If anything, the early church took the narrative of a primitive Near East religion and created a uniquely European metaphysical structure. There is no biblical correlate to the elaborate cosmological constructions and deductive arguments – these are European features.
The second element is claiming the atheist position to be that Christianity destroyed an ancient intellectual culture based on “pure reason”. First, it would be interesting to know what O’Neill meant by “pure” reason. It sounds impressive, with echoes of Kant which the naive might credit with erudition, but it is a term with a specific meaning that in no way applies to this context. But that is a mere quibble next to the important matter of blurring a more nuanced issue. I know of no serious atheist who denies the use of deductive Aristotelian logic; especially among the hyper-rational Scholastics. O’Neill obscures, or perhaps is ignorant of, the real matter at hand – the metaphysical basis of such logic, where proofs are deduced from metaphysical ideas. This is in stark contrast to the later scientific method, which removed the metaphysical premises in favor of induction from empirical observations – a critical adjustment that apologists yet today bemoan.
The serious atheist claim is usually not that Christianity destroyed a culture of reason, but rather that it imposed certain metaphysical assumptions as starting premises to arrive at deductions that accord with Christian dogma. Any logical deductions that offended such dogma, no matter the validity, were quickly condemned. Even clerics found themselves on the wrong side of the auto de fe when logic defied obligatory beliefs.
The third element of O’Neil’ls framing is that atheists claim the Church retarded a nascent scientific and technological revolution. O’Neil relies on a somewhat revisionist account of the Middle Ages as the foundation for modern science encouraged by the Church. It wasn’t. There was a degree of scientific inquiry of a sort, but what was at the time called Natural Philosophy wasn’t quite what we would recognize as science. It was more metaphysically derived and included alchemy and magic, for example. Some early empirical attempts were indeed accepted by the Church if they could be interpreted as proclaiming the glory of god and his creation. Of course, any scientific inquiry that contradicted Church dogma was quickly condemned, and at times with grievous consequence.
O’Neill’s support for his demonstration that the Church nurtured science and formed the foundation for its further development was a book by James Hannam: God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Groundwork of Modern Science, and an approving comment by Edward Grant. My intention is not demean Hannam – he is a legitimate scholar who advocates well for his position, but his position has supporters and detractors among historians. Edward Grant was a historian of much greater renown whose main scholarly thesis was that the Middle Ages did lay the groundwork of modern science, so we would expect to see his approval. But again, that is one school of thought and not received truth. In fact there is no received truth in history, which is an endless series of re-interpretation of past events and facts, partly out of ideology; partly out of the need to introduce novelty.
I believe the preponderance of evidence demonstrates that, on the whole, the Church oppressed science as it did freedom of thought in general. Through oppressive threat and more than occasional torture and burnings at the stake, few dared to voice findings or opinions in contradiction to Church dogma. The Church jealously guarded its authority at all costs. Countless lesser-known scholars and clergy, as well as the less educated, experienced the terror of the Church, but the more respected were not immune. Galileo was accused of heresy in the Inquisition for advocating the Copernican idea of a sun-centered system and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Those like O’Neill can try to minimize the number of occurrences or try to tangle us into minutia such as no published boundaries for permissible scientific inquiry, but that misses the point as badly as the attempts of some to minimize the number of deaths in the Inquisitions. The point is the terror and oppression such occurrences spread regardless of frequency. The threat demonstrated by such occurrences worked contrary to the claim of Christianity nurturing scientific progress.
Science as we know it did not exist until the relaxing of the Church’s grip in the seventeenth century. It was not the sudden rebirth of reason, as O’Neill tries to have us say, but the removal of metaphysical speculation and ideas from science; i.e. the institution of empiricism and inductive reasoning – not possible under Church rule.
In the Twitter thread that initiated this response, I suggested to the originator that he read Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages as an introduction to credible historical works, not because it presented the absolute truth about that time, but because it offered a much more nuanced and holistic rendering. Unlike those such as O’Neill, who can obscure the terror by reducing things to numbers and facts, Huizinga introduced an immersive approach into the culture itself though exploration of the art, philosophy, and other texts of that time. It supplanted the cold numbers and disembodied facts with the atmosphere. We could sense what it was like at that time. From that we can interpret as we see fit. I do not mean to imply that Huizinga was the last word on the subject. In fact I suggested to the originator that he read as much of the primary sources as he could as well as different perspectives of respected historians. There is no other way to come to grips with the past.
There are no easy or final historical answers, and most assuredly there is no internet site that can furnish the ultimate truth of the past.
I didn’t find it worth my time to belabor this response with a detailed critique of every point O’Neil attempts in the essay, but he is, of course, invited to expand or otherwise respond below in the comments; or discuss with me on my YouTube channel.
This is Simon Egopart’s response to my last comment and again my latest response:
First of all, thanks for your constructive and respectful attitude. It clearly is not your intent to score cheap points or to ridicule, and I appreciate that.
Obviously I agree with the statement that there is a stark difference between dream and waking experience. Our waking reality is much more stable then our dream reality and seems bound to “fixed” laws of physics. I also agree with the statement that this difference stems from different inputs and with the statement that energy originates outside of “our” consciousness. However, the fact that the inputs are “different”, by no means justifies the conclusion that they are “different in nature”. It could be that the inputs are identical in nature, but merely coming from a different source. What we perceive as closing our eyes and falling asleep, could be the manifestation of a process that causes our manifestation mechanism to be temporarily isolated from the universal consciousness that we perceive as our waking reality, thus making room for a private dreamworld, that, being fed only by thoughts of an individual mind, is more flexible and mutable.
I’m glad that you freely admit that science has hit a brick wall when it comes to explaining quantum mechanics. You basically accept defeat and conclude that energy is just too weird for our understanding. There are formulas that predict behavior, but what we observe seems impossible. Waves and particles are so very different in nature, have such different properties, that it’s simply unconceivable that the same “thing” can manifest as a wave ór as particle, based on the method of observation. The wave particle paradox is just one example, but scientific investigation based on physicalism has encountered paradoxes everywhere it looked. Time after time, seemingly impossible things were discovered, and each time, in order to maintain their physicalist belief system, scientists had to come up with more absurd concepts to explain their observations. Quarks have “flavors” these days, reality 11 dimensions and don’t get me started on the Higgs-boson. That’s the problem with physicalism: it results in a model of reality that just doesn’t make sense.
I was surprised to read the following lines: “For me that isn’t a problem, but rather the call to exploration. It cannot be scientifically explained, but its nature can be explored in experience.” Well, I could not agree more! So let’s explore! Let’s dig in ourselves. Let’s have lucid dreams and sleep with the most beautiful girl we can imagine. Let’s knock on a hard wall in a lucid dream, and wonder how in earth it is possible that our mind creates such a hyper-realistic tangible experience, out of thoughts. Let’s fly past the stars, talk to our own subconsciousness and wake up in tears of joy. Let’s explore our mind, get impressed by the sheer depth of it, and let’s see if we can connect to the greater consciousness that idealism postulates. Spoiler alert: we can. If indeed we are conscious beings that exist within a greater consciousness, then there must be a connection between ourselves and that greater consciousness. And even though our senses and rational mind were only built to interact with our observed and often harsh reality, it is entirely possible that other information might travel over our “connection with greater consciousness”. And even though we might not be able to process that information with our rational minds, it is still possible that we can “feel” it. These feelings could result in a deeper intuitive understanding of reality, that can only be conveyed through the usage of metaphors.
Well, history is full of such experiences. Countless people everywhere in space time have had spiritual experiences. Physicalists have to reduce spiritual experiences to physical events, there’s no room for anything else in their world view, but this forces them to completely ignore the testimonials of people that had spiritual experiences, who state that the experience feels “more real” than anything else they ever experienced. They speak of gnosis, a homecoming, a loss of illusions, and often drastically change their lives as a result. A single spiritual experience can be so powerful that it results in a total turnover of someone’s lifestyle. This simply cannot be explained by physicalism. It is my personal believe that even hardcore physicalists are just one spiritual experience away from idealism. So there is hope 😉
The problem of physicalism is nót that it can’t explain everything. I completely agree with you that ultimate truth is out of reach of our rational mind, just like a gut bacteria can’t conceive the concept “man”. But the fact that we can’t understand ultimate truth, does not mean that we can’t improve our understanding of how energy works. We do not perceive ultimate truth, but we dó perceive energy. Physicalism has hit a brick wall, but I believe there’s a way forward if science reassesses its assumptions about the nature of energy. We can’t reach ultimate truth, but can get way past where we are now. If energy is thát weird, why is it so impossible to consider the option that it is mental in nature? To me it seems like a small step from where you are already, especially since because of that small step, suddenly our whole reality and all scientific observations make sense.
Seen through the lens of idealism, many things become possible and many tools become available. Positive things ánd also scary things. But I do believe there is a good aand safe way forward: science. Science has to be opened up, so that at least theoretically, it becomes possible to do experiments under circumstances that are compatible with idealism. This was the main point of my previous post and actually you didn’t really cover this part in your reply. So let me ask you directly: “Do you believe that the current frame of evidence is fair for someone like Masaru Emoto? Suppose he was right, would it be possible for him to prove it, under the current circumstances? And if not, isn’t that a major problem?
Too Late for the Gods 