Philosophy: Mind, Soul, Consciousness, Body - Part 13

The Decline of the Purely Mechanistic View of the World Continues

After the publication of the Special Theory of Relativity (1905) Einstein worked on a refinement and generalization of this theory, which he published in 1915. It became famous as General Theory of Relativity. Einstein's General Theory of Relativity gave the classical mechanistic world view another very violent blow.

Its most succinct statements are

• that clocks slow down under the influence of gravity (the stronger the force of gravity the more clocks slow down);
• that matter can condense so much that its gravity becomes so strong that nothing can leave its sphere of influence, not even the light – these are the so-called "black holes"; 
• that our universe is expanding and about 15 to 18 billion years ago must have come out of an infinitely small, infinitely dense and infinitely hot matter accumulation – this singularity is the so-called big bang (today's physics has available scenarios that allow you to substitute "infinitely" by "very very very" thereby avoiding the problem to describe what "infinitely small", "infinitely dense" or "infinitely hot" should mean, if anything at all).

Incidentally, even to this day, we cannot definitively predict whether our universe will continue to expand forever, or whether the expansion will eventually come to a hold, or even turn into a contraction, making the universe once again a very very very small, very very very dense and very very very hot cluster of matter which will then perhaps explode again – and so on, forever (whatsoever "forever" could mean in this context).

As you can imagine, soon certain questions came up:

• Who or what caused the Big Bang? 
• And why is our universe designed in such a way that we can live within it? 
• And even if we were to live in a cyclically expanding and re-contracting universe, there has to be at least one very first cause for the very first big bang, hasn't it? 
• Somewhere, finally, this primordial matter must come from! 

And there he was again, the un-caused first causer, and with him the concept of creatio ex nihilo (creation of something from nothing) was also back again; and if it was just the creation of the primordial lump of matter.

Anyway, the theory of relativity, which has long since ceased to be a theory, but has found experimental confirmation, had thrown overboard our mental concept of space and time. But it got even "worse"! Much more than the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics has shattered our classical view of the world and caused it totter. I would like to go into more details, because quantum mechanics describes that field of probabilities from which everything emerges and that underlies everything we experience as the material world in which we live; and above all, I see quantum mechanics as a "rated break point in natural science," or let me call it a bridge between science and mysticism.

Already back in 1901, Max Planck had discovered that light, which until then had been regarded as a wave, under certain conditions behaved like a stream of small particles, each transporting a certain amount of energy. The wave nature of light had been confirmed by thousands of experiments so far. So, suddenly one had to face the task of having to explain why one and the same physical reality one time behaves like a wave and another time like a particle beam, also called corpuscular radiation.

Only a little later it was discovered that particles like for example electrons, in certain circumstances behaved like a wave, although until then it had been a firm belief that the electron was a particle. For example, it was shown that a beam of electrons can produce the same interference pattern as a light wave when passing through a suitable diaphragm. Here, the particles clearly showed wave nature. Physicists were soon able to repeat the experiment with a beam of protons and a beam of neutrons as well as with a beam of so-called alpha particles (that is a beam consisting of helium nuclei; that is, helium atoms stripped of their electrons), always with the same result: the supposed particle beam under certain conditions mysteriously behaved like a wave!

Since in these experiments physicists were dealing with small particles carrying certain amounts of energy, so-called energy packets or quanta of energy, they called this new field of research quantum mechanics, and meanwhile physicists have become used to call these packets of energy simply quanta; with quantum denoting the singular form.

Anyway, it soon became clear that depending on how an experiment was performed with light or electrons, or protons, or other "particles", at one time particle properties and at another time wave properties were observed.

Depending on how physicists formulated their questions to nature, nature's answer was either wave or particle. That is to say, whenever they asked particle-related questions they received particle-related answers, and whenever they asked wave-related questions they received wave-related answers.

Particle property and wave property are obviously two different manifestations of a dual pair – a kind of yin-yang principle – two manifestations of one and the same underlying entity.

In ancient Greek philosophy, such a pair of opposites is called syzygy. Physicists like to talk about a complementary pair and call the principle behind it principle of complementarity. This expression comes from Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Mysticism prefers to speak of polarities. I will use these two terms synonymously. Also the term wave-particle-dualism has become popular meanwhile.

Syzygies play a major role in Plato's philosophy and are also the fundamental element of the creation myth of Gnosticism, which is not strictly a mere creation myth, but part of a great cycle, and also explains why our world is dualistic; that is to say, why what we perceive as reality consists of complementary pairs. For reasons that shall become clear later, I had better say, it seems to consist of complementary pairs.

It was not too long before the next discovery was made that caused even more confusion. The physicist Werner Heisenberg discovered another dualism when he tried to develop a theory to explain the wave-particle-dualism. It is about the dualism of location and speed, known today as Heisenberg's location-speed uncertainty principle.

Heisenberg discovered that the more precisely one knows the speed of a quantum, the less precisely one can know its location in space; conversely, the closer one knows its location in space, the less precise on can know its speed.

But that's not all! Heisenberg discovered another such uncertainty principle, today known as Heisenberg's energy-time uncertainty principle. It says that the more accurately one can determine the moment in time a quantum is at a certain location in space, the less accurately one can determine its energy; conversely, the more precisely one knows the energy of the quantum, the less accurate one can determine the moment in time at which it is at a particular location.

Based on a corresponding remark in this Wikipedia article I would like to mention the following:
It should be clearly noted that historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused with a somewhat similar effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems, that is, without changing something in the systems. 
Heisenberg utilized such an observer effect at the quantum level as a physical "explanation" of quantum uncertainty. However, it has since become clear that the uncertainty principle is inherent in all quantum systems and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the wave-particle-dualism of all quantum objects. Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems.
For details please refer to this wikipedia article.

Both uncertainty relations taken together lead to some amazing conclusions:

• It is impossible to measure the exact trajectory of a small particle or in any way to gain exact knowledge of it.
• A particle can appear to be in several locations in space at the same time.
• There is no vacuum; there is no nothingness. Or, paradoxically, the vacuum is never empty.
  In fact, particles are constantly being created from "nothingness" and dissolve into "nothingness" a short time later. The larger their masses the shorter the time after which they dissolve again (that is, their lifetime).
  This is not just pure theory but fact. There is extensive experimental evidence. The phenomenon is called vacuum polarization and also quantum fluctuation. The particles that so fluctuate between being and non-being are called virtual particles. 
• There is much to suggest that the aforementioned big bang, from which our universe emerged, could have been a quantum fluctuation instead of a creatio ex nihilo. 

Thus, our ideas of space and time, as well as movement (speed) and energy, and wave and particle, were once again shaken to its foundations. Suddenly physicists could no longer make any clear statements about location and speed, time and energy, particle- or wave-character. Notions that had until then been "well-defined", not only in previous physical thinking but also in our mental concept of the world, at least in the sense that we believed we knew what we were talking about and that we may regard them as fundamental properties of nature, suddenly lost their meaning.

Statements of the form "The particle is one meter to my left and moves at a speed of 15 km/sec in an easterly direction" had suddenly lost their meaning. In the course of time, many such dual pairs of particle properties have been discovered, and it is always true that the more we know about one of the two dual properties, the less can we know about the other, and vice versa. Or, as Taoism has it, "When Yin comes, Yang goes. When Yang comes, Yin goes. These are the eternal movements of the Tao."

It should also be noted that when it comes to wave-particle-dualism we are dealing with a syzygy, one pole of which is the wave and the other pole the particle, whereupon the way we formulate our question to nature and the way we build an experiment determine whether we observe the same entity as a particle or as a wave.

Without our consciousness there is neither one nor the other. Waves and particles, these are examples of mental constructs of our consciousness, which we project into the world.

In the last consequence this means: Our consciousness determines the outcome of the experiment.

As Marion Zimmer Bradley once wrote,

For this is the great secret, which was known to all educated men in our day: that by what men think, we create the world around us, daily new.

(Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon, The Random House Publishing Group,  New York, 1982; pg. ix)

For this is the thing the priests do not know, with their One God and One Truth: that there is no such thing as a true tale. Truth has many faces and the truth is like to the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, and your own thoughts, whither the road will take you, and whether, at the end, you arrive in the Holy Isle of Eternity or among the priests with their bells and their death and their Satan and Hell and damnation … .

(Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Mists of Avalon, The Random House Publishing Group,  New York, 1982; pg. x)

By the way, "wave and particle" is only one of many examples. I picked it out because it is particularly blatant.

Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr (1934)
Author: Fermilab, U.S. Department of Energy; 

License: This file has been identified as being free of known restrictions under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights.

Regarding the Heisenberg uncertainty relations, we are dealing with a syzygy regarding our knowledge or ignorance of a system. The closer we know a parameter that determines the system, the less accurate we know its complementary parameter. The poles of this syzygy are therefore mental states of the observer, who is observing the system, that is, wants to measure its determining quantities. That is, we are dealing here with a direct connection of the state of a material object being observed with mental states (states of consciousness) of the observer.

This becomes particularly evident in the various variants of the so-called double-slit experiment. For technical reasons, some of them could not be performed until the end of the 20th century.

To be continued