Philosophy: Mind, Soul, Consciousness, Body - Part 14

Physics Meets Mysticism

The ALL changes constantly by the initiative of his parts.
Author unknown to me.

Syntax
A man staring at his equations 
said that the universe had a beginning. 
There had been an explosion, he said. 
A bang of bangs, and the universe was born. 
And it is expanding, he said. 
He had even calculated the length of its life: 
ten billion revolutions of the earth around the sun. 
The entire globe cheered; 
They found his calculations to be science. 
None thought that by proposing that the universe began, 
the man had merely mirrored the syntax of his mother tongue; 
a syntax which demands beginnings, like birth, 
and developments, like maturation, 
and ends, like death, as statements of facts. 
The universe began, 
and it is getting old, the man assured us, 
and it will die, like all things die, 
like he himself died after confirming mathematically the syntax of his mother tongue.
(Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity, Harper Collins Publishers, New York 1998)

As already mentioned in part 13 of this essay, in quantum mechanics we are dealing with a direct connection of the state of a material object being observed with mental states (states of consciousness) of the observer. In other words, we are not able to separate the object from the subject; we are not able to separate what is observed from the observer. It seems that there is no way to describe nature (at least some parts of it) in an objective way. There seems to be no way to objectify our description. Instead, we meet the limits of human language when ever we try to describe Nature's behavior on the level of atoms and sub-atomic particles. But even by using pure mathematical formalism, we are not able to eliminate the observer effect from our equations.

This becomes particularly evident in the various variants of the so-called double-slit experiment (it should be mentioned that for technical reasons, some of them had not been performed until the end of the 20th century).

If a beam – no matter whether a beam of light or a beam of particles – is sent through a double slit, an interference pattern is observed on a screen positioned behind it; this is definitely a wave phenomenon.
If one of the two slits is closed, a point-shaped blackening is observed on the screen; this is definitely a particle phenomenon.

This fact in itself is strange enough, because how do the components of the beam know whether they are expected to behave and interfere like waves, or whether they are expected to behave like particles and therefore to cause punctiform blackening on the screen? How do the individual particles know where to hit the screen to create an interference pattern? It looks as if every particle knew where its predecessor has hit and would then conclude where it should hit on the screen itself. Are we dealing with thinking conscious particles (or whatsoever) of matter that are capable of deductive reasoning and making decissions?

Yet, there are even stranger phenomena. If only a single particle is sent through the double slit with both slits open, we still observe an interference pattern. But what has the particle interfered with? With itself?

And it gets even worse:

If both slits are open from the very beginning and only a single particle is sent on the trip and if then one of the two slits is closed after the particle has passed beyond the slits, but still before it has hit the screen, that is, while it is is still on its way between the slits and the screen, no interference pattern is seen but a single blackening instead. This is exactly what would have been expected if already from the very beginning only one slit had been open.

This works also the other way around. If one of the two slits is closed from the very beginning and then again only a single particle is sent on the trip and if then the slit that had been closed till then is opened after the particle has passed the slits, but still before it has hit the screen, that is, while it is still on its way between the slits and the screen, an interference pattern is seen. This is exactly what would have been expected if both slits had been open from the very beginning.

It's as if the particles after having passed through the slit(s) sort of became aware that we have changed the experimental set-up; that is, as if they had realized that we have decided to watch particles rather than waves, or vice versa. Or do the particles know from the very beginning that we would decide otherwise at the last moment and, above all, how we would decide?

Anyway, these experiments proved conclusively that there can be no subject-object separation and that our consciousness determines the behavior of the material world.

As the famous physicist John Archibald Wheeler once put it:

Nature at the quantum level is not a machine that goes its inexorable way. Instead, which answer we get depends on the question we put, the experiment we arrange, the registering device we choose. We are inescapably involved in bringing about that which appears to be happening.

(Quoted from The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World, Penguin Putnam Inc., New York, 1995; emphasis added)

What I have described above, by the way, has become known as delayed-choice experiments.

Although physicists soon learned to correctly predict the results of such experiments using a newly developed theory for the mathematical description of the behavior of quanta, a meaningful verbal interpretation of the mathematical equations of this theory, that is, a description of the behavior of quantum systems in our usual language, proved to be extremely difficult, if not impossible. 

If we say that light is made up of particles, we are just as right or wrong as if we were claiming that light is a wave, and, strictly speaking, even mathematical formalism does not resolve this contradiction.

An unnamed Zen master is credited with the following anecdote:

A Zen student came to his Master's study and said, "Master, isn't it true that I have the most beautiful handwriting of all the students here?" The Master replied, "Yes, it is true." The student thanked him and went out. A short while later another student entered the Master's study and said, "Master, isn't it true that I have the most beautiful handwriting of all the students here?" The Master replied, "Yes, it is true." This student also thanked the Master and went out. Another student, who happened to be present all the time, asked the Master, "Master, how can that be? You agreed with both. However, only one can be right! "The Master replied:" Yes, you are also right."

(Garma C.C. Chang, Die buddhistische Lehre von der Ganzheit des Seins. Das holistische Weltbild der buddhistischen Philosophie. Original quotation in German, translated into English by Questing Wolf)

Does not this Zen master say something that is very similar to what physicists say?

By and by it became more and more evident that we can talk about quantum systems merely in parables, in metaphors, or in allegories and that our language does not have an adequate expression for the underlying reality, that is, for the Syzygy. How then should we call it?

Zen Master Huang-Po is credited with the following anecdote:

Master Huang-Po was in need of a headmaster for a new Zen school he was going to found. He was looking for a suitable candidate among the students of his already existing school. However, since there was no one among his students for whom he could spontaneously decide, he came up with the idea of carrying out a qualifying examination. After he had had dinner with his students, he called them in for a meeting in the assembly hall. There, he put a jug of water on the stage and said, "Do not call it a jug of water! So how do you want to call it instead?" All students were perplexed and kept silent. But the new guy, who had just spent his first day at this Zen school, got up, went to the stage, and kicked the jar with his foot, shattering it into a thousand shards, calling out to Master Huang-Po, "I have no time to deal with such trivial matters, because tonight I'm in duty of the kitchen, and I must do the dishes!" Then the newbie left the assembly hall. Huang-Po said to his students, "Listen! Listen! Tomorrow I will make him head of the new school! The meeting is closed."
(Huang-Po, Der Geist des Zen. Original quotation in German, translated into English by Questing Wolf )

There are some other interesting questions:

• How does a syzygy know when to present itself as one pole and when as the other pole? 
• Can we even make any statements about the underlying entity, beyond duality; if not with our everyday language, then at least by means of mathematics? 
• Can we think non-dualistically? Or will we necessarily find the dual (complementary) partner to everything that we (try to) enumerate?

In fact, it has been found that quantum mechanical systems exist in a superposition of all principally possible states (and that may be very many; their number may even be infinite) until they are observed by a conscious observer. We could also say that they exist as a probability to manifest, but they are not manifest. Instead, at the moment of observation they pass into one of these states and all other states disappear, and strictly speaking, we even do not know what the word disappear is to mean in this context. That is to say, for example that as long as we do not observe the location of a quantum or determine it by a measurement, it is simultaneously at all possible locations – that is, at many locations at the same time; so ultimately, it is distributed over the entire cosmos. But by observation, performed by a conscious observer, it suddenly is at a very specific location and nowhere else. Is this black magic? Is there a trickster playing his tricks on us? Is there "someone" kidding us? What's going on?

To make matters worse, physicists and philosophers came up with experiments that seem to finally take what we like to call common sense to the absurd. One of the most famous of such experiments has become known as Schrödinger's Cat. This is one of many thought experiments dealing with the question of where quantum mechanics, with its strange phenomena and paradoxes, stops, and where the boundary between the quantum world and the macroscopic worlds runs. Since there is a lot of literature on this subject, which describes all possible variants that one can think of, I restrain from going into more detail here. The ultimate result is always a cat that is at the same time both dead and alive until a conscious observer looks up in what condition it really is. Only through observation does it either reach one of the definite states dead or alive (instead of being dead and alive).

There have been many attempts so far to get rid of these logical contradictions and grotesque, if not absurd, consequences of quantum mechanics. They all failed in one way or another. I do not intend to describe all these attempts here, just mention one, which is called Everett's theory of the many worlds.

Hugh Everett, an American physicist, postulated that observation plays no role whatsoever, but certainly the observer's state of consciousness! One must always consider the total system consisting of the observer AND that which is being observed, so he taught. This sounds good – at a first glance. This sounds like an attempt to eliminate the dualism "subject (observer) – object (observed quantum)". But "the trickster" (who soever this may be) laughs up his sleeve and we are confronted with another severe problem. One consequence of this form of involvement of the observer in the system is that any observation causes the system to split into several non-interacting "branches" or "worlds" each of which containing an incarnation of the observer. Because there are always observers at work, not just physicists who want to measure something, but also you and me, there is a tremendous amount of "simultaneously" existing worlds that contain another incarnation of you and me and ultimately of everybody.

Let's assume a physicist is observing a quantum system (that is, performing measurements) and, for sake of simplicity, let's also assume that this system can be in two states only which I'd like to denote by 0 and 1. When he is done with his measurements, according to Everett's postulate, the world will have split into two branches (we may synonymously say, into two worlds): one branch (world) where he will live in an incarnation that is convinced to have observed the system in state 0, and in another branch (world) where he will live in an incarnation that is convinced to have observed the system in state 1. And what is more, "reality" will be a superposition of both worlds [!] – if it makes any sense at all to speak of reality in this context.

Anyone who has seen the movie "What the bleep do we know?" can certainly remember the scene in which Amanda suddenly sees the world cloning itself (seemingly?!) and becoming a manifold of worlds. This is an allusion to the multi-world interpretation of quantum mechanics.

A more sophisticated discussion as well as a short biography of Hugh Everett can be found, for example, within this article published by Scientific American on October 21, 2008.  

Hugh Everett III in Scientific American, October 21, 2008
© Scientific American, 2008
Source: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hugh-everett-biography/

The multi-world interpretation seems to cast out the devil with the Beelzebub insofar as it represents a promising approach to dissolve the subject-object separation, but leads to a new problem the consequences of which are dizzying. Ultimately, you cannot exclude that, apart from the world in which you are right now, there are also many worlds in which you are not alive anymore or have never been born. The same applies, of course, to everyone. So we are all Schrödinger's cats! Or do we succumb to an illusion? If so, of what kind is this illusion?

We have already seen that quantum mechanics forces us to rethink the concepts of our everyday world. They can not be applied to quantum physical processes. Nevertheless, at a first glance it seems as if quantum mechanics is a concept that describes processes in space and time which are causally interconnected. Actually, that's what the name quantum mechanics implies. But beware, we are being fooled (by the trickster?), as the so-called Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment – EPR for short – impressively shows. It forces us to accept non-causal relationships. Non-causal relationships – that is a blatant contradiction to our usual way of thinking, which corresponds perfectly with our everyday experience: that every event must have a cause that predates the occurrence of that event. Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen wondered what would happen if two particles were made to interact with each other and then separate again.

We may perform the EPR experiment in several different ways, but it always yields the same amazing result: once two particles have interacted in a certain way with each other, they stay connected forever. To be specific, they stay connected in such a way that changing the state of one of the two particles causes an immediate, that is, spontaneous change of the state of the second particle, even if the two particles are meanwhile far away from each other. However, there is no causal relationship between these two events, because no signal is transmitted. If a signal were transmitted, it could not move faster than light. So it would need a finite time to travel from one particle to the other, and consequently the change of state of the particles could not occur simultaneously. We are dealing here with two events that are meaningfully related and yet are not causally connected in the classical sense, because one event is not really the cause of the other. We are dealing with a connection that “exists” outside of space and time. A connection of this kind is called synchronous, and it has become customary to speak of synchronicity to denote two events that are meaningfully however not causally connected. Within the next part of this essay, I will explain the topic of synchronicity in some more detail and also give an example.

Let me just mention here that if we assume that the Universe emerged from a big bang, so that all matter was once so close together that all (or most) particles were able to interact with each other, then the EPR experiment is a very clear indication that everything is connected with everything, and this connection exists on an acausal, non-spatio-temporal level; that is, beyond space and time.

The Other Syntax
Did the universe really begin?
Is the theory of the big bang true?
These are not questions, though they sound like they are.
Is the syntax that requires beginnings, developments
and ends as statements of fact the only syntax that exists?
That's the real question.
There are other syntaxes.
There is one, for example, which demands that varieties
of intensity be taken as facts.
In that syntax nothing begins and nothing ends;
thus birth is not a clean, clear-cut event,
but a specific type of intensity,
and so is maturation, and so is death.
A man of that syntax, looking over his equations, finds that
he has calculated enough varieties of intensity
to say with authority
that the universe never began
and will never end,
but that it has gone, and is going now, and will go
through endless fluctuations of intensity.
That man could very well conclude that the universe itself
is the chariot of intensity
and that one can board it
to journey through changes without end.
He will conclude all that, and much more,
perhaps without ever realizing
that he is merely confirming
the syntax of his mother tongue.
(Carlos Castaneda, The Active Side of Infinity, Harper Collins Publishers, New York 1998)

To be continued