This book is a series of articles that attempts to ‘break out into natural language’ meanings implicit in the formal mathematics of quantum mechanics. The whole materialistic, reductionist, logical positivist arc of western science has, at its greatest apex (quantum mechanics), seemingly given birth (from this viewpoint) to Rosemary’s Baby.
According to this model life is a vast machine; meaning, once the parts are properly labeled and relationships between the parts adequately understood, all mysteries will be resolved and we will then live in a perfectly predictable world. This model seemingly reveals a self-assembling, blind process of trial and error within the framework of space/time.
The problem here is that quantum mechanics thoroughly overturns the idea of mechanism along with its space/time infrastructure.
I’ll let David Bohm, a physicist and colleague of Einsteins explain…
“The quantum theory…overturned mechanism…I’ll give here its three main features. First of all, all action was in the form of what is called discrete quanta. For example, one found that the orbits of electrons around the nucleus would have to be discrete, as there were no allowed orbits in between, and yet, somehow, the electron jumped from one to the other without passing in between—according to this view. And the light shown on these things was also shown in the form of quanta, and in fact, every form of connection of energy was in the form of quanta. Therefore you could think of it as an interconnecting network of quanta weaving the whole universe into one, because these quanta were indivisible…
Secondly, all matter and energy were found to have what appears to be a dual nature, in the sense that they can behave either like a particle or like a field—or a wave—according to how they are treated by the experiment. The fact that everything can show either a wave-like or a particle-like character according to the context of the environment which is, in this case, the observing apparatus, is clearly not compatible with mechanism, because in mechanism the nature of each thing should be quite independent of its context.
The third point is that one finds a peculiar new property which I call non-locality of connection. In other words, the connection can be between two particles at considerable distances in some cases. This violates the classical requirement of locality—that only things very close to each other can influence one another…
There is another point we can bring out in this connection, which is that the state of the whole may actually organize the parts, not merely through the strong connection of very distant elements, but also because the state of the whole is indifferent to exactly where the parts are.
…I want to show how this contradicts the basic mechanist assumption. Firstly, the action is through indivisible quanta, so as I said, everything is woven together in indivisible links. The universe is one whole, as is were, and is in some sense unbroken. Of course, only under very refined observation does this show up. Now the second point was the wave-particle nature, and the third was non-locality. So you can see all these things deny mechanism.
The people who founded quantum mechanics, such as Schrodinger, Dirac and Pauli, and so on all understood this; but since that time this understanding has gradually faded out as people have more and more concentrated on using quantum mechanics as a system of calculation for experimental results, and each time a new text book is written, some of the philosophical meaning gets lost. So we now have a situation where I don't think the majority of physicists realizes how radical the implications of quantum mechanics are.”
--Unfolding Meaning, David Bohm
The fact that the most elementary particles are connected in a faster than light, non-local manner seems to imply one of two things; either Einstein was wrong and the speed of light is not the absolute speed limit in space/time, or the whole foundation (ground) of space/time emerges from a ground beyond space/time. As Einstein’s theories seem unimpeachable, most scientists accept the validity, if not the implications, of non-locality.
The question then is this—what is the ground of the phenomenal world if not space/time?
Bohm’s model (to grossly simplify) views the brain as a passive screen (like a TV) enfolding information unfolded from a higher dimension—the implicate order—which, in turn, receives that information from a source he calls the superimplicate order, or pure intelligence.
The Bohm/Pribam holographic model is described here in the following way…
“The theory, in a nutshell: Our brains mathematically construct concrete reality by interpreting frequencies from another dimension, a realm of meaningful, patterned reality that transcends space and time. The brain is a hologram interpreting a holographic universe.
---A New Perspective On Reality, The Holographic Paradigm
And yes, these sorts of theories are, for the old school scientist, the equivalent of having birthed Rosemary’s Baby. When it comes to the death of their world-view, they are still in the denial stage of grief.
Q: Would the community of physicists accept this interpretation?
Bohm: Oh, I think they have to, yes. They do use the idea of fields and particles and so on but when you press them they must agree that they have no image whatsoever what these things are, and they have no content other than the results of what they can calculate with their equations.
Q: So it’s pragmatic?
Bohm: Well, at least it’s in pragmatic language though it isn’t consistently pragmatic because all sorts of nonpragmatic ideas are allowed to be introduced in the mathematics. It’s confused rather, I would say; it’s a mixture of some pragmatic aspects and some highly speculative nonpragmatic aspects but in a very unbalanced way. It’s saying speculation is only allowed in the equations, but in the physical ideas they are rather fixed and essentially the physical ideas are only images of the equations, that is, they have no content other than as the convenient vehicles for stating imaginatively what the equations compute, so that you can grasp it in some imaginative though confused form.
Q: But isn’t that like saying that they are not anchored in anything real, that they have no actual ground?
Bohm: Their only anchor is the experimental results. They’re saying that these numbers that they get out of the calculations agree with numbers that come out of the experiments.
Q: And how would you perceive this differently?
Bohm: Well, we are trying to give a description of reality whether wrong or right, we are proposing a view of reality, a description of reality which will faithfully be about or fit this reality, and we can now regard the mathematics as a way of calculating what’s happening within this reality.
Q: It’s a very different claim from this current utilitarian one.
Bohm: Yes…reality is the implicate order and the equations are describing that.
Q: Whereas in the other view, i.e., that of most contemporary physicists, the equations are as it were almost both the means and the end?
Bohm: Yes, the equations are the truth.
Q: The truth about what is the question?
*The Enfolding-Unfolding Universe*, The Holographic Paradigm
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