This is the latest and last in a long series of articles about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For what has preceded, see the top of the Blog Index Page, click here. I have just finished summarising Danah Zohar’s The Quantum Self. I devoted several articles to this, because it was fascinating to see how an open-minded physicist approached the problems of consciousness, the self, and the relationship between mind and body, and where this journey took her.

    The latest development in this long story is that Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist and populariser of science, had a new book out this year called Helgoland in which he attempts to explain quantum physics to the general public¹.

    I noted much earlier that, even though quantum physics is recognised as the most successful theory of all time in terms of its experimental results, predictions and applications, there are nevertheless various interpretations of it; there is no consensus as to the philosophical implications, what it all means. Never has this been so apparent as when we compare Rovelli’s conclusions with Zohar’s. She ends up speculating about a God both transcendent and immanent. Rovelli’s interpretation is about as close to materialism as it is possible to be while supposedly remaining quantum. It would therefore be more appropriate to say that he is explaining his interpretation of quantum physics, since he is something of a lone voice.

    I am going to be critical of his conclusions, so let me say in advance that this book is probably the best I’ve read in terms of giving the history of the early period — exactly which physicist contributed what — and an explanation of the different interpretations of quantum physics that a general reader can understand.

    The book is somewhat paradoxical. Superficially he would appear to be returning to what Fritjof Capra started in The Tao of Physics, pointing out the parallels with Eastern religions, since he has a chapter on the Buddhist teacher Nāgārjuna. He says that he was contemplating the problem: what is the world’s elementary substance, if not matter? He was unconvinced by all suggestions until he came across a text by Nāgārjuna, and he found that “the resonance with quantum mechanics is immediate”.

    The central thesis of this text is that “there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else”, thus things have “no autonomous existence”; “everything exists only… in relation to something else”. He is therefore pleased that the long search for the ultimate substance in physics may have ended, since there isn’t one. Other ideas he found appealing were:

• “There is no ultimate or mysterious essence to understand that is the true essence of our being. ‘I’ is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else”. He therefore thinks that “centuries of speculation… on the nature of consciousness vanish like morning mist”.
• “the ultimate reality, the essence, is absence, is vacuity. It does not exist”.
• The world of phenomena is “not a world that we should trouble ourselves attempting to derive from an Absolute”. “There is no sense in looking for an ultimate substratum”. “There is never an ultimate reality”. He is pleased therefore that “no metaphysics survives”.
• “Reality, including our selves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which there is nothing”.

    This apparent attraction to Buddhism is somewhat misleading, however, since the main thrust of the book is that there is absolutely nothing spiritual at all to be discovered in quantum physics, which he wants to keep as close to materialism/naturalism as possible. The only difference between him and a materialist seems to be that, whereas materialists believe in separate entities, he believes that this is a mistake and that reality is made up of relations rather than objects: “Quantum physics is the discovery that the physical world is a web of correlations: relative information”. This is therefore merely a different way of understanding the surface level of reality. That is hardly a revolutionary idea, and is in contrast to the truly revolutionary idea, as advocated by the various physicists I’ve discussed. They say that quantum physics is the discovery that the apparently material universe emerges from one or more other levels of reality.

    Here are some of his statements which demonstrate his predisposition and commitment to materialism:

• He thinks that there is a “mountain of stupidity dressed up with the word ‘quantum’… (including) holistic quantum theories of every kind; mystical quantum spiritualism”, which he calls “an almost unbelievable parade of quantum nonsense”.
• He consistently seeks physical, natural explanations for everything: “The conviction on which this book is based is that we human beings are a part of nature”. By this he means processes rooted in biology, calling Darwin’s Origin of Species a “marvellous book”. He rejects anything that smacks of Idealism, Dualism, hidden levels of reality, or spirit. On the same theme, he favours the ideas of the physicist Ernst Mach whose philosophy “is a real natural philosophy”, which “resonates with the ideas of Marx and Engels”. Why that should be considered attractive is far from clear to me.
• On the same theme, he calls the “radical scepticism of (David) Hume” some of “the best of much Western philosophy”. Really?
• He says that “reality is not divided into levels”. There can therefore only be the one level of apparent ‘matter’, which contradicts the beliefs of the whole earlier quantum tradition.
• He calls the idea of “being constituted by some vaporous supernatural substance that remains alive after death” a “sad hope”, and “utterly implausible”. (He is denying the reality of an astral body, or a soul.)

        He believes that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain:

• “To ask what consciousness is, after having unravelled the neural processes… is a question that makes no sense”.
• “There is no reason to suspect that in our mental life there is something not comprehensible in terms of the known natural laws”.
• “It is possible to think of both mental and physical phenomena as natural phenomena: both products of interactions between parts of the physical world”, thereby denying the independent reality of mind/consciousness.
• He quotes with approval the philosopher Erik C. Banks: “However mysterious the mind-body problem may be for us, we should always remember that it is a solved problem for nature. All we have to do is figure out that solution by naturalistic means”.

    He even concludes that “quantum theory is of no direct help in understanding the mind”. That’s a bold (and unsubstantiated) assertion. I’ll merely note that various other physicists have thought the exact opposite, or at least that it’s worth considering the possibility. Danah Zohar wrote a whole book The Quantum Self, believing that it did. Also worthy of attention is Fred Alan Wolf’s Mind and the New Physics, and Roger Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind, and Shadows of the Mind. (Penrose is a giant in the world of contemporary physics, a Nobel Laureate, no less. His two books together devote 1,000 pages to the possible relationship between quantum physics and mind.)

    Like several modern neuroscientists and philosophers, Rovelli believes that the self is an illusion. He says that “we have the ‘intuition’ of an independent entity that is the ‘I’ ”. He thinks this an error (and perhaps he’s right), but his argument is very poor, saying that “we also once had the ‘intuition’ that behind a storm there was Jove… And that the Earth was flat. It is not through uncritical ‘intuitions’ that we construct an effective comprehension of reality. Introspection is the worst instrument of inquiry if we are interested in the nature of mind”. Whether or not he is correct to say that the self is an illusion, in line with Buddhism, these are very poor analogies. What he calls intuitions are indeed errors, misunderstandings. He completely misses the point, however, since what he actually needs to explain away is the consciousness or self that is aware of the storm or the Earth in the first place, the ‘we’ who are ‘interested’ in the nature of mind. That would be a much harder task than ridiculing the mistaken beliefs of earlier humans.

    He doesn’t find panpsychism persuasive, saying that “there is no need to attribute proto-consciousness to elementary systems”. He hasn’t even understood the argument, however, which he claims is: “since we have consciousness, and are made up of protons and electrons, then the electrons and protons should already have a kind of proto-consciousness”. The real issue, which needs to be addressed, and which led Zohar cautiously to adopt a limited panpsychism, and other physicists, for example David Bohm, to go even further, is that sub-atomic particles appear to have consciousness in actual experiments. They seem to be aware of the experimenter’s decisions, and seem capable of attempting to solve problems. That is the difficulty that Rovelli needs to explain if he wishes to reject panpsychism.

    I hope that is enough to demonstrate Rovelli’s preconceived assumptions, his prejudices, and his poor reasoning. In order to argue his position, he goes off in an unusual direction. The wave/particle duality is one of the cornerstones of quantum thinking, and has led to much bewilderment in the minds of quantum physicists. What exactly can this mean? Rovelli, conveniently for his argument, denies that it is a problem, saying: “the wave is not a representation of a real entity: it is an instrument of calculation that gives the probability that something real will occur”, comparing it to weather forecasts. “It is not enough to think of the electron as a wave… When we look at (a wave), it disappears, concentrated into a point, and we see the particle there”. What he is saying therefore is that, because the wave is not a representation of a real entity at the material level, that for him is enough to deny its reality.

    Rovelli conceded that “there are many different interpretations of Nāgārjuna’s text”, but I won’t go into a discussion of whether his is correct, and therefore whether Nāgārjuna’s worldview is the true one. What is important to note is that Rovelli, predisposed to materialism and opposed to anything spiritual or metaphysical, found there what he wanted to find, or perhaps interpreted what he read in order to make it fit with his views. He chose to adopt the teachings of one single Buddhist, who may or may not have been correct, and ignore the teachings of Hinduism, Taoism, Kabbalism, and spiritual traditions in general. In the same way, he picked out a single physicist (Ernst Mach) whose thinking appealed to him, and ignored the whole tradition of earlier quantum physicists who completely disagreed with him.

    Like Danah Zohar, Rovelli believes he has arrived at a worldview which can serve humanity: “I think it is time to take this theory fully on board… into the whole of contemporary culture”. He presumably thinks this because he believes it to be true, and truth is good. It is hard to see, however, how his interpretation of quantum physics can offer any sense of meaning or purpose to any alienated individual, or society in general. All he has done is move the goalposts; we once believed in separate entities, now we have discovered that they only exist in relationship to each other. There is interconnectedness, but still at the ‘material’ level. This is exactly the opposite conclusion to that of Danah Zohar, even though they both start as quantum physicists with the same material — history and experimental results — at their disposal.

    Rovelli’s book is inspired by Werner Heisenberg and his reflections on quantum physics on the isolated island of Helgoland. It was he who “found the idea that made it possible to account for all the recalcitrant facts, to build the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics”. Heisenberg therefore was the prime mover in this revolution in physics, and it is no surprise that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for the “creation of quantum mechanics” — that is the actual wording of the citation.

    Rovelli, however, doesn’t mention or is unaware that Heisenberg was also a Lutheran Christian, publishing and giving several talks reconciling science with his faith. Also, as I noted earlier in the series, Fritjof Capra says that Heisenberg was a major source of inspiration for him. Furthermore, he went through the manuscript of The Tao of Physics with him chapter by chapter, thanking him for his personal support and inspiration. It is reasonable to conclude therefore that Heisenberg endorsed the thesis of Capra’s book, which Rovelli would presumably call “mystical quantum spiritualism”, thus “quantum nonsense”.

    Heisenberg also wrote: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you”. He would presumably think that Rovelli had only taken this first gulp, and would have rejected everything that he says. Ironically, Helgoland (in English Heligoland), the lonely island where Heisenberg worked out the foundations of quantum theory, can be translated as ‘Holy Land’ or ‘Sacred Island’. It probably seemed like a holy place to Heisenberg, but obviously not for Rovelli!

                                                                                          Carlo Rovelli

Footnote:

1. Allen Lane, 2021

    This is the latest in a long series of articles about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For what has preceded, see the top of the Blog Index Page, click here.  I am currently summarising the book The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar, and what follows will make most sense if you have read the earlier articles about her book. This will be the last in this part of the series, as I’ve now reached the final chapter entitled ‘The Quantum World-view’. It isn’t necessary to go into detail about this, since her worldview has become reasonably clear in the preceding chapters, and this one is indeed one of the shortest.

    She discusses the importance of actually having a worldview, which is “a theme which integrates the sense of self, the sense of self and others, and the sense of how these relate to the wider world — to Nature and other creatures, to the environment as a whole, to the planet, the universe, and ultimately to God — to some overall purpose or sense of direction”. She then notes that, without a coherent worldview, “the sense of self and world disintegrates. We feel that we are ‘empty’, that our lives are ‘pointless’ or ‘absurd’, that ‘it’s all for nothing’. The alienation suffered at this level is a general spiritual alienation”. (The pointlessness of the universe and the absurdity of life is, of course, the worldview that we are invited to embrace by much of modern science and philosophy, notably Existentialism.)

    She notes that the Judaeo-Christian viewpoint fulfilled the role for a long time, but that it “started to lose its coherence when the discoveries of modern science began to undermine many of the cosmological assumptions on which it rested”. Then a mechanical world-view was born, but this “could never really succeed. From the beginning, it was flawed by its inability to account for consciousness… (It) successfully gave us a science which explained things, and a technology to exploit them as never before, but the price paid was a kind of alienation at every level of human life”.

    She criticises various worldviews for their inadequacies: Idealism, Materialism, Freudianism, “many strains of mysticism” (by which she means Eastern religions), Behaviourism, exaggerated Individualism, Marxism, Relativism of all sorts, and extreme Fundamentalism. She then notes that “in recent years, many people have begun to sense that the new physics, primarily quantum physics holds out the promise of a new world-view, one which would give some physical basis to a more holistic, less fragmented, way of looking at ourselves within the world”. (This promise of a new worldview is my purpose in writing this series.)

    She thinks that this explains why there had been much literature, prior to her writing, about quantum physics and holism, Eastern mysticism, healing, psychic phenomena etc. However, “all have been partial and groping attempts to articulate something that is ‘in the air’… a need to find a unifying explanation of ourselves and our universe and a unifying foundation for our behaviour”. However, the problem is that “none has actually grounded this need itself in the actual physics of consciousness”. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that she offers the vision she has outlined in her book as the solution to these problems. These are some of her key statements:

• “Once we have made this connection, once we have seen that the physics of human consciousness emerges from quantum processes within the brain and that in consequence human consciousness and the whole world of its creation shares a physics with everything else in the universe — with the human body, with all other living things and creatures, with the basic physics of matter and relationship and with the coherent state of the quantum vacuum itself — it becomes impossible to imagine a single aspect of our lives that is not drawn into one coherent whole”.
• “The quantum world-view stresses dynamic relationship as the basis of all that is. It tells us that our world comes about through a mutually creative dialogue between mind and body, between the individual and his personal and material context, and between human culture and the natural world. It gives us a view of the human self which is free and responsible, responsive to others and to its environment, essentially related and naturally committed, and at every moment creative”.
• “The creative dialogue between ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ is the physical basis of all creativity in the universe and is also the physical basis of human creativity. The quantum self experiences no dichotomy between the inner and the outer because the two, the inner world of mind… and the outer world of matter (of facts) give rise to each other”.
• “In some very important sense we are all interdependent, and that our human lives are inseparably intertwined with the world of nature”.
• “The quantum self thus mediates between the extreme isolation of Western individualism and the extreme collectivism of Marxism or Eastern mysticism”.

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Comments

    That concludes my summary of Danah Zohar’s book. Apart from the obvious interest in observing how a quantum physicist approaches the problem of consciousness, and the interesting places that this takes her, the reason I’ve spent so much time discussing it, is that she has actually developed a quantum worldview, which goes beyond the science. She believes that this is a basis for living, so much so that soon afterwards she went on to write another book, together with her husband, called The Quantum Society. Since I’m very interested in politics and society, and since I think and write more from a spiritual point of view, it is important to understand just how far science can take us, whether it can truly offer us a political and social vision, or whether we need something more.

    I suspect that a quantum worldview cannot completely fulfil this role, but it does pave the way for a reunification of science and religion which the world so badly needs. That would be a genuine foundation for a new way of living in tune with the universe. (At some point I might write about how adequate their quantum vision is.)

    The weakness in her whole argument, as I see it, is that she repeats frequently her belief that consciousness arises from quantum processes within the brain. (Perhaps she cannot avoid this, given her starting point as a scientist.) This seems to be only one step removed from the materialism of those neuroscientists and philosophers who believe that consciousness/mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain, the only difference being that she takes into account the quantum aspects. She never seems to notice the fact that, according to her understanding, since matter itself arises from quantum processes, then the brain must also arise from quantum processes before it can give rise to the conscious self. In apparent contradiction to this viewpoint she says: “The quantum world-view transcends the dichotomy between mind and body, or between inner and outer, by showing us that the basic building blocks of mind (bosons) and the basic building blocks of matter (fermions) arise out of a common, quantum substrate (the vacuum) and are engaged in a mutually creative dialogue whose roots can be traced back to the very heart of reality creation”. Since she believes that the quantum vacuum may well be conscious, this suggests that both the brain and the self are the consequence of consciousness, therefore the self does not arise from quantum processes within the brain. She does not seem to notice this contradiction.

Even though I believe this is a weakness in her train of thought, I don’t think that it creates any serious objections to the overall picture that she paints, something approaching evolutionary panentheism, as discussed in the previous article, God both transcendent and immanent.

    One of the problems she struggled with, how to account for the unity of the self in terms of the physics involved, would be much more easily solved if one adopts what is known as the Transmission Model, that the brain is an organ which filters and limits consciousness. In Western spiritual and esoteric traditions that consciousness would be called the soul, but that’s another story.

    This is is the latest in a long series of articles about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For what has preceded, see the top of the Blog Index Page, click here. I am currently summarising the book The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar, and what follows will make most sense if you have read the articles dealing with her earlier chapters, although this is not essential. In them she explored the nature of consciousness, the mind-body problem, her quantum understanding of the personal self, and the nature of relationships, specifically those experiences when we do not feel self-contained, when two people can overlap so that they participate in an identity bigger than their individual selves.

    In the following chapters she continues to develop the last of those themes, that the self sometimes seems contained within the body, yet on other occasions seems to extend beyond it. In chapter 10, which is entitled ‘The Survival of the Self: Quantum Immortality’, she therefore turns her attention to the question of life after death. She thinks that what she has written in her earlier chapters, the suggestion that consciousness arises from within a quantum process in the brain, seems to prevent any continuation of consciousness without that brain. Various experiences during pregnancy, however, have led her to contemplate “a wholly new way of thinking about the survival of that self”. These sound like what we might call spiritual experiences, altered states of consciousness, similar to those reported under the influence of psychedelics:

• “In many ways I lost the sense of myself as an individual, while at the same time gaining a sense of myself as part of some larger and ongoing process”.

• “I felt complete and self-contained, a microcosm within which all life was enfolded”.

• “I experienced myself as extending in all directions, backwards into ‘before time’ and forwards into ‘all time’, inwards towards all possibility and outwards towards all existence”.

    She therefore goes on to contemplate whether life after death might be possible. A classical scientific perspective suggests otherwise: “Any expectation of immortality has relied upon belief in the existence of a personal, immortal soul”, or an astral body “which detaches itself from the physical body at the moment of death… (Each) flies in the face of modern scientific sensibility”. As we might expect by now, she wonders what the physics of this survival might be. She assumes that the existence of a soul implies dualism, but thinks that “the physics of consciousness argue against the separation of mind and body”; “there are no grounds for the dead having continuing experience”.

    From a quantum physics perspective, however, things can be viewed differently. Early in this chapter she says that “at the subatomic level of elementary particles, there is no death in the sense of permanent loss. The quantum vacuum, which is the underlying reality of all that is, exists eternally… Within this well (of being) all basic properties are conserved… nothing is ever lost”. (This vacuum will be discussed in more detail below.)

    She goes on to state that the concept of an isolated personal self is an illusion, because it is part of an ongoing greater process: “Viewed quantum mechanically, I am my relationships”. By this she means not only our relationships with others…

• “On a quantum view of the self, there can be no hard and fast distinction between my own past and that of another with whom I am intimate”.
• “I and you overlap and are interwoven, both now and in the future”.

…but also our relationship to life and the universe itself:

• “On a quantum view, there is no way to draw any sharp distinction between my persistence through time, my close relationship to others, and my survival after death. Neither isolation nor death have any clear-cut meaning”.
• “I am made of the stuff of which the universe is made and the universe shall be made of me”.
• “With a quantum view of process, it becomes clear in a new way that ‘I’, not just my atoms or my genes, but my personal being — the pattern which is me — will be part and parcel of all that is to come, just as it is part of the nexus of now and, indeed, was in large part foreshadowed in the past”.

    She therefore concludes that “all life is an ongoing process of which we are a part”, because “there is no real division in space or time between selves. We are all individuals, but individuals within a greater unity, a unity which defines each of us in terms of others and gives each of us a stake in eternity”. “Understanding the full reality of the extent to which we are all, physically, interwoven, requires a revolution in our whole way of perceiving ourselves and our relation to others… We know that quantum physics calls upon us to alter our notions of space and time, but now we have to accept that this touches each and every one of us at the core of our personhood”.

    Perhaps not everyone will agree with the logical process by which she arrived there but, starting from a scientific quantum physics viewpoint, she has arrived at what we might call a spiritual worldview; there is an eternal underlying reality (the quantum vacuum), which is the source of everything that exists, an ongoing evolutionary process. In the language of spirituality, God is both Being and Becoming, both transcendent and immanent. Philosophically this is called evolutionary panentheism, a position which I would wholeheartedly subscribe to.

    Her next few chapters are not directly relevant to this main theme, so I’ll offer only a few notes. The next chapter is entitled ‘Getting Beyond Narcissism: the Foundations of a New Quantum Psychology’. This is merely a continuation of an earlier theme. By narcissism she means the “model of the self as a thing which exists in isolation”, not in the usual sense of the psychological problem (excessive interest in or admiration of oneself). This has to be transcended, and again she states the spiritual idea that the self is a microcosm of the universe: “To be a self in the first place is to be a being within whom all of reality finds expression…  Equally, a psychology based on the quantum nature of the person carries with it certain basic moral implications, implications which follow internally from the very nature of the self — a nature which it shares, at its most basic level with the whole of reality”.

    In chapter 12 she discusses the question of free will and determinism. She says that “we certainly experience ourselves and others as free”, yet “such experiences of freedom are… at loggerheads with any arguments we might use to defend or justify them… It is difficult to argue rationally what we know intuitively”. The Freudian viewpoint is that “all mental activity is the result of unconscious mental forces which are instinctual, biological and physical in origin”, thus the human psyche is “by its very nature the bond slave of unconscious forces outside its ken and beyond its control”. This leads many neuroscientists, and in their wake various writers on Medium, to deny the existence of free will.

    Zohar, however, argues for some free will:

• “The physical basis for freedom in any quantum system is quantum indeterminacy, the fact that quantum wave-functions can’t be ‘pinned down’ ”.
• “It is only with a quantum model of the person, where ‘I-ness’ arises out of a coherent, unifying quantum state in the brain, that there can be any one, central ‘me’ who makes or avoids mistakes”.

    In the next two chapters Zohar discusses creativity and aesthetics. Then chapter 15 has the bold title ‘The Quantum Vacuum and the God Within’.

    Many people believe that science and religion are completely separate realms, and “each is alien to the other and neither can learn from or refute the other”. She disagrees, saying that, in contrast to Newtonian physics and Darwinian theories of evolution, “quantum physics, allied to a quantum mechanical model of consciousness, gives us an entirely different perspective. This is a perspective from which we can see ourselves and our purposes fully as part of the universe and from which we might come to understand the meaning of human existence (her italics)… If such a perspective were fully achieved, it would not replace all the vast poetic and mythological imagery, the spiritual and moral dimensions of religion, but it would provide us with the physical basis for a coherent world picture — and one which includes ourselves”.

    This is how she attempts to justify such a statement. If gravity is “regarded as a basic organizing factor in the universe, mediating the passage from equilibrium to non-equilibrium”¹, and “gravity itself is a boson force field”, then “bosons (gravitons) are a large-scale driving force which moves the universe towards greater order. At a more basic level still, they may even be responsible for the collapse of the quantum wave function”. If all that is true: “From the very beginning, then, from the most primary level of what later become the material world and the world of consciousness, the building blocks of matter (fermions) and the building blocks of consciousness (bosons) are necessarily involved in a mutually creative dialogue. That which, in a far more complex form, later becomes us, is part and parcel of the basic dynamic through which the universe unfolds. With this understanding of the origins of consciousness — that it begins wherever two bosons meet — it may not be too wild to speculate that a gradual evolution of consciousness is the driving force behind that unfolding. This is not quite as strong as saying that Mind created the world, but it is suggesting that the elementary building blocks of Mind (bosons) were there from the beginning, and were necessary partners in that creation. In creating themselves (fulfilling their nature as ‘relationship’), they evoke the world”.

    “This capacity to increase the rhythms of evolution, specifically of evolving consciousness, may suggest a reason for human existence. It may hold the key to why we are in the universe, and give us some good notion of exactly where we fit into the general scheme of things (her italics). To understand this fully, we need to see the link between the physics of human consciousness which I have proposed in this book and the physics of the quantum ‘vacuum’ as proposed by quantum field theory”.

    The quantum vacuum is therefore the key. She says that it is “very inappropriately named because it is not empty. Rather, it is the basic, fundamental and underlying reality of which everything in this universe — including ourselves — is an expression”. The vacuum can be conceived “as a sea of potential. It contains no particles, and yet all particles come about as excitations (energy fluctuations) within it… The vacuum is the substrate of all that is”. (Earlier this quantum vacuum sounded remarkably like the Brahman of Hinduism, the Tao, or the Ayin of Kabbalism — a complete emptiness. Following this clarification it sounds more like the creative principle Brahma, the Pleroma [fullness] of the Gnostics, or the Kabbalistic En Sof.)

    Developing this further, she believes that, since it is reasonable “to conclude that the physics which gives us human consciousness is one of the basic potentialities within the quantum vacuum, the fundament of all reality”, this “might even give us some grounds to speculate that the vacuum itself (and hence the universe) is ‘conscious’ — that is, that it is poised towards a basic sense of direction, towards a further and greater ordered coherence. If we were looking for something that we could conceive of as God within the universe of the new physics, this ground state, coherent quantum vacuum might be a good place to start”.

    She says that the idea of a transcendent God will always remain appealing for some, although this can obviously only be a matter of faith, and it leaves us with a God who undergoes no creative transformation. “But if we think of God as something embodied within, or something which uses, the laws of physics, then the relationship between the vacuum and the existing universe suggests a God who might be identified with the basic sense of direction in the unfolding universe — even, perhaps, with an evolving consciousness within the universe. The existence of such an ‘immanent God’ would not preclude that of a transcendent as well, but, given our knowledge of the universe, the immanent God is more accessible to us. This immanent God would be at every moment involved in a mutually creative dialogue with His world, knowing Himself only as he knows His World”.

    She notes that this is the concept of god as proposed by Teilhard de Chardin and by ‘process theology’, and “it is a concept in terms of which it makes sense to speak of human beings — with our physics of consciousness which mirrors the physics of the coherent vacuum — as conceived in the image of God, or as partners in God’s creation”. Again she is coming close to adopting the philosophy of evolutionary panentheism, God both transcendent and immanent, both Being and Becoming. And all this from a starting point of the science of quantum physics.

    Her last chapter is entitled ‘The Quantum World-view’. That will be the subject of the next article, the final one about her.

    This is the latest in a long series of articles about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For what has preceded, see the top of the Blog Index Page, click here. I am currently summarising the book The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar, and what follows will make most sense if you have read the most recent articles, which deal with her earlier chapters.

    Having explored the nature of consciousness, the mind-body problem, and her quantum understanding of the personal self, in chapter 9 Zohar turns her attention to the nature of relationships, specifically those experiences when we do not feel self-contained, when two people can overlap so that they participate in an identity bigger than their individual selves.

    As examples she offers:

• motherhood: “During the pregnancy with my first child, and for some months after her birth, I experienced what for me was a strange new way of being. In many ways I lost the sense of myself as an individual, while at the same time gaining a sense of myself as part of some larger and ongoing process” (p123).
• moments of great intimacy between lovers when “neither can tell where one ends and the other begins” (p107).
• the phenomenon of projective identification in psychotherapy “where often the therapist finds himself feeling feelings or thinking thoughts which are really those of the patient”. This “involves the undoing of boundaries”. “The two seem at moments… to share a common identity, to be of one body and one mind” (p108, p109).

    She therefore wonders whether such experiences are in any sense real or whether they are illusory, as some suspect about consciousness and the self. She says that “in any classical approach to the philosophy and psychology of persons, this question has no answer”. As examples of those who would reject the reality of such experiences, she mentions Descartes, Newton (or at least his physics), Heidegger, Sartre, Freud, and Melanie Klein. She says that such thinking “has made its way into the general culture and contributed in no small measure to the sense of alienation felt by so many”, so that it is “little wonder that other thinkers — (philosopher Derek) Parfit, (Fritjof) Capra, (Gary) Zukav, (David) Bohm — have attempted to transcend this alienation by denying the existence of the isolated and isolating self altogether”.

    As we would expect by now, she again turns to quantum physics to explain this phenomenon. She affirms once again the reality of the self, and of close relationships. We therefore “need to ground the reality of ‘we’ in a new conceptual structure which gives equal weight to individuals and to their relationships, a structure which rests on the physics of consciousness… Such composite individuals are not possible in classical physics, but we know that they are the norm in quantum physics”.

    She explains this in the same way that she explained consciousness and the reality of the personal self, “in the tensions within the wave/particle duality and the ability of an elementary particle to be both a wave and a particle simultaneously. The particle aspect of quantum matter gives rise to individuals…The wave aspect gives rise to relationships between those individuals… Because wave functions can overlap and become entangled, quantum systems can ‘get inside’ each other and form a creative, internal relationship of a sort not possible with Newtonian billiard balls. Quantum systems ‘meet’, and through their meetings, evolve” (p113). She sees the wave/particle duality as “a tension between being and becoming” (p114). As within one self “we are speaking of overlapping wave patterns”; in relationships there are again overlapping wave patterns which may be non-local.

    Her conclusion to this chapter is as follows: “The notion of a quantum self which is both a self in its own right and a self-for-others cuts a new path through the more familiar dichotomy between seeing the self as all (i.e. the philosophers mentioned above whom she rejects) or seeing the self as nothing (e.g. Buddhism). In its ‘particle aspect’, the quantum self can be seen to have an important individual integrity and yet, through its ‘wave aspect’, to be simultaneously in relation to other selves and to the culture at large. This lays the basis for both personal identity and personal responsibility and at the same time for intimacy and group identity. It also suggests a new way of looking at the whole question of personal survival after death”. That’s an interesting place for her to end, and will be the subject of her next chapter.

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Comments

    In addition to the examples she gives of motherhood, intimacy and projective identification, she might also have mentioned ESP phenomena, the most obvious being telepathy, but other possibilities would be clairvoyance and remote viewing. In all these the personal self/consciousness is clearly not confined within the brain/body, and is part of some greater process.

    Whether or not her quantum explanation is the whole truth, I believe that Zohar is onto something very profound here. She is talking about something for which Arthur Koestler, intellectual giant of the 20th century, coined the term holon. This means exactly what Zohar is talking about, an entity which at the same time is both a self-contained individual and part of a larger whole.

    Her idea resonates with what in biology is called a superorganism, for example an ant colony, which mysteriously acts as one despite being made up of thousands of individuals, to the puzzlement of biologists, who find it difficult to come up with a satisfactory scientific explanation. It also resonates with the foundational idea of various spiritual systems, that there is an ultimate source of all being, a Oneness, of which everything that exists is a manifestation. This is what Hinduism calls Brahman, and what the Tao Te Ching calls the nameless eternal Tao, “the beginning of heaven and earth” which is “the mother of ten thousand things”. Everything that exists is a holon participating within this cosmic oneness.

    There is no doubt that such superorganisms exist, for every human being is one, being made up of various holons. We are comprised of individual atoms, which are part of individual molecules, which are part of individual cells, which are part of individual organs or bones etc., which all contribute to the constitution of one individual human. The atoms, molecules, cells, organs are therefore all examples of holons. The problem with humans is that in general the process stops there. We clearly recognise ourselves as separate individuals, made up of the holons I mentioned, but fail to appreciate that we are part of much larger groups and processes, thus that we are also holons. If we contemplate the state of the planet and the world of politics, it is easy to see that many people recognise themselves as holons within the larger group of their own nation-state, but have failed to appreciate that, beyond that, each nation-state and therefore each human being is a holon within the planetary family. This is also a holon, part of the superorganism of the Earth, called Gaia by the scientist James Lovelock.

    This is the latest in a long series of articles about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For what has preceded, see the top of the Blog Index Page (click here). I am currently summarising the book The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar, and what follows will make most sense if you have read the most recent articles, which deal with her earlier chapters.

    Zohar is attempting in her book to answer the big questions of life from a strictly quantum physics point of view. Having explored the nature of consciousness and the mind-body problem, in chapter 8 Zohar turns her attention to quantum identity. She feels very certain that she does exist as a person, but wonders whether this might be what the Buddhists call the illusion of self. She asks some familiar questions on that theme, and then this really important one, “If persons are real, what holds them together?” It’s worth quoting her understanding of the problem in full:

    “Each of us is an organism made up from billions of cells, with each cell in some sense possessing a life of its own. Within our brains alone some ten thousand million neurones contribute to the rich tapestry of our mental life. Another ten thousand million or so cells keep our hearts beating, the same number again give us a liver, and so on. How, given all this complexity, are we, in sum total, one thing? Or indeed, as some philosophers wonder, is it even true that we are?” “If our brains consist of all those myriad neurones, from whence emerges ‘a person’ and how really solid or basic is he?” (A simple answer to her question, how we are one thing given all this complexity, is that we are the equivalent of what in biology is called a superorganism.)

    She says that “the apparent impossibility of answering that question on the basis of known science” has strengthened the dualist case. However, “fairly recent research done on the effects of split-brain surgery raises what appear to be insurmountable objections to any theory which tries to separate the person from his brain”. It suggests that a self “can be divided into two selves and then patched together again under the right circumstances. The person is now one person, then two people and then again only one”. She concludes: “Certain split-brain phenomena are proof that the self is not an eternal, indivisible whole as Descartes argued, no more than particles are the tiny, solid and indivisible billiard balls that Newton’s physics supposed. Both selves and particles… flow into and out of existence, now standing alone, now wedding themselves to other selves or particles, now disappearing altogether — teasing us with their dancing forms and shadows”.

    We are therefore back to the familiar dilemma of the Hard Problem; consciousness appears to be inextricably linked to the brain, yet science cannot account for this. Having discussed some of this research, she concludes that it is easy to think that, “not only does the self reduce entirely to the mechanics of the brain, but that, stronger still, the existence and continuity of various brain states is all that is meant by the self in the first place”, therefore that the sense of personal identity is a chimera.

    One possibility is therefore that our sense of personal identity is an illusion, as Buddhism claims. In that context she mentions the philosopher Derek Parfit who subscribes to the Buddhist viewpoint, which he thinks “has liberated him from the prison of self”, and compares him to Capra and Zukav and their leanings towards Eastern religions, both of whom were discussed in previous articles.

    At this point, her thinking takes an interesting turn, going in a direction different from some of those who preceded her. She says: “I want to argue that looking too hard for parallels between modern physics and Eastern mysticism distorts our perception of matter, just as being drawn too much towards a Buddhist view of personal identity distorts our perception of the self”. She quotes Arthur Lovejoy, author of The Great Chain of Being, who thinks that such attitudes reflect “an emotional rebellion against the externality of things and… a craving to escape the burden of self-consciousness”. She agrees, saying that “they leave out a whole side of both reality and human existence”; she believes that both particles and selves do indeed exist. (These Eastern religions might say that she is trying to hang on to the reality of what they call illusions.) This is a significant alternative to the ideas of Fritjof Capra.

    Since she has this firm belief in her sense of identity, she therefore has to find a credible scientific explanation for how this self emerges. Having discussed the idea of sub-selves – otherwise known as sub-personalities – saying that “no psychotherapist would argue that because the self is a house with many mansions it is in any sense less of a thing in itself”, she goes on to say: “It’s just that the self must be defined in some new terms that can take into account its composite nature without denying its substance. What can be the physics of this?”

    Her explanation is quite complex and takes several pages, so I’m going to try to extract the essential idea. She compares the fact that “elementary particle systems are wholes within wholes, or ‘individuals’ within ‘individuals’ ”, to the relationship between aspects of the self (the sub-personalities) and the individual (the sense of ‘I’), thus the wave/particle duality, saying that “the dynamics of the two are much the same”. The quantum self “now behaves like a new entity in its own right, with its own wavy aspect and its own capacity for further relationship on its own terms… A whole created through quantum relationship is a new thing in itself, greater than the sum of its parts”. Regarding subpersonalities, “we are at times more fragmented… and at times more ‘together’, some more integrated self that binds together the sub-selves more completely”.

    My interpretation of what she is saying is that, just as the human body is indisputably an integrated whole, despite being composed of billions of independent cells, as I quoted her above, there is no reason not to believe that the same process of coming together might be true of the psyche. She says that we have good reason to believe this on the basis of the wave/particle duality at the heart of quantum physics. She concludes therefore that:

• “ ‘I’ am an ever-present witness to the dialogues between my selves… This is the most basic definition of the self at any given moment — the most highly integrated unity of all my many sub-unities”
• in contrast to Buddhism, “because of the quantum mechanical nature of consciousness and the relational holism of quantum unities, this shifting, composite ‘I’ is not nothing, it is not an illusion”.

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    This is obviously a very complex topic. Zohar is attempting to explain in the language of physics (thus matter) certain aspects of the psyche, which some might say is an impossible task. My observation along those lines is that she is attempting to explain the self (consciousness) from the bottom up, assuming that it emerges as a complex unity from simpler quantum processes. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to her that the fragmentation and separation of the psyche she describes might be the consequence of a pure consciousness (the soul?) acquiring these aspects during its descent into the body. Her book is, however, a fascinating attempt by one open-minded scientist to come to terms with these big questions of life. More to follow in subsequent articles.

    This is the latest in a long series of articles about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For what has preceded, see the top of the Blog Index Page. I am currently summarising the book The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar, and what follows will make most sense if you have read the preceding articles, which deal with her earlier chapters.

    Having outlined the basic issues, and made some preliminary steps towards understanding the mystery of consciousness, in chapter 7 Zohar addresses the question of how the mind and body relate, (thus the Hard Problem of Consciousness — although she was writing before that term was coined). As I said in the previous article, even though this series is about the relationship between quantum physics and a spiritual worldview, this section is merely about Zohar’s book, which is one physicist’s attempt to understand this mystery. She is attempting to understand consciousness from a scientific point of view. My purpose is to examine how successful this quest of hers is.

    She begins by quoting Descartes, including, “I am truly distinct from my body, and can exist without it”, an extremely dualist viewpoint (with which anyone who has had an out-of-body experience might be inclined to agree.) She then describes the conflict inside her. Her heart and intuition tell her that she is indeed different from her body, thus that she is “a good Cartesian at heart”, despite her “ rational convictions to the contrary”, which are presumably derived from what modern ‘science’ has told her. She thinks that her intuition is the result of “some deep patterns of belief laid down in my own childhood and strengthened by the whole tenor of my education”, implying that she must have been indoctrinated into an antiquated worldview.

    She nevertheless says that “most of us feel that our minds (or souls) and our bodies are somehow essentially different… We experience ourselves as a self which has, or a self within a body”. She repeats that “this deep cultural conditioning holds us in its grip”, apparently suggesting that we should really know better by now, but then points out that the physics of the last 300 years supports it: “Given our everyday essentially Newtonian notion of what matter is, and hence what bodies must be, there is no clear way to see how they could be anything like minds”. She also notes that philosophers since Descartes “have tried in vain to argue any viable alternative”.

    Matter has no purposes, intentions, emotions, or desires. There is no reason why atoms should give birth to life. Historically therefore, “the physical was set against the mental as a world apart, and in turn the mental came to be seen in terms that were not physical”. These “two radically different realms of existence… for the most part remain with us today”.

    She concludes therefore that “there is little wonder that dualism holds us all within its spell”, yet “the obvious alternatives seem equally unpalatable, or just plain impossible”. She rejects materialism for the usual and obvious reason that it cannot account for consciousness. She makes the important point, however, that the motivation for materialism “springs from a wish both to simplify our account of Nature and to rid mankind of what many have seen to be religious superstition and fear”. (Neither of these, it seems to me, are sound scientific reasons for advocating materialism, but closer to philosophical prejudice. What evidence is there that Nature is simple? Quantum physics suggests the opposite. Wanting nature to be simple merely suggests that one’s mind may not be up to the task of understanding it. And religion cannot be got rid of simply because one does not like it.)

    She is also uncomfortable with idealism. She says that this has taken many forms, including the most extreme version which “asserts the material world is just a figment of the imagination”, and a more cautious variety which “simply argues that all the perceived qualities of the material world depend upon mind, whereas matter itself is real enough in some sense”. She says that this “doesn’t sit well with our common-sense intuitions about the world of experience, and it is ill-suited to the pursuit of objective science”. (Neither, of these, it seems to me, are sound reasons for rejecting idealism. She seems here to be rejecting the connection with idealist Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism. Yet our ‘common-sense’ intuitions about the world may be profoundly wrong, what these religions call maya. Perhaps a true understanding of reality is counterintuitive, and perhaps completely objective science is an unrealistic aspiration, however desirable that might be.)

    Because she is uncomfortable with these two alternatives, she contemplates panpsychism, as she did in an earlier chapter: “Perhaps the mental is really a basic property of the material and vice versa. Perhaps the basic, underlying ‘stuff’ of the universe is just one ‘thing’ which possesses two aspects”.

    She has therefore come to the same conclusion as the philosopher Philip Goff in his much more recent book Galileo’s Error; namely that panpsychism seems the only plausible option if one has rejected materialism, dualism, and idealism. She says she is attracted to panpsychism because, unlike materialism or idealism, it attempts to find one substance which unifies the mental and the material, without denying the reality of either. (This is not especially convincing. The second sentence could just as easily be interpreted as an idealist position, the underlying ‘stuff’ being pure consciousness, and she has already noted a “more cautious” form of idealism which accepts that “matter itself is real enough in some sense”.)

    She is going to advocate a limited panpsychism, but her version will be different from the more traditional one, which she says doesn’t get to the heart of the problem: “It only pushes it back to a more primary level of reality, where ultimately, if electrons are conscious, we then have to say that they have a mind/body problem”. (This is a valid objection, one which I believe applies to Philip Goff’s book, once one appreciates that panpsychism is a logical deduction, merely moving the goalposts, rather than something based on scientific evidence.)

    Zohar now begins to present her own vision. She says: “Something is deeply wrong with all the traditional approaches to the mind/body problem because ultimately they all rest on outmoded notions of matter and/or they fail to see how any more updated notions — those following from quantum physics — could do much to explain how anything going on in our very physical (objective) brains might give rise to all the mental characteristics associated with the (subjective) mind”. She therefore believes that the discoveries of quantum physics will enable us to understand consciousness, thus that a scientific explanation is possible.

    She reminds us that matter as we perceive it is actually not very material. Instead we have “patterns of active relationship, electrons and photons, mesons and nucleons that tease us with their elusive double lives as they are now position, now momentum, now particles, now waves, now mass, now energy — and all in response to each other and to the environment”. Existence and relationship “are the two sides of the quantum coin, and they are essentially what we mean by the wave/particle duality”, which is “a good metaphor for a deeply integrated mind/body relationship. But given the idea that consciousness itself arises out of a coherent ordering of virtual photon relationships in the brain’s quantum system, it becomes much more than a metaphor. The wave/particle duality of quantum ‘stuff’ becomes the most primary mind/body relationship in the world and the core of all that, at higher levels, we recognize as the mental and physical aspects of life” (her italics).

    She then elaborates on this idea, explaining that the particle aspect gives the appearance of matter, while “it is because of the wave aspect and what it allows to happen that the quantum systems display a kind of intimate, definitive relationship among their constituent members that doesn’t exist in classical systems”. The latter she calls ‘relational holism’. She believes that this kind of quantum relationship, “which creates something new by drawing together things that were initially separate and individual… is both the origin and the meaning of the mental side of life” (her italics). She is suggesting that “consciousness is at the most primary level of existence a pattern of active relationship, the wave side of the wave/particle duality”, and therefore concludes: “The mind/body (mind/brain) duality in man is a reflection of the wave/particle duality which underlies all that is. In this way, human being is a tiny microcosm of cosmic being. We are, in our essential being, made of the same stuff and held together by the same dynamics as those which account for everything else in the universe. And equally… the universe is made of the same stuff and held together by the same dynamics as those which account for us”.

    She notes that her understanding indicates that mind is “not some mere offshoot of brain function”, thereby challenging materialism. More importantly for the originality of her interpretation, consciousness is not a ‘property’ of matter, as other panpsychists argue; it cannot be traced back to matter because it is “in its essence, relation-al”, (by which she means derived from the wave, not the particle).

    How impressive and convincing is her analysis? From a spiritual perspective, we see some interesting terms and ideas beginning to appear. Relational holism sounds something like undivided wholeness. The whole universe, presumably both mind and matter, is made of the same ‘stuff’, as any idealist would agree. “Human being is a tiny microcosm of cosmic being”, which sounds like Hinduism. There are, however, some weak links in how she arrives at these conclusions:

• Is comparing the wave/particle duality to mind and matter, despite her claim, really anything more than a metaphor or analogy? Is there any science behind it? I’m not sure.
• She says that the wave/particle duality is “primary”, “irreducible to any other thing or process”, it is the “origin of the mental and the physical”, but has not explained how this wave/particle duality comes into being, from where it arises.
• In similar vein, we may agree that there is a wave/particle duality, but this is two different aspects of what exactly? She herself has said that “perhaps the basic, underlying ‘stuff’ of the universe is just one ‘thing’ which possesses two aspects”. In which case the wave/particle duality is presumably not primary and irreducible.
• The universe may be “held together by the same dynamics as those which account for us”. But what exactly is doing the holding?

    Her search continues in the next chapter, which is entitled ‘The Person That I Am: Quantum Identity’. That will be the focus of the next article in the series.

    This is the latest in a long series of articles about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For what has preceded, see the top of the Blog Index Page.  I am currently summarising the book The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar, and what follows will make most sense if you have read the three preceding articles, which deal with the earlier chapters.

    Having outlined the basic issues, Zohar now begins her search for an understanding of the mystery of consciousness. It is important to note that, even though this series is about the relationship between quantum physics and a spiritual worldview, this section is about Zohar’s book, which has as its theme one physicist’s attempt to understand this mystery. She is aware of the parallels with Eastern Mysticism, as outlined for example by Fritjof Capra, but does not think that they are necessary in this investigation. She is attempting to understand consciousness from a scientific/physics point of view. It will, however, be interesting to see where this journey takes her later.

    Spiritually minded people will therefore have reservations about what she says in what follows here, that she is looking at things from the bottom-up. For example, Ken Wilber believes that physics is purely the study of matter, and that consciousness belongs to higher realms of spirit and soul. It could be argued therefore that a physics of consciousness is impossible in principle, so we should note that Zohar is merely attempting to understand consciousness as it manifests itself within a human being, and its relationship to the brain.

    In chapter 5 she discusses some of the alternatives offered: dualism, materialism, and functionalism — the tendency to compare the brain to a computer. She finds all these inadequate. She even has reservations about the holographic model, advocated by David Bohm, which she believes has attractive qualities, but cannot account for the ‘I’ of consciousness, the unity of conscious perception. She says that her book “can be seen as part of that general holistic movement”, although holism “must be grounded in the actual physics of consciousness, in a physics which can underpin the unity of consciousness” and be related “both to brain structure and to the common features of our everyday awareness”. She believes that to achieve this we must turn to quantum mechanics.

    She begins chapter 6 by quoting Bohm who believes that there is a “close analogy between quantum processes and our inner experiences and thought processes”. Since the problem with computer and holographic models is their failure to explain the unity of consciousness, she finds it interesting that “now that special sorts of specifically quantum mechanical unity are recognized, both physicists and philosophers have begun to wonder whether they might not have some meaningful relevance to the unity of consciousness”.

    Her assumption is “that there is a vital link between thought processes and quantum processes, between ourselves and electrons”, and that “the many analogies between the two are both tantalizing and suggestive”. Even on the strength of analogies alone, it is possible to make a powerful case. We do, however, remain at the level of analogies, and require harder scientific proof: “If it really were possible… to go beyond analogy, to get beyond saying that thought processes are like quantum processes and go further on to explain consciousness in terms of quantum mechanical features in the actual structure and functioning of the brain, we would have taken a truly revolutionary step… We would have gone a long way towards understanding our relation to Nature and the material world”.

    She says that at the time Bohm first made these analogies, it would have been impossible to go much further, since neurobiology and quantum physics were not sufficiently developed. Since then, however, we have had the proof of non-locality, and “the even stronger unifying effects found in some large, ordered structures like lasers and superconductors”. With all this “a quantum mechanical approach becomes attractive”.

    Such thinking appeals even to physicists as prestigious as Roger Penrose, whom she quotes in relation to non-locality: “It seems to me to be a definite possibility that such things could be playing a role in conscious thought modes. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to suggest that quantum correlations could be playing an operative role over large regions of the brain. Might there be any relation between a ‘state of awareness’ and a highly coherent quantum state in the brain? Is the ‘oneness’ or ‘globality that seems to be a feature of consciousness connected with it? It is somewhat tempting to believe so”.

    She goes on to describe some scientific experiments which lean towards such a conclusion:

• “Nerve cells in the human brain are sufficiently sensitive to register the absorption of a single photon (mirroring the passage of an individual electron from one energy state within the atom to another) — and thus sensitive enough to be influenced by the whole panoply of odd quantum-level behaviour, including indeterminism and non-local effects”.
• “Further experiments proved that quantum indeterminacy is built into the functioning of the brain itself, through random variations in the chemical concentrations surrounding nerve junctions (neurone synapses)… The levels at which neurones fire vary according to definite statistical law, just like any other quantum process. Of the brain’s 10¹⁰ neurones, some 10⁷ are believed sensitive enough to register quantum-level phenomena at any one time”.

    She then mentions the work of Ninian Marshall and Yuri Orlov who argue in similar vein that free thought processes, free will or intention (Marshall) and doubt, resolution or creative thinking (Orlov) are impossible in a brain obeying the laws of classical determinist physics, so that “quantum indeterminism and superimposed probability states must be playing a role in the brain’s openness to all the potentialities latent in consciousness” (Orlov). (Various scientists, philosophers, and writers on Medium do of course argue, somewhat counterintuitively and obviously unaware of these quantum developments, that free will is an illusion.)

    This still leaves much unexplained, however; “What sort of quantum process might it be, for example, and what properties of the brain could possibly sustain it?” She says that, for consciousness to be unified, as it appears to be, its background state must be what physicists call a ‘steady state’, “uniform in space and persistent in time”. In plain language, you may be driving a car, carrying on a conversation, while simultaneously being aware of the car radio in the background, yet no one assumes that these are three separate people. “This considerably limits the choice of underlying physical explanations, as can be gathered from the failure of all attempts to explain consciousness in classical terms”. She points out that “this kind of settled uniformity is rare amongst dynamic processes in Nature, but it does occur in materials which exist in ‘condensed phases’ ”.

    It is therefore worth investigating this phenomenon. A phase or state is a condition of some material system. Thus water has three phases or states — gaseous, liquid, and solid. Other examples she gives are: “ordinary magnets, superfluids, superconductors, laser light, electric currents in metals and sound waves in crystals”. “The property that all these things have in common is some degree of coherence, such that the many atoms or molecules which make up the substance suddenly (or gradually) behave as one”. This is what we are to understand by a condensed phase.

    She then wonders how the neurones of the brain could possibly get into such a state; what kind of neurobiological mechanism would be required to line up neurones in this way? It has been suggested that consciousness might “depend on the brain somehow taking on the characteristics of a superfluid or a superconductor”. These, however, exist only at very low temperatures, whereas brains function at normal body temperature. “There would have to be some such mechanism that functions at normal body temperature”.

    She says that there is indeed one such system, Herbert Fröhlich’s ‘pumped’ system, which “seems to satisfy all the necessary criteria”. This is “simply a system of vibrating electrically charged molecules… Fröhlich demonstrated that beyond a certain threshold, any additional energy pumped into the system causes the molecules of that kind to vibrate in unison. They do so increasingly until they pull themselves into the most ordered form of condensed phase possible — a Bose-Einstein condensate”. (This is named after Albert Einstein who predicted its existence following the work of Satyendra Nath Bose.) The parts not only behave as a whole, but they become whole. For consciousness to draw together the various elements into a unity, some such process would be crucial.

    Zohar says that at any given moment there are at least one hundred different pieces of information, and “to bring all this together… necessitates that the separate brain states attending to each element become identical. All their properties and all their information must entirely overlap. This kind of unity is only found in Bose-Einstein condensates. And it is only in such condensates, where individuality breaks down, that we can find distinctively quantum mechanical effects in large-scale systems”. She says that “when cell membranes vibrate sufficiently to pull themselves into a Bose-Einstein condensate, they are creating the most coherent form of order possible in Nature, the order of unbroken wholeness”. This is a term which, of course, occurs very frequently in the literature of quantum physics.

    She mentions the work of some other scientists, and then concludes: “Evidence for coherent states (Bose-Einstein condensates) in biological tissue is now abundant, and the interpretation of its meaning lies at the cutting edge of exciting breakthroughs in our understanding of what distinguishes life from non-life”, and that the same process among neurone constituents is what constitutes the physical basis of consciousness.

    If that is true, we then have to look for the features of a Fröhlich-style system in the brain. Her whole explanation is too complicated to go into here, but she believes that at a crucial point “the movements of the synchronized molecules within neurone cell walls would take on quantum mechanical properties — uniformity, frictionlessness, unbroken wholeness. In this manner they would generate a unified field of the sort required to produce the ground state of consciousness. The phase shift, then, is the moment when ‘an experience’ is born”.

    Such thinking “lends support to the view that some rudimentary consciousness may well be the property of all living systems”, although “a snail would have a much more limited consciousness than we do”. “Indeed, no reason in principle to deny that any structure, biological or otherwise, which contained a Bose-Einstein condensate mightn’t possess the capacity for consciousness”. As in her chapter 4, she is again contemplating panpsychism.

    Her next section is somewhat technical, so I’m going to jump ahead to the conclusions she reaches. She arrives at a quantum mechanical model of consciousness “which is neither entirely like a computer nor entirely like a quantum system… (It is) a complex, multi-layered dialogue between the quantum aspect (the ground state) and a whole symphony of interactions that cause patterns to develop in the ground state”. Such a model is “already pregnant with far-reaching philosophical implications”.

• “The unbroken wholeness which is a prerequisite for any such model, and hence the loss of individuality of its constituent parts, bears on the whole question of personal identity and group relations”.
• “Any quantum mechanical model is necessarily a physical model, and thus assumes that the phenomena of consciousness (awareness, perception, thought, memory, etc.), along with those of physics, chemistry and biology, belong to the order of Nature and can be experimentally investigated. This way of looking at consciousness also implies that consciousness and matter are so integrally bound up with each other that either consciousness is a property of matter (as in panpsychism) or else… that consciousness and matter arise together from the same common source — in our terms, from the world of quantum phenomena”.

    She says that “either view takes consciousness out of the realm of the supernatural and makes it a proper matter for scientific enquiry”, and that the assumptions of dualism are profoundly challenged. The next task is “to reassess the whole question of how the mind and the body relate”. That is the subject of her next chapter, and the next article.

    This is the latest in a long series of articles about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For what has preceded, see the top of the Blog Index Page. I am currently summarising the book The Quantum Self by Danah Zohar, and what follows will only make sense if you have read at least the two preceding articles.

    The title of her fourth chapter is ‘Are Electrons Conscious?’. Here she picks up again the theme she left at the end of the preceding chapter: “Whereas what the observer sees can be described in the equations of quantum mechanics, the observer himself cannot. We don’t have any equations for observers, human or otherwise. They are outside the quantum system”. Quantum physics is therefore incomplete and needs to take into account the consciousness of human observers. She believes that “the behaviour of fundamental reality as expressed in the new physics almost demands that we reassess the whole question of consciousness… perhaps even to the most elementary constituents of matter”. It becomes impossible to ignore the possibility that, as suggested by physicist David Bohm and philosopher Albert North Whitehead, “even elementary subatomic particles might possess rudimentary conscious properties”. It is here that Zohar first introduces the term panpsychism, which is the philosophical term for this belief.

    She gives a brief history of the idea; we discover that, even before the discoveries of quantum physics, panpsychism in various forms had its advocates. From ancient Greece she mentions Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato, the latter in connection with the Great Chain of Being, which is the viewpoint of physicist David Bohm, and advocate of the Perennial Philosophy Ken Wilber, as discussed in an earlier article in this series. From more recent times she mentions Spinoza, Leibnitz, William James, and Teilhard de Chardin.

    One especially interesting quote comes from the 18th century German philosopher Hermann Lotze: “If we are panpsychists, we no longer look on one part of the cosmos as but a blind and lifeless instrument for the ends of another, but, on the contrary, find beneath the unruffled surface of matter, behind the rigid and regular repetitions of its working, the warmth of a hidden mental activity”. Such a viewpoint seems remarkably prescient; Lotze was clearly someone well ahead of his time. His contemporary Gustav Fechner “saw the earth as a living creature, ‘a unitary whole in form and substance, in purpose and effect… and self-sufficient in its individuality’ ”. He therefore was a predecessor of James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis.

    Zohar is cautious, and advocates merely a limited form of panpsychism, since she believes that “there is nothing whatsoever about modern physics to suggest that mountains have souls or that dust particles possess an inner life”. However, we are confronted by the obvious fact that “there is only one basic kind of matter. It follows then that all things — animate and inanimate — are made of it, that some of this matter has the undoubted capacity for conscious life, and that at the quantum level at least there is a creative dialogue between matter and consciousness such that the observer’s conscious mind actually influences the material development of that which he observes”.

    Furthermore, “the inanimate matter that we conscious beings are made of keeps changing — in the case of human beings, it changes totally every seven years…. Our living bodies are in constant, dynamic interchange with other bodies and with the inanimate world around us. So how can the very same atoms be part of a conscious structure at one point in their history and of an inanimate object at another?” She suggests therefore that we are forced to conclude, quoting philosopher Thomas Nagel, that: “unless we are prepared to accept… that the appearance of mental properties in complex systems has no causal explanation at all, we must take the current epistemological emergence of the mental as a reason to believe that the constituents have properties of which we are not aware, and which do necessitate these results”. In other words, “we must accept that unless consciousness is something which just suddenly emerges, just gets added on with no apparent cause, then it was there in some form all along as a basic property of the constituents of all matter. As Karl Popper says, ‘Dead matter seems to have more potentialities than merely to produce dead matter’ ”.

    She continues: “(Nagel) argues that both these proto-mental properties and the elementary matter with which they are associated might derive from a common source, from a more fundamental level of reality that itself has a two-sided potential to become both the mental and the material. ‘Such reducibility to a common base would have the advantage of explaining how there could be necessary causal connections in either direction, between mental and physical phenomena’ ”. She says that such an idea is “compatible with what is known about quantum reality and the wave/particle duality”, and the viewpoint is shared by David Bohm, whom she quotes: “The mental and the material are two sides of one overall process that are separated only in thought and not in actuality. Rather, there is one energy that is the basis of all reality”.

    Therefore, “for Bohm, as for Whitehead and de Chardin before him, this process view of reality leads him to consider the presence of proto-conscious properties at the level of particle physics… He compares the movements of electrons in the laboratory to those of ballet dancers responding to a musical score, the score itself constituting ‘a common “pool” of information’ that guides each of the dancers as he takes his steps”.

    Zohar would seem to be getting close here to the idea of the Great Chain of Being, thus Ken Wilber and the Perennial Philosophy. However, at this point she is cautious about incorporating such views: “To say that a limited panpsychist view is compatible with quantum physics is not to say that it is necessitated by it. There is nothing in quantum theory as it has been developed so far that has anything whatever to say about the origins of consciousness in quantum reality nor about there being possible proto-conscious properties associated with elementary subatomic particles”. However, “such possibilities are suggested by the uncanny behaviour of photons and electrons in the laboratory and the participatory nature of the observer/ observed relationship, but quantum theory per se, has yet to take them on board — and indeed it has no way to do so until we achieve a better understanding of the nature of consciousness itself”.

    The mystery continues! We will have to wait to see where this journey into the nature of consciousness will take her.

    This is the latest in a series about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For what has preceded, see the top of the Blog Index page. In the preceding article I briefly introduced the ideas of Danah Zohar and her book The Quantum Self, in which she offers her ideas on what quantum physics means for our understanding of ourselves, society, and how we should live our lives. Here I’ll begin to explore her ideas in more depth. Perhaps more than any other book I’m aware of, this one encapsulates the whole theme of my series, how the discoveries of the quantum physics revolution can lead to a spiritual worldview. For that reason I’ll devote several articles to it. (I’m assuming that readers will have some familiarity with the basic ideas of quantum physics.)

    In her early chapters, Zohar outlines the challenges that quantum physics poses for our everyday understanding of how the world works. She begins with the familiar idea that quantum mechanics is the most successful theory ever, but that physicists are unable to explain the philosophical implications of the results: “no one new picture of reality has emerged from all the equations generated, never mind a new world-view in which the discoveries of quantum physicists reach down to quicken the imaginations of ordinary people”.

    These discoveries have even led some physicists and philosophers to deny that there is any reality at all. Zohar states emphatically, however, that “there is a real world in which ‘things’ exist”, and therefore that quantum mechanics “must be brought more into dialogue with such facts in the everyday world”. Like many others, she believes that the key lies in an understanding of the nature of consciousness: “We conscious human beings are the natural bridge between the everyday world and the world of quantum physics, and that a closer look at the nature and role of consciousness in the scheme of things will lead both to a deeper philosophical understanding of the everyday and to a more complete picture of quantum theory”.

    As we all know, the existence of consciousness has always been a problem for both science and philosophy. Zohar considers “very seriously the possibility that consciousness, like matter, emerges from the world of quantum events, that the two, though wholly different from each other, have a common ‘mother’ in quantum reality. If so, our thought patterns, and beyond that our relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world at large might in some ways be explained by, and in other ways mirror, the same laws and behaviour patterns that govern the world of electrons and photons”. Such ideas are very similar to those of David Bohm, who was discussed in an earlier article.

    Zohar continues: “If our intellect does indeed draw its laws from Nature, then we have the further consequence that our perception of these laws must to some degree mirror the reality of Nature herself. Thus in knowing ourselves, we can come to know nature”. She then concludes her first chapter by saying that both our science and psychology can be based on the discoveries of quantum physics, and that “through a wedding of physics and psychology we can live in a reconciled universe, a universe in which we and our culture are fully, and meaningfully part of the scheme of things”. This was the general worldview before the advent of the so-called Enlightenment, to which we perhaps need to return.

    In chapter 2, Zohar outlines the problems we encounter when faced with accepting quantum theory:

• that we can’t easily imagine a world which mocks the reality of space, time, matter and causality, so that, according to Bohr and Heisenberg, “there is no clear, fixed, underlying ‘something’ to our daily existence that can ever be known”. This is a view that she broadly supports, that “the foundation of reality itself is an unfixed, indeterminate maze of probabilities”.    
• that electrons jump, apparently without cause
• that there is apparent time reversibility at the quantum level
• that things happen simultaneously in every direction at once
• and that, “if reality at the everyday level… does indeed consist of actual things… while at the quantum level there exist no actual ‘things’, but rather myriad possibilities of countless actualities, what becomes of all that potential? … What role, if any, is played by all the lost possibilities in achieving this final state of affairs?”. This problem has led some physicists to speculate about the possibility of parallel universes.

    She further explains how some of the things we automatically assume to be true in our everyday lives, are not so from the quantum viewpoint. She begins with movement: “At the quantum level of reality, the whole picture of continuous movement through space and time breaks down”; quantum physics is a physics of lumps and jumps. She then discusses relationship: “Things and events once conceived of as separate, parted in both space and time, are seen by the quantum theorist as so integrally linked that their bond mocks the reality of both space and time. They behave, instead, as multiple aspects of some larger whole, their individual existences deriving both their definition and their meaning from that whole”. 

    This leads on to a discussion of the phenomenon of non-locality, whereby “two events can be related across time in a way that ensures they will always act ‘in tune’, and any attempt to set up a cause-and-effect relationship between them is useless”, thus “two events happening at different times influence each other in such a way that they appear to be happening at the same time”. This has been proved many times over, yet defies classical physics and common sense, and “has obvious mystical overtones”. We can see here signs that her study of physics is leading her to adopt what we would call a spiritual worldview.

    In chapter 3, Zohar discusses one of the most difficult questions associated with quantum theory: “If reality at its most fundamental level is just an indeterminate porridge of many possibilities… How do we get the world? At what point is reality real-ized?” She accepts the usual conclusion that observation collapses the quantum wave function, that reality happens when we look at it. However, her reasons for doing so are radically different from the standard viewpoint, as expressed for example by John Archibald Wheeler and Eugene Wigner. Their interpretation is dualistic, suggesting that mind and matter are separate entities. It also leads to difficult questions like this one: “what conscious being was here at the beginning of things to collapse the first wave function?”, that is to say, before the advent of human (or animal?) consciousness. On the contrary, she wants “to see ourselves — our souls, if you like — as full partners in the processes of nature, both in matter and of matter”. She believes therefore that there is something either wrong or incomplete about quantum theory: “since it can’t account for whatever it is about observation that collapses the wave function, it simply can’t apply to the whole of physical reality”. We need a better physics for the consciousness of observers.

    In the following chapters she begins to explore these questions, and develop her own understanding. This will be the subject of future articles.

    This is the latest in a series about the relationship between the quantum physics revolution and a spiritual worldview. For a general overview, see the Blog Index page.

    In the preceding article I discussed the ideas of David Bohm, who is the most spiritual of quantum physicists in my estimation. He provided a relevant cosmology, equivalent to that of the Perennial Philosophy. Now I’ll turn to the vision of Danah Zohar who, in The Quantum Self¹, offers her ideas on what quantum physics means for society, and how we should live our lives. So here it starts to get really interesting and, for length considerations, I’ll devote more than one article to her.

    In her foreword she relates how she discovered quantum theory at the age of sixteen, and how this “seemed to hold out to me a kind of poetic vision” in answer to life’s big questions. The ideas “all worked like a kind of potion to excite my imagination, and gave me an admittedly somewhat mystical sense that the universe was ‘alive’… I had found the rudiments of a faith that ‘it all meant something’ ”.

    As she says, the complex mathematical equations and “apparently unfathomable experimental results” seem to have no relationship to our everyday world, our perceptions and emotions, “never mind to the personal and social problems that occupy so much of our lives”. If that is what we think, then Zohar sets out to persuade us otherwise, offering “well-grounded speculation about the actual physics of human psychology and its moral and spiritual implications”, how to see ourselves as “quantum persons”.

    In her first chapter, she says that her book is not intended to be yet another account of quantum physics, rather “a book about how the insights of modern physics can illuminate our understanding of everyday life, can help us better to understand our relationship to ourselves, to others and to the world at large”. Her central theme is about getting beyond “the sense of alienation which follows from a feeling that we conscious human beings are somehow strangers in the universe, merely an accidental by-product of blind evolutionary forces with no particular role to play in the scheme of things and no meaningful relationship to the inexorable forces that drive on the larger world of brute, insensate matter”. She will be “proposing a new, quantum mechanical theory of consciousness, which promises to bring us back into partnership with the universe”, classical physics having “transmuted the living cosmos of Greek and Medieval times, a cosmos filled with purpose and intelligence… into a dead, clockwork machine”. This sounds like music to my ears!

    Zohar says that “throughout history we have drawn our conception of ourselves and our place in the universe from the current physical theory of the day”. Classical physics is part of the movement we now call the Enlightenment, and the bleak vision it has provided has variously spawned Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, Existentialism, and Modernism in general. The “cost in terms of both personal and cultural uprootedness has been high”. She asks: “If consciousness has no part to play in the universe, as Newtonian physics implies, what relationship can we have to Nature and to matter? We are aliens in an alien world, set apart from, and in opposition to, our material environment. Thus we set out to conquer Nature, to overwhelm her and use her for our own ends, never minding the consequences”.

    Einstein’s theory of relativity is the beginning of post-Newtonian physics, but “is not likely to lead to a new world-view… It plays itself out on a cosmological scale and has virtually no application in our everyday, earth-bound world”. Quantum physics, however, is different; it “describes the inner workings of everything we see and, at least physically, are”. She says that in her book she will be “drawing on a great many ways in which quantum theory can provide us with a radically new understanding of various aspects of our experience”, and her overall theme is that “a whole new metaphor for the age, or a new world-view, follows naturally from what quantum physics is telling us about the physical and the human world… Through a new physics of consciousness, it can be applied to the philosophy of the person and the psychology of human relationships”.

    In the following articles we’ll see what she has to say.

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Footnote:

1. Flamingo, 1991