… there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash … it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say “force moves,” “force causes,” and the like – all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the “subject” (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, as is the Kantian “thing-in-itself”) … Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1969: 45) When Nietzsche speaks of “the misleading influence of language” in The Genealogy of Morals , he is opposing both positivist materialism and idealist subjectivism of the late nineteenth century, the “double deed” – or, in Bruno Latour's terms, “double task of domination and emancipation” (1993: 10) – of Enlightenment understanding examined in part I. He does so through the reconception of time, which Russell describes in relation to post-Newtonian physics, in relation to the eternal recurrence of the same. Nietzsche's method of transforming the settled self-evidence of received opinion does not simply offer other understandings of “force,” “subject,” “atom,” and even the “same” ( das Gleiche ). Rather, he temporalizes understandsing, meaning, and value by bringing together and confronting alternative and alternating discourses.
… there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed – the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash … it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say “force moves,” “force causes,” and the like – all its coolness, its freedom from emotion notwithstanding, our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the “subject” (the atom, for example, is such a changeling, as is the Kantian “thing-in-itself”) … Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (1969: 45) When Nietzsche speaks of “the misleading influence of language” in The Genealogy of Morals , he is opposing both positivist materialism and idealist subjectivism of the late nineteenth century, the “double deed” – or, in Bruno Latour's terms, “double task of domination and emancipation” (1993: 10) – of Enlightenment understanding examined in part I. He does so through the reconception of time, which Russell describes in relation to post-Newtonian physics, in relation to the eternal recurrence of the same. Nietzsche's method of transforming the settled self-evidence of received opinion does not simply offer other understandings of “force,” “subject,” “atom,” and even the “same” ( das Gleiche ). Rather, he temporalizes understandsing, meaning, and value by bringing together and confronting alternative and alternating discourses.
formalism, which, like propositional dictum, general and unmarked. In this understanding of interpretation, an interpreta tion always an example of more general preexisting truths, an ex emplary part for whole of truth. Moreover, this conception pre serves our common-sense idea of referential function of interpre tation and sign systems more generally: world to language refers preexists (objectively, substantially) language that de scribes it just as necessities of formal logic preexist phenom ena that exemplify those logical necessities. Interpretation, then, con sists of finding a language conforms to preexisting forms. The second concept of interpretation, Greimas and Courtes argue, is completely different. Within this perspective (which they identify with Saussurian linguistics, Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian psychoanalysis—all intellectual movements contemporaneous with quantum theory), no longer a matter of attributing a given to a would otherwise lack one; rather, it a paraphrase formulates in another fashion equivalent con This downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:27:46 UTC All use to http://about.jstor.org/terms 300 Ronald Schleifer tent of a element within a given semiotic (Semiot ics and Language, 159). In this second understanding of inter pretation, and are not distinct, but rather every form is, alternatively, a semantic content as well, a signifying form, so that offers an analogical paraphrase of something already within a system of signification. Such para phrases are alternatively and different from their model, and as such raise serious questions about referential truth value that seems to govern linguistic dicta and science. That is, alternativeness of paraphrase offers what Jacques Derrida calls without paradigm ... [in elements are] at once analogous (hence series) and utterly different, offering no guaran tee of (Living On, 130). The opposition between modality and dictum presents just this seriality without paradigm. This espe cially clear in extreme case of negation of modal articulation: negation of a statement taken to be modally inflected—e.g., It not true that atom in left half of box or It not true that multiplication of two negative numbers equals a number—presents metonymic iteration without paradigm, para phrase as Like Heisenberg's between quantum theory and levels of language, this understanding of interpretation presents form of an example, yet, by virtue of fact that what it exempli fies necessarily semanticized, it offers an analogy rather than an example. Even abstract formalism of mathematics, from vantage of classical logic without content, carries meanings that be translated and paraphrased. Although number i operates like any ordinary number, when apprehended modally—when understood as a paraphrase of \J-1—it alternatively seems to be no number at all. All these difficult definitions and dis tinctions, Heisenberg writes, can be avoided if one confines lan guage to description of facts, i.e., experimental results (Physics and Philosophy, 185). In this, Heisenberg suggesting that as soon as one interprets facts—and elsewhere he defines facts of quan tum mechanics positivistically as the black spots on a photographic plate or water droplets in a cloud chamber (Physics and Philoso phy, 179)—one enters realm of dualism of alternation and paraphrase. Positivism—in facts are assumed to be simple entities like water droplets in a cloud chamber—does not admit negation. The droplets are either present or absent, there or not there, and when they are not there nothing signifies. As Jacques La This downloaded from 157.55.39.144 on Wed, 07 Sep 2016 06:27:46 UTC All use to http://about.jstor.org/terms Analogy and Example 301 says, the real, whatever upheaval we it to, always in its place,26 and it so precisely because, unlike symbolic systems (to Lacan opposes real), it does not admit negation. The ab sence of droplets only signifies in logic of semantics in ab sence takes on complex positive meaning within a symbolic system just as unmarked of engagement of vocal chords takes on meaning in phonological system of English in absence of voicing distinguishes phoneme /t/ from /d/. These two traditions of interpretation—one classical, other modernist—themselves present a complex double articulation in same way twentieth-century linguistics and Bohr's description of complementarity do. In this complexity, distinction between these traditions not absolute, but rather alternates as a function of questions asked so that interpretation itself remains undecided. Interpretation and understanding, in Emile Benveniste's terms, are cultural phenomena which have characteristic that they never be taken as simple or defined in order of their own na ture but must always be understood as double from fact that they are to something else, whatever their 'referent' may be.27 In an analogical way, nature of data of physics, at least at subatomic scales, cannot simply be defined in order of their own nature. Instead, in same way that even most straight forward, self-evident literal propositions of a sentence—even pure informative (or non-modalized) utterances Greimas and Courtes describe (Semiotics and Language, 10)—can always also be taken to be a figure for something metonymically of them (such as being behind doing, force behind events, very subject articulating propositions that Nietzsche describes), so of quantum physics also always be taken to be connected to something else outside that data: of (modally in flected) knowledge, quality of spatial and temporal position, semiotic system that governs interpretation.
‘Sprache und Wirklichkeit in der modernen Physik’ is the title of a lecture Heisenberg gave in 1960 at the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste. The polemics that had accompanied the establishment of quantum mechanics were over by then and the so-called problems of its foundations had lost much of their initial interest. Einstein had been dead for some years. Right up to the end he had expressed his profound dissatisfaction with a theory which, in his opinion, had something unreasonable about it. With the volume dedicated to him by the community of physicists and philosophers, the long debate between Bohr and Einstein had come to an end. It had been a disappointing conclusion, marked by the reaffirmation of the respective viewpoints of two scientists who by now found great difficulty even in defining a common code of communication. As though seeking to narrow the gap between them, Heisenberg took the opportunity to underline the existence of a common feature in their contributions to 20th century physics. Their discoveries had in fact made it possible to recognize that ‘even the fundamental and most elementary concepts of science, such as space, time, place, velocity, have become problematic and must be re-examined’. The conceptual and cognitive implications of relativity and of quantum mechanics were obviously different but Heisenberg maintained that both theories asked the same question: ‘Does the language we use when we speak of experiments correspond to the artificial language of mathematics which, as we know, describes real relationships correctly; or has it become separated from it so that we must be content with imprecise linguistic formulations and only return to the artificial language of mathematics when we are forced to express ourselves with precision?’.
There are two languages in which we speak about what it means to be. The first is the language of physics. It speaks of wave functions and probability amplitudes, of coherence and decoherence, of superposition and collapse. It describes the world from outside — as an object to be measured, predicted, controlled. In this language, the brain is an electrochemical system, neurons are signal processors, and consciousness is either an emergent property or an illusion to be explained away. The second is the language of experience. It speaks of pain and joy, of fear and love, of the redness of red and the taste of morning coffee. It describes the world from inside — as something lived, felt, undergone. In this language, the brain is not experienced at all. What is experienced is: being here, in this moment, as this self. For four hundred years, since Descartes split mind from matter, we have assumed these languages describe different things. The physical and the mental. The objective and the subjective. The measurable and the ineffable. This book argues that assumption is wrong. The two languages describe the same thing. Not two things that mysteriously interact. Not two aspects that somehow correlate. The same thing — seen from different angles. This is not a metaphor. It is not an analogy. It is not a poetic gesture toward unity. It is a claim about the structure of reality.
The difficulties of the old quantum theory were largely dispelled by the development of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. First Heisenberg (1925) developed the rather abstract matrix mechanics and soon after Schro¨dinger (1926; see also Eckart, 1926) developed the physically more appealing wave mechanics. Subsequently he showed them to be mathematically equivalent. The physicists were greatly relieved; now they had once again a mathematical formalism that enabled the results of experiments to be calculated. It was possible to move forward. It is certainly a very elegant and indeed beautiful formalism, and does enable the results of many physical measurements to be calculated with great accuracy. It is used daily by atomic and nuclear physicists; there is no other way to make calculations. From the earliest days there has been intense debate about the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it shows no signs of being settled; if anything it is becoming more intense over the years. As Penrose has remarked, no one understands quantum mechanics. Feynman (1967; see also Sykes, 1994) also admitted that ‘nobody understands quantum mechanics’, and Einstein once remarked: ‘I have thought a hundred times as much about the quantum problems as I have about general relativity theory’ (Pais, 1994, p. 57). It should therefore be evident that the most that can be done here is to try to show where the real difficulties lie, and how the failure to recognize that quantum mechanics is an essentially statistical theory has led to a series of confusing quantum paradoxes. It is just these paradoxes that have often been used to support theological speculations. It is useful to ask what ‘understanding quantum mechanics’ actually means. Certainly it means being able to calculate the results of many measurements. The same applies to Newton’s theory of gravitation, which we understand in the sense that we can use it as a basis of calculation, although we do not really understand the gravitational force itself. Very often, especially in modern physics, the mathematical formalism does not give us the sort of intuitive physical feeling for what is going on that we often obtain from classical mechanics. Perhaps we can never achieve more than this for quantum mechanics. In classical mechanics we can assume that a property that is measured objectively exists prior to the interaction of the measuring apparatus with the observed system. Quantum mechanics, however, ‘is incompatible with the proposition that measurement discovers some unknown but pre-existing property’ (Peres, 1997, p. 14). There is an important distinction between mysteries and absurdities. We may be forced to live with mysteries, but there is no reason why we should put up with absurdities such as the wave-particle duality, tunnelling through potential barriers, acausal events and the collapse of the wave function. These are the quantum paradoxes that will be discussed later on. They arise within the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and are solved by other interpretations. These alternative interpretations enable us to make conjectures about what is going on, even though we cannot understand it in detail. This is acceptable and a stimulus to further research. It is certainly difficult enough to understand quantum mechanics, but there is no need to try to visualize logical absurdities in the effort to do so. Quantum mechanics is a mathematical formalism that makes it possible to calculate the results of some experiments. Anything more than this, such as questions about the interpretation of what is measured and whether it tells us what is actually going on in the system being studied, belongs to philosophy. Thus we are concerned here with what is essentially a philosophical debate; if it were just a matter of physics the debate would have been settled long ago. One of the difficulties is that it invokes the results of experiments and uses the language of quantum mechanics. Inevitably this language uses philosophical terms and then it is easy to give the impression that the philosophical propositions are in some way entailed by the physical results. These in turn can influence theological thinking. In order to be quite clear which arguments are justified and which are not, it is essential to separate the three levels of discourse: physical, philosophical and theological. Our task is to relate these together, and this immediately raises the traditional problems of the philosophy of science, including the relation of experiment to theory, and of theory to explanation. We begin by discussing experiments, distinguishing between those that are real and those that are imaginary.
COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF THE HEISENBERG PRINCIPLE I T HE Heisenberg uncertainty principle, like its rival theory of relativity/ has been one of the truly crucial phases in the physics of our day~ It did not, like the discovery of a new element or the Maxwell equations, simply indent the story of classical physics for a new paragraph. It was not only a new chapter but a new book. Detected, in the words of Heisenberg himself, when physics became self-critical, the principle is a statement of what is observable-like its contemporary, the theory of relativity. It was anew advance in method, so revolutionary indeed that physics has virtually lost meaning as content and become synonymous , as logical empiricism amply indicates, with mere rules of procedure. That science is developing into a system of logic, combining the Cartesian stress on clearness with the Kantian regulative idea, actually confirms a contention of traditional philosophy. It reveals that once we deny the colors and sounds, the life, lights, and purpose in our universe-as pure scientific method actually does-we are fated to deny much more than quality. Quality is in the order of form, substance, and being. The moment quality is banished from the real world, by the same 1 That all is not as peaceful and unified in physics as the layman sometimes believes can be seen in the deep cleavage between quantum and relativity mechanics. For the first, the exact specification of space (position) and time (velocity, momentum) has no meaning, while in relativity theory such exact description is the only meaning that can be had. Despite the efforts 'of leading physicists, including Dirac, to unite the two theories, the contradiction is so profound that one of these systems must eventually be abandoned or, more probably, both of them will be superseded. The recent work .of Schroedinger and apparently also of Einstei~ himself are directed to extend the general theory of relativity, making the current theory a special case just as Newtonian physics is a special case of present relativity mechanics. 474 COGNITIVE ASPECTS OF THE HEISENBERG PRINCIPLE 475 decree being itself-because it is an immediate, non-inertial (formal) thing like quality-is driven into its only possible exile, nothingness. It is not surprising then that, after modern physics· has finished its task, the universe should not only be emptied of its lights, its fragrance, its sweetness, and its music but should also be without being and without existence. The uncertainty principle has been much debated in modern thought. Its impact has brought a sad end to the pride of 19th century science since it prevents a complete knowledge of anything at all by shading into the darkness at least one of the two major factors that specify it. Shortly after the principle was born it was hailed by various authors as a proof of free will, of the possibility of religion, and of non-mechanistic concepts in biology. In a more consistent and challenging sense, it has often been taken to refute what the physicist calls causality and what the philosopher calls the order of nature. The fact of the matter is that if the senses alone supply knowledge, truly only one thing at a time can be apprehended. If Hume was right in philosophy, so is Heisenberg. But when sensism yields to an intellectual insight into reality, it is easy to refute the scientist's claim to dethrone the doctrine of nature's order which he could never detect, even in classical physics, by pointerreadings .2 But whatever the fate of the Heisenberg principle in cosmology , it has had a most fruitful career in the field of physics. To Heisenberg himself, the principle was a point of departure for an original development of quantum mechanics based on the " uncertainty " of position and momentum,.: 3 If, for example, measurements are made, under a microscope, of the position of an electron, the photon (light-particle), which impinges on the eye and thus conveys the required knowledge to the physicist, has had to collide with the electron, thus imparting an impact known as the Compton recoil. When • For ·a discussion of the order of nature, cf. J. Marling: The...
A physics-based understanding of how our conscious thoughts can affect our physically described brains is presented. This understanding depends on the shift from the mechanical conception of nature that prevailed in science from the time of Isaac Newton until the dawn of the twentieth century to the psychophysical conception that emerged from the findings of Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, and von Neumann. This shift converted the role of our conscious thoughts from that of passive observers of a causally closed physically described universe to that of active participants in an essentially psychophysical understanding of nature. 1. The Basic Question and Why It Is Important. Science’s conception of the physical world changed radically during the twentieth century. At the end of the nineteenth century most scientists still viewed the physical universe as essentially a giant machine. This mechanical view emerged from the seventeenth century work of Isaac Newton, who built his conception of nature on the ideas of Rene Descartes. According to Descartes, the universe is composed of two kinds of elements, the first consisting of elements each of which occupies at each instant of time a definite region in space, and the second consisting of elements that include our human thoughts. Descartes allowed these two parts of nature to interact causally within our brains, but Newton specified that the motions of the elements of the first kind are completely determined by laws of motion that refer exclusively to elements of this kind. In Newtonian-type physics these elements of the first kind are, moreover, essentially mechanical, in the sense that they have been stripped of the experiential qualities that characterize our thoughts, such as the conscious awareness of feelings, and the capacity to grasp meanings. Consequently there is in Newtonian-type physics no possibility for any causally effective role for any aspects of our being that are essentially different in kind from the mechanical elements that occur in that type of physics. Descartes’ views accommodated our intuitive feeling that our conscious thoughts can influence our bodily movements – my conscious intent to raise my arm seems to cause my arm to rise – whereas Newton’s physics leads to the contrary conclusion that, in spite of what may seem to be the case, the notion that human thoughts, per se, can affect human actions is a deeply misleading illusion. Newton’s ideas led eventually to the classical physics of the late nineteenth century. Its main premises are these: 2 1. There exists a material universe that develops over the course of time by means of interactions of its tiny mechanical parts with neighboring tiny mechanical parts. 2. These interactions are governed by mathematical laws. 3. These laws entail that the mechanically described future is completely determined by the mechanically described past, with no reference to human thoughts, choices, or