As part of Symposium of Quantum-Informational Medicine QIM 2011 (www.qim2011.org), a one-day round table Knowledge Federation Dialog Belgrade 2011: Partial & Holistic-Oriented Approaches is planned for September 25. This round table will provide an opportunity for critical consideration of partial and holistic-oriented approaches to physics and engineering, medicine and biology, psychology and transpersonal phenomena, art and philosophy, society and religion. The paradigm of quantum physics enables us to broaden our foundation for truth and worldview - and explain and include phenomena and insights that have hitherto been ignored or denied, because they did not fit into the classical (in many aspects mechanistic) scientific paradigm. When we do that, we come closer to a more inclusive or holistic view which can lead to a profound or 'paradigmatic' change in any field, and in our society at large. The observation that the insights reached in quantum physics point us towards a more inclusive or holistic worldview has been voiced by many authors, notably by Heisenberg in Physics and Philosophy. The fact that those insights are so slow to propagate into other disciplines and to influence general culture may be attributed to the lack of communication across and beyond disciplines. Knowledge Federation is an international project whose goal is to develop remedial knowledge-work practices - by federating key insights across disciplines, and to media and popular culture. In the Knowledge Federation Dialog we share holistic insights from a variety of disciplines to a round table, let them synergize with one another and become general insights; and we allow those general insights, and our dialog, to spread through the media and include general public.
As part of Symposium of Quantum-Informational Medicine QIM 2011 (www.qim2011.org), a one-day round table Knowledge Federation Dialog Belgrade 2011: Partial & Holistic-Oriented Approaches is planned for September 25. This round table will provide an opportunity for critical consideration of partial and holistic-oriented approaches to physics and engineering, medicine and biology, psychology and transpersonal phenomena, art and philosophy, society and religion. The paradigm of quantum physics enables us to broaden our foundation for truth and worldview - and explain and include phenomena and insights that have hitherto been ignored or denied, because they did not fit into the classical (in many aspects mechanistic) scientific paradigm. When we do that, we come closer to a more inclusive or holistic view which can lead to a profound or 'paradigmatic' change in any field, and in our society at large. The observation that the insights reached in quantum physics point us towards a more inclusive or holistic worldview has been voiced by many authors, notably by Heisenberg in Physics and Philosophy. The fact that those insights are so slow to propagate into other disciplines and to influence general culture may be attributed to the lack of communication across and beyond disciplines. Knowledge Federation is an international project whose goal is to develop remedial knowledge-work practices - by federating key insights across disciplines, and to media and popular culture. In the Knowledge Federation Dialog we share holistic insights from a variety of disciplines to a round table, let them synergize with one another and become general insights; and we allow those general insights, and our dialog, to spread through the media and include general public.
The present volume is part of the 'Worldviews, Science and Us' series of proceedings. It contains selected contributions on the subject of bridging knowledge and its implications for our perspectives of the world. This volume also represents the proceedings of the interdisciplinary stream of the international workshop (Part 1) Times of Entanglement, 21-22 September 2010 at the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai, People's Republic of China in the context of the Shanghai World Expo 2010 and related cutting-edge investigations in the quantum paradigm from discussion panels organized by the Leo Apostel Center for Interdisciplinary studies within the framework of the 'Research on the Construction of Integrating Worldviews' research community set up by the Flanders Fund for Scientific Research. Further information about this research community and a full list of the associated international research centers can be found at http://www.vub.ac.be/CLEA/res/worldviews/
The findings of physics at the beginning of the last century have caused a revolutionary change in our commonly accepted view of the world. Because of their seemingly paradoxical features the philosophical consequences of the new insights, however, were never really adopted by the scientific community despite the quite apparent and far-reaching technical innovations they enabled. The new so-called „quantum“ physics revealed that the world at its foundation is no longer the familiar, tangible (thing-like) reality but rather a holistic immaterial „gestalt“: pure „interconnectedness“, inseparable „potentiality“. Its evolution in time does not follow from strictly determined laws but is only guided by certain inherent tendencies exhibited in terms of definite probabilities for possible material-energetic realizations. Generally these realizations recover the appearance of the familiar classical world as an objective reality with rigorous dynamic laws. In contrast to the old world view, where matter, consisting of discrete, constant building blocks, ranks first, and its various forms result secondarily from different law-determined arrangements of these building blocks, the situation in the modern view is turned around: Relationship or „gestalt“ or „information“ is now more fundamental and substance or matter/energy appears subsequently as an as-if phenomenon on the macroscopic level. The new world view sets limits to knowledge and the related science on principle. It proves to be very powerful because it establishes bridges between all disciplines and hitherto conflicting paradigms and descriptions. In particular in this more open framework the non-living and living phenomena (including the human species) no longer appear as basically different, but as two different structures of the same immaterial essence, relating respectively to static stable and static instable (highly sensitive), but dynamically stabilised (homeostatic) configurations. In such a „basically alive“ world biology and medicine, therefore, have to accept that logistically the immaterial, information-type (“spiritual“) software in the background becomes more important than the (physical) hardware being guided by it. The well-known difficulty of complementary medicine – and in particular of homeopathy with its impressive healing record – to explain its experience in the language of the old science, based on substances and a mechanistic dynamic, may thus be resolved within the more open and flexible framework of modern „science“, in which knowledge has a more open meaning (due to basic indeterminism) offering many more dimensions for healing to the devoted healer. The observation of a highly diversified filigree crystalline structure of (liquid) water, as demonstrated by recent studies, may represent a material/energetic print-out of the hidden information coded in the basic immaterial software.
The subject of “quantum entanglement” in general doesn’t seem to be particularly considered in Europe in the form of popularizing books or of educational physics projects. These authors have started to spread out this kind of scientific culture in both forms, including popularizing seminars too. Concerning the entanglement phenomenon, recently, new thought experiments have been outlined, new laboratory results have come out in the form of real discoveries in quantum optics, new studies on “bio-entanglement” and “global consciousness effects” have been carried out, and very sophisticated new ideas have been developed in the fields of quantum physics, biophysics, cosmology and epistemology. These authors intend to show their effort of diffusing widely this growing scientific knowledge. Beyond all this there is a long-term strategy aimed at inculcating new concepts in physics in order to trigger the interest of scholars at all levels, in that which is probably the most innovative and interdisciplinary subject of the human knowledge of this new millennium. In order to accomplish this difficult task, these authors are acting in the following ways: A) explain, using intuitive examples, the basic physical mechanism (1, 2, 3, 4) of entanglement at the particle level; B) explain all the possible ways in which entanglement may involve quantum or “quantum-like” non-local effects occurring also in the macro scale (2, 3, 4) represented by biological (DNA bio-computing, microtubules), psychophysical (consciousness, synchronicity and Psi effects), astrobiological (neural spin entanglement), and cosmological (Bit Bang) environments; C) study and spread the scientific knowledge concerning alternative ways for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (5) and – specifically – prepare research projects regarding possible non-local aspects of SETI (NLSETI) and their applicability (4) on the basis of our physics knowledge and technology; D) prepare extensive plans for post-graduate courses in physics (6) with a special address to “anomalistic physics”, brain biophysics and mathematics; E) train persons and students to reach optimal concentration states – by using well experimented techniques – in order to permit them to exploit at the maximum level their intellectual and consciousness potential. All of these educational and promotional actions are aimed at training people in understanding the strict link existing between physics and consciousness in all of its aspects, in the light of a probable general phenomenon that occurs at all scales by involving (micro and macro) matter, mind and consciousness. A strategy plan containing in a self-consistent way all of these aspects will be schematically illustrated.
In classical physics, the world is considered as a matter-based reality, the arrangement of whose parts in time is uniquely determined by certain dynamic laws. By contrast, modern quantum physics reveals that matter is not composed of matter, but reality is merely potentiality. The world has a holistic structure, which is based on fundamental relations and not material objects, admitting more open, indeterministic developments. In this more flexible causal framework, inanimate and animate matter are not to be considered as fundamentally different but as different order structures of the same immaterial entity. In a stable configuration, effectively all the uncertainties are statistically averaged out, thus the unique and deterministic behavior of ordinary inanimate matter is exhibited; whereas in the case of statically unstable but dynamically stable configurations, the “lively” features of the underlying quantum structure have a chance to surface to the mesocopic level and to be connected with what we observe as the phenomenon of life. This supposition can be more explicitly treated and clarified by identifying the electric dipole moment of biomolecules as the ordering parameter of the corresponding macroquantum system. This has important consequences for biology and medicine. In particular, it suggests the existence of a quantum-based “software,” essential perhaps for the logistics of biological processes, which are hidden behind the matter/energy-based “hardware” that alone is considered in the conventional approach. In medicine it opens an opportunity to build bridges between conventional medicine based essentially on the classical paradigm, and the various forms of complementary medicine, which have strong affinities with the new features of the modern holistic worldview.
The Thomist 65 (2001): 223-38 QUANTUM MECHANICS: A DIALECTICAL APPROACH TO REALITY WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL The Priestly Fraternity ofSt. Peter Wigratzbad-Opfenbach, Germany In a recent article, Wolfgang Smith states that "the ongoing deChristianization of Western society is due in large measure to the imposition of the prevailing scientistic world view."1 One need be neither a philosopher nor a scientist to notice that deChristianization makes its presence felt in every aspect of the life of a citizen in the modern West-familial, professional, cultural, and religious. Thus it opposes the two-and-a-half-millennial tradition that began in ancient Greece and achieved its full development in medieval Christian philosophy. This tradition is one of constant refinement and crystallization, continuously coupled with and catalyzed by the divine plan of salvation of mankind from the bondage of original sin. This complex phenomenon was well encapsulated by Etienne Gilson: It is hardly possible to realize the continuity that prevails through the whole history of Western culture, unless one keeps in mind the important part played by the Church in the work of its transmission. The Greek and Latin Fathers of the Church had so carefully preserved the classical notion of man that when St. Thomas Aquinas, in the thirteenth century, undertook to build up a complete exposition of Christian truth, he did not scruple to borrow for his technical equipment from the pagan Aristotle, whose logic, physics, biology, ethics and 1 W. Smith, "From Schrodinger's Cat to Thomistic Ontology," The Thomist 63 (1999): 49. 223 224 WOJCIECH P. GRYGIEL metaphysics were then transformed by his medieval disciple into as many elements of Christian synthesis.2 This Christian synthesis is central to the understanding of science as an integral part of the classical Western world view. In it all beings are perceived as purposefully ordered in their natures towards their ultimate goal, which is the glory and praise of God. In his Summa Theologiae St. Thomas writes Therefore since sacred scripture considers things insofar as they are divinely revealed, according to what has been said all things whatsoever that are able to be divinely revealed share in the one formal object of this science, and so they are included under sacred theology as under a single science.3 This position radically contradicts the currently dominant mind set that goes back at least to Descartes's decoupling of philosophical and theological wisdom, with its bifurcation of nature into res cogitans and res extensa.4 As the term extensa indicates, in Cartesian philosophy matter appears to the human mind clearly and distinctly only under the aspect of quantity. All the other Aristotelian categories of accident are thus reducible to quantity. As a result the human mind is unable to discern natures, and so is cut off from the possibility of investigating change, the object of physical science.5 The Cartesian assimilation of corporeality to pure mathematics, based on Descartes's own distrust of sense experience, has boxed science into, one could say, living a life of extension without any reference to the nature of reality. The mathematicism of Galileo, and in some ways that 2 E. Gilson, The Unity ofPhilosophical Experience (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 221. 3 Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, a. 3. • One of the most striking examples ofscientism practically bordering on mythology is the Darwinian theory of evolution. The drastic imposition of stochasticism on the vital mechanisms of natural generation with minimal experimental evidence seems more like an attempt to carry out a deliberate philosophical agenda than an honest scientific investigation. A solid refutation of Darwinian theory based on microbiological and biochemical evidence can be found in Michael J. Behe, Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Touchstone, 1996). 5 Aristotle, Physics 2.2.193b31-35. QUANTUM MECHANICS 225 of Isaac Newton, further implanted a conviction in the modern mind that physical phenomena can be accounted for simply by the use of mathematical equations. The implications of such reductionism were well summarized by Alfred North Whitehead: The laws of nature are nothing else that the observed identities of pattern persisting throughout the series of comparative observations. Thus a law of nature says something about...