This introductory chapter explores a very old parallel between quantum physics and Daoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It argues that physicists, over the past one hundred years, have drawn on this parallel for a number of different reasons. In revisiting the parallel, the chapter aims to investigate what it might tell us about mind, action, and strategy in a radically uncertain world. The chapter also looks at the earlier debates in international relations which revolved around a question of whether change is possible at the international level. It then explicates the intersection of two debates that transcend disciplinary boundaries and would seem on the surface to have little to do with one another: the relevance of quantum theory for the social sciences and the importance of moving toward global international relations. The chapter emphasizes that the parallel between quantum theory and the Eastern philosophies brings the intersections between these debates to light.
This introductory chapter explores a very old parallel between quantum physics and Daoism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. It argues that physicists, over the past one hundred years, have drawn on this parallel for a number of different reasons. In revisiting the parallel, the chapter aims to investigate what it might tell us about mind, action, and strategy in a radically uncertain world. The chapter also looks at the earlier debates in international relations which revolved around a question of whether change is possible at the international level. It then explicates the intersection of two debates that transcend disciplinary boundaries and would seem on the surface to have little to do with one another: the relevance of quantum theory for the social sciences and the importance of moving toward global international relations. The chapter emphasizes that the parallel between quantum theory and the Eastern philosophies brings the intersections between these debates to light.
Repositioning the apparatus impacts on what is seen. The rationale for repositioning and the implications for my positionality as researcher were explored in the first part of the introduction. Here we seek to deepen understanding of the apparatus, that is, the parallel between quantum physics and ancient Asian philosophies, as preparation for the snapshots that follow. Nearly a half century ago Fritjof Capra’s ([1975] 1991) The Dao of Physics drew a parallel between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism, focusing in particular on Buddhism, Daoism and Hinduism. His book, which was a sustained exploration of the parallel, was both insightful and popular. The argument resonated with the New Age politics of the 1970s. In the context of the argument that follows, Capra’s framing of quantum science and Eastern mysticism is problematic in so far as experience within the world is the primary concern here. I argue that an earlier articulation of the parallel, by the Danish physicist and father of the Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr (2010), provides a better positioning for exploring the meaning of mind, action and strategy in an uncertain world. Bohr argued that mysticism was not the point of the parallel, and shifted emphasis to our role as spectators and actors. Further, Bohr’s concept of complementarity provides a different angle on the relationship between science and mysticism that goes beyond the either/ or terms in which it is usually discussed. The first part of this chapter examines various ways that physicists have articulated the parallel between quantum physics and the Eastern philosophies, elaborating in particular on the contrast between Capra and Bohr.
Repositioning the apparatus impacts on what is seen. The rationale for repositioning and the implications for my positionality as researcher were explored in the first part of the introduction. Here we seek to deepen understanding of the apparatus, that is, the parallel between quantum physics and ancient Asian philosophies, as preparation for the snapshots that follow. Nearly a half century ago Fritjof Capra’s ([1975] 1991) The Dao of Physics drew a parallel between quantum physics and Eastern mysticism, focusing in particular on Buddhism, Daoism and Hinduism. His book, which was a sustained exploration of the parallel, was both insightful and popular. The argument resonated with the New Age politics of the 1970s. In the context of the argument that follows, Capra’s framing of quantum science and Eastern mysticism is problematic in so far as experience within the world is the primary concern here. I argue that an earlier articulation of the parallel, by the Danish physicist and father of the Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr (2010), provides a better positioning for exploring the meaning of mind, action and strategy in an uncertain world. Bohr argued that mysticism was not the point of the parallel, and shifted emphasis to our role as spectators and actors. Further, Bohr’s concept of complementarity provides a different angle on the relationship between science and mysticism that goes beyond the either/ or terms in which it is usually discussed. The first part of this chapter examines various ways that physicists have articulated the parallel between quantum physics and the Eastern philosophies, elaborating in particular on the contrast between Capra and Bohr.
Abstract Quantum physics is being positioned as a new archive for addressing major theoretical problems in the field of international relations. Two of the major proponents of engaging quantum thinking within international relations, James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt, have argued that quantum thinking offers the possibility of a major paradigm shift in the field. Before we determine quantum’s revolutionary potential, the persistent and most pressing question for me is how to position quantum thinking among other kinds of and claims to knowledge. I want to horizontalize where different kinds of knowledge sit within the renewed attention to quantum theory. Rather than just horizontalize or flatten ontology, I want to see what happens when we place scientific and philosophical inquiry in dialogue, and what that conversation does to the authority and value of quantum thinking for the social sciences. The article reconstructs the dialogue between the first generation of quantum physicists and the philosophers who informed them. Rather than make an explicit argument about the philosophical debt of physics, I argue that a broad and highly interdisciplinary set of questions drove both fields well beyond the specific areas of expertise of any of these thinkers. I believe this adventure of ideas followed by physicists, philosophers, and social theorists alike offers us a way forward as the complexity of our contemporary global challenges confront us now with the necessity to think well beyond our disciplinary expertise.
This chapter reconstructs the conversations and debates between philosophers and physicists before and during the first generation of quantum thinking. Rather than making an abstract case for epistemological or interdivisional pluralism, the chapter presents a set of intersecting and parallel lines of thought that perform the radical pluralism that was demanded of cosmological thinking in philosophy and physics. The hope is that such a reflection can disarm some of the anxiety regarding the superiority or inferiority of scientific and philosophical inquiry as if such a determination were a zero-sum game. Ultimately, this chapter argues that while singular in their mode of inquiry, philosophy and physics are inseparable once the meaning of each discourse’s findings enters the fray of human experience. Therefore, engagements with and against any quantum turn ought to prefer a kind of epistemological generosity rather than seek discrete territorial claims to intellectual labor.
A comparative analysis of the process of measurement in classical and quantum physics is given. It necessitates the expedience of the reexamination of the role of the researcher and his consciousness in the process of the interaction of the subject with the material world around him. A survey of the philosophical aspects that pertain to the problem of measurement in quantum physics leads to the conclusion that the scholar is not an independent observer of the material world beyond him, he rather becomes a part of this world to an extent that he brings pressure to bear on the properties of the observed objects. In other words, man becomes an integral part of the universe hence the classical assumption about the existence of the objective reality that is beyond the consciousness of man ceases to be relevant. That is why the philosophical treatment of the problems of quantum theory appears to be much closer to the philosophical principles of the East than to the more common here Western philosophy. Key words : quantum world, measurement, subject, object, Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism.
Although this book is about the implications for social science of a quantum approach to the mind, much of that potential stems from its ability to integrate consciousness – a particular aspect of the mind – into a naturalistic worldview. And when it comes to the hard problem, quantum brain theory is only a necessary condition for such integration, not sufficient. Necessary, because it would enable the body to exploit for macro-level purposes a physical but non- material space for consciousness at the quantum level – collapse of the wave function – that does not exist in classical physics. Insufficient, however, because quantum brain theory embodies an objective, third-person standpoint and as such can tell us no more than classical brain theory can about why brains have a subjective, first-person point of view in the first place. The explanatory gap is still there, in other words, only now pushed down into quantum theory. To cross this gap, therefore, in addition to a new physics of the brain we will need a new meta -physics as well. As I argue in this chapter, it is this metaphysics that does the real work in solving the mind–body problem. Most social scientists have an instinctive aversion to ‘metaphysics,’ which in our world connotes wooly-headed and speculative thinking that has no place in science. Yet in moving onto this terrain the situation is both worse and better than that. It is worse because we have no choice. The Neuron Doctrine itself is based on a metaphysic, materialism, which looks increasingly unlikely to ever explain consciousness; and in thinking about the meaning of quantum theory metaphysical debate can hardly be avoided, precisely because physics provides little guidance for choosing among its interpretations. So the only question is whether to change our metaphysics of the brain from classical to quantum.