From 1974 to 1978 Ulrich Mohrhoff studied physics at the University of Göttingen, Germany, and at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore (India). Since his settling in Pondicherry in 1978 he pursues independent research in the foundations of physics and at the interface of physics and Indian philosophy/psychology. In 1996 he began publishing original research in various peer-reviewed journals. He was the founding and managing editor of AntiMatters, a quarterly online journal addressing issues in science and the humanities from non-materialistic perspectives, which appeared from 2007 through 2009. I thank Ulrich for accepting this interview. Enjoy.1-Ulrich, can you tell us who was Sri Aurobindo and which is the importance of his thought for contemporary readers and scholars?
Sri Aurobindo was born in Calcutta in 1872. His father, convinced of the superiority of European culture, did everything he could to prevent his son from becoming acquainted with the cultural and religious life of India. At the age of seven Sri Aurobindo was sent to Manchester with instructions for his new guardian not to let him receive any religious instruction, and not to allow him to make the acquaintance of any other Indian. Sri Aurobindo returned to India fourteen years later, after completing a thorough classical education at King’s College, Cambridge. This was followed by thirteen years in the service of the Maharaja of Baroda, where he acted mostly as Vice-Principal of Baroda College. During this period Sri Aurobindo worked behind the scenes to establish a revolutionary movement with the eventual goal of liberating his country.
In 1905 the announcement by the British Government that Bengal would be partitioned provoked unprecedented agitation. Seeing improved prospects for open political action, Sri Aurobindo accepted an offer to become the first principal of the newly founded Bengal National College, went to Calcutta, and plunged into the fray. Between 1905 and 1910 he acted primarily as a political journalist and as one of the leaders of the radical wing of the Indian National Congress. In 1907 a warrant for sedition was served against him as editor of the journal Bande Mataram. He was acquitted, but the trial made headlines around the country and brought him to national attention. The Bande Mataram, Sri Aurobindo later recalled (quotations in italics), was almost unique in journalistic history in the influence it exercised in converting the mind of a people and preparing it for revolution. Sri Aurobindo was the first Indian who had the courage to declare openly that the aim of political action in India was complete and absolute independence.
During his stay at Baroda, Sri Aurobindo had become interested in Indian philosophy, and had turned with increasing frequency to the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Initially he had accepted the prevailing illusionistic interpretation of these scriptures, but soon he became convinced that this was not in accord with the texts. The Upanishads declared that everything was Brahman, not that everything but the world was Brahman. Once Sri Aurobindo realized that yoga was “skill in works,” as the Gita put it, he began to practice yoga in the hope of acquiring spiritual power for carrying out his political program. He met a yogi, they retired to a secluded place, and within three days Sri Aurobindo realized the state of consciousness which in India had come to be looked upon as the consummation of all spiritual seeking. In the absolute stillness of his mind there arose, he wrote, the awareness of some sole and supreme Reality, which was attended at first by an overwhelming feeling and perception of the total unreality of the world. By a strange irony, Sri Aurobindo had been engulfed by the very experience that is the solid basis of the illusionistic philosophy which he had previously rejected.
Sri Aurobindo lived in this selfless awareness of what he later identified as the passive Brahman for days and months before it began to admit other things into itself and realization added itself to realization. What was at first seen only as a mass of cinematographic shapes unsubstantial and empty of reality eventually became real manifestations of the One Reality. And this was no re-imprisonment in the senses, no diminution or fall from supreme experience, it came rather as a constant heightening and widening of the Truth; it was the spirit that saw objects, not the senses, and the Peace, the Silence, the freedom in Infinity remained always, with the world or all worlds only as a continuous incident in the timeless eternity of the Divine.
While his body at first continued to act as an empty automatic machine, a new mode of action soon became evident. To quote from an autobiographical note written in the third person, something else than himself took up his dynamic activity and spoke and acted through him but without any personal thought or initiative.
In May, 1908, Sri Aurobindo was arrested in the Alipur Bomb Case [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alipore_bomb_case]. He was acquitted after a detention of one year as undertrial prisoner. During his imprisonment, his spiritual realization enlarged itself into an all-encompassing awareness of the Divine. The passive impersonal Brahman revealed its other side, the active and all-controlling personal Brahman.
In April, 1910, Sri Aurobindo moved to Pondicherry where he remained until his passing in 1950. He originally thought to return to politics after completing his yoga in a year or two at most. But before long the magnitude of the spiritual work set before him became more and more clear to him. It was no longer a question of revolt against the British government; he was now waging a revolt against the whole universal Nature.
Between 1912 and 1920 Sri Aurobindo kept a detailed account of his yoga in a series of diaries, now published as The Record of Yoga. They bear out in detail a statement he made years later in a letter to a disciple; he wrote that he had been testing day and night for years upon years his spiritual knowledge and force more scrupulously than any scientist his theory or his method.
While still in jail, Sri Aurobindo had made the discovery of a series of higher planes of consciousness and existence. In Pondicherry he concentrated his energy on the triple process of ascent, descent, and integration: ascent to a higher plane, descent of the powers of the higher plane, and integration of the already established powers into the descending dynamism. Before long, his inner experiences surpassed anything dealt with explicitly in the Gita or the Upanishads. However, when he took up the Rig Veda in the original, he found his hitherto unexplained psychological experiences illuminated with a clear and exact light. This is how he recovered the lost secret of the Veda: the key to its spiritual symbolism.
Between 1914 and 1921 Sri Aurobindo brought out a philosophical review and wrote, under a continual deadline, all of the works upon which his reputation as a philosopher, Sanskrit scholar, political scientist, and literary critic is based. For six and a half years he produced from scratch the yearly equivalent of two or three full-length books, but working on as many as seven simultaneously. His principal work in prose, The Life Divine, is regarded by some as one of the most important metaphysical treatises of the 20th century. Yet Sri Aurobindo not only emphatically denied being a philosopher but also asserted that his works were produced without the aid of thought. I had only to write down in the terms of the intellect all that I had observed and come to know in practicing Yoga daily and the philosophy was there automatically.
In the right view both of life and of Yoga, Sri Aurobindo explains, all life... is a vast Yoga of Nature attempting to realise her perfection in an ever increasing expression of her potentialities. In a more specific sense, yoga is a methodised effort towards self-perfection by the expression of the secret potentialities latent in the being and – highest condition of victory in that effort – a union of the human individual with the universal and transcendent Existence we see partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. Crucial to success in this effort are a fixed and unfailing aspiration that calls from below, a supreme power that answers, and a total and sincere surrender to it, an exclusive self-opening to the divine Power.
The action of this power has three main features. In the first place, it does not act according to a fixed system and succession as in the specialised methods of Yoga, but as determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates. In a sense, therefore, everyone has his or her own method of yoga. Secondly, the process, being integral, accepts our nature such as it stands organised by our past evolution and without rejecting anything essential compels all to undergo a divine change.... Thirdly, the divine power in us uses all life as the means of this Integral Yoga…. All life, all thought,… all experiences passive or active, become thenceforward so many shocks which disintegrate the teguments of the soul and remove the obstacles to the inevitable efflorescence.
Of equal importance in the corpus of his works to The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga is his epic poem Savitri, which he begun in 1915 and last revised in 1950. Sri Aurobindo wrote that Savitri has not been regarded by me as a poem to be written and finished, but as a field of experimentation to see how far poetry could be written from one’s own yogic consciousness and how that could be made creative. The result of this experiment is a poetic chronicle of Sri Aurobindo’s yoga as well as a rhythmical embodiment of his experiences, which can awaken sympathetic vibrations in those who read it. Containing a detailed account of the geography of the inner worlds, it is an invaluable chart for the use of future explorers.
In 1926 Sri Aurobindo arrived at a turning point in his yoga. There is a highest mental plane to which he gave the name “overmind.” The Isha Upanishad describes it as a “brilliant golden lid” obstructing the passage from mind to the original creative consciousness-force, which he called “supermind.” For years Sri Aurobindo had striven to negotiate this passage. Success came on the 24th of November of that year when the light and power of the overmind descended into his physical being. Subsequently Sri Aurobindo withdrew from outer contacts to concentrate on the more difficult task of enabling the supermind to descend, take possession of his body, and for the first time act on physical matter directly, rather than through intermediate planes. His withdrawal, however, did not prevent him from attending to world affairs, as may be gleaned from another third-person autobiographical note:
There is... a spiritual dynamic power which can be possessed by those who are advanced in the spiritual consciousness.... It was this force which, as soon as he had attained to it, he used, at first only in a limited field of personal work, but afterwards in a constant action upon the world forces.... He put his spiritual force behind the Allies from the moment of Dunkirk when everybody was expecting the immediate fall of England and the definite triumph of Hitler, and he had the satisfaction of seeing the rush of German victory almost immediately arrested and the tide of war begin to turn in the opposite direction.
So much about who Sri Aurobindo was. I’m more reluctant to talk about the importance of his thought for contemporary readers and scholars, for given my (albeit loose) association with the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, it is bound to sound like propaganda. Sri Aurobindo is someone to be discovered, not someone to be advertised. I don’t believe in advertisement expect for books, he wrote, and in propaganda except for politics and Patent medicines. But for serious work it is a poison. It means either a stunt or a boom — and stunts and booms exhaust the thing they carry on their crest and leave it lifeless and broken high and dry on the shores of nowhere – or it means a movement. A movement in the case of a work like mine means the founding of a school or a sect or some other damned nonsense. It means that hundreds or thousands of useless people join in and corrupt the work or reduce it to a pompous farce from which the Truth that was coming down recedes into secrecy and silence. It is what has happened to the “religions” and the reason of their failure.
2-As a trained physicist, do you think that quantum mechanics provides a theoretical framework to understand phenomena like psi (e.g, telepathy, psychokinesis, etc.) or the nature and origin of consciousness?
No, I don’t think so. The idea that quantum mechanics provides such a framework is based on what philosopher David Chalmers has called the “law of minimization of mystery.” The quantum-mechanical correlations (between measurement outcomes) are mysterious. Nobody knows anything about the mechanism or process by which measurement outcomes influence the probabilities of measurement outcomes. The observed psi correlations are mysterious. The correlations between neural firing patterns in a brain and the subjective, first-person content of consciousness are mysterious. So it’s economical (but also chimerical) to assume that the three mysteries can be reduced to a single mystery.
3-Some materialist scientists argue that the notion of a causally efficacious consciousness and phenomena like psychokinesis is physically impossible because it violates the law of energy conservation. For example, in psychokinesis, physical energy would be actually created by a non-physical consciousness in order to affect a purely physical world, and the principle of energy conservation precludes such creation of energy. What do you think of this scientific objection against the causal efficacy of consciousness?
A tautology. Energy is only conserved within a closed physical system. To assume the universal validity of the law of energy conservation is to assume that the physical universe is causally closed. If one assumes that the physical universe is causally closed, then nothing nonphysical can influence the goings-on in the physical universe. This begs the question of whether the physical universe is causally closed. I have discussed this in detail in a paper titled “The physics of interactionism,” which appeared in Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (Nos. 8–9, pp. 165–184) and The Volitional Brain (Imprint Academic, 1999). It can be downloaded at http://thisquantumworld.com/PDF/Mohrhoff_JCS.pdf.
However, I am in full agreement with those – not only neuropsychologists but also phenomenologists, mystics, and yogis – who reject the folk psychology of free will. The mystic or yogi discovers behind our ordinary consciousness a subliminal consciousness, whose initial attitude is that of a detached witness. It experiences thoughts, feelings, intentions, actions impersonally and undistorted by any sense of ownership, authorship, or responsibility. Those who go further become increasingly aware of the true origins and determinants of their thoughts, feelings, intentions, and actions. And once they are sufficiently aware of these subliminal controlling influences, they are in a position to accept or reject them, to choose, and for the first time to exercise a genuine free will.
4-You have argued that, contrary to the common opinions on the matter, there is no such thing as a collapse of the state vector (or wave function). Can you expand on this idea?
Quantum states (state vectors, wave functions, density operators, etc.) are mathematical tools by which we calculate the probabilities of the possible outcomes of a measurement on the basis of the actual outcomes of other measurements. Accordingly, the time t on which a quantum state functionally depends is the time of the measurement to the possible outcomes of which it serves to assign probabilities.
The common mistake is to misconstrue the time dependence of a quantum state as the continuous time dependence of an evolving state. An algorithm for assigning probabilities to possible measurement outcomes on the basis of actual outcomes has two perfectly normal dependences. It depends continuously on the time of measurement: if this changes by a small amount, the assigned probabilities change by small amounts. And it depends discontinuously on the outcomes that constitute the assignment basis: if this changes by the inclusion of an outcome not previously taken into account, so do the assigned probabilities. But think of a quantum state’s dependence on time as the time-dependence of an evolving state, and you have two modes of evolution for the price of one: continuous and predictable between measurements, discontinuous and unpredictable at the time of a measurement (the so-called collapse). Hence the mother of all quantum-theoretical pseudo-questions: what causes the (non-existent) collapse?
5-You have said that many writers who comment about quantum mechanics (and its putative metaphysical implications) are misguided, because they transmogrify the mathematical tools of a probability calculus into descriptions of actual physical states, events, or processes. What do you mean exactly by it? Does not quantum mechanics tell us something about the ontologically objective reality out there and its actual metaphysical properties?
Let me begin by quoting David Mermin, one of the most level-headed physicists I know. In his May 2009 column in Physics Today he wrote:
When I was an undergraduate learning classical electromagnetism, I was enchanted by the revelation that electromagnetic fields were real. Far from being a clever calculational device for how some charged particles push around other charged particles, they were just as real as the particles themselves, most dramatically in the form of electromagnetic waves, which have energy and momentum of their own and can propagate long after the source that gave rise to them has vanished. That lovely vision of the reality of the classical electromagnetic field ended when I learned as a graduate student that what Maxwell’s equations actually describe are fields of operators on Hilbert space. Those operators are quantum fields, which most people agree are not real but merely spectacularly successful calculational devices. So real classical electromagnetic fields are nothing more (or less) than a simplification in a particular asymptotic regime (the classical limit) of a clever calculational device. In other words, classical electromagnetic fields are another clever calculational device.
“Most people” are the silent majority, who unfortunately are rarely heard by science journalists and quantum physics popularizers. The latter are more likely to listen to a vocal minority, who, instead of having learned from quantum physics that even the reification of some of the calculational tools of classical physics was never more than a sleight-of-hand, are desperately trying to apply the same sleight-of-hand to quantum physics. It beats me how, even in the old days of classical physics, people could pass off calculational tools as physical entities or natural processes. Perhaps it was their hubristic desire to feel potentially omniscient — capable in principle of knowing the furniture of the universe and the laws by which this is governed. Or was it the prestige provided by the carefully cultivated image of physicists as being potentially omniscient?
To answer the second part of your question: Yes, quantum mechanics can be interpreted as telling us something about “the ontologically objective reality out there,” but the reification of calculational tools is definitely not the way to find out what quantum mechanics is trying to tell us about the nature of Nature. On the contrary, it’s the best way to make sure that nobody finds out.
6-Defenders of a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics have argued for such realist view based on the following arguments: 1-The mathematical axiomatization of the quantum theory shows that it doesn’t contain any variables denoting mental/psychological properties or entities (like consciousness, thoughts, experiences or human observers). Quantum theory refers to an objectively existing real world. And 2-The collapse of the wave function is nowadays conceived by some physicists as the decoherence resulting from the interaction between a quantum particles and its macrophysical environment, which need not include any empirical observation or technical measurement at all. What do you think of these arguments?
As to 1: The axioms that encapsulate the mathematical structure of quantum mechanics are, every one of them, as clear and compelling as axioms ought to be – provided that they are treated as features of a probability calculus. The way the axioms are generally stated, they are anything but clear and compelling. Only one – the Born rule – then refers to probabilities, while the other axioms make it seem as if quantum states were evolving physical states of some kind. I agree that this probability calculus allows us to conceive of an “objectively existing real world” and to make inferences as to its nature. But I repeat that this cannot be done by reifying the probability algorithms we call “quantum states.”
As to 2: I don’t see the need to invoke environment-induced decoherence to mimic or get rid of something (wave function collapse) that does not exist or occur in the first place. What can be shown with the help of decoherence is that, as far as position measurements performed on sufficiently large and/or massive objects are concerned, the statistical correlations encapsulated by quantum physics are for all practical purposes indistinguishable from the deterministic correlations encapsulated by classical physics.
Since you use the expression “technical measurement,” which suggests something like a laboratory setup, I should perhaps clarify what I mean by a “measurement.” A measurement is any actual event or state of affairs from which the possession of a particular property (by a physical system) or of a particular value (by a physical observable) can be inferred.
7-A common technical objection against the idea that Quantum Mechanics is indeterministic is that the concept of indeterminism, properly understood in a philosophical sense, denies the existence of laws. However, QM is based on laws, both deterministic and probabilistic laws. Examples of deterministic laws are: 1)The conservation of energy, momentum, and angular momentum; 2)The rules forbidding some transitions between atomic levels; or 3)The principle of exclusion, which denies the possibility of two quantum particles (e.g. electrons) of a system occupying the same space. And regarding the existence of probabilistic laws, it is not the same as the absence of laws. Thus, QM is based on laws, both probabilistic and deterministic, which rules out indeterminism. What do you think of this technical objection against indeterminism?
I don’t see how indeterminism “properly understood” (by whom?) denies the existence of laws. The existence of the statistical laws of quantum physics proves the contrary. When you do scattering experiments with identically prepared incoming particles, the outgoing particles are statistically distributed over many variables, except that the total energy, the total momentum, etc., of the outgoing particles must equal the total energy, the total momentum, etc., of the incoming particles. How is this supposed to rule out indeterminism?
8-Some contemporary atheist physicists have argued that physics provides empirical evidence that “something can come from nothing” or that the universe was created without any cause at all. For example, in the recent book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have argued that “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” Do you think this conclusion is scientifically correct? Has QM provided an empirical counterexample to the principle “out of nothing nothing comes”?
My only reply to this is a statement by C.D. Broad: “the nonsense written by philosophers on scientific matters is exceeded only by the nonsense written by scientists on philosophy.”
9-Do you think the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of the universe suggest (or make more probable than not) the existence of a creator or cosmic intelligence?
I don’t think it makes sense to assign probabilities to these things. As to what they suggest – it depends on one’s prior beliefs. I don’t believe in an extracosmic creator, but I see a creative intelligence at work in many places, not just the big bang and fine tuning. I also believe that this intelligence is far superior to the human variety, so that any attempt by us to second guess it is sheer folly.
10-Materialists have argued that the existence of split-brain patients provide almost a knock-down argument against dualism and in favor of materialism. What do you think of the cases of split-brain patients and their relevance for the mind-body problem?
I’m not competent in this field, but I’m confident that you will find a most competent response in the book First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of Mind by Stephen E. Braude.
11-As a trained scientist, do you think there is good scientific evidence for psi phenomena and survival of consciousness?
There is impressive evidence. I don’t care if it’s considered scientific. Evidence is evidence.
12-Which is your current philosophical position regarding the mind-body problem (e.g. dualism, panexperientialism, etc.)?
Matter and mind are mutually irreducible, but they have a common origin, which is neither material nor mental but a trans-categorial (“ineffable”) Reality, which relates to the world in (at least) two ways: as a substance that constitutes it, and as a consciousness that contains it. In other words, the world exists both by that Reality (this is the origin of matter as we know it) and for that Reality (this is the origin of consciousness as we know it). So dualism is isn’t the last word, but it seems to me to be a necessary stepping stone towards an adequate understanding of the problem and its solution. There is an excellent book on this subject: The Two Sides of Being: A Reassessment of Psychophysical Dualism by Uwe Meixner. (I’ve written a lengthy review of this book, whose two parts can be downloaded from the AntiMatters website: http://anti-matters.org.)
13-Do you think that intelligent design, both in biology or in cosmology, is a viable scientific hypothesis?
I think that intelligence is beyond the purview of science. There is an excellent book on this subject: Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science by John F. Haught (My review of this book is also available at the AntiMatters website.) I am sympathetic to those who see a higher intelligence at work, but not to the politico-religious movement associated with the phrase “intelligent design.”
As I said, I believe in an intelligence that is far superior to human intelligence. The latter first designs and then executes its designs, utilizing pre-existent materials and pre-existent laws. The former doesn’t work that way; it doesn’t first design and then execute, and the only material it uses is the substance (Reality) in which it inheres. It works more like a spontaneously self-realizing vision of what is to be.
14-You are sympathetic to the epistemology known as “radical constructivism” developed by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Why do you think this epistemological view is superior to or better or preferable than other common epistemic doctrines like epistemological realism?
Everybody has his own views on all but the most trivial subjects. Often we stick to our views and defend them with a tenacity that makes us construct epicycles upon epicycles, but sometimes we reconstruct our working model of reality to incorporate new evidence. It would be ludicrous in the extreme to pretend that one’s present working model is adequate to all the evidence one may yet obtain. The great advantage of radical constructivism is that it takes this into account. (Note that von Glasersfeld doesn’t claim that radical constructivism is right but only that it is part of such a working model.) I believe that only the superior intelligence mentioned before can have an adequate knowledge of reality. (I also believe that evolution will eventually produce a species embodying that superior intelligence.) Our own intelligence can at best grasp limited aspects of this knowledge. The human being, to quote Sri Aurobindo,
is not intended to grasp the whole truth of his being at once, but to move towards it through a succession of experiences and a constant, though not by any means a perfectly continuous self-enlargement. The first business of reason then is to justify and enlighten to him his various experiences and to give him faith and conviction in holding on to his self-enlargings. It justifies to him now this, now that, the experience of the moment, the receding light of the past, the half-seen vision of the future. Its inconstancy, its divisibility against itself, its power of sustaining opposite views are the whole secret of its value. It would not do indeed for it to support too conflicting views in the same individual, except at moments of awakening and transition, but in the collective body of men and in the successions of Time that is its whole business. For so man moves towards the infinity of the Truth by the experience of its variety; so his reason helps him to build, change, destroy what he has built and prepare a new construction, in a word, to progress, grow, enlarge himself in his self-knowledge and world-knowledge and their works.
15-A common objection against radical constructivism is that it leads to skepticism regarding the real, objective world (if it exists) and destroys the traditional philosophical concepts of “truth” and “knowledge.” What do you think of this objection?
I wouldn’t call it an objection. Skepticism is healthy (as long as it also remains skeptical of itself). The correspondence theory of truth is our naïve, lazy, default position. It is not even wrong, to use Wolfgang Pauli’s felicitous phrase, inasmuch as there is no way to prove it either right or wrong.
16-What do you think of Ken Wilber’s philosophy?
I am not sufficiently familiar with it to be competent to comment on it.
17-Do you have any opinion about ufology and the documented cases of putative alien abductions?
None.
18-What books on philosophy, quantum physics, consciousness and related topics would you like to recommend to the readers?
The major works of Sri Aurobindo, all of which can be downloaded for free via http://www.sriaurobindoashram.org/ashram/sriauro/writings.php. Also the magnum opus of Jean Gebser: The Ever-Present Origin. Part 1 of this volume (“Foundations of the Aperspectival World”) is subtitled “A contribution to the history of the awakening of consciousness.” Part 2 (“Manifestations of the Aperspectival World”) is subtitled “An attempt at the concretion of the spiritual.” (See also my article “Evolution of consciousness according to Jean Gebser” in AntiMatters.) Then the works of Stephen E. Braude, whom I have already mentioned. Nobody writes with greater competence about paranormal phenomena. Also my own textbook The World According To Quantum Mechanics: Why The Laws Of Physics Make Perfect Sense After All (warning: pricey and intended mainly for students and teachers of quantum mechanics). A non-mathematical overview is available at http://thisquantumworld.com.
19-Would you like to add something else to end the interview?
I have said that quantum mechanics can be interpreted as telling us something about the nature of Nature, albeit not via the reification of calculational tools. So what does it tell us, and how? My physical interpretation of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics distinguishes itself from others in that it does not invoke untestable metaphysical assumptions – such as what happens between measurements – but proceeds directly from the testable calculational rules of quantum mechanics. By analyzing the probabilities that quantum mechanics assigns in various experimental situations, I arrive at the following conclusions:
• Considered by themselves, out of relation to anything else, the so-called ultimate constituents of matter are identical in the strong sense of numerical identity. They are, each of them, that trans-categorial Reality I mentioned before.
• By entering into spatial relations with itself, this Reality creates both matter and space, for space is the totality of existing spatial relations, while matter is the corresponding apparent multitude of relata – “apparent” because the relations are self-relations.
• The world is structured from the top down, by a self-differentiation of this Reality that does not bottom out: if we conceptually partition the world into smaller and smaller regions, we reach a point where the distinctions we make between regions no longer correspond to anything in the physical world.
Note that the belief that quantum states are evolving (and hence instantaneous) states, is incompatible with the last conclusion, for while this implies that the world’s spatial differentiation is incomplete (it does not “go all the way down”), the interpretation of quantum states as evolving (and hence instantaneous) states implies that the world’s temporal differentiation – and thus (via the special theory of relativity) its spatial differentiation – is complete.
Another conclusion:
• Measurements do not reveal pre-existent values – values that the measured quantities would have possessed even if they had not been measured. Instead, they create their outcomes. Physical quantities have values only if (and only when) they are actually measured.
But if no value exists unless it is measured, then the value-indicating property of a measuring device also needs to be measured in order to have a value, and a vicious regress ensues. To avoid such a regress, some properties must be different. Solving this problem requires (i) a rigorous definition of the elusive term “macroscopic” and (ii) showing that the positions of macroscopic objects form a self-contained system to which independent reality can consistently be attributed. The elusiveness of defining “macroscopic” has often been remarked upon. It is worth pointing out that it was the incomplete spatial differentiation of the physical world that enabled me to rigorously define this word, which in turn made it possible to terminate that regress.
Another thing I said is that nothing is known about the mechanism or process by which measurement outcomes influence the probabilities of measurement outcomes. Let me add this: every conceivable measurement outcome has a probability greater than zero unless it violates a conservation law. Consequently, physics never needs to explain “how Nature does it.” It only needs to explain – via conservation laws – why certain things won’t happen. This is exactly what one would expect if the force at work in the world were an infinite (unlimited) force operating under self-imposed constraints. We therefore have no reason to be surprised by the impossibility of explaining the quantum-mechanical correlations laws, except in terms of final causes. It would be self-contradictory to invoke a mechanism or process to explain the working of an infinite force. What needs explaining is why this force works under the particular constraints that it does, and this I have explained in my book (as well as several papers, which can be downloaded via this page: http://perfect-sense.in/wp/?page_id=42).
Links of interest:
- Ulrich Mohrhoff's
website on quantum mechanics.
-Anti-Matters'
website.
-My other
subversive interviews.
