Hello Professor! Sorry not to get back sooner. Thanks for your kind wishes for my vacation. I was thinking of you during my week at the beach. May we continue where we left off?
As much as I love Plato, I have long regarded Plotinus has having “improved” on him in a certain way that’s important to me. For he makes explicit what Plato only hints at (e.g., in his ideas of apeiron and epikeina -- the depth or ground of human (and natural) existence; and its “beyond,” respectively). And that is the one transcendent God, absolute unity and first cause that is outside of space and time.
I do not regard this simply as a theological statement. It is also a statement in logic. The knower and the known cannot be brought together, such that meaningful knowledge can result, unless there is a common plenum that can accommodate the two terms – which, it seems to me, takes the form of a fundamental universal law (which may be as simple to state as "the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts"). To my way of thinking, the knower is not the maker of fundamental laws; but by means of them the world of nature and the cosmos becomes intelligible to the human mind.
Here is where orthodox Christian theology and reason come together in complete resonance: The Church “holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.” That is, God can be known by man through his creation. I am convinced God gave us reason and free will – the two essential attributes of the immaterial soul (more on this in a bit) -- because he wants us to understand the universe he made.
Yet, as Rabbi Tarfon put it, “It is not your part to finish [this] task; yet neither are you free to desist from it.” Complete knowledge of the laws of the universe (i.e., creation) is never the possession of any man, given the finitude of the individual human life span. It is the evolving work of the human race over time. And let me say it truly appears the physical sciences over the past century have made enormous strides toward this goal.
Speaking of the greatest achievement (IMHO) of science possibly of all time: I have noticed absolutely nothing in orthodox (i.e., Copenhagen Interpretation) quantum theory that refutes or in any way undermines another fundamental teaching of the Church – the teaching about the soul. Rather, the logic of CI seems to confirm this teaching.
The Church teaches the soul is “the seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material.”
Now when we speak of “eternity,” we are not necessarily speaking of an infinity of time. In this context, it may be better to say we are speaking of a state or condition of timelessness. Fundamentally, “eternal” and “timeless” are synonyms. (“Infinity” can take on quite other meaning, especially in mathematics.) In this connection, however, I think timeless is the better word. For timeless things do not change in substance or principle; and I believe that is the fundamental meaning of the quoted text.
As physicist Stephen Barr of Notre Dame points out, “When religious believers say that we have a ‘spiritual soul’…they are not referring to something occult or magical; they are referring to the faculties of intellect and free will that are familiar to and constantly employed by all human beings.” So in effect, when people like Julian Huxley (or latterly Richard Dawkins) denigrate the soul as some kind of fictitious “ghost in the machine,” to my mind what they are really denigrating (whether they are aware of it or not) is human intellect and free will.
Indeed, the logic of quantum theory would seem to require that the observer possess at least one immaterial quality: There must be something about the observer that cannot be drawn into the “meta-system” of the Schroedinger probability amplitude being measured. We can define the meta-system as the total of the probability wave for the quantum object under investigation plus the probability waves for the physical equipment being employed in the experiment, plus the probability waves of all the physical “parts” of the human experimenter. The point is, if the observer himself is swallowed up in the total probability wave of the experiment or measurement itself, no observation can take place at all. No probability can ever be realized as actual. Quantum theory has no way to get to “actuality,” absent an observer: QM only predicts the relevant probability distributions; not at any time can its method predict actual outcomes.
Absent the observer, there could never be any improvement in the state of human knowledge at all. Indeed, knowledge has no meaning whatsoever, without a mind to know it. But if all mind is, is an epiphenomena of the brain, then the brain – as a physical system – would have been engulfed in the probability amplitutude of the meta-system just described above, and (presumably) the mind along with it. And along with the mind, the “observer” – thus any possibility of a measurement or observation. Thus any gain of new knowledge -- the by-product of observation/measurement -- is utterly precluded.
Professor, you mentioned that the idea of the universe as a unified whole “is common to all sorts of religions.” This is true, of course. But the idea also appeals to certain scientists – any scientist at all who’s working on a unified field theory, for instance. It seems clear to me that physicist Heinz R. Pagels, for another example, is thinking along the same lines, given the title of his valuable book, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature (Simon and Schuster, 1982) which I just had the pleasure of reading.
Pagels – who gives no evidence of being anything other than a “religious skeptic” in these pages – can say “I think the universe is a message written in code, a cosmic code, and the scientist’s job is to decipher that code.”
Now a message written in code is an encrypted message. Any encrypted message has two parts: the coded message itself, and its decryption key. You need both to read the message. If you have the former without the latter, there is no way to translate it. If you have the latter but not the former, you have nothing to translate. It stands to reason that if science is in the business of deciphering the message, it must do so by first elucidating the decryption key – the laws of the universe. And then we can “read the message.”
Message encryption/decryption sounds like yet another Niels Bohr-style “complementary,” writ large. Still the question goes begging: Who sent the message?
That question is not a proper question for science per se. Of all people, Bohr seems to have understood that perfectly. His quantum epistemology – a consequence of this understanding that is the heart and soul of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory – is an astonishing, rigorous work of extraordinary beauty. But it also implies that what science cannot do needs to be done in some other branch of human intellectual endeavor.
RWP, you said, “What I don't do is theorize ahead of the data.” Well, you certainly can’t do that in the microworld of quantum mechanics. But although you may work in that microworld (??? just guessing), you don’t live there; you live here with the rest of us, in the macroworld of common human experience. I sincerely hope that the “two cultures” of the physical sciences and “the humanities” can once again start talking to each other (assuming anything of what used to be called the humanities still survives today). Pagels writes:
“What divides us is the difference between those who give priority to intuitions and feelings and those who give priority to knowledge and reason – different resources of human life. Both impulses live inside of us; but a fruitful coexistence sometimes breaks down, and the result is an incomplete person.”
Not to mention a divided and increasingly dysfunctional society and culture.
I sense you are a man of faith, RWP, that you have faith in reason and the fundamental intelligibility of the universe. (Me, too!!!) This tension of faith and reason is what transforms human life – individual and social.
Pagel writes of this “tension”: “Our capacity for fulfillment can come only through faith and feelings. But our capacity for survival must come from reason and knowledge.”
Balancing this dynamic tension could become critically important for the survival prospects of the human race and our planet, and even beyond. Pagels has speculated about this. And so have Grandpierre and Kafatos, et. al….
Thanks for listening to me ramble, RWP. I had a lot of fun struggling with this problem. And thanks so much for writing, oh eclectic reader!!! (I easily believe you are that! P.S.; Born comes this week....)
Absent the observer, there could never be any improvement in the state of human knowledge at all. Indeed, knowledge has no meaning whatsoever, without a mind to know it. But if all mind is, is an epiphenomena of the brain, then the brain – as a physical system – would have been engulfed in the probability amplitutude of the meta-system just described above, and (presumably) the mind along with it. And along with the mind, the “observer” – thus any possibility of a measurement or observation. Thus any gain of new knowledge -- the by-product of observation/measurement -- is utterly precluded.
A fine exposition, bb, i.e. ALL of your post #614. You should indulge in these "beach ruminations" more frequently ... ;-}