In line with our seafaring metaphors, images of moored ships and sea anchors spring to mind. ‘Is the article, in the nicest sense, sophisticated “SOFistry”?’ I asked myself in the wee small hours as I wrestled with some of its themes.
Lightning Flashes Over there, he seems to be saying, is some ‘real’ stuff.
Over here is me looking at it. The stuff is there independent of me and was there before I acquired a vocabulary to articulate anything about it. Hence I couldn’t possibly have created it.
So let’s take a bit of stuff, a picture on a page. (Admittedly this one’s got words in it but it could just be a shape.) Look at the figure at the top of the next column quickly for half a second and then cover it.
SoF Magazine No. 26, July 1996 ONCE UPON A A TIME What did you see? The phrase ‘Once upon a time’ of course. Are you sure? Look again. You may have got it wrong the first time. If so, why? No doubt it was because you were expecting it to be the familiar opening statement that you recognised from all those stories you were told on your mother’s knee. Clearly, we bring our own history, expectations and experience to bear when we are observing this tiny bit of ‘reality’. Now you know the trick you’ll get the next one right first time.
PARIS IN THE THE SPRING With a bit of new data we can change our perception and “create” a new version of ‘the world’. Even this very simple illustration teaches us not to take things for granted and I would suggest that we shouldn’t take Chris Gaal’s assertion for granted that ‘the world must have existed and had definite characteristics, independently of language’. It begs so many questions. What is ‘the world’ being referred to? What is a definite characteristic? What is meant by existed? If we stop Chris’s thought experiment before the emergence of people I am inclined to ask can anything be said at that point about the world?
Quantum Clouds of Uncertainty Throughout his article Chris seems to imply that there is clear blue water between humanity — the self — and the world — the ‘real’ physical universe. For example, towards the end of the piece, he states, ‘Any theory of knowledge has to move us from statements about human subjective experience, to statements about the (objective) world.’ I thought that Quantum Theory had removed the distinction between the two and achieved, as it were, a marriage after their historical divorce, creating a number of waves in the process! In the words of Danah Zohar in her book The Quantum Self, quantum physics reveals the wave/particle duality of matter so that ‘at the subatomic level it can be described equally well either as solid particles, like so many minute billiard balls, or as waves, like undulations on the surface of the sea’. The ‘definite structures’ of the universe in Chris’s thought experiment are beginning to look distinctly less solid by the moment.
There is more.
Raining Cats and Elephants Chris writes about elephants. What about cats and in particular, Schrédinger’s cat? Erwin Schrédinger, one of SoF Magazine No. 26, July 1996 the founders of quantum theory, has another thought experiment to offer, using his cat. The cat is put in an opaque box and once inside is unseen. Some radioactive material is put in the box with a fifty-fifty chance of shooting out a decay particle upwards or downwards. If it shoots upwards the particle hits a particle detector which activates a switch which in tum releases lethal poison into the cat’s feeding tray. If the particle shoots downwards another switch releases food and the cat lives.
The quantum cat’s possible aliveness and possible deadness forms a probability wave filling the box. The wave function shows the cat both having eaten the poison and died and having eaten the food and lived. Only when the box is opened and the event observed, will the wave function describing all the possibilities collapse and gel into one fixed reality, revealing whether the cat is definitely alive or dead. Unfortunately, the mathematics of Schrédinger’s wave function equation suggests that the wave function cannot collapse, and nothing can settle the cat’s fate. It is both dead and alive, which contradicts common sense observation when the box is opened.
A more sophisticated experiment shows that a photon has an option of passing through slits in a screen. How the physicist sets up the experiment determines whether the photon’s particle-like nature or its wave-like nature is revealed. In other words the dialogue between physicist and photon has ‘solidified’ one of the many quantum possibilities into a fixed reality. At the atomic level, then, it would appear that solid material objects dissolve into patterns of probabilities and that the actions of the observer affect the outcome. ‘Observers are necessary to bring the world into being’ (Wheeler). It seems, therefore, that it is a participatory universe.
Stormy Weather The significance of the quantum theory approach is that it dramatically challenged the whole basis of the mechanistic world view’s concept of the reality of matter — the notion of solid bodies moving in empty space. In the words of Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics):
At the sub-atomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows ‘tendencies to exist’, and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show ‘tendencies to occur’.
It is these tendencies that are expressed in ‘probability waves’ which describe the probabilities of finding the particles at particular points in space at particular times — the probabilities of interconnections.
Hence the world does not consist of independently existing smallest units but a complex web of relations between the parts of the whole. Moreover, these relations always include the observer in an essential way .:. . and the properties of any atomic object can only be understood in terms of the object’s interaction with the observer. This means that the classical ideal of an objective description of nature is no longer valid. The Cartesian partition between the I and the world, between the observer and the observed, cannot be made when dealing with atomic matter. In atomic physics, we can never talk about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves.
Thus we may conclude that the observer’s consciousness killed the cat (Schrédinger’s) by collapsing the probability wave function.
Derived from this quantum picture consciousness and matter are intimately bound together. If this is an accurate interpretation, mind and body are not separate phenomena and the basic underlying ‘stuff of the universe is just one ‘thing’ with two aspects — the mental and the material. I read from this that human beings were latent at the start of the evolutionary process and are identified with, rather than apart from, the world. People have individuality (‘particle’ feature) and form relationships with others (‘wave’ feature) just as electrons are simultaneously particles and waves. In this quantum sense both are the same and since they stem from the same physical stuff, we are the world and the world is us or as Danah Zohar puts it, ‘... as a quantum self I have a basis for commitment to the whole world of nature and material reality. We are all, basically, stuff of the same substance.’ Hence, we were there at ‘the beginning’. And, as we all know, in the beginning was the word!
Blue Skies On this theme, I am persuaded by the arguments, to the extent that I understand them, in Don Cupitt’s books, Creation out of Nothing and The Last Philosophy, where to use his own metaphor, he offers us, not so much a fountain but a waterfall with a torrent of words leaving some of us splashing about in its wake! I find some of the following highly selective quotations most appealing. They collapse and paraphrase, but I hope not distort, the arguments into the concluding statements most closely related to the current controversy. ‘The world’s all words,’ Don Cupitt writes in Creation out of Nothing. He goes on to say that even sensation only becomes intelligible experience via language. So there is no sense in trying to get outside ‘the world of signs or language’ to the thing-in-itself ... the primal chaos . . . the formless flux of minute events . . . To make this flux habitable we must make it into a world. We have to generate order, meanings, truth, values, narratives . . . There is a world — only it is not the world, but only our world, a cultural product . . . Anti-realism does not say that there is no world at all, but only that we cannot compare our view of the world with the way the world is absolutely, for we have no access to the way things are absolutely’. This is rather reminiscent of the famous Wittgenstein quotation, ‘what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
Then again later in The Last Philosophy Don Cupitt says, ‘Nothing is prior to language . . . the world we see out there is our own objectivity as we have so far developed it.’ It is in this sense that the world is dependent on language that I part company with Chris, and feel that it is time that the remnant of religious realism depicted in the words (!), the ‘sliver of reality’, finally sloped off the scene. 0 SoF Magazine No. 26, July 1996 Patricia Sargent and David Dulley commend THE SLIMMING OF THEOLOGY The Death of the Punishing God heology is 99% prejudice. A prejudiced view is one formed before considering, or in the absence of, reliable evidence. More informally, prejudice means that one is just yielding to one’s emotions and giving the thinking brain a holiday.
Third of three responses under 'Not a Sliver But an Essence', replying to Chris Gaal's article 'Is there room for a sliver of reality?' in SoF Magazine No. 25. Includes several sub-heading asides in the source (e.g. 'Lightning Flashes', 'Once Upon a Time', 'Paris in the Spring', 'Quantum Clouds of Uncertainty', 'Raining Cats and Elephants', 'Stormy Weather', 'Blue Skies') interleaved through the body paragraphs.