Category: English

Newsletter List: Main

Posted on

Experimental Metaphysics

Experimental metaphysics has become viable, and almost nobody is aware of that. But first, what is metaphysics? The first publisher of Aristotle’s writings (the philosopher Andronicus of Rhodes – 1st century BC) literally named the books that followed the books on physics: ‘ta meta ta physics’, meaning ‘ that which comes after the physics books’. Aristotle did not use the term metaphysics himself, but spoke merely of ‘the first philosophy’.

Wikipedia: Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental basic structure of reality. Do not confuse this with the examination of the aspects of reality that are open to our sensory or instrumental observation, that’s what physics does.

The suggestion of this metaphysics icon is that it’s something of the physical brain. It’s not however.
And this is not a befitting image representing metaphysics either.

In other words, Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the deep foundations of the world: the nature of space, time, causation and existence, the foundations of reality itself.

Metaphysics is therefore not about sensory experience, which is ultimately the way every aspect of reality enters our consciousness, but about the basis of reality. Not how it works but what it IS. It should be the mother of all philosophy, but from the 19th century on it became a branch of philosophy that was no longer considered really that important since the hugely successful department of physics was considered the branch of science that would from then on deliver all answers about how the world works and why. Which is something that is still is professed and believed by many. Metaphysics is often relegated to the same dubious department as the occult as can be inferred from the following statement from Nobel laureate for Medical Physiology Charles Richet (1850-1935) where he also points to the hopefull possibility of experimental metaphysics:

Metaphysics is not yet officially recognized as science. But that will change... In Edinburgh I was able to confirm to a hundred physiologists that our five senses are not the only way through which knowledge can be acquired and that part of reality is sometimes in other ways reaches consciousness... Just because a fact is rare doesn't mean it doesn't exist. If something is difficult to investigate, is that a reason not to want to understand it?... The people who have taunted metaphysics as occult science, will be just as ashamed as those who protested vehemently against chemistry because seeking the philosopher's stone would be an illusion... As a principle of investigation, only the starting point of Lavoisier, Claude Bernard and Pasteur should apply: to work experimentally always and everywhere. Let us therefore welcome the new science, which will change the direction of human thinking.

One reason that, despite Richet’s emphatic plea, experimental metaphysics didn’t really take off at the time is that the assumptions about the ground of reality were considered untestable. Physics would not have the necessary resources to do metaphysical tests. At about the time of the turn of the 20th century, however, it was gradually becoming clear that metaphysics was indeed beginning to play the role Richet hoped for. We became able to put our metaphysical assumptions to the test.

Bell experiments and spacetime ideas – experimental metaphysics for a Nobel Prize

The Bell experiments that were carried out at the second half of the past century and into this century, and for which in 2022 a Nobel Prize has been awarded, are in their deepest nature metaphysical experiments. The experiments performed with gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s theory of gravity are also ultimately metaphysical experiments. Measuring and demonstrating gravity waves means that the spacetime fabric – what is it? – is elastic and can carry waves. What is measured there is the effect of these waves on material objects, not the waves themselves, nor the spacetime fabric. If the theory of relativity is correct, and all experiments have confirmed it so far, then causality, that’s cause and effect and its order, is no longer an objective fundamental reality but a consequence of the observer’s individual perspective. The same is true for space and time, they are not as fundamental as we supposed. So, these theories and objective experiments have already clearly a metaphysical tenor. With the Bell experiments quantum physics also starts to offer the opportunity for in-depth metaphysical experiments. That’s the topic I want to discuss here.

The Bell experiments answer a deep question about the nature of reality. The question is whether that reality matches our intuitions. Those intuitions put to the test in these experiments are, to be exact, our inherent assumptions about locality (the assumption that things separated in space cannot influence each other instantaneously) and about realism (that things exist without having to be measured. The Bell experiments have shown already that at least one of those two assumptions is not true. That such an experiment made many physicists uncomfortable is evident from the fact that when John Clauser conceived the idea to setup a Bell experiment, and consulted John Bell about it, the latter asked concerned whether Clauser had a tenured post.

In the meantime, metaphysical experiments are back on the agenda through these questions and experiments and the first performers of these experiments, Clauser, Aspect and Zeilinger, were awarded a joint Nobel Prize in 2022. That is well considered a Nobel Prize for experimental metaphysics.

From left to right, John Clauser, Anton Zeilinger en Alain Aspect – Nobelprize 2022 (experimental meta-)physics © Quantamagazine

Testing alternative realities

Another experiment of this type, published in 2019, has, unfortunately, received little attention. It is a variation on Eugene Wigner’s thought experiment. In that experiment, Wigner’s friend conducts a quantum experiment in which the observation of that friend causes a quantum collapse – a positive or negative polarization of a photon, for example. However, outside the laboratory stands Wigner who has not yet observed what happens in the laboratory. The door is not opened yet. For Wigner, who stands outside, his friend and his experiment are quantum entangled and there is therefore no quantum collapse yet. In Wigner’s reality, the quantum collapse on observation only happens when he opens the door of the laboratory. Wigner’s thought experiment is in itself is already a metaphysical thought experiment about how the universe manifests itself with multiple observers.

A,B: Two seperate Wigner’s friend experiments.
C: Alternative realities tested with two entangled Wigner’s friend experiments.

But this 2018-19 experiment goes a step further than a single Wigner’s friend experiment and tests whether several observers in two entangled Wigner’s Friend experiments always observe the same result. It is going too far here to describe the experiment in detail, but the results of the experiment answers the metaphysical question whether the next three assumptions about reality also all three are true:

  • Locality (no instantenious remote action, mutual effects with maximally the speed of light)
  • Freedom of choice for each experimenter
  • Absoluteness of observed events (everyone always observes the same outcome)

The result of the experiment – provided that we accept that the detectors used here can be considered as observers – is with a great certainty that at least one of these three metaphysical assumptions is not true. The road to metaphysical experiments without an occult label being immediately affixed to it seems open.

If detectors and other instruments can be considered as observers in quantumphysics is a topic for a next blog, but consider this. All our senses can be considered as instruments feeding experience in our consciousness. Instruments are just extensions to our physical senses and their purpose is the same, evoking ultimately the experience of observation in our consciousness. So, every observation has to end in consciousness and is only experienced there. So, it’s not really about what observers are, it’s about experiencing in the end. We always observe the universe through physical instruments, be it your eyes, ears, fingertips or a proton accelerator. Consciousness is required for experience which is always the product of observation.

For those who want to know the ins and outs of experimental metaphysics, I refer them to the Quanta Magazine article ‘Metaphysical Experiments’ Probe Our Hidden Assumptions About Reality’ or watch the Essentia Foundation YouTube movie ‘Experimental metaphysics with first-person perspectives, by Dr. Eric Cavalcanti’.

Or read further on this website:

The consensus problem in quantum physics
Nobel Prize physics for demonstrating non-local quantum entanglement
Posted on

Conscious agents and the emergence of space-time

A proof of reality by reductio ad absurdum

Earlier on this website I wrote already about professor Donald Hoffman – cognitive psychologist – and about his book ‘The Case Against Reality. How evolution hid the truth from our eyes.‘ When reading that book for the first time, a few years ago, I had some objections to the way he came to the counterintuitive conclusion that reality is not what it seems and that our physical senses have not evolved to represent reality. This was because he arrived at his conclusion, by implementing the neo-Darwinist evolution theory of the survival of the DNA of the better fitted carrier thereof. And, as I have argued before, I am not a fan of this materialistic neo-Darwinist theory, although Hoffman’s final conclusion was in line with the conclusions I drew from quantum physics.

Reductio ad absurdum is the best proof there is and also the finest

But I was wrong. What I didn’t realize is that Hoffman shows that the neo-Darwinist hypothesis ultimately, through the application of game theories based on it, evolutionary games, ends up in a logical paradox. By performing a good many computer simulations, evolution games, based on the neo-darwinistic evolution theory, he showed experimentally that the neo-darwinistic hypothesis shoots itself ultimately in the foot. Evolution games, based on the reproduction of the fitter organism for survival, consistently delivered the result that evolution always chooses to adapt our sensory processing in a way that costs the least energy but is effective. A truthful internal representation of reality costs way more than a simple but effective representation that does not have to be truthful.

The delicious juicy apple you observe therefore does not have to be exactly that in reality. If your action – pick it and and eat it – is beneficial for your organism, that’s enough. So it is precisely the case that if neo-darwinism were correct, your image of reality would not. That’s pretty absurd, isn’t it?

Neurons are not the source of consciousness

Hoffman then goes further and says that the image we have formed of physical brains and neurons is also absolutely incorrect. His next step is then to reject the hypothesis that your neurons are the source of your consciousness. It cannot be because the image of material brains and neurons that our physical senses produce cannot correspond to reality. Furthermore, the real hard – and not even approximately solved – question is how physical neurons would produce consciousness. These physical neurons are only just there when we turn our attention to them.

Which is precisely what I conclude from the now well-known observer effect in quantum physics. When we see that the observer, simply by observing, can influence reality – think for instance of the experimentally confirmed changed behavior of the quantum wave if we can know the slit that the electron traverses. That change of the immaterial quantum wave cannot be accomplished by your supposedly physical neurons. Such an assumption would be a fairly absurd one. So Hoffman and I reach the same conclusion, but along different lines.

A network of ‘Conscious Agents’

Hoffman therefore assumes – just like me and many others – that consciousness must be primary. Together with his team he created an already fairly complete mathematical theory, describing a network of interacting consciousness units, Conscious Agents (CAs). His extensive article ‘Objects of consciousness’ of 2014 is easy to find on the internet. In it he shows mathematically, among other things, that several interacting CAs form together a larger and more complex CA. The mathematical description of the simplest CA appears – very surprising – to be identical to the quantum physical description of a free particle. So every conscious organism is a complex CA with several layers of complexity.

Each complex organism is then such a complex CA. Each multicellular organism is made up of billions of cells, where each of them in is a complex CA. And so on. At the very bottom we find particles acting as CAs.

A Virtual Reality game

The interaction of the entire network of interacting complex CAs then ultimately yields spacetime as we experience it. This spacetime is therefore an illusion that is experienced by those complex CAs. Hoffman often uses the virtual reality metaphor of a VR game in which the players present themselves as action figures, named avatars. He often makes the comparison of our senses – not only the eyes – with virtual reality goggles or glasses. What we experience as an object or person is, in that case, not very much different from a set of pixels generated by the VR system at the moment we look there. When we are not looking, those pixels do not have to be generated and are therefore not there.

This also explains the observer related elasticy of space and time as it emerges from special relativity. If space and time are a by a VR system generated experience, we can, in that case, understand that elasticy better.

Note: A pixel is the smallest unit of presentation in an image on a computer screen. Everything you see on a computer screen is made up of pixels.

Pixels – enlarged

What is not observed does not exist

Thus, Hoffmans idea fits seamlessly into the findings of quantum physics that the observed object does not exist before it is observed. The object – the set of pixels – is generated when we focus our attention on it and thus experience it. André Duqum’s interview with Donald Hoffman below – a full two hours – is very interesting and easy to follow because Hoffman explains very patiently. But be advised to take a quiet do-not-disturb moment for viewing the whole interview.

NB: The term ‘Markovian kernel’ is often mentioned in the interview. A Markovian kernel is a mathematical concept used in Hoffman’s CA model. Translate that, for an easy understanding of the concept, into the two-way filter that any communication combination of sense and expression capability actually is. It’s just a highly technical word for what is exchanged and what is suppressed in experiencing and responding.

So, we live in a VR Game. A rather absurd looking conclusion. But that’s no reason to take the game idea not seriously. Perhaps a good reason to just enjoy it without much fear but more in wonder and admiration of the presentations.

Proof That Reality Is An ILLUSION: The Mystery Beyond Space-Time – Donald Hoffman
Posted on

Coherence, decoherence and the observer of the state wave

The state wave is a probability wave

The state wave in quantum physics is the solution of the Schrödinger equation, it is thus a mathematical object. This mathematical object predicts the probability of an object, to which that state wave relates, to be found at a given time and location when doing a measurement. Because it is a wave, its medium, whatever that is, should be coherent. The coherence of this state wave plays an important role in quantum physics. When a measurement takes place, the state wave ends abruptly and the object is observed. The end of that wave is often called the decoherence of the state wave. An understanding of what is meant by coherence and decoherence is therefore important for a better understanding of quantum physics.

A coherent phenomenon

In order to exhibit wave behavior, a form of cohesion of the medium is required plus a force that strives for the middle position. In water, this cohesion results from the direct physical connection and attraction of the water molecules. It is gravity that returns the medium to the middle position, the rest position of the water surface. Gravity thus ensures the return to the middle position of the wave. The physical connection, the coherence, of the water molecules ensures that the movement is propagated in the medium.

Surface wave in a liquid. The liquid particles perform a circular movement. So there is no liquid transported by the wave in the direction of the wave.

With a sound wave in air, the air pressure is the force that strives for the middle position. This ambient pressure ensures a return to the middle position. In the middle position, the pressure is therefore equal to the ambient pressure. The coherence of the medium transporting sound waves in air stems from the continuous collision of air molecules, through which they constantly exchange their energy. A sound wave is therefore a coherent phenomenon. This means that the air provides coherence, just like with a liquid.

No air molecules are transported in a sound wave, only areas of high and low pressure. Switching on the sound system does not lower the pressure in the room by transporting air molecules out of the room.
© ar.inspiredpencil.com

With electromagnetic waves, EM waves, such as light, the coherence is ensured by the fact that a changing magnetic field also causes a changing electric field. And vice versa. These changes are therefore closely related and evoke each other. The force that makes the EM wave return to the middle position is a bit more difficult. Electric and magnetic fields tend to extinguish gradually when there is no electrical or magnetic charge nearby. Only their mutual dynamics keep them moving. The force to the middle position is therefore a result of the tendency of an oscillating field to lose its energy. This is again a result of the tendency of an electric or magnetic field to spread in space at the speed of light in all directions, so that the local strength must quickly decrease. That an electric or magnetic field spreads in space in this way is a fundamental but also an unexplained phenomenon. We still don’t even know what it is. We only know very well how it behaves.

EM wave. The electric (E) and the magnetic (B) field forces are perpendicular to each other. The change in electric field strength causes a change in magnetic field strength .. and vice versa. This only functions well if the wave moves at the speed of light.

The quantum state wave and the observer

The quantum physical state wave is somewhat more difficult. As far as we can judge and know, it is a wave of potential, of possible observations, in which the probabilities of position and movement, more exactly the probabilities of showing these properties when measured, alternate. This is thus a wave of potential. Potential is clearly immaterial. The object – before its measurement – is not. Position and movement do conflict with each other. If the position changes then that is clearly movement. As soon as there is movement, the position becomes more variable, so it becomes more uncertain. But as soon as the position is more certain, the movement decreases.

In short, standstill is the absence of movement, movement is the absence of standstill. That is therefore also a form of coherence between these two phenomena, position and movement, in which wanting to know position and/or movement is the driving force. In this wanting to know, we immediately, hopefully, recognize the observer’s influence on his observation, which is just having an experience, and perhaps understand a bit more of the non-material nature of the state wave.

Yin and Yang. Standstill is the absence of movement, movement is the absence of standstill

Loss of coherence?

So, can you still speak of a collapse? Can something that is not material, so is not really there in the sense that we are assigning to the idea of materiality, collapse? We never see such a sudden loss of cohesion in all the waves that we can observe unless we take very special measures. Such as the sudden removal of the medium in which the wave propagates. There is then no longer any sound propagating in that vacuum. In an analogous way would a measurement then suddenly annihilate the medium in which the state wave propagates. The appearance of the measured object from nothing is even more mysterious.

Citing decoherence as a cause of the loss of coherence that is the end of the state wave is a tautological trick. Using the description of the event, the name we give it, as a logical explanation is a tautology. It rains because it rains. The wave disappears because the wave disappears. Decoherence is just a label and very probably a misnomer.

An immaterial wave of potential

Now back to the, in my opinion most likely, cause of the transition from the state wave, that wave of potential, to the observed object. This, the transition from potential into realization, happens in our experience, which is the becoming aware of what is observed. It is here that we see the influence of the observer. This is not to say that the awareness of the act of observing something, inexorable means that the observed objects then materially concrete exist. Just think of what we observe in our dreams.

Why are we convinced that the quantum state wave exists when we cannot observe it? That’s because of all these double-slit experiments, the result of which can only be explained as the result of a wave phenomenon. The overwhelming evidence of it.

I have said already a lot about the influence of the observer on what is observed elsewhere. That is something that Einstein saw very early on already as a consequence of quantum mechanics and he did not like it at all. So, he used the predicted effect, the observation of the slit influencing the outcome of the experiment, which is the dissappearance of the fringes, therefore as an argument for his deep suspicion that quantum mechanics could not be a complete theory. Complete in the sense that its predictions were in all circumstances correct. But he was proved right in a way by various experiments that indeed demonstrated the observer effect he had predicted. Quantum mechanics was therefore right in its predictions. Too bad for Einstein.

I refer those who still have doubts about the reality of the observer effect to this fascinating interview with Professor Donald Hoffman below who makes a very convincing argument for the case of primary consciousness. He aasumes a network of a multitude of conscious agents. For an article by him on this, just google for ‘Objects of Consciousness’ or click here for the pdf.

Posted on

Entangled Neurons?

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is Btub.jpg
Microtubuli in a fixated cel

If you look closely, quantum entanglement can be found almost everywhere. Quantum entanglement says that objects, however small or big, that were once in contact with each other, share a common state wave and that the observation of one of those objects has an immediate effect on the state wave of the other objects. Can we encounter quantum entanglement in everyday life? Good question. I think so.

Microchimerism in mothers

In the Scientific American of 2013, I come across an article that says that the unborn child’s cells can enter the mother’s body through the placenta to live there for many years. There is no immune response by the mother’s body to this. The phenomenon has been given the name microchimerism. The SA article describes in detail how neuronal brain cells can enter the mother’s brain and then live on for decades. However, the researchers are in the dark about the biological reason for this phenomenon.

‘In this new study, scientists observed that microchimeric cells are not only found circulating in the blood, they are also embedded in the brain. They examined the brains of deceased women for the presence of cells containing the male “Y” chromosome. They found such cells in more than 60 percent of the brains and in multiple brain regions. Since Alzheimer’s disease is more common in women who have had multiple pregnancies, they suspected that the number of fetal cells would be greater in women with AD compared to those who had no evidence for neurological disease. The results were precisely the opposite: there were fewer fetal-derived cells in women with Alzheimer’s. The reasons are unclear.’

White blood cells love playboy girls

Then I jump to an at first sight unrelated topic. I will discuss therefore briefly the controversial research of Cleve Backster, a top specialist in the use of the polygraph. In a playful mood, Backster hooked a polygraph up to a plant to see if the polygraph would show anything when he watered the plant. This gave no discernible response. But when he considered burning a leaf of the plant with his lighter, the polygraph, and therefore the plant, responded violently. His interest was immediately piqued and he continued to do polygraph experiments with all kinds of living organisms throughout his further career. In one of his later experiments, he collected white blood cells from a subject’s mouth, and hooked these somehow up to the polygraph. The subject then leafs – in the meantime – through a Playboy lying on the table next to him and hits on the centre fold picturing Bo Derek. The polygraph responded immediately with a maximum swing of the writing stylus. Apparently the white blood cells , though not physically linked to the subject’s body, were still linked to the subject emotions!

Polygraph result showing the reaction of white blood cells, taken from the subjects’ mouth, to the subject viewing the Playboy Bo Derek centrefold. From ‘The secret life of Plants’.

This is in my opinion entanglement in action.

Entangled living cells

When I connect those two stories – neural cells of their children in mother brains and white blood cells that respond to an emotional event that takes place in the organism they have come from –, then the reason for the microchimerism in mother brains should become clear. If there is a reaction to an alarming situation in the child’s brain, the “entangled” neurons in the mother brain will also fire. The mother receives thus a signal that something serious is going on with her child and that she must intervene quickly. The reports about such maternal instinctive red flag actions are countless. You may still remember stories by your own mother.

Quantum entanglement and information transfer

Now I have spoken here about entangled neurons that apparently can fire in response to each other. That is actually information transfer through quantum entanglement. That’s something Einstein protested vehemently as it would violate his laws of relativity. ‘Spooky Action at a Distance‘. Quantum entanglement has been demonstrated convincingly and repeatedly by many Bell experiments, however, and is now widely accepted. It is even an essential feature used in quantum computing. The Bell experimenters have even been awarded a Nobel Prize. However, quantum physicists explicitly state that quantum entanglement cannot be used for data transfer because the collapse of the quantum state by a measurement (the quantum collapse) is fundamentally unpredictable. We can’t influence the unpredictable outcome of the measurement on the entangled objects.

Descartes again?

Drawing by Descartes how the immaterial mind connects to the pineal gland

The quantum observer effect has also been investigated in parapsychological experiments. The question there was whether people can influence the results of a quantum experiment. The outcome in many of these experiments is affirmative, often with a significance that is even higher than the confirmation of the existence of the Higgs particle. So, this could answer the question that has been asked since Descartes: can an immaterial mind influence matter – the body – and vice versa. Such an influence however goes against generally accepted scientific dogmas, notably the conservation laws of energy. A reason for many to reject Cartesian dualism.

But if we were to allow that possibility, interesting new perspectives would open up in the study of consciousness. Move your index finger and then wonder how it is possible that this movement is created by your thought. The classic orthodox answer to that question is the computer metaphor that is used by neuroscientists. According to them, your brain is an extremely complex advanced parallel processing computer that also generates your consciousness and thus your thoughts. So also the nerve signal to your index finger. Problem solved. Oh yeah, really?

The observer effect has been demonstrated

However, this vision of neuroscience is strongly contradicted by the observer effect in quantum physics. Matter does not exist prior to observation. This has been confirmed by multiple Bell type and Delayed Choice experiments. These confirm that an observation is required for the materialization of matter in a measurement. Since the observer is needed for the manifestation of matter, it is unlikely that matter will produce conscious observers and then manifest itself recursively.

If we can recognize the possibility that the observing mind can also influence the reduction of the state wave – the quantum collapse – then perhaps we can apply the Orchestrated Objective Reduction hypothesis of Penrose and Hameroff where consciousness is a product of the quantum collapse in microtubules (microscopic structures in living cells) in our neurons, but then in the reversed direction. Consciousness is then able, through the influence of the quantum collapse in these microtubules, to control the firing or the not firing of the neuron.

Thus moves my thought my index finger. And mothers are warned that their child is in danger. Magnificent.

Posted on

Consciousness, the next dimension?

Consciousness is becoming a hot topic in the media

In the quantum physics and awareness courses that I give regularly, I show my audience that primary consciousness holds the best cards for an explanation of the ‘weird’ effects in quantum physics, like the observer effect and entanglement. No hard evidence, of course, but we will never get that in our laboratories. Hard evidence is only applicable for mathematical theorems. We also have no hard evidence for the Big Bang and yet it seems generally accepted as an acceptable scientific explanation for the universe we are currently observing. It suits the current paradigm.

That many people just refuse to even consider primary consciousness was showed excellently by a student who argued on the subject of the near-death experience (NDE) with me on the last day of the course. I support the view that the NDE shows that the mind survives death. Any reported NDE can be explained excellently with the assumption of primary consciousness. The same assumption explains also any quantum phenomenon, like the observer effect, very well. So, it explains effects in entirely different domains, which makes the idea of primary consciousness much stronger. Primary means that consciousness cannot be a product of that bundle of neurons in your skull. Well, according to this student, it was proven sufficiently that the NDE would be a neurological phenomenon. He could, very understandable, not provide the evidence so readily, but nevertheless he remained adamant. In the end, we agreed we disagreed friendly. In any case, the phenomenon of consciousness creates a lot of discussion these days. Even in the regular media appear nowadays articles on consciousness.

So, consciousness seems to enter these days into the spotlights. Especially in combination with AI. If physical neurons can become aware, transistors probably can too. So, what if such a collection of transistors becomes conscious, will we have then created a slave? A conscious aware slave who will eventually rebel against his masters? Not my idea, nor my fear.

The last guest in a podcast series on consciousness broadcasted by the NRC, one of the more important and rather science oriented Dutch papers, was cognitive neuroscientist Jacob Jolij, a fervent reseacher of consciousness. After having abandoned the idea of the neural source of consciousness, he brought his most recent idea forward in the podcast that consciousness is just another dimension. We have three dimensions of space and one for time. Consciousness should, according to him, be the next dimension. As far as I am concerned, this proposal is still the idea of a material thinker. I will explain this further.

What is consciousness actually? A tantalizing search from neurobiology to parapsychology. Dutch edition only.

So, at the present stage of his research, Jacob Jolij has arrived at the conclusion that consciousness is not a product of your neurons – I agree totally there – but that it is probably a dimension such as time and space. I disagree there. All things considered, that is of course far from being an explanation. You will not begin to understand consciousness more by putting a new label on it. It seems even a step back to Descartes’ ‘Res Cogitans’. According to Descartes there exists matter – in the familiar three dimensions – and there exists consciousness, two substances that cannot be traced back to each other. One is physical, the other is definitely not. They exist in fundamentally different domains. Such an idea of separate domains is plain dualism. The main objection to Descartes’ idea is that the interaction between those two domains (dimensions?) cannot be explained physically. For physical interaction you need the transportation of energy, which is in the same domain as matter. So, interaction between the two domains is impossible. This objection is based on the – unproven, rather dogmatic – assumption that every physical action always has a physical cause. Forget the Big Bang for a moment.

Dimension as label for unexplained phenomena

As far as Jacob Jolij is concerned, the question of consciousness is then solved with the word dimension, satisfying because consciousness becomes – seen that way – an element of the physical world, just as time and space are. Then perhaps the interaction between matter and energy on the one hand and non-material consciousness can become understandable. This solution to the hard problem of consciousness reminds me somewhat of the ether, the element that was supposed to act as a transporting medium for electromagnetic waves because waves as we know them need a transporting and coherent medium. The ether was already in the 19th century proved to be unsustainable.

So, it is actually a play of words that is done here. Replace Descartes’ ‘Res Cogitans’ with a word from the conceptual framework of physics and you seem to have found an explanation. Watch your way of thinking carefully! You are avoiding acknowledging the mystery.

Are dimensions fundamental?

I would also like to point out that time is not a fundamental dimension of nature. Einstein already showed that clock time also depends on the observer’s situation. Space too, because space and time are one weave. What is experienced as time for one observer can be experienced as space by another. In quantum physics, time and space appear in the becoming aware of an observation of the appearance of a material object. That’s the so-called quantum collapse, the reduction of the quantum wave happening on our observation. The collapse is the name physicists use for the disappearance of the non-material quantum wave and the simultaneous appearance of the object upon observation. The object is manifested including its history, which is therefore also retroactively recorded with the act of observation, and thus becomes ‘true’. Before that, the object did not exist materially, there was only an intangible wave of potentiality. This is the so-called observer effect. An effect that caused and still causes headaches for a lot of materialistic thinking physicists, which is reflected in rather unsatisfactory and vague explanations of the quantum collapse in – in a lot of other ways excellent – books on quantum physics.

Let’s not make it harder than it is.

A dimension is not some fundamental physical element, it is a concept, something that therefore belongs in the same category as a thought. As a result, a dimension is not something that contains the mind, it is clearly the other way around. Attaching the label dimension to the mind doesn’t add anything to our understanding. It obfuscates only the mystery.

Posted on

The Laws of the Universe

Why does nature obey mathematical formulas?

Galilei investigates the fall movement. His assistant counts his heartbeats to measure the time the rolling ball needs to pass the markings.

Since Galileo Galilei we have known the idea of the laws of nature. A nature that neatly adheres to exact mathematical formulations. These laws describe the supposed immutable mandatory rules that nature has to adhere to. Since Galilei it has proved possible to discover the mathematical descriptions of those laws. It has become the task of the physicist to find them so that we can predict the behavior of the universe with increasing precision. And yes, we are only too happy to predict the future. Alas, quantum physics has thrown there a spanner in the wheels, but the consolation is that the future of large objects can still be predicted very well, the bigger the more precise, but in the small we lose that possibility.

A small selection of those ‘laws’ that we have ‘discovered’ since Galilei:

  • Newton’s first law: the law of inertia: An object on which no resulting force acts stays at rest or moves in a straight line, and at a constant speed.
  • Newton’s third law: Action and reaction are of the same magnitude and opposite.
  • Conservation law of energy and mass: the amount of mass (plus energy) in the universe is constant. No new mass is created and no mass disappears. Mass is solidified energy.
  • Gravitational relativity time dilation Law: time slows down in a gravitational field. The greater the gravity, the slower the clock is ticking.
  • The second law of thermodynamics: the entropy of a closed system can only decrease. This means in simple words that the coherence of the parts of that system, because it is closed, necessarily eventually dissolves into chaos.
  • Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: The greater the precision with which the location of an object can be determined, the smaller the precision with which we can determine the speed. And vice versa.
  • Quantum ‘Law’: The location and speed of an object in time can be described as a wave of possibilities. This is the state wave. The state wave extends in time and space without limits. It is a wave of potential. The intensity of that wave at a certain location and time indicates the magnitude of the probability that we will find the object when observing at that location and time. This is not yet accepted as a law actually, but it is an extremely accurate interpretation of the meaning of the solution of the Schrödinger equation. Many experiments have confirmed that the object has no speed and location before its observation. It therefore cannot be said to exist before its observation.

All these laws – and more – are discovered by humanity in the last centuries and are all laid down in mathematical formulations. Nature’s behavior can be described apparently very well with mathematical formulas. Many prominent physicists have already expressed surprise and wonder at this willingness of nature. But the more common opinion is that nature should obey to these laws anytime, anywhere. Basta. That opinion is the source of the following statement by Pierre-Simon Laplace (1814):

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. 

An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom.
For such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes.

That everything would be predictable – albeit in principle – meant not only the end of chance and of free will, but also that Laplace’s demon is in fact powerless. He knows everything but has to watch the course of events idly. You would almost feel sorry for him. Laplace’s statement is from before the introduction of quantum physics. A physics theory that posits the unpredictability of nature on an atomic scale as a fundamental property of nature. But Laplace still has a major influence on our ideas of reality today

That the mathematical formulations we have found since Galilei have been promoted to laws illustrates the human need for certainties. If something happens often enough, we declare it a certainty. Just like that turkey that gets fresh food every day from the farmer’s wife, which he could declare then a law – till his surprise at Christmas. Rupert Sheldrake also throws the bat into the henhouse in the presentation below by stating that the so-called natural laws are probably just habits of nature.

Even God would better stick to the laws of nature

What is the place of God in this? For the God who has been presented to us by most religions, that does not seem very different from that of that poor demon. The big difference is that God can intervene. Which means he’s overruling then the laws of the universe at his whim. Something we would rather not have, as that makes us powerless. We would rather have a trustworthy God that sticks to his laws. We would then at least have the (false) certainty of the predictable results of our actions, even when we are facing an almighty entity, right?

The past is created and fixed by the observation in the NOW

In the delayed choice experiments, which I also discuss in detail elsewhere on this website, it has been demonstrated that what happened in the past – history – is created and recorded only at the time of observation – NOW. Also have a look at my ‘Schrödinger stopwatch in a closed box’ thought experiment. That is easier to understand and says essentially the same thing. The past is recorded upon observation in accordance with the knowledge that is available to us at that time. Before that observation, that past did not exist. Past is in fact just memory.

That is the inescapable conclusion of the delayed choice experiments I discuss elsewhere. If we can have knowledge of the slit through which the photon passes in the double slit experiment, the state wave that describes that photon will only pass through one slit. The probability that the photon was in the other slit is zero. Even if that information only arrives in our awareness later. This apparent retro-causality follows inescapably from the results of the delayed choice experiments. It cannot, of course, happen that this outcome may conflict with information that surfaced at a later time. That would incur a real change of the already recorded past and therefore mean real retro-causality. That existing but unseen information still influences the outcome of an experiment is an even more stunning conclusion. It means that the universe must therefore be aware of existing but still unobserved information! This is indeed congruent with the law of conservation of information that quantum physicists have discovered.

The result of observing the photons as they are passing the double slit. As soon as the slits are observed in order to catch passing photons, the interference pattern disappears. There is only a single wave left for each photon. With many photons, a single diifuse spot is created in the middle behind the slits.

Incidentally, creating the past by observing also explains the apparent retrocausality that occurred in the parapsychological experiments of Helmut Schmidt and Marilyn Schlitz that I describe extensively in two previous blogs (here and here).

An intelligent and intentional operating universe

In other words, the universe makes everything – in retrospect – happen, matching the expectations we have of it, based on available information, although that information is not yet known to us. As far as I am concerned, that is enormously impressive intelligent behavior of the universe. The Universe is therefore very probably aware of our current knowledge plus the existing knowledge that we are not yet aware of – but that will in the future be at our disposal – and finally of our expectations we have on the basis of what we know. The Universe then ensures that the observed events, our experiences, correspond to that knowledge plus our expectations based on that knowledge and on previous experiences.

That’s Hollywood studio’s on steriods over glassfiber – no, it’s infinitely more than that.

Even when the knowledge where the Universe is aware of, is not in our own awareness yet but, for instance, waiting in a drawer, on a yet to be developed photonegative or on a hard drive in a computer, it will be taken into account.

The law of conservation of information

And so we have arrived at a law that was not mentioned in the list at the top this blog. A law discovered by quantum physicists during the last century and that they take as seriously as the other conservation laws: The total amount of information of a closed system is constant. Physicists have discovered that information is a physical reality and must therefore comply with the other conservation laws. In order to use that law in their calculations they express the information of a system in groups of zeros and ones, bits and bytes. That black holes seem to destroy information runs contrary to this conservation law which is at the moment still an issue in physics.

Translate what these physicists understand by their concept of information into available knowledge, the knowledge we can gain about the system if we investigate it. But now I hope you start to suspect that information conservation is not a real law, some script that the universe has to obey following cause and effect blindly. On the contrary, it is very active to ensure that the total knowledge – including still unobserved but somehow existing knowledge – matches precisely what is experienced.

So now becomes clear, I hope, that the laws of nature that we experience are the result of intelligent and intentional behavior of The Universe / God / Source / The One. This means that The Universe monitors and controls everything that happens in the visible and invisible universe down to the smallest detail, in order that what is experienced by us or by any intelligence corresponds to the expectations and knowledge of every living being in that universe. And I think that means that if we adjust our expectations, there will very probably be listened.

It’s time to work on our expectations

For many, right now, our expectations are those that arise from the image of a mind-bogglingly large but completely indifferent universe, in which we have accidentally ended up. On that basis, we will have to make the most of it in that one single life that we have, whereby that ‘best’ is strongly limited by those supreme and inflexible laws of nature. It is therefore high time that we adjust our expectations. I strongly suspect on the basis of the all-knowing, intentional, and attentive character of the universe that we will be listened to.

Each observer is a different perspective of ánd on the universe

And what are we, those observers of the Universe then? That could well be the universe itself divided into a myriad of observers. I think that the simultaneity of all those observations is no problem for such an Universe. After all, it creates time itself as I argue in Schrödinger’s stopwatch. For comparison: The Unix operating system for computers has no problem with simultaneity because of the enormous speed of the processor, if I can make an irreverent comparison with a computer operating system. Each observer is then a unique individual perspective of the universe on itself, a conscious individual peephole to itself.

That is also the solution to the consensus problem in quantum physics that prompted Eugene Wigner – Nobel Prize winner in physics – to abandon his initial belief that it is consciousness that plays a role in the reduction of the state wave – the quantum collapse. He confused his own awareness with the consciousness of the universe.

Miracles happen, Every day, Everywhere you look.

It is actually abundantly clear that the laws of nature are regularly violated. That’s what we, those little peepholes, call miracles. They have been described and recorded so often and by several witnesses that it is time for us to ‘believe’ more in The Universe / God / Source / The One than in those unchanging indifferent laws of nature.

By believing, however, I do not mean that critical thinking should be suspended, on the contrary.

A warning should be given here, do not confuse expectations with desire. This is what happens when people try to materialize a shining new car by desiring and visualizing the outcome.
Posted on

Quantum Physics and PSI

Quantum physics and psi may sound like a strange combination at first hearing. But on closer inspection, the connection is even obvious, however in an indirect way. The quantum collapse, the collapse of the intangible state wave and the manifestation of the object upon observation, is an experimentally confirmed fact. However, as long as you refuse to give up the material vision of the world – that there is only matter and energy and nothing more – you will not be able to understand the world as quantum physics reveals to us. You can, probably, perform mathematical calculations, and with great predictive success, but that is not the same as understanding.

“What I am going to tell you about is what we teach our physics students in the third or fourth year of graduate school…
It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it.
You see, my physics students don’t understand it…
That is because I don’t understand it.
Nobody does.”  

Richard Feynman in a lecture on quantum physics.

Science fiction as a metaphor and prediction

However, if we are willing to accept that the world is showing itself to us because we observe it and that we are therefore an intrinsic and necessary part of the world, not only quantum physics becomes understandable, but also psi because in that vision the world is primarily mental. Above that, quantum entanglement tells us also that everything is connected. It would perhaps be better to avoid the word connected because that implies separation, even when that is a separation in which everything is connected. The world is ultimately one. Even a quantum physicist like Heinrich Päs eventually comes to that conclusion in his book The One. I wrote about his book in a previous blog. Think also of David Bohm’s Implicit Order, which is only another name for the single source from which everything, the explicit order, unfolds.

In this way, when the mind is needed for material manifestation and thus precedes matter as it presents itself to us in place and time, psi becomes a very acceptable and even predictable possibility. If we do create the world by observation, it is very understandable that we also influence it with intention. Numerous experiments, where quantum generators are influenced by intention, have shown that psi is a real effect. Knowing that we also create time through observation, the idea of viewing in the future, something that belongs to the psi phenomena, won’t be very surprising. The quantum wave, as it follows from the Schrödinger equation, extends endless into the future without bounds. Its end, the quantum collapse, is the result of observation, an action that cannot be captured in the equation. This means that the future cannot be fixed since there are many observers. So viewing the future clairvoyantly is merely looking at a possible future, at something that will happen if we don’t take action to prevent it.

The main character - the hero of the story - Jason dinAlt, has a psychic gift with which he provides for his somewhat irregular but profitable existence by significantly enhancing his chances of winning in casinos. He becomes involuntarily  involved in the struggle for existence waged in a human mining colony on the planet Pyrrus. He wins a fortune in a big casino on an urgent assignment, almost  on the point of their gun, for a group of settlers from the planet Pyrrus. In itself an exciting scene that would do well in a Hollywood movie. The settlers have a great need for money to continue their deadly struggle with the planet. That battle is one against a nature that attacks the settlers with claw and teeth. Going out on the streets of the only settlement is already extremely dangerous and a sure death for the unprepared. The flora and fauna are lightning fast and extremely deadly. Children are already in kindergarten trained violently in survival tactics. Jason is ashamed to have a toddler as a protector and instructor because that's vital for his street survival.
Jason, meanwhile, learns that there are also descendants of runaway settlers who, without advanced technology, succeed in surviving and seem even to be thriving in that hostile nature. The relationship between the settlers and the runaways is not cordial, on the contrary. He makes contact with these runaways by actually making a narrow escape from the settlement. Landed outside the settlement, he notices that all nature on Pyrrus is psychic and that all this psychic "energy" is directed against the small settlement. In fact, the planet is working very hard to remove a persistent irritant from its surface. This psychic energy is apparently able to produce increasingly hostile mutations in the flora and fauna in an asthonishing rate. He finds that the settlers once evoked that reaction of the planet through destructive behavior towards the native flora and fauna, the runaways tell him this. Jason initiates contact between the settlers in the settlement and the hated runaways. The planet is appeased when man shows respect for nature. The settlers and the runawayse are reconciled. All's well that ends well.

You can find many examples where science fiction made a prediction that came true or very near to it. Is that perhaps also the case in Death Planet? Well, it is becoming increasingly recognized that mutations are not the result of just chance. They are intelligent adaptations to challenging circumstances. Is psi perhaps involved in evolution? Secondly, are you not seriously reminded by this story of the direction in which humanity is going on earth? I am. Earth is starting to protest against our presence. Deadly viruses, earth quakes, hurricanes, floods and more. Harrison apparently saw it coming in 1960. Psi and science fiction are a good combination. A pretty good one. The warning is that we have to make peace with and show respect for nature, else …

By the way, my new book 'Quantum Physics & the Mind, a Crash Course' is out.
Click on the image for more information
Posted on

Yin and Yang

Observation causes the manifestation, 
manifestation causes the observation.

The first part is the message of quantum physics, the second part is so obvious that we tend not to see the connection. But there is a straight connection between the two. Both seem opposites and implicate and initiate each other. It’s very much like the Yin-Yang symbol for simultaneous unity and duality. Yin and Yang are not real opposites but complementary and shape reality, just as observation and manifestation do.

We experience the events in the world as something that happens to us, but the truth is deeper, we are the author of our own story. But we are so absorbed in our story that we have forgotten our authorship.

The experience of a thought is the thinking of that thought. Do you see the obvious parallel to the observer effect? Think about that. Isn’t everything we experience a thought?

Which means that the moment you really control your thoughts, you have your own story also in hand. That is essentially what you are looking to achieve with meditation.

Hence our fascination with stories, such as in a book, a film, a play. We are the storyteller and the listener at the same time. Even dreams are actually stories that we create ourselves without realizing that we create them. The moment we realize that we dream, that it is ourselves who are creating the dream, we dream lucidly.

Isn’t the transition in dying something like it? In the communications about life after death that come to us through mediums and shamans, life after death is very similar to a transition from an ordinary to a lucid dream.

The Realities of Heaven: Fifty Spirits Describe Your Future Home.
by Miles Allen.

Asking for the meaning of existence is asking about the meaning of listening to stories, of the meaning of creating stories, of going to the cinema, of visiting a stage performance, of listening to music, of reading or writing a book. Of gathering wisdom.

This is the deeper message of quantum physics. Things, matter, are stories that we tell. That’s all folks.

Posted on

Retrocausality or Retro-creativity?

Rereading the excellent book ‘The Holographic Universe’ by Michael Talbot – originally published in 1991 and still a splendid and well-documented overview of scientifically based insights on the nature of reality – a passage in the chapter ‘Time out of Mind’ resonated with my idea that we not only do create matter by observing but also do create time. Read also my post ‘Schrödingers Stopwatch‘ on this site why I think that is so. Therefore, try to understand really what Talbot describes and what it implies. Talbot writes there:

"At the 1988 Annual Covention of the Parapsychological Association, Helmut Schmidt and Marilyn Schlitz announced that several experiments they had conducted that mind may be able to alter the past as well."

What had Schmidt and Schlitz found to justify their remarkable statement? Well, in one of their experiments, they had produced 1000 different sound tracks through a random computer process and copied these sound tracks onto 1000 empty audio cassettes. Each sound track consisted of a series of audio clips, each clip differing in duration and character. Half of these audio clips were producing tones that were pleasant to the ear, the other half were producing uncomfortable raw noise. The computer selection program randomly chose clips from a database of 100 different clips, 50 of them producing pleasant tones, 50 of them just unpleasant noise.

Important: The selection process was a 100% random process, and the duration of each clip was also the result of a random process, so the expectation is roughly a fifty-fifty distribution of pleasant/unpleasant clips, not only in their number but also in the length of each clip.

These 1000 cassettes – containing the copies of the prepared soundtracks – were then sent by mail to volunteers. These were instructed, while listening to the cassette, to try with their minds to lengthen the duration of the pleasant clips and to shorten the duration of the unpleasant ones. The original 1000 soundtracks were still residing – unlistened to – in the laboratory of Schmidt and Schlitz.

When the subjects had finished listening to the tape, they informed Schmidt and Schlitz, who then examined the original sound track, that still resided in their laboratory. They found that the original sound tracks, after the subjects had listened to the copies, contained significantly more pleasant tones than unpleasant noise. Their conclusion was that the subjects had influenced the production process and thus had changed the past. Talbot joins their view:

"In other words, it appeared that the subjects had psychokinetically reached back through time and had an effect on the randomized process from which their prerecorded cassettes had been made."

Talbot thus also interprets this – the influence of the minds of the subjects on the randomly chosen length and type of sound clips from a database with 50/50 divided pleasant and unpleasant sound types – as a real retrocausal effect, a psychokinetic backwards action in time, thus changing the past. However, I am here of a different opinion, one that has a lot to do with the non-locality in space and time of quantum entanglement.

It’s not found in the description in Talbot’s book if the random generation of the compilation of sound clips was controlled by a QRNG, but it is very likely that it was given Schmidt’s other experiments. I’m assuming such for the moment.

Quantum entanglement applies also to macro objects

Nothing in quantum physics dictates that entanglement applies only to elementary particles. Most quantum physicists accept the possibility of entangling macro objects.

When generating the sound tracks, the QRNG and the sound tracks became entangled. Most quantum physicists will agree to that. Copying the generated sound tracks on the cassettes created more entanglement, the contents of the cassettes became also entangled with the QRNG. What was recorded and copied onto the cassette had not been observed yet. The contents of the cassettes – the magnetization of the iron particles – were therefore still a non-collapsed quantum state wave. However, the physical material of the cassettes, the cassette including the recording tape, was visually observable, so the observable part of it was material. The cassettes were then unlistened to – their content not observed, so still entangled with the QRNG – sent to the subjects. So the entanglement of QRNG, soundtrack, ánd copy thereof, now stretched considerably over time and place.

It was only when listening that the entangled quantum state wave – which contained not only the probabilities of the magnetization of the iron particles on the cassette but also the probabilities of the electronic zeros and ones generated by the QRNG – collapsed in its entirety in time and space. Only then – through the observation by the subject – did the entire production history of the contents of the audiocassette along with its contents become history as an experienced reality. So, the full history was created by listening to the contents of the tape.

So the past was not really altered, that would be true retrocausality, but the past was created at the moment of listening – observation – by a conscious person. Finally, if Schmidt and Schlitz didn’t use a QRNG in their experiment, but some other not-quantum based device, then this only has even greater implications for our ideas about quantum entanglement.

Feeling the future

Finally, this reminds me also of the more recent experiments conducted by Daryl Bem in 2011. He also noticed an effect, where the past seems to be altered by an action in the present. Studying the answers after the test, had a measurable positive effect on the test results. Indeed, the improved test results are clearly already in the past. But in my opinion it is not the already fixed past that is altered. It’s more comprehensible to consider it as an action in the present that is influenced by an action in the future. This action in the future is already residing as a potential in the outside time and place existing entangled quantum state wave. The future exists already in some quantum state, it is however not fixed. Which explains why prophetic dreams do not always come true.

Posted on

The One

The ultimate ground of the world.

Some physicists are beginning to realize that quantum physics has much more to say about the world than that quantum mechanics is an unparalleled successful predictor of physical phenomena. The book ‘The One‘ by Heinrich Päs, professor of theoretical physics at TU Dortmund, is a very good example of this changing attitude. He concludes that quantum physics can only be fully understood if we accept the existence of a quantum universe – already ages ago described by many philosophers as The One – as the ground of the world we observe.

According to Päs, this quantum universe is the – immaterial yet real – version of Everett’s multiverse, but metaphysical instead of physically material. Päs states that the image presented to the public of endlessly splitting material universes is wrong, brought into the world by opponents of Everett’s idea. All these possible universes exist certainly, however as state waves that together, by their respective superpositions, form one single state wave, where all their oscillations cancel each other out. This composite superpositioned state wave of all possible universes together is The One, the unmoving immaterial ground of everything, where space, time and matter do not exist any more, not even as thought, but from which all observed diversity sprouts. This is the Tao of Lao Tze, here anew presented as an ultimate quantum metaphysical reality..

So what’s Everett’s idea, precisely?

To answer that, we first need to look at the greatest mystery that quantum physics confronts us with, the quantum collapse. The end of the – unlimited in space and time expanded (non-local) – immaterial state wave that, according to the accepted quantum physics interpretation, represents the probability to find the material particle at measurement when, precisely at that act of measurement, that wave ends abruptly. This end of that state wave is however not predicted by the mathematics describing the state wave, the Schrödinger equation. How the act of measurement triggers this abrupt transition of immaterial probabilities into matter is still not explained satisfactorily. The most commonly accepted explanation given is decoherence, which is actually not an explanation but only a verbal description of what seems to occur. Which is that a coherent phenomenon – the wave – suddenly loses its coherence as a connected whole, whereupon only one element of it – the in our measurement found particle – remains and becomes matter.

The attributed name – decoherence – doesn’t really explain how it works. However, Päs explains decoherence as an effect caused by the necessarily limited perspective of the observer on the composite quantum wave of the universe, that one single unmoving state wave in which the state waves of all possible universes are summarized, superpositioned in the language of the physicist. His explanation how a limited perspective of the observer hides the full unmoving universal state wave and presents us only one of its myriad components, does unfortunately not go into more detail.

A metaphor he offers as an explanation is that of a completely flat ocean surface that, observed from an overall perspective, shows no movement, but which in that motionlessness may as well be the result of an endless conjoining of an enormous number of waves, that together completely cancel each other out. Waves can cancel each other out, which is what we call destructive interference. This is applied in noise reduction headphones. From a much more restricted perspective then, the area of that ocean that we are able to observe becomes something that appears to be separated from the rest. I don’t understand fully how a perspective change will present to us the world of distinct objects, but it’s an interesting image and it can at least serve as a useful metaphor for a rough explanation of the idea. If you accept his idea, the decoherence of the state wave, happening on measurement, is not that the state wave does disappear into thin air on observation, but that it is just no longer observable from the limited perspective of the observer. The observer observes then only a small part of the full quantum universe. It’s still there, in its immaterial way, but we can’t ‘see’ it.

Everything becomes an observer

Which raises the questions of what an observer actually is, and – related – if an observer is really necessary for evoking the quantum collapse. Everett’s idea to do away with the observer and the quantum collapse is that every possibility exists in the state wave where ‘existence’ does not mean a material existence, but nevertheless a real existence. With this, the definition of what is real is changed in an important way. Accept this for the moment. According to Everett’s proposal, in the double-slit experiment with a single object shot at the slits, both possibilities exist in a real way – the object goes through the left slit and it goes also through the right slit – but both in their own separate immaterial realities. In each of these two realities exists an immaterial observer, who observes the only one outcome within his reality. Every observer is after all only able to observe the reality in which he exists. This eliminates the apparent necessity of a physically enigmatic influence of the observer on the state wave, triggering the quantum collapse of that wave, simply because there is no collapse at all. Instead, however, there are now two completely identical observers.

I hope that you will understand that Everett’s proposal does not impose any special immaterial requirements on the observer, such as perceptive awareness, a camera will suffice. The underlying condition for his idea is clearly that consciousness is an emergent property of the immaterial but nevertheless real brain of the observer. Both observers in both universes are (immaterially) identical to each other and therefore have an identical emergent consciousness, with their also identical emergent memories. The only difference is their observation at the time of the experiment. There splits their universe, with them in it, in two.

Wat is real, really?

Multiverse interpretation of Schrödinger’s living ánd dead cat.

This example of ‘bifurcating’ observers in their universes has been kept simple for reasons of explanation here, way simpler than in any practical real double-slit experiment. In practice, there are many, almost innumerable, possibilities in such an experiment where the observed object can manifest itself everywhere at any of the interference fringes on the back screen, and each possibility therefore means a split universe, each including a copy of the observer. I hope you see that the number of universes and observer copies can get quite substantial if not improbably gargantuan. Therefore, Päs stresses that all these possible universes are not material, even if they are real. The definition of what is real therefore needs to be adjusted. But in such an extended interpretion of reality, an illusion, even a dream, is also something real, although I think Päs does not want to stretch it that far.

Emergent consciousness as condition for the multiverse

Only by considering consciousness as an emergent property of the physical brain, this way of interpreting quantum physics is defensible, it is definitely a prerequisite for Everett’s idea, and this assumption is also stated repeatedly in Päs’s book: ‘Of course, as long as we stick to the reasonable hypothesis that our consciousness is confined within our brains, …’. After shortly considering the idea of primary consciousness as a possible cause of the quantum collapse like, for example, John von Neumann did – Päs joins the almost unanimous opinion of neurologists (Tononi et al.) that consciousness is an emergent product of the brain. He forgets that neurology is an ultimately reductionistic branch of science while he argues elsewhere in his book strongly against reductionism in physics.

Monism – not a new idea – to the rescue of physics?

The idea of the existence of an ultimate source of reality that is The One, that knows no separation, that contains no separate elements, that knows no time and space, is called monism. Päs spends an extensive and indeed fascinating chapter of his book on the history of monism. It is a view on reality – also known under the more common denominator Platonism – that can already be found in Greek antiquity with proponents like Thales, Plato, Parmenides, Pythagoras, and Philolaus. Later on, monism as an opponent of the monotheistic but dual presentation of the world that the Christian church steadfast portrays, repeatedly pops up in historical figures such as Giordano Bruno, Kepler, Copernicus, Meister Eckhart, John Scotius Eriugena, and much later on in time, Spinoza and Kierkegaard.

According to Päs, the strong reactionary suppression of the Catholic church of these clearly monistic ideas, through torture, pyre, excommunication and social exclusion, is the root cause of the fact that the notion of an immaterial ground of our reality is not very popular at the moment, certainly not among most physicists, although I do notice a growing change in attitude. Bohr and Heisenberg also played an important role in this suppression, with their idea of complementarity, by classifying the deeper reality of the state wave as not relevant to physical theories. They classified thus the contradictions, between for example particle and wave, as fundamental to nature, and thus not susceptible to further investigation. There is just no underlying reality to investigate. Case closed. Shut up and calculate.

According to Päs, this is the reason that physics, with its highly reductionistic approach, is currently in crisis. The investigation into the foundations of matter has so far been sought in the ever smaller dimensions of matter for which the necessary energies ánd finances are correspondingly increasing . The path of reductionist approach of nature, and what could be achieved by it, seems to have come to an end. It is therefore time, according to Päs, to introduce monism as a grounding principle in physics. Quantum physics and the quantum universe show us the way.

Entanglement as the ultimate creator of unity and universal love

According to Päs, entanglement is by far the most important factor in the quantum universe. It ensures a connection of everything with everything and confirms thus the unity of The One. Individual properties of the parts do cease to exist in favor of strongly interrelated properties. Interestingly, he quotes Neoplatonist John Scotus Eriugena in: ‘Just as entanglement unites the universe in quantum cosmology, for Eriugena it is “the pacific embrace of universal love” that “ gathers all things together into the indivisible unity which is what He Himself is, and holds them inseparably together”. Päs, apparently makes here a connection between quantum entanglement and what Eriugena calls universal love. That immediately reminds me of the NDE reports that are almost always about the overwhelming experience of universal love. This is found in almost all reports. That’s real, if only because of the amount of data.

You could protest now that you and your ex have a common history and must therefore be quantum physically entangled, but that there is no more love in your present relationship. Päs would say – I think – that your observation is of course a matter of your limited perspective.

Love is entanglement, entanglement is love.

Does Päs acknowledge the quantum physical reality of universal love? It might be different. By linking entanglement and universal love in this way, he also could reduce the latter to the first. Love would then become something that could be examined in the physicist’s laboratory as a phenomenon to which numbers could be assigned by means of measurement. He would then do the same that physicists have done with the actually incomprehensible mystique of forces at a distance, as we experience it with gravity, electricity and magnetism; reducing it to a field that can be measured and described mathematically and thus reduce the phenomenon to something that belongs to the material universe. Reïfication by reduction.

How could they know?

An important question then is, of course, how the ancient philosophers had already stumbled on this principle of the very substance of our reality without having the technical tools available to science today. The ancient Greeks had little more at their disposal than their own senses and their sharp minds. Päs just briefly goes into this and assumes that early and primitive humanity was capable of a more direct observation of The One than modern man, and that these insights were handed down from generation to generation. Which is very close to the assumption of the general validity of mystical lore.

Summary and comments

At the end of this book review, it is good to briefly summarize Päs’ ideas, supplemented with my summarized comments:

  1. The perceived reality is an illusion and originates in the quantum universe. Certainly a remarkable statement by a physicist.
  2. The multiverse is the quantum universe and it is not material. It’s one. That too is remarkable.
  3. In the apparent split of the universe, the physical observer and his mind also split into several observer copies, each observing a single outcome. The quantum collapse is therefore the impression that every observer copy has because each one observes necessarily only a single result of the many possible outcomes. That means that an underlying assumption has to be made, that the mind is a product of the physical brain. That assumption is essential in this multiverse explanation of the quantum collapse. Accepting this, the large number of experiences of people leaving their body at the threat of an imminent physical demise, often verified by third parties, while being able to perceive and report the circumstances near their body correctly (the NDE), are either completely ignored or declared as illusion.
  4. In this assumption, the observer is therefore just a physical object, so that actually every physical object becomes an observer. Which is also the conclusion that, among others, Carlo Rovelli, Sean Carrol and Thomas Hertog convey. Why certain objects, such as lenses, mirrors and even reflective crystals, are exempt from being observers is not clear to me.
  5. But since, according to Päs, physical reality is an illusion, we as observer have an illusion that observes the world and thus creates also reciprocally the illusion of the observer. Whoever wants to believe something contorted like that, is fooling himself, as far as I’m concerned.
  6. The quantum collapse is caused by decoherence which is, according to Päs, an effect of the observer’s limited perspective. The deeper mechanism of decoherence, and how it is triggered, remains unexplained.
  7. Given the interference that the state wave always shows us when it travels through the double slit, all those universes must be able to interfere with each other. That can only be true if all those universes are themselves indeed non-material state waves. Then they can indeed interfere with each other, because they are waves. In this way, they are not material and therefore do not contain any material observer copies. How a non-material state wave can then produce emergent consciousness is pure speculation.
  8. As Päs describes the quantum universe, he is already very close to the idea of the universal mind from which all reality comes, which is a description precisely matching those reported by many near-death experiences. He’s clearly switching his own perspective and he is almost there.

In short: A fascinating, instructive and in general honest book of the quest of a quantum physicist for the meaning and future of quantum physics and a much needed beginning of a farewell to the there-is-only-matter paradigm.