THE UNCONSCIOUS QUANTUM: METAPHYSICS IN MODERN PHYSICS AND COSMOLOGY

If there is one factor that virtually every thinking person recognizes in contemporary America, is the “dumbing down” of our culture.  Given the tremendous clout of fundamentalist religion, this decline should come as no surprise.  Creationist (or “Intelligent Design”) quackery is still being peddled as legitimate science.  Likewise, the amazing developments in astronomy and physics in recent decades have led many mystically-oriented people to try and find some kind of reconciliation between the mysteries of science and the mythologies of religion.  While hardly a recent phenomenon, this tendency has markedly escalated in recent decades.  One popular myth that has arisen as a result is that, rather than being two mutually exclusive fields, science and religion are mutually complementary.  The late Stephen J. Gould (1941-2002), an award-winning paleontologist, biologist, and popularizer of science, had a blind spot on this, referring to science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria.”  This is obviously false since the two often make conflicting claims.  The inevitable result has been a flood of “New Age” literature, cleverly written, illustrated, packaged and sold to an increasingly gullible public as the “latest” in scientific findings.

Unfortunately far too many scientists have, in both their writings and pronouncements, tended to reinforce much of this nonsenses.  Perhaps it started with Albert Einstein’s offhand remark that “God does not play dice with the universe.”  Whatever the case, few scientists nowadays seem to possess the honesty and integrity to swim against the current and condemn these absurdities for what the are.  One of the few to do so was the late Victor J. Stenger (1935-2014).

Stenger was the author of numerous books on science including Not By Design: The Origin of the Universe and Physics and Psychics: The Search For A World Beyond The Senses.  He also authored The Unconscious Quantum, a much-needed work that exposes the quasi-science that seems to dominate the field today.  In this seminal work, Stenger discusses several New Age writers, including Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics), Gary Zukov (The Dancing Wu Li Masters) and Deepak Chopra (Quantum Healing), and the fallacies inherent in their desire to discover a world beyond the senses.  Interestingly, there is nothing really “new” in their versions of the new age, at least at the most basic level, for they are simply building on ancient Platonist metaphysics: That physical existents do not exist outside the consciousness of the observer (in other words, the old ‘If a tree falls in the woods and there is nobody there to hear it, does it really make a sound?’ argument).  Given the stunning increase in knowledge of both the macroscopic and microscopic  universe in recent times, it was perhaps inevitable that many people inclined to magical thinking would try to hijack this new scientific knowledge and utilize it in an attempt to demonstrate a connective link between human consciousness and their imagined “Cosmic Consciousness” which in reality is nothing more than the natural order in the natural universe.

However, The Unconscious Quantum is much more than a mere refutation of new-age metaphysics, timely and necessary though it is.  Stenger details the development of quantum mechanics over the last century and discusses the roles of key scientists such as Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, David Bohm, Erwin Schrodinger, and others.  For example, Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle, the principle that it is impossible to measure any particle’s exact position or location to any degree of high precision without affecting its motion, has overturned much of classical Newtonian mechanics, which never addressed the element of chance, viewing the universe instead as a finely-tuned machine.  Newton remained a lifelong religious believer; after all, a perfectly designed universe would have no arbitrariness in its nature and this must therefore prove the existence of a supernatural designer (great scientist that he was, it is interesting to contemplate how he would react to all the discoveries made since his death in 1727).  Stenger also discusses non locality, the one-directional “Arrow of Time” and John Bell’s theorem of inequality, thus providing much useful information to counter those attempts by believers to use scientific ideas as ontological “proofs” for mystical claims.

Stenger also addresses another popular new age belief, the belief that everything in the universe is instantly connected to everything else, in other words, the idea that event A, which occurs in one part of the universe has instantaneous effects and/or repercussions all over the universe.  Stenger rightly points out that this is contradicted by a fundamental law of physics first described by Einstein:  The speed limit.  Stenger astutely observes: “Much of pseudoscience is qualitative hand-waving.  Until a concept can be made quantitative, or at least put on a firm logical foundation, it is not science.” (pg. 150)

Vic Stenger was a remarkable man in many ways, as I can attest from personal experience.  I first met him many years ago and had a long, fascinating conversation with him.  I saw him again several years later at a free thought meeting; as he entered, he saw me, walked over and sat down next to me as if we had been friends for years.  He remembered my name and just about everything else we had previously talked about!  Stenger was friendly, modest to a fault, and endlessly fascinating all at the same time.  Truly an exceptional man by any standards.

Perhaps it is in our nature to seek causal explanations for everything that happens.  However, the indeterminate nature of quantum mechanics suggests that, at least at the most fundamental level, the universe may not operate this way.  The proponents of a mystically-derived “quantum consciousness” will no doubt be discomforted by this and seek to disprove it, usually by some kind of verbal sleight of hand.  However, as The Unconscious Quantum illustrates so well, magical “answers” need not be invoked at any point in the scientific discovery process, not only when we have no immediate answers, but even when such answers seem momentarily beyond our grasp or comprehension.