When Two Worlds collide…
A Classical World of Reductionism colliding with a Quantum World of Entanglement
“The misconception which has haunted philosophical literature throughout the centuries is the notion of “independent existence”. There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.”…
— Alfred North Whitehead
“The primary difference between the classical layer and the quantum layer is that the classical layer deals with facts, and the quantum layer deals with probabilities. In situations where classical laws are valid, we can predict the future by observing the past. In situations where quantum laws are valid, we can observe the past, but we cannot predict the future. In the quantum layer, events are unpredictable.”…
— Freeman Dyson
During Daniel Dennet’s – What is Life? – lecture in Dublin in September 2018, he made the following observations on the fundamental nature of evolution:
“When problems are difficult blurt something out, and then you have something to try and fix – and that’s the first maxim of oversimplification…. You then have something you can look at, study, think about, fix and throw away … that’s what evolution does. Oversimplify and then self-monitor…
This insight captures the central challenge for every living organism in surviving, evolving and thriving in an emergent world.
Since the beginning of time, we have been in a perpetual dance with reality through the interplay between our mind, body, and environment.
Through our entanglement with the world, we attempt to make sense of reality through our agency and interactions with the environment (sensemaking and reflexivity), constructing simplified models through inference and rules of abstraction (Verstand) and applying practical wisdom (Vernunft) to respond and adapt.
Our minds are essentially prediction engines that are in a perpetual state of minimising the free energy of the uncertainty — entropy — that arises from complexity.
To live is to flow and evolve…
Through oversimplification and building models of our world, we begin to edge closer to understanding the nature of reality.
The emergence of Classical Models of Reality through abstraction and logic
In ancient Greece, Aristotle outlined in his six-part book – The Organon – the concept of logic.
He had developed a set of basic rules from which an entire system of logical reasoning was shaped.
An abstract framework to describe how an idealised, rational person ought to think in their attempt to navigate the world.
In attempting to bring coherence, his central observation was that validity (truth) depended on their logical structures, which could be separated from the non-logical words involved.
For example:
John is a human
All humans have brains
Therefore, John has a brain
His methods shaped Euclid’s – Elements – which, despite its focus on geometry – became the quintessential textbook for deductive reasoning and causation.
The emergence of Verstand.
By the 1630s, Descartes built on these foundational metaphysics principles to illustrate how geometric ideas represented through spatial diagrams could be further abstracted through algebra.
A shift in the dominant field of mathematics from diagrams to formulas subsequently led to the development of calculus by Isaac Newton.
Self-taught English mathematician, philosopher and logician — George Boole — extended this logical abstraction through his Laws of Thought to create a new domain of mathematical (Boolean) logic.
Classical abstraction, rational reasoning and causation literally changed our world, disrupting our truths & beliefs, generating new knowledge & technology and unbundling complexity – mitigating uncertainty.
Isaac Newton embraced these tools to build new theories anchored in logic and mathematics.
In Principia, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the basis of classical physics and became the catalyst for the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial & Scientific Revolution that followed.
The emergence of science as a knowledge of nature with the declared purpose and value of producing wealth and inventions that would improve human lives.
By gathering facts through observation, embracing logic to reveal elements of causation, and applying linear thinking, we shaped a new human consciousness for scientific prediction.
The earth was no longer at the centre of the Universe.
The development of Verstand led to an explosion of new knowledge, technologies and economic prosperity.
20th Century German philosopher, linguist & poet — Jean Gebser — describes this evolutionary form of human consciousness as a Mental Structure – a model of the world anchored in the mind, rationalism, mathematical logic, causation and scientific methods.
A shift beyond the previous evolutionary frameworks of human consciousness of the archaic, magic and mythic.
A model that remains the dominant way of making sense of our world – shaping our truths & beliefs, and knowledge – despite what was about to unfold.
The return of Uncertainty
By the early 20th Century, these classical tools of deductive reasoning, abstraction and term logic culminated in the emergence of a new theory – quantum mechanics – that described the patterns and behaviour of the smallest known particles to the largest systems in the universe.
It radically shifted our prism of reality – no longer was matter seen as continuous (e.g. water, light etc.) – nor was it simply consisting of atoms and sub-atomic particles
Instead, it was the quanta of matter – discrete systems displaying both wave and particle-like behaviours at the same time — wave-particles.
With such wave particles, you could never simultaneously know the exact position and speed because everything in the universe behaves simultaneously as a particle and a wave.
A wave does not have a single position but has a wavelength that is related to its momentum (mass x velocity).
A particle has a position, but it does not have a wavelength, so we don’t know its momentum.
This theory once again disrupted our mental model's re-introducing uncertainty — Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle — into a world that, through Classical Abstraction and Cartesian Logic, had increasingly been viewed as a mechanical predictable machine of discrete parts from the Industrial Age.
A form of Materialism.
It was now, through probabilities, observations, reflexivity, friction, and patterns, that uncertainty could be embraced to determine the movement of particles as they hopped from place to place.
Quantum Mechanics challenged our understanding of the Universe. A theory of all scales, large and small.
It represented a shift in scientific inquiry from Reductionism to Emergence.
Between 1925 and 1927, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg developed the Copenhagen Interpretation as a way of attempting to reconcile the nature of quantum mechanics and our observations.
Quantum mechanics was highly effective in predicting the probability of possible results and behaviours; however, the act of attempting to measure the system saw the set of probabilities collapsing into one of the possible values immediately after measurement (a wave function collapse).
As Freeman Dyson highlights, did Cartesianism violate quantum mechanics? — starkly illuminated by the confusion surrounding the Copenhagen Interpretation.
Humans were embedded and embodied in the Material World. The Observer and Observed were entangled.
The wave function was a form of abstraction and reductionism ( Verstand) .
In doing so, the Observer was apart from the World.
An understanding through abstract reductionist rules (a Verstand — Cartesian Rationalism).
“Objectivity is the delusion that observations could be made without an observer”…
— Heinz von Foerster
A paradox of deductive reasoning and Human perception – a collision of classical models of abstraction that sought certainty with the quantum behaviours of our world.
We were no closer to explaining the nature of Reality as our logic and mental models collided with the uncertainty of quantum systems.
Or was the Copenhagen Interpretation and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle simply explained by our Classical Aristotelian Logic of Consciousness ( our prevailing perception of reality) – originating some 2,300 years ago – colliding with the Quantum Nature of Reality?
The limits of logic that Kurt Gödel outlined in 1931.
Will we move from an Age of Reason to an Age of Entanglement?
A shift from reductionism to an embodied form of Reason.
Reason as a Quality.
