Each of us isn't a thing, but a web of connections

Before moving on to subjects other than quantum theory, which I've written about here and here recently, I want to talk in my own words regarding what I like about Carlo Rovelli's book, "Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution." 

The previous posts consisted mostly of excerpts from the book. So here's my attempt to describe what appealed to me the most about Helgoland. (That's an island in the North Sea where Heisenberg came up with his key concepts about the quantum world.)

Rovelli is an exceptionally clear writer. He also has a poetic sense that isn't unique among physicists, but is uncommonly well developed in Rovelli. This book deals with notions that never made much sense to me, yet I largely accepted given that the ideas are embraced by so many experts in quantum theory.

For example, the idea that an observation by human consciousness brings a certain quantum reality into being. As Rovelli notes, galaxies billions of light years away obey the laws of quantum physics, as does everything else in the universe.

Consciousness doesn't exist everywhere, unless we assume that everything in existence possesses at least a minute form of proto-consciousness. 

Ah, but if that is true, then there's no need to bring in human consciousness as the means by which the probabilistic nature of quantum equations, involving various possibilities, "collapse" down to a single outcome when an observation of an electron, photon, or whatever occurs.

The Many Worlds approach to quantum theory deals with the observation problem by positing that all possible outcomes of an observation occur, with reality splitting into an infinity of worlds at every instant, of which we inhabit only one of them.

The relational approach to quantum theory makes much more sense. Both the quantum world and the world familiar to us aren't made up of things, but of connections, of relationships. 

Not family relationships, of course. Something much more general.

As I stare at my computer screen, there's a dance going on between the photons striking my eye, the pixels of the screen, vision processing centers in my brain, and more besides. Our dog would see something different. As would a snake. Or a bat.

I like how Rovelli says that there is no such thing as an outside perspective on the world or universe. It's all 100% inside, in two senses. 

First, there's no way we can get outside of the universe, of everything that exists (some call this the cosmos). We humans, along with everything else, are part of the universe. We aren't experiencing the universe. One aspect of the universe is experiencing another aspect.

Or we can say, "The universe is experiencing itself." 

Most books about quantum physics don't include a mention of Nagarjuna, the Buddhist thinker. But Rovelli's book does.

It isn't that Nagarjuna had a mystical insight into the nature of quantum reality. Rather, Rovelli says that ancient texts should be read not from the perspective of what the author initially intended to say, but how the work speaks to us today.

Rovelli writes that the central thesis of Nagarjuna is there is nothing that exists in itself independently from something else. Thus Buddhism fits in nicely with the relational approach to quantum physics.

Buddhism evolved in part as a reaction to Hinduism, which assumes the existence of soul, Atman, that is an aspect of God, Brahman. Buddhism denies that anything is eternal or unchanging, including ourselves, or our self. 

So from the most minute subatomic particle to the grandest expanse of galaxies, with us humans occupying a middle ground, size-wise, relations are what reality is all about, not things. 

We're alive because of our relationships with air, water, food, sunlight, other people, bacteria, cells, neurons, and everything else that makes it possible for us to be born, live, and yes, die.

The good news is, from the relational view of Rovelli's take on quantum physics and Buddhism, we never exist as a separate and distinct entity, so when we die, it is the relations that cease to exist. In a very real sense, each of us has never existed as the "I" we generally take ourselves to be.

The bad news is, there's nothing that can live on after the relations which sustain life are broken. But this is just reality speaking, and I don't see reality as dealing in good news and bad news. It simply is what it is.

Over and over in his book, Rovelli says that we need to embrace the idea that reality may be very different from how we currently consider it to be. This is how science is so successful: scientists do their best to understand reality as it actually is, even if that understanding is uncomfortable or surprising. 

On his third page, in a section called Looking Into the Abyss, Rovelli writes:

But this is what science is all about: exploring new ways of conceptualizing the world. At times, radically new. It is the capacity to constantly call our concepts into question. The visionary force of a rebellious, critical spirit, capable of modifying its own conceptual basis, capable of redesigning our world from scratch.

I love those words.

Comments

[um]

Language describes. Over time the descriptions change. Each community can only describe using its own concepts. Take the many words the Inuit have for snow and we do not have. Like those indegenous tribes have no concepts for the modern technological inventions of the world etc.

But ... if the descriptions over time change, science being nothing more than a formal way of describing, the things that are described do not change.

Things, facts etc are what they are
seldom what they look like,
let alone how they are presented by .... science, religious lore etc.

[Appreciative Reader]

Great commentary, this whole series I mean, on a very interesting book. Thanks for making these accessible to us, who may probably not have read these books, or even heard of them, otherwise.

One comment, as far as this:

"Ah, but if that is true, then there's no need to bring in human consciousness as the means by which the probabilistic nature of quantum equations, involving various possibilities, "collapse" down to a single outcome when an observation of an electron, photon, or whatever occurs."

.......It is my understanding, generally and basis my layman's understanding of QM and not basis what has been said here, that observations in QM have nothing to do with consciousness. An inanimate machine that records observations would be as much of an observer as far as QM as a live conscious human observer. At least that is my understanding, subject to correction of course, given my far less than perfect ideas about QM.

[Spence Tepper]

So long as we are connected in ways we do not yet understand it is impossible to conclude that what we see and can measure is all there is. How can there be death when life is continuing all around?

You would have to define the individual as a particle to confirm it ceases to exist.

But we are also interacting waves.

If planets millions of miles apart interact through the vast regions of space through invisible "gravity" that can reach across the regions of space without detectable substance, but with the power to move whole planets; if light particles and even much larger streams of molecules, separated in the lab still affect one another, long after they are separated, when one of those particles is detected, over distances that have nothing detectable connecting them, who really can say what we are?

We are the visible part of a larger invisible reality.

All of matter is mostly empty space.

These bodies we see are just a single aspect of what is actually here.

Therefore what happens to the body is only one part of what is really going on, and certainly not separate from anything else.

It is hardly more than a single projection, a single interference pattern recording on a two dimensional sheet of paper we are calling physical reality. But our visual field of measurement is most certainly not the entire field of energy from which that pattern emerges,existed before the interference pattern recorded on flimsy paper, which is only one physical record of it, and exists and progresses long after that physical recording.

The physical part of ourselves we can measure is nothing but a snapshot of a much larger existence. One snapshot is not the reality and hardly matters.

All of quantum physics supports this conclusion. We are interconnected because "we" are not simply discrete particles, but interconnected fields of energy.

[Spence Tepper]

Light is a beautiful example. We see many colors. But that is how our brain in its biological mechanisms distinguishes different energy levels of the same light! Blue and white are the same substance at different energy levels. They aren't two different things. We perceive them as two different things. But in the larger reality of physical existence, it is only by degree, by level of energy.

What makes a tree different from a human? Nothing but coding. Code the same elements and you get something else.

The only thing that distinguishes one form of matter from another, even life from death, is the information in it.

In Physics there used to be an adage that energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed. There is no life and death for energy.

But today scientists have changed this adage with the finer knowledge they now have. Today the adage is "information cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed."

The notion that the entire creation is conscious and that all matter and all beings are expressions of that consciousness has not been contradicted by science at all, which is actually moving closer to supporting it.

But even the notion of consciousness must be redefined. It isn't our will or thinking. It is the living awareness of information, perceived or somehow transferred into our walking awareness. That's all it is. Our awareness, not our will, is our tiny slice of consciousness, and our link to the greater information that makes up this creation. Raising our consciousness is nothing more or less than expanding our awareness. The locus of that awareness, like the elusive locus of consciousness in the brain, could really be in the larger information network that our is part of.