The following is the abstraction of a topic currently featured in V.H. Ironside, Behold! I Teach You Superman
Truth be told, since measuring a quantum particle in one part of the universe
can affect the properties of its twin in quite another (even light years away),
the notion of such information being
transmitted non-locally as “the sum of all parts,” at once resolves the philosophical problem of
“action at a distance,” or what Einstein called spukhafte Fernwirkung. Having first
determined that waves
had a dual nature and could be treated as particles, he now had to come to terms with the power of
‘entanglement’; i.e., with particles that appeared to be able to respond to an
experiment carried out in another part of the universe. Here, the substance of
the world is not in things, but in universal concepts whose properties in a
perfectly synchronized way are the product of the measurement itself. For even though nature has neglected to
provide us with any means of dealing with this idea, far from being a rigidly
discontinuous discipline, quantum non-locality prohibits the ‘dislocation in
thought’ that occurs when perceiving
widely separated events as independent entities.
For Feynman there was no such thing
as an isolated particle in quantum field theory.
Basing his view
on the necessary assumption that the photon cannot have a path from A to B, nor
speed or position, when not being observed, he discarded the causal connection
between distant events in favour of an immaterial continuum. It is the virtual field that connects them,
albeit that the field itself never actually exists in the real world of motion
and force. But then, theories of real worlds are a weak basis for discounting
concepts with no reference to the space in which we live, and if this is a
positivist view, anathema to classical theories, it nevertheless demands that
abstract conceptual systems should be taken
into account in any analysis of the links which may exist between
synchronicity and kinematic force.
Being, so it seems, is a mystery, a
metaphysical property that we seek to explore in detail, and so misread its
wholeness. Which is another reason, of course, for the want of explicitness and
connectivity, that ultimately leads to it losing its power and its immediacy.
For nothing impairs these conditions so much as causality, which squanders
energy unproductively and inhibits Supersanity.
In fact, the classical understanding is incapable even of remotely
encompassing the meaning of this property, for the principles inherent in it
are nothing but a manifestation of apparently random effects calculated, if
anything, to heighten and promote irrationality. Hence the equation of
knowledge with causality, and the priority of a causal theory over the principle of Supersanity.
Meanwhile, of course, for all
considerations other than conventional ones, holistic understanding has
actually attained supremacy over the mechanics of strictly determinate
interactions and is in the process of liberating itself from the constraint of
a closed causal machinery, rendering the written principle and even language
all but obsolete. Wolfgang Pauli’s conclusion was uncompromising: “We are
speaking a language that is not sufficiently adequate to the simplicity and
beauty of the quantum world.”[1] For on the
question that had dogged physics for so many years, concerning the common
ground shared by mind and matter, his simple conclusion was that it would be a
mistake to separate physics from psychology; or from what he had decided was
the essence of the scientific explanation: the relationship between the
two. More specifically, the contingent-choice experiment
illustrates graphically that the quantum world possesses a kind of holism which
transcends time as well as space in the same way that we experience the
synchronistic knowledge directly. Which means that there are laws of
synchronization for spacetime itself. Laws which not only determine how the
detached observer becomes the anonymous agent of the action, but which become
even more crucial to the development of a theory when you absorb the simple
fact that it is not the synchronistic experience which is the critical
unexplained aspect of the relation between the subject and the event, but the
very relation itself.
[1]
Quoted
in D. C. Cassidy, Uncertainty. The Life
and Science of Werner Heisenberg. W. H. Freeman, N.Y. 1992, p. 194
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