“To be is to be perceived...“ Berkeley
If the manner of our observation determines the universe, can knowledge bring about its own existence?
The universe proves little beyond its own
existence. If reality depends on our choice of measurement, no clear dividing line exists between ourselves and the reality we choose to experience. Indeed,
it is at this point that cognition in terms of identity and locality enters the theory inevitably and inexorably.Whereas quantum mechanics denies objectivity
and locality - arguments of probability take precedence over the precise
establishment of facts - the materializing faculty of knowledge is deployed with
extraordinary power and incisiveness. Particle and wave are as much states of
mind as mutually exclusive, actual events. If consciousness is choice, a means
of intelligent conceptualisation of either wave or particle, knowledge is
analogical. It is the process whereby potential reality becomes actual reality.
Whether positive ‘holes’ in a sea of electrons represent the genuine
architecture of the universe, or whether the particle physicist evolves a
net-work of such analogies disguised as statement of fact, from any point of
view, in seeking to reconcile theory and observation, he deftly replicates and
exemplifies the phenomenal and verbal structure of man’s inner mind.
One may be inclined here to create an analogy - it would be precipitous
to treat it as more - with the physicist's process of reciprocal (i.e. negative
and positive) suggestion as a classification of semantic archetypes. Pairs of
opposites are archetypes of the coordinate system used to measure the asymmetry
of electrical charges. And since no other logical explanation suggests itself,
‘the occasional unoccupied state, or “hole”, in the sea of negative energy
electrons’, has long since been recognized as the positron.
The point of the analogy is this: the dichotomy of the human mind and
its empirical psychology is an inherent part of the process by which a system of
ideas is so ordered as to arrange itself in balanced, complementary opposites.
If the physicist is the great intellectual synthesizer, facing an abstract
conceptual world, all the anticipated effects are there. Indeed, it is a matter
of common observation that theoretical predictions of new properties, are often
made before the slightest experimental evidence has come forth. Thus, by the
principle of contrasts, consciousness, having conceived of itself as a problem,
also solves it. The universe has been turned into an idea, an unconscious but
self-assertive principle of never-ending solutions. That is to say, it grasps
itself as a paradox and, in apprising itself of that which it has opposed to
itself, creates itself.
Dreamy
