Bending the laws of physics with your will

Lent 2018, Day Two

Stuart A. Kauffman intends to upset the hegemony of reductive materialism (the science of reducing everything around us down to a set of equations that empirically prove how things are). Accepting classical physics as the basis of our worldview, he suggests, tends to make us feel that we are but helpless automatons in a pre-ordained universe. We chase the illusory goal of endless economic growth, buying things we don't need, despoiling the environment because we have lost contact with art, with poetry, with that which lies beyond scientific law.

The mechanistic, rationally scientific way of looking at life has blinkered us. We are fully alive, a messy part of a confused and confusing biosphere that we are co-creating.

Science is continually searching for a final theory, a grand unifying theory, a foundational law, outside of the Universe, that will perfectly explain why everything is as it is, its origin and its ultimate end. Kauffman does not believe we will ever find a final theory... "...efforts to unite quantum mechanics with general relativity have all failed since 1927."

What we will find, he suggests, will be ever-changing, a Universe of continually shifting possibilities.

Isaac Newton's third-person objective science allowed Mankind to calculate the elliptical orbit of Mars with great precision. Knowing its precise mass, we could have once be sure that the planet would continue along that orbit forever more, in a steady-state Universe.

But, says Kauffman, Newton did not reckon with the will of mankind. From 1971 to the present, sentient primates on Planet Earth have steadily been increasing the mass of Mars; human intervention has resulted in Mars gaining over six tonnes (a variety of landers and rovers, some crashed; others are long-defunct, their missions over; Curiosity still roves and sends us data).

Those six tonnes may be a tiny fraction of the planet's overall mass, but Newtonian physics insists that they would influence Mars's orbit. And so the silent billiard ball, obeying the initial and the boundary conditions of its motion, will be ever so slightly deflected, altering the dynamics of the entire solar system... because of Man's will.

Returning to quantum mechanics, Kauffman mentions the experimental evidence by Dean Radin from 2013 that conscious human attention can alter the outcome of quantum measurement - even at a distance.

So not only is Schrodinger's cat alive and dead at the same time until the observer opens the box - but there is now the suggestion is that the observer can will the cat alive (or dead). "Radin's experiments are a first hint that we can show how human consciousness can 'mediate' measurement, perhaps even nonlocally."

The implications are huge. "This all leads to a vast panpsychism, in which all quantum measurement is mediated by Mind, conscious and free-willed, as part of the furniture of the entire universe!" says Kauffman. He sets out the triad of Mind, Possibles and Actuals, in which Mind measures Possibles to yield new Actuals, which in turn yield new Possibles which the Mind can measure.

Panpsychism suggests that Consciousness and Will are distributed throughout the Universe. "[They] have evolved at the origin of and with life," says Kauffman, who points out that the single-celled E. coli bacterium "gives signs of emotions ranging from fear to disgust and anger".

Wow. Flaky science or a new pathway? As Isaac Newton says, he was standing on the shoulders of giants - Einstein standing on Newton's shoulders, but in terms of looking at matter and the Universe, it is clear we still are a long, long way off full understanding.

More tomorrow!

This time two years ago:
Giving it up for Lent

This time four years ago:
North-east of Warsaw West revisited

This time five years ago:
Looking for answers

This time six years ago:
Fresh powder in Warsaw's parks

This time eight years ago:
Another Lent starts

This time ten years ago:
Okęcie dusk