"The Entanglements Are Primary."

Valdko Vedral, "Living in a Quantum World," in Scientific American, June, 2011, at p. 39.

I. Quantum Effects.

Several efforts to post this essay have been obstructed even though I am writing at public computers. I will continue to struggle to post this work. A more extensive list of sources will be attached to the essay at a future time. New essays dealing with New Jersey corruption and the continuing effort to end the embargo against Cuba will appear soon at these blogs. ("Time to End the Embargo Against Cuba.")

Roger Penrose was the first scientist to detect the implications of the quantum revolution for the study of consciousness. Despite some marginal criticisms of Professor Penrose's theories, Mr. Vedral's work, to the extent that it carries over quantum insights into unified biology-chemistry as well as physics is much indebted to the prior writings of Professor Penrose.

A debt is owed by all researchers in these fields to the pioneering efforts of the Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana and the Russian chemist Ilya Prigogine, both are Nobel winners, for their chemical-mathematical perspective on molecular science: "These [quantum] effects are more pervasive than anyone ever suspected. They may operate in the cells of our bodies." (Vedral, p. 40, emphasis added.) ("Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism" and "John Searle and David Chalmers on Consciousness.")

We live in a dual- or multiple-aspect universe in which variable effects open on to a reality that is always under construction. As with phenomenological-hermeneutics, so today's science postulates that the knowable universe is a "fusion of horizons" or "hermeneutics of freedom" between knower and known. This is a completion of a line of thought derived from Immanuel Kant who is rightly regarded as the foremost philosopher of the modern world. ("Immanuel Kant and the Narrative of Freedom.")

Quantum interactions, accordingly, are pervasive features of reality underlying all entities, both at the micro and macro levels. The reason that larger material entities "seem" to abide by principles of classical physics (Newton, Einstein) is their greater or more predictable tendency, based on mass, to arrange themselves in stable patterns of atomic relations. A unified field theory is desperately needed for an "elegant" universe. Such a unification, in the opinion of many experts, will involve a transition from "probability theories" to "entaglement or relational theories."

The idea of entanglement, relation, interaction or "dialectic" (Hegel, Bradley, Bell's Theorem) becomes crucial in terms of defining systems or "networks" (Mark Taylor) which become more dynamic and less static as entities that are, necessarily and perpetually, under construction -- like our identities in postmodernist societies. Both your "sefhood" and reality may be a Rubik's Cube-like set of probable interactions. I have expressed this insight in the past by saying that Heisenberg's "observer distortion" has become an "observer construction." (J. Galis-Menendez, "Ricoeur," pp. 82-83.)

We move from a black-and-white universe to a vast technicolor extravaganza that is user-friendly and invitational. This is the "Rubik's Cube" universe, again, or reality as a Hollywood blockbuster action flick. As with hermeneutic theory developing phenomenology, observer-or-recipient response theories suggest a "revolving door" reality of the text and/or the universe and/or you "as" a text. (Brian Greene, Jacques Derrida, Hans Robert Jauss.) ("Conversation on a Train.")

The "Creation of Adam" is represented as a collaboration -- like a Hollywood script conference -- with writers, director and actors contributing equally to the final outcome which is always tentative. (Amit Goswami.)

"In accordance with the language of decoherence, too much information leaks out to the environment, [in particle interactions involving large objects,] causing the system to behave classically. The difficulty of preserving entanglement is a major challenge for those of us seeking to exploit these novel effects for practical use, such as quantum computers." (Vedral, p. 41 and David Deutsch.)

II. Consciousness as the Ultimate Quantum Process.

Mind or ideality -- like possible quantum computers -- faces new dangers of decoherence in fast-flowing or unstable informational environments where perception is enhanced reality-creation.

This sounds very much like our cultural public square early in the twenty-first century as we are saturated with images, slogans, manipulations of various kinds emanating from powerful entities in globalized economies.

With heat, molecules are speeded-up (which is why water boils and swirls when you apply heat to a tea kettle).

Environments of comparable uncertainty or "heat" for the psyche have the same destabilizing effects. Indeed, consciousness may have arisen from cerebral processes or reactions to trauma resulting from encounters with life and identity-threatening dangers for early humans. Trauma and collisions of various kinds -- as with the superconductor for the tiniest particles -- may produce highly damaging results in persons and other material entities even if they are "instructive" results for scientists as observers. Dr. Mengele's "results," for example, have been found fascinating by subsequent researchers if not for the reasons that Dr. Mengele hoped.

Postmodernity has allowed for the development of subjects with variable identities that are "speeded-up" and much more interactive in complex cultural environments that are quantum-like:

"In a quantum world a particle does not have to take one path at a time. It can take all of them simultaneously." (Vedral, p. 43.)

Sanity and madness, conscious and unconscious, organic and non-organic, classical and quantum effects become matters of degree for a universe with multiple aspects or "handles" to be grasped by its various users.

The final scene of the Hollywood blockbuster that is the universe is never written or performed.

III. "If you see it, then it's there." (Peter Martin.)

We must give up not belief in or the continuing search for truth -- truth is essential to these very conclusions -- rather, we must abandon the notion that reality or character, world and self, are "objectively" and separately existing entities as opposed to mutually-dependent products of interaction in a never-ending "dialectic" of Being and Truth. "There is no self without other."

The observer and what is under observation, observational realities, are mutually constitutive -- like artists and their artworks that are shared with recipients. This is a hermeneutic understanding of science and reality. This understanding of truth is both epistemological and metaphysical in a chastened emerging ontology of forms, where pattern-detection is pattern-discovery. (Ian Stewart, James Gleick, Jacques Derrida.)

For philosophers to ignore this new paradigm is absurd; for scientists to ignore humanistic uses of these concepts over decades is foolish. In the words of Amit Goswami: " ... the universe is 'self-aware' and ... it is consciousness itself that CREATES the physical world." (Goswami, p. xv.)

Selected Sources:

Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement (New York & London: Plume, 2003).

Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004). http://www.Lulu/JuanG

James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987).

Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos (New York & London: Penguin, 2007).

Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Putnam, 1995).

Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception (Minn.: University of Minn., 1982).

Christoff Koch & Giulio Tononi, "A Test for Consciousness: How Will We Know When We've Built a Sentient Computer? By Making it Solve a Simple Puzzle," in Scientific American, June, 2011, p. 44. (Essay marred by logical errors and flawed assumptions.)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Benoit Mandelbrot, "A Multifractal Walk Down Wall Street," in Scientific American, February, 1999, pp. 70-73.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World (Illinois: Northwestern U. Press, 1973).

Humberto Maturana & Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Moment of Complexity (Boston: Reidel, 1980).

Roger Penrose, Abner Shimovny, Nancy Cartwright, Stephen Hawking, The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1997).

Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming: Time and Complexity in the Physical Sciences (San Fransisco: W.H. Freeman, 1980).

Ian Stewart, Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics (New York: Basic Books, 1993).

Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1992).