The Merits and Demerits of Quantum Explanations

Almost since the rise of quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small, speculative thinkers have formed a kind of aura around the field in attempts to help them give various puzzling phenomena  a scientific explanation. Among these are consciousness, the mind-body problem, telepathy, near-death experiences, and the like.

A philosophically serious attempt in this direction is an appendix in Hans Jonas’ book, The Imperative of Responsibility, 1979. The appendix (pp. 204-231 in the 1984 University of Chicago Press edition), is titled “Impotence or Power of Subjectivity, A Reappraisal of the Psychophysical Problem.” I have read many other such takes, to be sure, but none has shown any rigor, whereas Jonas’ work does. He tackles the problem that Descartes had already struggled with. Assume that we do have an autonomous spiritual self, however it is called (res cogitans by Descartes, subjectivity by Jonas); hereafter I’ll refer to it as “self.” How does this immaterial something interact with the physical world in a meaningfully causal way—or vice versa?

The merits of quantum mechanics as an explanation lie in the fact that it deals with the extremely tiny phenomena at the subatomic level—where the energies involved are also minute. The tentative solution to the mind-body problem is that the self, whatever it is, may have energy enough to move “matter” at the quantum level. Then, if an appropriate structure of amplification has evolved, thus a neuronal network like the brain, an immeasurably tiny intervention by the self can eventually result in a physical action like raising the arm or saying something, both because I want to. This has merit—and produces, at least in me, a kind of intuitive ascent. It points to a potential explanation—and Jonas does not go any further than that. The only assumption we have to make is that the self at minimum has some minute ability to interact with matter at the subatomic level.

The demerits of quantum explanations (and Jonas does not go there, but others do) is to suggest that the only difference between what we traditionally call the spiritual and contrast to the material is a difference in density or wavelength. Therefore souls are just as material as everything else—they’re just made of more subtle stuff.

Here I have the opposite reaction. I don’t believe a word of it. There may be subtle regions made of subtle matter, etc., etc., but matter, no matter how subtle, can’t possibly produce consciousness. The entity we call the self, therefore, is different from matter in kind, not just in degree. Nor is it absent in this coarse material realm. It’s plentifully present here in the ordinary world—and doing plenty of damage as well as good. And in both realms (coarse and subtle) it has, no doubt, a certain amount of force that it can exercise. In these dense regions, however, to exercise that force on the congealed energies we call matter, it needs amplification through machines—of which our bodies are the first and most potent versions.

Jonas wrote his appendix before extensive assembly of data on near-death experiences had even begun. One of the interesting result of those studies is the discovery that disembodied selves have the devil of a time interacting with other people—but an easy time passing through walls. But they do move about, more or less at will. Separated from their tool, the body, they are seriously handicapped here. But, presumably, not so in the regions beyond the border. Manner of speaking. And it would seem to me, those who first arrived here, finding themselves in this valley of dense matter, started to mess about with particles at the quantum level. And lo and behold. In the wink of a few millennia they had made the first living cell. First came chemical civilization, fashioned by nudging quantum particles this way and that. Next came life, then civilization. And now back to studying quantum mechanics again. What goes around comes around. But what they were then, and we still are, is something other than either energy or matter. This is a vale of body-making, not of soul-making.

The Borderzone Within

There is a borderzone right inside us too—as there is one out there in the macrocosm—but we don’t think of it in mumbo-jumbo or in mystical terms because it is a matter of direct experience. Humanity has treated this matter in countless ways, but it is summed up by that all-too-familiar phrase, body and soul. If we use that duality as the whole, then the “borderzone” in question is really the point where body and soul meet and interact. But that interaction is so puzzling and mysterious, that we’ve dismissed it altogether, conceived of it as a point, have ignored it, have formed all kinds of fantastic theories about it, and have often simply thrown up our hands.

The modern way is to deny it. There is no soul. Enough already. We’re strictly chemistry arranged in a certain dynamic pattern—and that pattern has a kind of tenacious tendency to maintain itself, like a whirlpool does—but no more mysteriously than a whirlpool does; we call that tenacity survival. End of story.

Aristotle proposed that everything has body and soul if only we call the one matter and the other form. The combination of the two is the only real thing. He called it substance, and to this day, if we mean that something’s real, we say that it’s substantial. A consequence of this, of course, is that after our bodies fall apart, what we call “we” disappears. But Aristotle was not quite sure that intellect disappeared; he cut himself some slack, as it were. Almost to a man—and it usually is a man—our deep thinkers imagine the “high” element within us as intellectual. My explanation is that they expend most of their lives in thought; they get to know that faculty genuinely well; but, perhaps, they fail to experience other facets of their beings equally as fully—or observe them with the same care. There are other ways of being—there are other paths: action, art, and love come to mind. Thomas Aquinas, among the greatest thinkers of the medieval era, had a mystical experience shortly before he died. He stopped writing abruptly. Asked why, he answered that all that he had written until then (and it was a monumental opus, still avidly studied today) was “mere straw.” (1) I’ve always valued Aquinas’ thought—but I have valued this story as its crown. Paradoxically, perhaps, it holds a practical as well as a deeper truth.

Descartes, who, in a way, gave modern philosophical thought its original shape, carried simplification to a great height. He proposed two realities, the extended thing (call that the body) and the thinking thing (call that the soul). They were radically different; they communicated and met at one point in the body, in the pineal gland. No, this is not a tongue-in-cheek dismissal; but to get into the complexities of Descartes’ thought on the subject you have to look elsewhere (2). My point is that humanity has struggled with this subject. The borderzone within is a very mysterious aspect of reality—and this despite the fact that it is, for us, the most familiar.

It is our inability to pinpoint precisely where higher and lower meet, to describe in mechanical (or even electromechanical) terms how spirit moves matter, our inability to capture and hold the spirit that has led to the materialistic theories of life. But modern thought had its ancient analogues too—and functionally quite similar. Lucretius was one of these theorists: everything is atoms, he said. They move deterministically, but at unpredictable times they suddenly “swerve.” This accounts for what we would call mental events and the illusion of volition. But atoms that form into bodies by law and swerves, dissolve back into free atoms, ranging from coarse to superfine. All is a dance of occasionally swerving atoms. (3) Modern theories of physics are now approaching the Lucretian level. Statistical explanations of everything real are beginning to eat away even at the claim that laws of nature exist (which, of course, suggests a law-giver) to make everything a product of chance. This is what I call throwing up the hands.

I’m of a mind to see value in all of these approaches. All of them produce raw materials, all of them spin twine useful for making a meaningful cosmology—or an understanding of the self. What we need is the right loom to weave it into fabric. (4) That loom is projected, I think, by emanationist conceptions of reality. I’ve discussed these recently under the heading of “Angels: Heavenly Schematics.” There I have suggested that reality is indeed a creation of two distinct fundamentals; they interact at every level and dynamically—thus either rising toward complexity or moving away from it. Within this dynamic spiral are regions of relative equilibrium. Borderzones are spatially conceived areas where a transition is taking place— from one region to the other. They are spatially conceived because, for us, living where we live, space is a decent concept for locating activity. But let me put this projection into more visual or linear terms.

God created two kinds of realities. One of these are agents, that which we call “we”: persons; selves. The other is what we call matter—but this matter may manifest in a vast range of subtlety—thus more than just what we call matter. We live our lives in a borderzone. What do I mean by that? I mean that both a higher and subtler and a lower and coarser kind are both present in it, mixed, as it were. We are keenly aware of the lower. And, being lower, it has a greater grip on us; why that is so I’ll try to explain in a moment. But we’re also aware of the higher. It charms and draws us. The matter of that world, however is more subtle. It is invisible to us because we are still more aware of the lower region than the higher. The higher is an imaginal (but not an imaginary) world. We sometimes dismissively label it “mental,” signaling that such worlds are unreal. Yet mental creations and realities are very real for us: great myths, great music, great works of art, great structures of thought, grand tales, personal and collective memories. And also personifications like the United States of America or the Red Menace. Lady Macbeth, meet Don Quixote. There’s also our honor—produce it for me to touch if you can—and our shame. With only the slightest of careful observation, we can easily discover that most of the things that really move us, in our daily lives, are structures of the insubstantial kind—impossible to touch although, of course, they have tangible manifestations as print on paper, images on screens, or the bodies of people whose intangible attitudes, thoughts, intentions, benevolence (or lack thereof) are the source of our pleasures and our pains. The lower order, the material aspect, sometimes touches us most irritatingly too. And their disarray, as in Haiti these days, is a great source of pain.

We live our lives in tension here because we’ve entered a developmental region, a borderzone. We come from the lower and are headed upward. But because the lower is more familiar to us, has long been our home, it has more claim on us. Hence we are more aware of it. But, at the same time, we hear the call (but cannot see) a higher region. We interact with both. But after we are freed of bodies, which way shall we go? That is the question. If in some greater scheme we are on a vector, we are lucky to be in a borderzone; we’re also at risk. If we don’t develop, we won’t be able to resist the downward pull of the lower region after death; to be sure, it is the one we already inhabit now. But if we do manage to acquire new powers sufficient to continue in the higher direction, then, at the end of life, awakening to that ability, and finally seeing the higher dimension directly, without the interference of this level’s coarser materiality, we shall look back on all our works, and like Thomas Aquinas, declare them all as “mere straw.”

Soul-Body Interaction: Is the Problem Real?

The most frequently discussed aspect of the soul-body duality has been the interaction between the two. How can an immaterial something affect a material something else, and vice versa. This discussion tends to begin with Descartes (1596-1650), but the problem is that Descartes’ views on the matter are all too frequently over-simplified and, as usually stated, turn out to be cartoons of his thought. For example: bodies are of matter, and matter is the extended thing (res extensa); soul or mind is the thinking thing (res cogitans); it has no extension. But these two realms interact one with the other by means of the pineal gland. That’s the caricature.

The statements listed are, indeed, discoverable in Descartes’ extensive writings—but so is a great deal more. Descartes was a prodigious thinker, a diligent writer; whole tribes of modern theories can claim him as their father. He did not, for instance, insist that the soul has no extension; what he said was “that extension is not the principal attribute of the soul” (quoting an enlightening article in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, titled “Descartes and the Pineal Gland,” found here). Indeed, the article just referenced makes it clear that Descartes wrote about every aspects of this subject. Those who wish to cite a famous authority can search René and find chapter and verse to justify their views.

The problem, it occurs to me, may stem from a faulty conceptualization of what we mean by soul. We insist on its immateriality—and when we use that term, it largely suggests a kind of emptiness; we have a tough time imagining the immaterial. The root of that conception is anchored in common experience; we don’t see souls (forget about ghosts for a moment). In part the rooting lies in Plato’s proof for the soul’s immortality; the argument is made in Phaedo; Plato there rests his case on incorruptibility and declares that all things made of parts are subject to change, hence to corruption. Therefore the soul, which is a unity and has no parts, is incorruptible and thus also immortal.

This whole nexus of ideas is tricky, slippery. Immateriality works nicely to prove immortality. But in Greek thought, not least in Plato’s, the soul is also a form. In Aristotle we have the concept of substance, a duality of matter and form. Form shapes matter; matter manifests form. But the interaction between these two is just as nebulous in general as that between the soul and the body is in the particular. Some kind of force is implied in the very concept of the union of matter with form.

Form must compel matter to shape itself either by attraction or by some kind of positively shaping impulse. If by attraction, we might imagine a kind of complex form of gravity. Indeed Descartes himself believed that the soul exerts a force of volition which is communicated to the body by means of the pineal gland. But if a force is present, able to move at least “animal spirits,” thus another but also subtle form of energy, the pure immateriality of the soul becomes problematical. What kind of force? Magic? To avoid magic, one is tempted to see the soul as somewhat more complex, and matter-like, as possessing capacities beyond a kind of point-like presence without extension.

Not that I have any problem with that. But if we admit a soul into the arena, a soul able to exert force—and to the extent that it does also has the ability passively to experience force—at that moment the supposedly insurmountable difficulty of interaction actually disappears. Never mind the pineal gland. You might say that it was a decent stand in for some kind of point or organ where the force of soul is transmitted to the body and where, at the same time, experience reaches the soul. The contact may be extremely subtle—in comparison, for example, with a sneeze—but it must have some kind of tangible reality, suggesting that the soul does have capacity, at some minimal level, to interact with what we normally call matter. It is this sort of meditation on the subject that encourages me to propose, as I have in earlier posts, that the soul may indeed interact with the material dimension at the subatomic level. And if you have a single fixed point of interaction then, as Archimedes said, he could lift the world—and humanity can move mountains or build dams.

Defining a Border

All thought ultimately rests on evidence, another way of saying that it rests on truth. The root of truth is experience—for the simple reason that you have to start somewhere safe, and experience, at least in the raw, thus separated from any interpretation of it, is beyond questioning. Descartes’ cogito is simply one example of an experience that suited one kind of mind. What distinguishes philosophy from metaphysics is that philosophy is closer to evidence than metaphysics. Or that, at least, is a thesis worth examining.

I arrive here because I thoroughly enjoy well-argued philosophical propositions. I always feel the urge to apply a similar approach to the matters that interest me. But then I discover that my questions invariably concern the why of things, the purpose or the explanation of X. And here philosophy becomes deficient. It is good at explaining how things relate—and by thing I don’t mean material phenomena necessarily. It can analyze a concept and accurately find its limits, appropriate use, illegitimate application, etc., but it cannot deal with meaning unless the meaning is an intermediate term in a series: why does the rider use as saddle? No problem there. It can’t deal with ultimate meaning. Why is the rider there?

An example is the two-fold nature of the human: body and soul. What purpose does a body serve if, as we can reasonably demonstrate, using philosophical approaches, souls are in their very essence different in kind, thus radically different, from bodies. To answer this question rationally calls for explanations of the soul and of its purpose, of the material realm in the same respects, why they both exist, how they relate, and the nature and purpose of the realm in which they are each a manifestation.

Here we effectively cross a border. We can’t resolve the question without speculation, using that last word to mean an activity which cannot yield hard answers for lack of evidence—at least while we’re inside vile bodies. No system of thought, however elegant or probable, can compel agreement—as philosophy can indeed compel while it remains on the firm ground of experience. I put this out by way of saying that I’m fully aware, in all that’s said in these pages, of the limitations under which I labor. And the tone of certainty I sometimes produce must not be mistaken for authority of any kind.