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.

Hans Jonas

Precisely because Christianity came to dominate the civilization of the West—it was the successful competitor among many others as the Roman Empire fell apart—its competitors are much less known. One of these was Gnosticism; it manifested in several different strands; these never fused into a single major religion. To speak of a “gnostic religion,” therefore, is to use a metaphor. Those who wander into these woods soon discover that the written remains are sparse, essentially inaccessible without major archeological help (in a manner of speaking). The historical, sociological, and intellectual background is opaque. The texts are, ultimately, tedious. Indeed the interest in Gnosticism today—and stretching back about a century—is itself proof that Western civilization (it used to be called Christendom) is beginning to fall apart. We have entered precisely the same kind of historical period in which Gnosticism once flourished. It was itself one of the “new age” phenomena of the Roman imperial period.

But there is an interest. And with that in mind I would suggest that people with a serious interest in understanding Gnosticism should obtain The Gnostic Religion, written by Hans Jonas. The book originally appeared in 1958. It is available today as a paperback from Amazon and other sellers. Jonas’ is a comprehensive presentation of the subject, placed in its own historical context. He carefully preserves, but properly sorts, the confusions and complexities. He lays out the significant doctrines in sufficient detail, traces the branches of Gnosticism, and, at the end, he also attempts to link the phenomenon to his own era. To put it in a nutshell, he links Gnosticism to existentialism. Which, by the way, initially surprised me. But after pondering the matter, I saw the justice of Jonas’ joining of the two. And, yes, I’d read the whole mind-numbing length of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. I’ve lived on the Borderzone a long time. I began, in my youth, with people like Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. I once actually read a whole paragraph of Husserl! Heiddegger’s name is one I recognize, and I can give a decent capsule of his central concerns. So I had, you might say, the minimal adequacy to recognize where Hans Jonas was coming from—and whither he was headed.

If the last paragraph is intimidating, it is meant to be. Life on the Borderzone is not light entertainment; it can be used for that—but then so can most things. The materials I present here, however, will benefit the solitary few who hear the call to understand in a genuine way. And where Gnosticism is concerned, a good starting point is Jonas’ book.

Hans Jonas (1903-1993) was a German-born philosopher; he died in the United States. He studied under Husserl and Heiddegger and was drawn to Gnosticism by presentiments within those doctrines of similarities to his own existential leanings. Jonas had many careers—and in philosophy at least three. His earliest phase was the study of Gnosticism and the linking of it to modernity. Later he became what might be called an environmentalist. And last, he developed his own existential view of biology and life in general, casting it in ethical terms.

Gnosticism, for me, is a window into the realms beyond—with an emphasis on the beyond. After having read The Gnostic Religion, encouraged by the powerful insights contained within it, by its synthesizing powers, by the hint that, as the next step, Jonas might advance into the brighter light by means of Gnosticism, I spent around fifty dollars to acquire Jonas’ chief later writings. But this time I was disappointed. When I look through the existential window, I see Being, as it were; but the hard existentialist—and Jonas was of this variety—when he looks through that window, he sees Nothingness. And then the Stoic bravery is to act responsibly despite the yawning nihil over there. But that doesn’t make sense to me. Then, again, I’m of the next generation over.

Trapped: Another Model

Suppose that a community of souls becomes entangled—caught up, trapped—in the quite alien order of matter. We’ve looked at something similar, namely a community that voluntarily enters (I used the word “invades”) the alien realm; I labeled that a “weird” model. What I’d like to look at here is a variant, one in which the entanglement is involuntary.

If this is familiar ground for you, you’ll only notice subtle differences. I based the weird model on Hindu conceptions. In that tradition the soul descends voluntarily but, descending, is so shrouded in ignorance that it becomes a captive on the Wheel of Karma. Escape is only possible by bursting through that veil of darkness by a supreme act of self-denial. The focus in Hinduism is on the ignorance and the escape. The voluntary character of the descent doesn’t get much ink. The involuntary model of entanglement or capture is based on another tradition, Gnosticism. That mode of thought views the soul as innocent; the emphasis is therefore on the capture and on the agency responsible for it (not us); escape is not by self-denial but by realization, insight, knowledge: gnosis.

But let me put Gnosticism on the back burner for now. Its doctrines were forbidden and persecuted in the West; consequently they never acquired the clarity and high philosophical development that Christian and Hindu doctrines manifest. Merely to outline Gnosticism in its endless variants would be confusing. Those who wish to go there, however, might well start with Hans Jonas’ superb work, The Gnostic Religion, Beacon Press, 1958, available here. Let me, instead, put the model in terminology readily accessible to a Westerner using a naturalistic style of framing—meaning that I will neither invoke nor exclude any higher beings in the process.

To see this process we must imagine a cosmic order quite similar to the one we experience down here on earth, namely one in which vast realms coexist under discernible—but not easily discernible—laws. A strong element of randomness is present, at least from our perspective. Beneath that randomness a deeper order may in fact represent absolute necessity, but as we see, weird things can happen; the lightning might just strike the cat, and why it did we’ll never know. Assume, further, that an order of soul, such as I’ve outlined it before, exists within this cosmic whole; it has its own laws and powers, including consciousness and will; it is different in kind from the other phenomena, be they subtle or dense; the soul-order may very well exist in a more subtle kind of material order—suitable to its natural unfolding. It is perfectly consistent, in this model, to hold that God exists in some mysterious way behind all that we are able to discern, indeed that what we see is the creation, and, further, that it may well still be under way. But this God is very obviously the Deus absconditus, not the intervening deity of the Old Testament.

Next assume that in the course of the cosmos cosmosing, as it were, on the model of Spinoza’s “nature naturing,” the cosmos doing what the cosmos does, energetic phenomena well above the pay-grade of the souls happily living their lives in what, to us here, would be a kind of heaven, a disaster would take place. It would be a disaster only from the point of view of the soul-community affected, not in any absolute sense. By way of an example, let’s suppose that a new sub-universe forms in a big bang, and in the process a region of the soul-order is swept away in the consequent enormous explosion and becomes hopelessly disrupted, confused, and its subtle matter wildly mixed in with matter of quite another density. The souls caught in this vast melee would, of course, continue to exist. They are immortal. But they would be greatly disoriented, confused, and their habitation a hopelessly shambles without the accustomed rhyme and reason.

There you have it: an involuntary model of entanglement.

Let me next compare this model to the other two in order to discover if it has any merit. In this model a vast yawning distance opens between God and the soul. In the creation model God personally forms the body and breathes in the living soul; the narrative is that of creator and creature, of command and of obedience. The interaction is continuous. The absence of God is due to the soul’s own disobedience. In the Hindu model the soul is itself a separated tiny instance of God, hence an identity relation continues. And, of course, the separation is voluntary and, with the right effort, can be healed. The Gnostic model, by contrast, produces a very high verisimilitude to actual human experience—which was at least materially a whole lot more miserable even for the middle classes when Gnosticism flourished; it flourished for a couple of centuries before and after the transition between BC and AD. The Gnostics found this world intolerable; they wanted somebody to blame. God could not be blamed. Like all other human communities, the Gnostic were also keen defenders of God against charges of collusion with evil. They chose a secondary agency, much higher than man but lower than God—and they held that this demiurge created the world we see, full of its mayhem and absence of meaning, is a botched job; a hapless imitation of the creator. In the Gnostic doctrine, the demiurge deliberately keeps us asleep so that we’ll stick around. Breaking through our ignorance means liberation.

I will close this presentation by outlining another possible explanation which the modern mind might find more plausible. It isn’t pantheism nor yet lineal creationism. Assume that creation is continuous and God is behind it—but apart. God is not evolving, but the world is. God isn’t finished yet; another chapter is being written. And this evolution, consequently, takes place in resonance with God’s intentions. The aim of existence, in other words, isn’t placid equilibrium but infinite development. We had no choice in being here, but we do have a choice. We can participate or we can decline. If we decline, we’ll find our equilibrium in due time. If we volunteer to take part in the creation, the future may hold many more wonders. Pop psychology might call that “tough love.”