Quantum powered questions
Big Think interview with David Albert, Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University. (Full transcript of interview available at bigthink.com).
Within the context of this website (focused on productive-creativity) Albert outlines the fundamental issue with quantum mechanics ... that even though it is by far the most successful physical theory in history, it remains alien and 'counter-intuitive' to our everyday experiences. Therein lies the gem within this article ... that creativity cannot be reduced to easy explanations of brain neurophysiology (as our brains are composed of said quantum stuff that defies easy definition and understanding).
Quantum mechanics opens the door to possibilities that will remain outside and beyond logical analysis, or definition. In short we're made of stuff, and live within a universe that is indescribably strange ... and it is that 'indescribably strange' nature of deep reality that cannot but continue to provide an endless resource of creativity, solutions and ideas.
This interpretation of quantum mechanics - that the fount of creativity and possibility will remain boundless - was voiced in similar terms by physicist David Bohm, who wrote that:
The actual operation of intelligence is thus beyond the possibility of being determined or conditioned by factors that can be included in any knowable law ... Intelligence is thus not deducible or explainable on the basis of any branch of knowledge (e.g. physics or biology). Its origin is deeper and more inward than any knowable order that could describe it".1
Quantum mechanics is providing the basis for accepting a new world-view, one that enables new fields of medical science, such as neuroplasticity - the ability of the brain to change itself, adapt and provide increased cognitive abilities. Or in the case of stroke, to remap and regain previous cognitive abilities and functions that were lost due to physical damage.
Salient points from the interview with Albert:
Albert outlines the great contrast between the enormous success of quantum physics, and its 'flat-out contradiction' with our everyday experiences.
As Albert explains:
"On the other hand, we also know that there's an enormous amount that's right about (the equations of quantum mechanics). These equations are where, you know, indescribably vast swathes of 20th century science and technology come from. These equations get an enormous amount right. On the other hand, it couldn't be more obvious from our everyday experience of the world and of ourselves that something is wrong with them. There's a problem about how to put these two facts together. There's a problem more specifically about how to modify the theory in such a way that this contradiction goes away without ruining the rest of the good predictions of the theory. This problem, once again, is called the measurement problem."
Albert dismisses easy, pat New-Age understandings of quantum mechanics:
"There's something really indescribably strange about the picture that we're presented with of ourselves by -- especially by fundamental physics. And it's a picture that we just don't know how to fully take in. And I think it's very, very, very disturbing. And I think that's as exactly the opposite as it could be of what typically is said to come out of science from New Age understandings of it."
Albert also explains how our everyday notions of time are, again, seemingly at odds with what is inferred by the fundamental laws of physics,
It's an astonishing thing that all of the serious candidates that anybody has entertained for fundamental laws of physics, from Newton onward -- so by this I mean Newton's laws, I mean Maxwell's equations, I mean the Schrödinger equation, I mean general relativity, I mean string theory, everything -- it's an astonishing fact about all of these theories, even though they differ wildly from one another in all kinds of other respects, and even though they straddle different sides of enormous scientific revolutions, it's an astonishing fact about every single one of these theories that all of them are perfectly symmetric under time reversal. Every single one of them has the feature that for any process which is in accord with those laws, the process going in reverse is in accord with those laws as well. But this poses a problem. And once again, just as with the measurement problem, the structure of this problem is a clash between the laws of physics that we have developed by carefully observing the behaviours of microscopic systems and our everyday macroscopic experience of the world.
- 1. David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, London 1995, page 52.
