THE IMPLICATIONS OF QUANTUM NON-LOCALITY FOR THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

William Plank

Montana State University-Billings

This paper was given at the 20^th annual conference of the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness at Tucson, Arizona, April 5-9, 2000

ABSTRACT

Bell's Inequality, a laboratory set-up whereby the differential polarity of photons is measured and correlated will be briefly explained. It provides empirical and mathematical evidence that local reality (i.e., the existence of an independent object in the external world, which is then independently perceived and measured by an "objective" observer) is not an accurate way to understand the nature of reality or of consciousness. Thus Bell's Inequality, by dealing with subatomic particles, has broken through the self-deception of the "coarse-graining" consciousness and puts the consciousness into an intimate unity with the thing observed (and without some touchy-feely mysticism). Bell's Inequality, the most amazing scientific demonstration of modern times, used the behavior of sub-atomic particles to hoodwink the coarse-graining and presumptuous personal consciousness. Coarse-graining, as used by Murray Gell-Mann, will be briefly explained. Thus the world is not a question of a consciousness measuring and perceiving an independent object, but it is a question of a quantum configuration of object, measuring device and perceiver (which invalidates phenomenology or consciousness-as-epiphenomenon. I believe the concept can equally and most certainly applied to animal consciousness, providing support for the continuity of biological consciousness (as Nietzsche understood). Quantum is thus seen as an empirical experiment in ontology, and likewise an experiment in metaphysics (as Abner Shimony of Boston University used the term). It is more than interesting that Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil, section 36, had an intuition of what Bell's theorem demonstrates--the unified configuration of perceiver and perceived and the impossibility of understanding consciousness as an epiphenomenon laid on top of some putative structural complexity and appearing as if by magic. The question, "Is the moon still there when Einstein is not looking at it?" is only a failing strategy to preserve Platonism or philosophical idealism: it is, in fact, only half a question, the other half being: "Is Einstein still there when the moon is not shining?"

Everybody knows about Heisenberg's Principle of Indeterminacy, i.e., basically that observation and measurement change the thing observed so that the thing will never be observed as it actually is. Measurement and perception are consumers of energy and since energy comes in packages no smaller than Planck's constant

(6.6 X 10^-34 joule seconds), a constant found to be applicable to the whole atomic world, the observer is bound to err by at least that amount. Measurement always requires some interchange of energy with the measuring apparatus. These numbers apply to black body radiation and particle physics and we will see if we can make them apply to the macroscopic world…pretty soon.

Heisenberg went so far as to claim that the act of measurement is an indissoluble unification of instrument and event. Bohr claimed: "There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract quantum mechanical description" (Peat, Einstein's Moon, p. 65). We create the data as wave or particle, just as we determine the number on the die by stopping their trajectory in that little leather cup slapped onto the bar. You get what you measure for. Now this is a significant and violent rejection of Platonism as well as local reality.

Einstein believed in local reality , however, though he required it to be understood by relativistic position and velocity…that is, he believed that there was a thing there that had a separate existence and could be studied by an observer. It was simply a matter of discovering the hidden parameters, i.e., conditions that we did not yet know but could ultimately discover. The belief in "hidden parameters" is, I think, an exhibi9tion of faith in ignorance. In order to escape the trap of Heisenberg's statement that we create the situation through our formalism and measurement, that we disturb he object so violently that we can never observe it accurately, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen devised a gedankenexperiment, called properly the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen experiment, i.e., the EPR gedankenexperiment.

The EPR proposed finding parallel systems, measuring one of the terms of that system, and getting therefore the truth by leaving one term of the pair undisturbed. To cut a long story short, if Bill and Joe are identical twins, have had identical experiences, and both know a horrible secret--you have only to catch Bill and beat the hell out of him until he gives up his secret and then you know what Joe knows without ever having had to hurt a hair on his head. Or if we know two brothers, one of whom always wears a white hat and the other always wears a black hot, when we see one brother we know what color the other brother's hat is, even without seeing him. And then along comes the British physicist John Bell, with his laboratory apparatus.

To follow Bell's experiment, we have to know (1) that particles [photons and electrons] have an "up-spin" or a "down-spin," (the concept of polarity may be used), (2) that we have the technology to fire off individual particles, and (3) that we can have spin-detectors to measure whether they are "up" or "down." Let us therefore set up a laboratory apparatus, as David Bohm did: en electron source is set up in the middle of a large lab and shoots off an electron to the left where its spin is registered by a spin-detector : A. At the same time, the source shoots off an electron in the other direction, where it is registered by spin-detector: B. The readings are compared at the counter: C. Since there are only two kinds of electrons, up and down, and since the choice is totally random, the 50-50 chance of whether it will be up or down holds when we measure large numbers. In addition these paired electrons are correlated so that if A flies off to the right with down-spin, the B flies to the left with and up-spin and vice-versa. There will therefore be a 100% correlation between the readings of A and B. So it seems we have proved the EPR experiment: that we can predict the behavior of one system by observing another--so local reality is true, God is not throwing dice with the world and everything is A-OK. But why do the protons correlate 100% in spin unless there is some communication between them? Devices have been set up to avoid that possibility.

But Bell altered the apparatus. He changed the alignment of the detectors, so that one would register 99% of electrons as up and 1% as down at the same detector. This may seem picky--but it is going to give some astonishing results. By messing around with the detector even more, he showed that if parallel orientation gave 100% correlation, that moving it around some will give you 80% registering up, and 180 degrees rotation gives you 50% or electrons going up and 50% going down at that detector--which is still reasonable and logical.

But the problem lies in the fact that when he messed around with the detectors, the correlation began to change: if you got an "up" at A, you would expect a "down" at B, but now you might get an "up" at A and B You can no longer predict from one system to another: if you see one brother with a white hat, you can no longer expect that the other brother is wearing a black hat.

You can rotate the detectors until there is no correlation at all. We are then forced to resort to a quantum posture and calculate the probability of the correlation for each angle of orientation. If we stick to the idea of local reality, we would have to have recourse to the "hidden variable" idea, i.e., a kind of appeal to a necessary but hopefully temporary ignorance.

The point to be retained in all this is that the explanation is not local but that it resides in the holism of the relation of the two detectors together, in fact, within the whole apparatus, including the observer. "The claim is that we have strong empirical evidence (I repeat strong empirical evidence) that no local realistic theory is true of our world" (Philosophical Implications of Quantum Mechanics, Cushing and McMullin, p. 68). Abner Shimony describes quantum as "experimental metaphysics" (Ibid.). We must necessarily skip a lot here: a fuller explanation is found in F. David Peat's Einstein's Moon or in section 26 of my manuscript. Unable to predict behavior from parallel systems, we find ourselves in a situation where local reality does not hold: Bell took two sets of correlation readings from two angles of detectors: he compared the correlations and found that the particles arriving at detectors A and B can be described by the negative cosine of the angle of the detectors but cannot be predicted by the idea of local reality. That is, to make a long story short, quantum correlations are "more highly correlated that any world that depends on local reality or locally operating hidden variables…" (Peat, 112). The amazing this about this is that Bell has demonstrated that local reality, measured against itself, is of less predictive value than a holistic point of view.

What does all this mean for consciousness? It simply means that reality, as empirically and mathematically demonstrated, does not exist in terms of a separately existing thing from which we take data. It means that reality is a a question of a great number of configurations in which consciousness, the measuring device, and the thing measured exist in a configuration in which consciousness is an innate and intimate element. It means, empirically demonstrated, the bankruptcy of that great aberration, Platonism, in which we were always alienated from absolute knowledge by the Platonist forms: it means that what Nietzsche called the "poor man's Platonism," Christianity, does not have to restrict us to knowledge as faith; it means that consciousness is a necessary and original aspect of the universe as a whole and that consciousness is not merely an epiphenomenon piled on top of some material complexity, but that it was always already there is some aspect yet to be determined; it means that the last gasp of Platonism, called phenomenology, is no longer necessary; it means that the intuition of Nietzsche, the cosmic will to power, as described in Beyond Good and Evil, section 36, reflects a quantum mechanical view of the world. Nietzsche's BGE 36 does nothing less than raise the question, consistent with the cosmology of his cosmic will to power, of the inseparability of perception from the material-energetic universe, a world which is not really external any more--and this without any phenomenological or idealist tinkering. I refer you to it: we do not have time to analyze it here, but it is, I believe, the most astonish8ing page in the history of philosophy. And Bell's Inequality means that the question, "Is the moon still there when Einstein is not looking at it?" is a question deeply infected with Platonism and aggravated by the German idealists, when just as quantum mechanically reasonable is the question: "Is Einstein still there when the moon is not shining?"

This is no mere phenomenology, where the thing-in-itself is bracketed [the existentialists and phenomenologists used the Greek EPOCHE], and the phenomenon, as that constitutive encounter of the conscious and the thing-in-itself is given as the only possible matter for study. This is an ontology in which the stuff of the universe, whatever we may call it, has the element of consciousness. You cannot understand this statement if you insist on adhering to the idea of local and pre-existing reality for which you have been prepared by 2500 years of Platonism. What does this have to do with the macroscopic world? Let us turn to the idea of "coarse-graining", a good introduction is found in Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar. And let us remember that reality exists as a series of configurations and not as pre-existing and absolute local reality on which we will exercise our unprejudiced, scientific method. To put it another way, a way that should begin to make more sense now--there are a great number of parallel universes and no original created and absolutely existing universe to which we blithely apply the scientific method in order to find out the truth.

A horse-race of six horses will on the most simple of coarse-grained description, coarse-grained perception, coarse-grained consciousness give you win, place, and show, and the also-rans. A more fine-grained description will give you the identity of the riders, their record of success, whether the horses are mudders, and what was the weather on the track that day. But if you want to push the fine-graining to its ultimate you may take the record of the jockeys and the horses back through their genealogies to generation N, and then back to the evolution of mammals where horses and men branch, and back to the primordial soup and the Big Bang.

But the consciousness is a resolute coarse-grainer and its coarse-graining has for centuries, under the aberration of Platonism and Christianity, and the lesser aberration of Newton, caused it to hide from itself that it is an intimate part of the universe, that it is not a fallen character from some original paradise, infected with some original fault and a Fall with a capital F. And the moral to the story, so to speak, and the point I want to emphasize, is that Bell's Inequality and quantum physics in general have hoodwinked the coarse-graining consciousness and revealed it to itself as an integral part of the stuff of the universe, not as a shaky epiphenomenon, or some alternately divine and cursed creation of a flaky demiurge, or even as some anguished existential creature in an indifferent universe. The consciousness belongs here. We belong here, without justification.

The satisfaction we may take in this situation is, I think, emphasized by Stuart Kauffman in his Order in the Universe. Connecting together on an immense sphere 100,000 light bulbs with on/off switches, we could statistically expect 10³⁰ configurations of these light bulbs (done with a computer), an incomprehensible figure. But what really happens in this Boolean network, when the switch is flipped, is one hundred twenty some periodically recurring configurations, a tendency to order so startling that it is no wonder that one hundred thousand organic molecules, working according to the laws of chemistry, can produce self-replicating organisms.

Consciousness is not an aberration nor an accident in the universe, no more than what we call matter is an accident or an aberration. But I would insist that there is no such thing as "dead matter." I do not make any suggestions for a treacly mysticism because of this, and I'm not interested in starting any cult, but I believe we have every right to feel at home in the universe. And it is not a new idea that human consciousness can be construed as the universe contemplating itself--but we can also say that in the consciousness of dogs and cats and rats and bacteria and viruses and the lattices of crystals the universe also contemplates itself. One might call this a scientific mysticism, nothing new to astrophysicists, who like to find star-dust in their palms--Jacques Maritain, the neo-Thomist, would have called it natural mysticism.

Whatever the stuff of the universe is, a stuff that has been sorely misunderstood by centuries of dualism of one kind or another, there is most probably no such thing as "dead matter," even if it sometimes stinks of death. And now for the science fiction part: it may be that some future complex computer may be said to "feel" in the human sense. You know that feelings are in some way electrochemical phenomena, and we will prove it in tonight's cocktail or in the Prozac or Synaquon or Viagra that keeps one running smooth. And that old van or suburban that has its quirky ways may indeed have, in more ways than one, the personality that you have on occasion attributed to it.