Shaping Our Minds to Reality

The wavefunction is the vehicle of our understanding of the quantum world. Judged by the robust standards of classical physics it may seem a rather wraith-like entity. But it is certainly the object of quantum mechanical discourse and, for all the peculiarity of its collapse, its subtle essence may be the form that reality has to take on the atomic scale and below. Anyone who has had to teach a mathematically based subject will know the difficulties which students encounter in negotiating a new level of abstraction. They have met the idea of a vector as a crude arrow. You now explain to them that it is better thought of as an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. ‘But what is it really?’ they say. You implore them to believe that it is an object with certain transformation properties under rotation. They do not believe you; they think that you are holding back some secret clue that would make it all plain. Time and experience are great educators. A year later the student cannot conceive why he had such difficulty and suspicion about the nature of vectors. Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality. If we are indeed in such a digestive, living-with-it, period, it would explain something which is otherwise puzzling. A great many theoretical physicists would be prepared to express some unease about the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics — in particular, about Copenhagen orthodoxy — but only a tiny fraction of them ever direct serious attention to such questions. Perhaps the majority are right to submit themselves to a period of subliminal absorption. [The Quantum World, J.C. Polkinghorne, Princeton Science Library, 1989, page 82]

J.C. Polkinghorne was from the group of theoretical physicists at Cambridge which also included Stephen Hawking. He quickly became a Professor, which is not the same as Professor at an American university but rather somewhat the same as a holder of an endowed professorship. Around 1980, when he was still young, he heard God calling and entered a seminary to become an Anglican priest, returning to Cambridge as a chaplain and administrator after ordination. He’s a clearheaded thinker in the domains of science and theology.

In this short entry, I want to emphasize the importance of what Polkinghorne is saying from his personal experience in learning and in educating young scientists. What he says is consistent with the Thomistic understanding of the human mind.

We do not come into this life with brains which are some sort of preconstructed general processors. We don’t really process information in the way of a computer or a communications channel. We handle information by reshaping ourselves to what we find when we actively engage what lies around us. Like a totemic hunter making himself one with the bear he hunts, we shape ourselves in some substantial ways to what we find and we can only find what we seek. Learning, in the general and academic senses, is an active process and, moreover, a process in which the mind itself is altered rather than just having new content loaded in. The hunter doesn’t think he can become one with the bear by imagining a bear which accords with his preconceptions. He learns how bears behave over his years as a boy and then begins to think as if he were a bear. The astrophysicist doesn’t think — not for long in any case — to understand the Milky Way by building a galaxy as if using an erector set. He studies how the universe really is for many years and shapes his mind around the reality that he perceives. When the hunter begins to understand the bear or the astrophysicist the galaxy, then he can begin to enter the story of that entity, to travel along with it through time.

It all begins with a suspension of conscious efforts, a suspension of the will, that the mind, and perhaps other parts of that human being, can be reshaped to accord with reality. You’ve got to be willing to learn the rules of the game rather than thinking you’re entering some sort of game for which you have inborn knowledge of the rules as well as inborn skills that only need the developing. We have inborn knowledge of the general rules of this world, very general skills of the sort needed to function in this world. That’s all.

Polkinghorne raises an issue not addressed by St. Thomas Aquinas so far as I know. I repeat a line from the opening quote:

Perhaps we are in the midst of a similar, if much longer drawn out, process of education about the nature of quantum mechanical reality.

This process of understanding quantum mechanics has already gone on for three generations. It seems there are some reshapings of the human mind so radical that it takes generations to build the foundations before the building can even rise. Or is it just that few there are willing to accept reality on its own terms in an age where we’ve deluded ourselves to believe we’re born as some sort of fully formed ‘persons’? How can we be reshaped if we’re already fully formed? How can we need reshaping to suit ourselves for lives as hunters or scientists or God-centered human beings if we’re autonomous agents who merely make decisions or consume knowledge or experiences the way we think to consume toothpaste?