I’ve advocated the view that our imaginations can encompass what God has created, what the Almighty has manifested in this Creation, but we need examples and stimuli — in a manner of speaking. We need to be courageous and open-minded in our responses to Creation if we are to learn from God, who has a far more powerful imagination than we can ever…imagine. So to speak.
In Shaping Our Minds to Reality, I quoted the physicist and Anglican priest J.C. Polkinghorne:
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]
As part of my comments, I claimed:
We do not come into this life with brains which are some sort of wetware 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 become one with 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: “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 has already gone on for three generations or so in quantum mechanics. Is it possible that 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 especially 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?
Until fairly recently, I was myself confused about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, thinking of position — in terms of a a Cartesian x-y chart — as existing along with momentum. The fact that you couldn’t measure both at the same time with unlimited accuracy was a problem no different from that we would have if we tried to find a billiards ball in a black-box by shooting at it with probes, such as marbles, comparable in size to the ball. You find the ball by disturbing it in such a way that momentum is changed. You measure momentum in such a way that you disturb its position. That’s not entirely wrong and is probably the right way to think about this issue when learning about quantum physics, but it’s a somewhat twisted way to view matters.
A position measurement is quite simply a result of what might be called a position-oriented interaction with a more general sort of entity. Similarly, a momentum measurement is quite simply a result of what might be called a momentum-oriented interaction with a more general sort of entity. In more official words:
[W]hen an electron interacts with a device that measures its momentum, its wave-like aspects (definite wavelength) are emphasized at the expense of its particle-like aspects (definite position). [page 130, Quantum Theory, David Bohm, Dover, 1989]
So we might say that this situation is due to a wave-particle duality. Momentum is a wave attribute and position is a particle attribute. There are other such pairs including energy (wave attribute) and time (particle attribute). I’ve not yet read Bohm’s later writings where he restated quantum physics in terms of what is apparently a strange potential in an effort to make it all more rational, but I’ll make my own suggestion here.
We should imagine and speak of that electron as an entity more abstract than the concrete forms it might take after establishing a relationship with a more concrete entity. Until it forms a particular relationship with concrete entities, that electron is a form of being which is one step closer to the raw stuff of Creation, the thoughts or truths God manifested as created being, a specific set of truths for a particular Creation. Within that particular Creation many highly peculiar concrete worlds might be shaped.
Some physicists and philosophers might be inclined to speak in similar ways, including — I think — Bohm and his co-workers in his later efforts to make sense of quantum physics. The problem I see with any discussions I’ve yet read of Bohm’s later work or the less detailed but suggestive comments of other thinkers is that they propose more or less radical rethinkings of our ideas about the concrete being of this universe but, overall, they only patch up what might well be rather questionable concepts of being in a more general sense. I’ve proposed a more substantial, ground-up re-understanding of created being in a complex process which can be followed in my first published book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand and in my writings on my blogs, Acts of Being and To See a World in a Grain of Sand, over the past 6 years or so. A large collection of my blog essays can be downloaded here. These essays, not yet updated to include my writings in 2011, are organized into seven categories:
- Making Peace With Empirical Being
- The Human Mind as a Re-creation of God’s Creation
- Love and Stuff
- What is a Universe?
- Freedom and Structure in Human Life
- The Narrative We Know as a World
- What Means it All?
Many of the essays don’t really belong in just one category, but I think this structure makes it a little easier to figure out what I’m up to, a matter that often leaves my own half-reshaped mind in a state of confusion.
For now, let me finish by stating first three general principles of my metaphysical thought as it currently exists and then three aphoristic statements of important aspects of the underlying worldview:
- The act of existence or act-of-being precedes and, so to speak, dominates substance.
- Only God can perform an act-of-being which brings contingent being into existence where there was nothing, but even electrons interacting with each other can perform an act-of-being of a secondary sort, shaping a more abstract form of being into a concrete thing, such as an electron as a point-like entity with a specific location or an electron as a wave-like entity with a specific momentum.
- Created being lies on a spectrum from the abstract to the concrete but abstract forms of being remain present in the most mundane things.
In a somewhat aphoristic style, I claim:
- Things are true.
- Truths are thing-like.
- Relationships bring things into being.