by Charles Eisenstein
The Age of Separation, the Age of Reunion, and the convergence of crises that is birthing the transition
Table of Contents:
Chapter 6: The Crumbling of Certainty
Chapter VI: The Crumbling of Certainty
The End of Objectivity
The Age of Separation in all its dimensions has unfolded before us. The objectification and reduction of the world, the conversion of life into money, the program of understanding and control, the alienation of a discrete and separate self are all reaching their historical zenith in our time. All of these facets of separation are bound together in the official dogma of our civilization: the religion of science. However, starting perhaps a century ago, new countercurrents have welled up from within science itself that are contributing to a gathering sea-change. This momentous shift both drives and reflects even vaster changes, a wholesale transformation of all the dimensions of separation that comprise the ascent of humanity.
Like most religions, science encompasses an ideology, a program, and a method. The ideology of science comprises our fundamental story of the world and how it works, our parsing of the possible into the real and the imaginary, and our definition of what types of knowledge are valid. The program of science is what I have named the Scientific Program. It is the ambition to become Descartes “lords and possessors” of the physical universe; that is, to bring all phenomena into the realm of measurement, predictability, and control, so that all knowledge rests on a firm foundation of experimentally verifiable, objective truth.
The third element of the religion of science, the Scientific Method, draws its validity from the ideology of science and its motivation from the program of science. I have already discussed how the Scientific Method depends on the replicability of experiments, the testability of hypotheses, and ultimately on the assumptions of determinism and objectivity. Scientific inquiry in general—as well as a scientific, rational approach to life—assumes that there is a reality out there that we can query, test, understand, and in due course predict and control. Herein lies the quest for certainty, in which understanding rises from a foundation of facts. By sticking with the facts and reasoning from there we remain objective, and obtain knowledge of superior reliability.
The assumption of determinism encodes the conventional notion of causation and validates the Technological Program of control. It says that nothing happens that is not caused to happen. Events do not arise spontaneously, mysteriously, magically without cause. Events follow predictably from causes. If we can learn the causes of phenomena, and then master those causes, we then become the masters of reality. With sufficient understanding, there is nothing that might not someday be brought into the human realm.
I want to emphasize how deeply determinism is woven into our belief system. Do the same thing in the same way, and you have to get the same result. You see someone strike a flint and get a spark. You try it and it doesn’t work. Do you then simply conclude, “Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t”? No, you assume that you must have done something different. You examine your stone—is it the same kind? You examine your striking motion. You do your best to recreate the conditions under which it worked the first time. Determinism is absolutely fundamental to a rational approach to the world. I emphasize that so that the import of the failure of determinism will be clear. We are still very, very far from having fully integrated the psychological shock of it.
Objectivity is equally crucial to our understanding of and relationship to the world. It says there is a reality out there that can be observed, measured, quantified, and controlled. It is the same for you and for me—any apparent differences arise merely from different perspectives or interpretations of an independently existing universe. Its laws are invariant: God does not operate the world according to some changeable whim, nor do its laws operate differently for me than for you. Statements like, “The unicorn was there—really there—for me, but not for you” we take to be the very epitome of irrationality. Come on—was it there or wasn’t it? The same holds for “The computer works for you but not for me, even when I do nothing different.” Reason as we know it insists that something must have been different, either between us or in the environment, to make the computer behave differently this time.
The aspiration toward objectivity affects nearly every realm of human endeavor, anything that tries to be scientific. It is in fact very hard to define such terms as “scientific” or “rational” without resorting to some variation of objectivity. In science, the experimenter is supposed to maintain an objective distance from his experiments, assuming that there is no necessary, ineliminable connection between himself and the system under study. In medicine objectivity is embodied in the controlled double-blind study, which seeks to isolate the objective effects of a therapy so that we know how well it “really works”, independent of the attitudes and foibles of patient or doctor. In agriculture we might plant two identical fields with crops differing in only one significant variable, and measure the difference in yield. In jurisprudence the judge is supposed to maintain impartiality and consider only “the facts”. In journalism the belief in objectivity implies that a reporter is just that: someone who “reports” whatever facts are already out there. She is not supposed to actually be taking part in those events, for then she would no longer be objective.
Together, determinism and objectivity promise us technologies that apply generally and generically. Their standard application produces a predictable result. The person applying them is interchangeable, just as a scientific experiment is supposed to be replicable by any competent experimenter. Machine civilization depends on this interchangeability. Power over the physical universe comes via method and structure. Follow the prescribed procedures and you will get the predicted result, reliably. No matter who prescribes them, the right dose of antibiotics, taken according to objectively determined instructions, will cure strep throat. It does not matter the intentions of the canoneer: the cannonball will follow the same trajectory no matter what, as long as the initial angle and propulsive force are controlled. No less than for a caveman striking a flint, technological civilization’s mastery of the physical world depends on having reliable, generalizable ways to control it. Or so it would seem.
This is the founding philosophy that galvanized the Scientific Revolutionaries and motivates still the program of understanding and control. For several centuries after Galileo and Newton, the Scientific Program extended the foundation of control by gaining an ever-finer understanding of the “reasons” and the “reason” of the world, making ever-finer observations of the reality out there, until it got down to the base level of the subatomic realm. Here were to be the building blocks of the determinism and objectivity that embody scientific reason. And then calamity struck.
The calamity for science and reason is simply that at the subatomic level, the very bedrock of the whole edifice of science, determinism and objectivity do not hold. At the most fundamental level of reality, our scientific intuitions (embodied in the above statements about unicorns and computers) are simply wrong.
As a result, the last eight decades have seen a proliferation of interpretations of quantum mechanics that attempt to reconcile the indeterminacy and observer-dependence of the quantum realm with the determinism and objectivity that we “know” characterizes the world of everyday experience. None of these attempts have been successful—a marked contrast to Newtonian mechanics, which provoked little serious dispute about what it all meant because it fit in with the tide of the times. The present lack of agreement about the interpretation of quantum mechanics—which after all lies lies at the basis of physics—testifies to its incompatibility with our fundamental ontology.
It is beyond the scope of this book to give a thorough summary of precisely how quantum mechanics violates determinism and objectivity. I refer the reader to the vast non-technical literature on the topic, in particular the works of Paul Davies, Nick Herbert, David Wick, Roger Penrose, Fritjof Capra, David Deutsch, and Johnjoe McFadden. I particularly recommend the last two: Deutch’s The Fabric of Reality for its lucid exposition of the many-worlds interpretation that is currently in vogue, and McFadden’s Quantum Evolution for its elegantly clear introduction to the basic paradox of measurement.
Quantum mechanics’ violation of determinism is somewhat less challenging to conventional beliefs about self and world than is its violation of objectivity, so let’s start there. Determinism holds that initial conditions completely determine final conditions: in other words, if you do the exactly the same experiment twice, you’ll get the same result. This is a key assumption in the requirement of repeatability used to determine scientific fact. But in quantum mechanics the assumption is false. Fire a stream of electrons, photons, or indeed any particle through a slit onto a detector screen, and the final detected position of each one will be different. The overall distribution of particles is fully described by mathematical equations, but the fate of each individual particle is random. One might veer left, the next right, the next straight through, and there is no explanation for that behavior.[1] It is acausal, which violates a central assumption of the Scientific Program that with sufficiently diligent querying of nature, the reason for everything can be found. Here, at the very basis of the reductionist pyramid, matter behaves acausally, unreasonably, a state of affairs so troubling to scientific orthodoxy as to incite Einstein’s famous protest, “God does not play dice with the universe.”
If you are less troubled than Einstein was, perhaps that is because you have not pondered it as deeply as he did. So think about it. There is no reason for the photon’s behavior. Why did it take a particular path? The only answer is because it did. Nothing made it veer left, or right, or go straight.
Quantum uncertainty provides us with a new source of metaphor and intuition for human life. Newtonian determinism contributed to the feeling that we too are mere masses, the trajectory of our lives wholly determined by the forces bearing upon us. But perhaps we are more like a quantum particle, whose path is constrained or influenced by outside forces, but behaves as if it made its own choices. The metaphor of quantum mechanics is one of choice, autonomy, self-determination. Forgive me if the following metaphor is a little corny, but perhaps we are hurled through the aperture of our circumstances toward a highly probable destination; we then have the power to choose that one, or one far divergent from it. And no one can predict where our path will take us, and no outside power can dictate our choice.
In the quantum metaphor, choice is the human counterpart of quantum randomness. Both are irreducible, inalienable properties of the subject in question. We can give reasons for our choices, justifications and excuses; we can explain why we “had to” do what we chose to do, but that fact is that there is always a choice. By falling back on justifications we give away our power. And I wonder if the correspondence between quantum randomness and human choice is mere metaphor. I suspect that if we described photon diffraction to an aborigine, he would say that the particle too chooses its path. Random? Feh! Randomness is just a feeble attempt to rescue the world of generic masses and uniform building blocks. What if they are all different? What if each bit of matter is unique? What if the sameness that we impose upon it is a mere projection of our own lot, as the standardized consumers and functionaries of the Mumfordian megamachine?
The same indeterminacy that characterizes the path of a particle through an aperture also characterizes the decay of a radioactive atom, the polarity of a photon or electron, and many other properties. But the challenge to our conventional world-view runs much deeper than that, because not only are these measured quantities random; apparently, until they are measured they don’t have any definite status at all. Interference experiments such as the double-slit experiment, the Stern-Gerlach experiment, and countless others demonstrate that in the absence of measurement or observation, particles behave as if they occupied all possible states at once. What’s more, the very presence of observation can affect the evolution of the system being observed,[2] even in the absence of any physical force operating between system and observer.[3] In other words, there is no independently existing universe “out there” separable from we who observe it. Observer and observed are intimately linked; the distinction ultimately does not even make sense. The discrete and separate self is an illusion. And, the Galilean “primary qualities” that we measure with our instruments are not primary at all, but created through the very act of measurement. Another way to say it is that such properties as distance, time, and form are properties of a relationship between self and universe, not of an independently existing objective universe. The naïve concept of existence represented by the disembodied fork floating in nothingness that we visualized in Chapter Three, is incompatible with modern physics.
Like the failure of determinism, the crumbling of objectivity opens the door to a profoundly different set of intuitions and metaphors. Seeing ourselves as isolated subjects in a vast indifferent universe, we easily succumb to feelings of powerlessness, alienation, and despair. No more. Just as quantum randomness is the metaphorical counterpart of human choice, quantum measurement is analogous to our interpretation of our experiences. Like a quantum measurement, these interpretations take on a creative significance. In interacting with the world and taking its measure, we collapse a plenum of possibility into a single actuality. We are not merely interpreting a reality separate from ourselves; we are, through the act of interpretation, actually causing that reality to come to be.
This is as we would expect if the foundational myth of our civilization, the discrete and separate self, is indeed a myth. If that separation is an illusion, then of course the inner world of our interpretations, thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes will have an effect on the outside world that is not really outside. We are now very close to the magical thinking of primitive animists, whose beliefs in the creative power of word and ritual take on a new significance. Could the metaphorical implications of quantum mechanics propel us toward a reunion of those long-separated inner and outer worlds? Let us begin imagining what a reunited world would be like for humanity, not as it was 50,000 years ago, but in the context of our long-accumulating technology and culture.
Even without such speculations, the consequences of failure of determinism and objectivity have so far been too huge for our culture to digest, so antithetical are they to the reigning orthodoxy. The quantum measurement “paradox” is the inevitable product of attempting to weld the observer-dependence of the quantum world with the supposed objectivity of the world of everyday experience inhabited by our discrete, separate selves. Quantum mechanics invalidates the discrete and separate self. Because quantum mechanics represents such a profound challenge to our very self-conception, for eighty years scientists and philosophers have gone through paroxysms of interpretation to somehow mediate the two realms of non-objective, acausal quantum events and the classical reality we think we experience.
Again, none of these attempts has been successful. On the practical level, most deny the extension of indeterminacy and observer-dependence into the macroscopic world essentially by claiming that quantum uncertainty tends to routinely cancel out, approximating classical mechanics on the scale of everyday experience. Thus while there is a finite chance that a marble flung through a hole will diffract onto a non-classical path, this chance is so close to zero that it can be ignored. While this solves the practical problem of why classical mechanics works so well for, say, designing machines and bridges, it doesn’t deal with the ontological problem: what is the fundamental nature of reality? Moreover, as the founders of quantum mechanics, particularly Shröedinger, realized, the ontological problem does not go away, but becomes especially pressing when quantum events are magnified into classical observations (which is essentially what a quantum measurement does).
Some unconventional thinkers such as Roger Penrose and Johnjoe McFadden argue that quantum effects are projected into macroscopic reality routinely in living systems, and not just in the contrived conditions of a physics lab. Some, more radical, even cite indeterminacy as an escape clause from mechanism that allows free will; others cite quantum phenomena as evidence to support various approaches to healing and spirituality. Such speculations range from the ignorant to the highly sophisticated, but I believe that someday science will establish a quantum explanation for many presently unexplained (and for the most part, unacknowledged) phenomena. However, a detailed discussion of the measurement paradox, and the dominant misunderstanding of decoherence, will have to await a future book. If you read my words carefully, you will see I claim no direct link between quantum phenomena and the world of human experience. For example, I am not claiming that quantum indeterminacy proves we have free will. Quantum mechanics has given us a new way of thinking, a new kind of logic, and a new source of metaphor. These already may be powerful enough to transform our civilization.
The counterintuitive aspects of quantum mechanics I have described are only counter to those intuitions that are contingent on the modern conception of self and world. To people before the Age of Separation was well underway, descriptions of quantum phenomena such as “It occupied two positions simultaneously,” or “It wasn’t there until you looked for it,” or “It was there for you but not for me” may not have seemed paradoxical at all. To them, there was no absolute distinction between observer and observed, imagination and reality, human and nature, self and other. To the extent that such distinctions existed, their provisional nature was recognized, perhaps as a play, a creative artifice. Hence the original identity cited in Chapter Two between ritual and reality, and in the Original Language between the name and the thing named.
The mind of the primitive is often irksomely irrational to the Western visitor. I must admit having suffered the same annoyance in my early encounters with New Agey people who would (it seemed) taunt me with such statements as “It’s true for you but not for me.” I would say, “I believe that if ‘qi’ really exists we would have detected it with scientific instruments” and my friend would respond, “That belief is why you cannot detect it with your instruments.” I would say, “I don’t believe out-of-body experiences are possible,” and he’d say, “Then for you they are not possible.”
It was maddening. “I don’t mean ‘for me’, I mean not possible for real.”
“Then for you, it is not possible for real.”
Aargh!
What I meant by “for real” was “objectively”. One friend, the healer and musician Chad Parks, tried to explain a psychic invisibility technique taught him by some (to me) dubious New-age guru. People choose not to look at you or they simply don’t notice you. “But surely if they looked, the light rays bouncing off your body would still reach their eyes,” I said, “so you’re not really invisible.”
“To them I am.”
A similar situation arises in one of Carlos Castenada’s books, in which the narrator, trying to get a grip on Don Juan’s shamanic powers, challenges him, “But what if someone was waiting in ambush on your path—surely you couldn’t stop a bullet, could you?”
“No, I could not stop a bullet. But I would not take that path.”
Castenada could have continued, “But what if the situation required you to take that path?” and Don Juan could have replied in kind, “Then I would not enter that situation.”
In the prior example, I could have proposed to Chad an experiment: “Okay, make yourself invisible—I bet I can still see you.” He would have said, “It won’t work, I am already here for you.” His invisibility is essentially untestable because the very grounds for objective testing embody a conflict of assumptions. It is testable only in an objective universe, and it only works in a non-objective universe. The whole idea of certainty of knowledge, built through objective reasoning, is only as sound as the objectivity at its basis. Question that, and we question the soundness of the entire edifice of experimentally-derived knowledge.
The reason that primitive and New Age logic seems irrational is that it is irrational. Reason, according to David Bohm’s definition that I quote in Chapter Three, is the application of an abstracted relationship onto something new. A non-objective world defies such abstraction. If the world “out there” reflects in some way the inner world, then reason is but one of several cognitive tools for creating and defining our experiences. Reason is still a valid and useful tool; it is only when it becomes a reflexive habit rather than a conscious instrument that it is limiting.
Professional skeptics are fond of railing at the abysmal stupidity of their opponents, who seem dispossessed of that key function of higher cognition, reason. Like a fish unaware that it is wet, these critics rarely perceive their own immersion in assumptions of self and world that constitutionally limit them to certain narrow modes of cognition, those that we call rational. These are powerful in a certain domain, having enabled us to build the towering edifice of our civilization; they are behind the vast program to engineer the world and remake nature. As this program falters, we open to the possibility of other modes of cognition and relationship.
As quantum mechanics slowly replaces our Newtonian-Cartesian intuitions with those that are non-dualistic, all of the fruits of separation will lose their deepest rationale. For even if conventional philosophy is right that quantum indeterminacy and observer-dependence have no practical consequences for consciousness, mind, and self; even if no one ever proves that our level of matter departs appreciably from the classical description, there still lurks at bottom an implacable exception to the claim that “the universe is just like that.” If only by way of metaphor, quantum mechanics confers upon us a new logic, a new framework of possibility. No longer will the discrete and separate self be the only conceivable, the only cogent way of understanding the world.
Quantum mechanics heralds a momentous shift in our intuitions that will rapidly accelerate as the failure of the old ways of life and thought becomes increasingly obvious. Just as the regime of separation both set the stage for, and was reinforced by, its apotheosis in the science of Newton and Descartes, so also will quantum mechanics quicken the emerging realization of our interconnectedness with each other and all of nature, which will in turn allow us to more fully digest quantum theory’s profound ontological consequences. In other words, quantum theory is both a cause and an effect, a harbinger and a symptom, of a larger shift in consciousness.
Armed with the intuitions, or at least the metaphorical possibilities, that quantum mechanics foretells, the beliefs of primitive humans will take on a new vitality, relevance, and import. Already we feel their pull, as the popularity of “Native American spirituality” testifies. (That this form of cultural capital is rapidly coopted and converted into money does not alter the kernel of its appeal.) Already, we are becoming more willing to believe that our thoughts, words, and actions have a power beyond their classical physical description as a mere shifting of masses and flux of chemicals. Already we grow more at ease with the idea of a fluid reality, not separate and absolute, but defined by our relationship to it and molded by our beliefs. Little do we realize that the stage is being set for a wholly different science, and a wholly different technology, no longer based on the premise of separation and no longer reinforcing that premise. And no aspect of human life will remain unchanged.
[1] While David Bohm’s “hidden variables” interpretation of quantum mechanics attempts to restore determinism, it does nothing to rescue the program of complete understanding/control, because these hidden variables are fundamentally unknowable.
[2] For examples of the intentional use of observation to affect reality, I suggest reading about “null measurements” or “quantum Zeno effect”.
[3] This was demonstrated once and for all in the Aspect experiment, which demonstrated an observer effect when the observation happened outside the space-time light cone of an affected part of the system.
2008 Charles Eisenstein