Where does the Lake go, when the Geese fly to Canada?

 

It began with John Locke (1632 – 1704). He analyzed the communication between mind and matter and found the process to be cluttered with secondary qualities and caveats. According to him, what we perceive is but a pale apparition of the real thing “out there.” This provoked David Hume (1711 – 1776) to dismiss perception as representing an outer world that cannot be proven to exist. Hume’s radical skepticism was vexing enough to annoy George Berkeley (1685 – 1753). Like everybody else the good bishop was longing for something real to sink in his teeth. And what does guarantee more authenticity and immediacy of perception than the Ideas in the mind? Plotinus (204 – 270 AD.) had already suggested this, fifteen hundred years earlier. So what if perception was the real thing, the actual constituent? What if perception, the mind, establishes and sustains existence and not the other way around?

Let us indulge and for a moment consider the consequences of such “participatory universe” in which the mind’s intervention is creating the event, even decreeing the outcome of such event.

Obviously, there are many minds out there, even the confirmed solipsist has now and then a run-in with his mother in law, and most of the other minds probably belong to facet-eyed aliens with feelers and antennae whose jerky limbs operate the dials of their spaceships – hollow asteroids on a gentle spin – while traversing the radiation belt in the constellation Ursa Major. Sustaining perception is provided by me, you, your daughter, my dog and the smellyphant in the zoo, but to do science becomes a tricky business. Billions of minds guarantee existence but not unity of perception. You see a buss, I see a restaurant, and in actual fact it is neither but a constable on the beat wearing drag, trying to entrap horny guys by impersonating a lady of the night. Events in the future could reshape the past. Think it through: the god Berkeley was believing in is a comparably recent entry in the religious history of the Human race. If the proposition is that mind sustains “existence” – think of the cart loads of believers who every Sunday work on their perceptions in Church – well then the faithful is sending his deity on an errant into a past that didn’t know of him. Which immediately should result in changes of the present.

This idea has crept in even into modern physics. The late John Wheeler (1911 – 2008) made a foray into mysticism and DIY philosophy, by claiming that “we are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but the far away and long ago.” Obviously this is not happening. If we were really “participators in bringing about something of the universe in the distant past,” it should enable us to erase Auschwitz from the records. Merlin would return from his grave. Archaeology would collect warping and mysteriously appearing and disappearing artifacts. We would live in a world as Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) is describing it in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.

Wheeler’s idea is a byproduct of quantum mechanics. In 1927 Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976) stated that short light-waves of high energy can measure the location of an electron with a certain degree of precision, yet the procedure will severely disturb the electron's impulse. Measuring the impulse of an electron with a light-wave of lesser amplitude will leave the impulse less disturbed, since long-waved light contains less energy, but then it is the electron's location that eludes precise measurement, diverging in a wave of statistical possibilities along the electron's orbit. From this Heisenberg drew the conclusion of a fundamental uncertainty in the correlation between impulse and location. A precise simultaneous measurement of location and impulse is just not possible, because the amplitude of the measuring light wave can only be short or long, not both at the same time. In other words, the moment we try measuring it, we destroy the correlation between impulse and position; it ceases to exist.

The philosophical question here is: was there a correlation to start with? If a measurement is not even possible how are we to justify the stipulation that there is a correlation?

The answer should be simple! There is nothing to prevent us from choosing to measure either of the two data in this correlation and we will always get a result, therefore the correlation exists, albeit hidden from direct observation. Heisenberg was a brilliant mathematician but a mediocre philosopher, something he, Wheeler and many of their colleagues in Copenhagen seemed to have in common. They felt troubled by the fact that the result of such measurement appears to be of our own making. They thought it does not entitle them to accept even the mere existence of the correlation between impulse and position as a physical fact. Instead scientists operate with an algorithm, a “probability function.” It is a good algorithm, these days quantum mechanics is our most precise science, down to the eighth digit behind the dot. Yet if the scientists would have been willing to listen, even a minor philosopher could have explained to them the difference between “phenomena” and “information.” The algorithm is representing information about the hidden correlation between impulse and position, it is a statement of our knowledge and not a representation of the phenomenon as such. We can make a measurement, even design the event we are measuring, but we cannot decree the outcome of the measurement. The involvement of the observer which scientists find so troubling, does not mean that we can pull out unicorns from the test-tube at our convenience. We are not commanding nature, even if we have learned that after the felling of a million trees it is fair to expect that this one, too, is going to fall when we are finished with hacking and sawing.

The claim that we live in a participatory universe is just another flirt with the irrational and would be a meaningful statement only if every bloody thought that goes through my mind could materialize as an observable phenomenon. There is absolutely nothing in the process that warrants “participatory” universes and “anthropic principles,” and if somebody wishes to enthuse about the “fine tuning” of a Universe that made our existence possible, he better explains why he thinks it is not us who are fine tuned to given conditions. Why didn’t this Wheeler just shut up and do what he did best: running the figures? Nobody denies he was a great physicist.

So, if we hold on to the proposition that “mind” sustains “existence,” how did Berkeley explain the stability of the physical world, the fact that things do not warp and bend to our wishes and fears, that there are laws of nature, physical constants and rocks that will not yield when we kick it? Bishop Berkeley was a man of the cloth, so the answer seemed obvious to him.

It must be the Great Perceiver himself before whose eyes we have found grace, and who knows our names. Nothing can exist without a mind – “His” mind – sustaining it. It was a brand new and wonderful proof for the existence of God. Let’s not rain on the good bishop’s parade and ask whose mind before the first day of creation could possibly have been around to endow God himself with existence. His wife, Mrs. Asheroth perhaps? Or an infinite number of turtles perceiving each other – very carefully? Let’s not do this; only the wicked skeptic seeks to explain the world without the appeal to God’s sustaining awareness. Because of all the arguments for the existence of God this is the only one with the potential of holding water: an empirical (not a logical) proof, that things cannot work on their own, but need an external agent to help it along. Prove it and you prove the existence of God. Disprove it and "God" is just an excuse for intellectual sloth.

Bishop Berkeley was entitled to put great faith in his god, but the strain of incessant omnipresence his philosophy is laying on the Old Potter must be unbearable. Unlike the deity of Isaac Newton, who is merely needed to leisurely drop the ball and kick off the game, before retreating to the terraces for tea and scones, the god in Berkeley’s joyless sweatshop would be unable to step aside for a cigarette break without causing the whole Universe to collapse. No wonder grouchy Yahweh lost it for a moment and on the way to the pub suddenly assaulted his friend Moses with homicidal intent (Exodus 4:24). A shark with a lifetime of sleep depravation will empathize. It never occurred to Berkeley that every humble mason is doing better: once it has left the drawing board, the new building doesn’t need the builder to personally double in for the pillars and beams. In order to sustain Berkeley’s philosophy, God’s full attention and undivided assistance is a condition. It is the key to the stability of the world surrounding us, and I am not sure brash John Ruskin (1819 – 1900) really answered it when he said, “to get rid of all the ambiguities and troublesome words at once, be it observed that the word ‘blue’ does not mean the ‘sensation’ caused by a gentian on the human eye; but it means the ‘power’ of producing that sensation. And this power is always there, in the thing, whether we are there to experience it or not, and would remain there though there were not left a man on the face of the earth. Precisely in the same way gunpowder has a power of exploding. It will not explode if you put no match to it. But it has always the power of so exploding, and is therefore called an explosive compound, which it very positively and assuredly is, whatever philosophy may say to the contrary” (Ruskin, Of The Pathetic Fallacy).

Bertrand Russell somewhere has suggested that there is no logical contradiction in the idea to think that the Universe was created yesterday, or a few seconds ago, together with all my memories of a past that never was, with ancestral tombstones, with the fossils of Jurassic monsters hidden in the rocks, and with the light in transit from stars billions of light-years away. Yet again, subsequent to the act of creation, this would require stability and natural laws – gravity, air pressure, leverage, isotope decay and Mendeleyev's table of elements – fully apply. Any “participatory” aberration and the cosmic hoax becomes a psychedelic experience. Minor disturbances caused by minor minds as ours, or by our facet eyed-friends from Ursa Mayor, would continually ripple through the picture. Coming to think of it, Lord Russell’s proposition must refer to the guy sipping his tea on the terraces.

Meanwhile I am standing at the reed-fringed Lake, watching the geese gathering in the clouded sky. Even as the last man on Earth, I would of course be able to go away and the lake is still there, because the little minds of the circling geese continue sustaining its existence. But where does the lake go when the geese fly to Canada?

Sounds almost like Zen, doesn’t it?

© – 4/21/2009 – by michael sympson, 1,925 words, all rights reserved