Steiner and Schrodinger's Equation

[Federica]

PS. I haven't carefully read the article suggesting that Steiner anticipated qm, so I don't have an opinion on the following, but I wonder whether you think the author had a wish to prove the anticipation as a "selling argument" for Anthroposophy towards the scientific community or other cultural groups adverse to it?

That's certainly a possibility. As mentioned before, though, the author did present an alternate viewpoint that challenged his conclusion at the end of the article (which is only 5 pages long). Without further information, I am reluctant to let any opinions of possible motivations color my understanding of his argument.

But… Ashvin, I had missed/forgotten that you actually asked my same question the other day!

answering the question of whether Steiner anticipated the Schrodinger equation in the affirmative could be little more than apologetic for Steiner and Anthroposophy when discussing the topic with scientifically minded people who may have a healthy skepticism of esoteric science. I imagine that was the main purpose for the author of that paper, although that’s just my speculation. Some people may be impressed that Steiner anticipated one of the key foundations of modern quantum mechanics, enough to spark their curiosity.

And you have also said in the same post:

It is always a great question to ask, "what is the purpose of this line of questioning and what can come from finding an answer to it?" Often times we may be seeking answers of out mere curiosity, or other shadowy motives

Moreover, the day before:

I will admit this question mostly seems significant to me because it also was significant enough for the author of the originally linked paper

So I'm not getting where the blue is coming from?

[AshvinP]

Returning to the light-ether, perhaps the following excerpt is instructive:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA165/En ... 02p01.html

Remembrance is this: the perception from the outer ether of inner etheric movements; the perception from the outer light-ether of movements in the inner light-body: that is, to remember.

Suppose, for example, that you see two men meet each other. Perhaps the one merely sees the face of the other, but because of this certain movements arise in his etheric body. Then he goes his way. The etheric body retains the tendency to repeat these movements if stirred to do so. Five days later these two men meet again. They perceive each other, the one whose light-body is stirred to make the same movements which it made when he saw the other's face before. This is expressed in his consciousness when he says: I have seen this face before. That is: consciousness perceives the inner movements of the light-ether from the light-ether. This is remembrance purely as an act of perception. We can say: in the external light one perceives the movements taking place in the inner light-body. But we do not see them as light movements. Why do we not see them thus in ordinary life? We do not see them as light movements, because this light-ether body is seated within the physical body, and therefore the movements of the light-ether impinge everywhere on the physical body. Through these impacts, the light movements of the etheric body are transformed into memory pictures. These light movements are not perceptible, it is only through what the memory presents to us through contact with the physical body that we are aware of them.

It seems to me that the faculty of memory directly corresponds to the quality of previous states of being consciously superimposed on our current state of being. From a strictly phenomenological perspective, that is basically how we experience memories (...)

Thanks for adding a reference to my questions on the nature of spiritual light, Ashvin.
I feel I'm somewhat behind on life ether, I haven't read the relevant lectures and I only have in mind Cleric's posts, so I'm not yet able to connect those dots, but I have a note on the nature of memory as you have described it.

I can't see how the underlined statement connects with the preceding quote, as well as with the way memory has been often characterized here, that is as the only constraint to the flow of becoming, that can only be experienced as coherent flow when the first-person perspective understands every time-frame as self-similarly linked to the previously experienced ones, that are embedded, or nested, in the subsequent ones as memory. How do you go from vertically nested succession of events to horizontal alternative storylines in the characterization of memory? It seems to me that memory is the opposite of superposition of states of being. And Steiner's quote speaks of the event of remembrance, not of the faculty of memory. He speaks of how an event triggers a specific remembrance of a past event. Aren't these two different things? (Despite that in English memory means both the faculty and the specific thought image occasionally recalled).
Superposition has to be horizontal, right? And when we recall a past event, and bring it all the way to the now, from the past, I wouldn't say the current event and the past one are superimposed, since they are not alternative storylines. They are both realized parts of our becoming, they have both collapsed in our karma, and are vertically related. Alternative superimposed storylines stand with each other, or interfere, in a quite different way: they express potential, as it seems to me. Could you say more about why you see memory as superimposed states?

Federica,

I am not sure why you are characterizing the 'alternative storylines' or 'superposition' as "horizontal" in this context. In my view, these storylines are our dim way of thinking about the superimposed, vertically nested potential in which our states of being unfold. In response to Cleric's previous post, for ex., I had mentioned how we often evaluate the value of decisions we are making, whether utility value or moral value (which can overlap), by comparing them to alternate branching structures of our stream that will unfold (for decisions not yet made) or would have unfolded (for decisions completed). So, in that sense, the alternative storylines act as background meaningful context in our stream of becoming, which is just as practically significant for how our stream will unfold as the frames of our stream which are experienced as actualized. Our normal memory stream that is tied to intellectual consciousness only resonates with the 'actualized' frames, but as our thinking consciousness expands outwards via higher development we can begin to also intuitively resonate with what we normally experience as 'what could have happened'. In other words, we could experience 'what could have happened' as intimate and integral to our stream as we normally experience 'what did happen'. That doesn't mean we suddenly start fantasizing that we ate caviar for breakfast and went skydiving when we actually ate cereal and went to work, but only that we have a keener sense of how the possibilities that didn't actualize 'interfered' to result in that which moved our will in a certain direction towards what actualized.

Now, for me, this is just speculation about the higher essence of our memory faculty based on conceptual reasoning through what I have encountered in esoteric science, including Cleric's posts on this forum. I don't have any intimate experience with this vertically expanded memory. But if we just look at our phenomenal experience of normal memory, the latter is also experienced as 'past' states of being superimposed on our present state of being. Like you said, the stream of memory is experienced as being embedded in our current state. In contrast, an animal can hardly experience any past states superimosed on its present state. We can also think about how much we miss in our previous actualized states experienced as memory - if we could revisit those states with the same intensity as if they are presently happening, how much more insight could we extract from them once our intuitive consciousness deepens? Theoretically there is no upper limit to that possibility. We can imagine that, in every 'next state' we transition to, we actually transition to all possible states, but only those that resonate with a certain constellation of self-similar states are actually experienced as 'next'. Through higher development, this constellation expands because we become intimately related to more states of being, i.e. our interest expands to encompass the first-person soul-life of more beings.

We could imagine that the whole potential of humanity has manifested itself in the differentiated streams of becoming for individual humans across the globe (or in disincarnate states), with various perspectives-experiences based on soul factors, life factors, and physical factors evenly distributed. The path of spiritual evolution will lead our individual stream to integrate with all others and eventually experience those 'other streams' as our own, including what they went through before we integrated with them. Or, put another way, the "before" and "after" integration will lose its meaning for our stream. That has already happened to some limited extent over the last 2,500 years or so and accounts for modern cultural evolution, in which broader swaths of individuals are able to thoughtfully communicate and work towards shared ideals with each other independently of gender, tribe, race, nationality, etc. Cleric touched on the much more expanded extent of this development in the context of the Jupiter evolution:

Man in the next aeon will be a new being. As the Jupiter stage is re-created from the spiritual potential it is like the evolutionary journey is recapitulated. An interesting example of such recapitulation can be observed in the way the human embryo quickly passes through its evolutionary stages. In the early stages it is difficult to distinguish human embryo from fish embryo, then from amphibian, from mammalian (remember that we have a tail that is then reabsorbed). But while other animal forms stop at a certain stage, the human being continues to its human form.

On Jupiter man evolves once again to his fully conscious state but in a different environment. There is no rigid mineral world, reality is of Imaginative nature. But this new man is now at a different ‘scale’ so to speak. It is similar to what the Angelic beings are today.

Now the critical point, however, is that when we reach self-consciousness again at that stage, we’ll be able to remember the Earthly aeon but there’s something very peculiar. That new man won’t be able to say for example “In the Earthly aeon I went through this and this incarnation. In one particular incarnation I was called Eugene.” This is very significant. There’s no one-to-one ‘mapping’ between the future man in the next aeon and our present man-unit. Instead, the future man feels himself as if he was already present in the Earthly aeon but was not fully conscious. But the interesting thing is that that man lived in whole groups of human beings, very roughly analogously to the way our “I” lives in the group of cells of our body.
...
It is necessary that we conceive of this higher man, as something that exists even at this moment in its germinal beginnings. But more importantly, we have to conceive of that being as something independent from our human-scale sense of self. It penetrates our being, we share one essence, it secretly attracts our becoming, yet there’s no strict one-to-one correspondence between our sense of “I”-unit and that of the higher man. The reason is that this being lives in other souls too. We can’t simply say “I’m that higher being” because what about the other souls? If everyone claims that they are the higher being, a fight will ensue. For this reason, the proper attitude is to have clear consciousness that that being lives in its germinal beginnings and acts as attractor of our evolutionary worldline and at the same time we’re collectively responsible for that being because after Pralaya it will evolve out of the karma that we have collectively weaved.

Another abstract way to characterize the above is to say, on Jupiter the new man will have consciously mastered the etheric movements that weave his memory experience into connection with many other humans, which is already the case but mostly obscured from our intellectual consciousness and its limited capacity for resonance (which is rooted in a lack of genuine interest, reverence, and love for our fellow beings). The fact that this higher 'man' already exists and is attracting our stream of becoming is quite important to recognize for our discussion here. In the context of QM science-philosophy we often speak of these things as metaphors, analogies, and so forth for higher realities, and that is generally the proper way to proceed, but they are not merely metaphors in the ordinary sense. They are also literally true, in so far as they point to concrete ideational perspectives that encompass broader spheres of potential states than our own current perspective. These are the more universal perspectives we experience every sleep and after death, where our "I" participates in intentionally weaving the curvatures of morphic spaces through which our relatively fragmented Earthly states of being have unfolded and will continue to unfold.

[Federica]

(...) these storylines are our dim way of thinking about the superimposed, vertically nested potential in which our states of being unfold. In response to Cleric's previous post, for ex., I had mentioned how we often evaluate the value of decisions we are making, whether utility value or moral value (which can overlap), by comparing them to alternate branching structures of our stream that will unfold (for decisions not yet made) or would have unfolded (for decisions completed).

I'm really not following. Yes, I noticed that example about comparing made decisions with what could have happened in case of a different decision, and I didn't get it, as I'm not getting it now. Again, it seems to me that you are putting in the same basket memory and remembrances. I don't find that from a pure phenomenological perspective we experience memory as superposition. We experience Memory with a big M as identity, as continuity of consciousness, and we experience a remembrance as a new thought in its own right, since every thought we consciously experience is a remembrance, in a big sense. We don't experience a recollection as a superposition, I don't get it... it's another thought, a thought perception, as fresh as the first time one thinks about anything.

I will do my best and read your sequence of posts again tomorrow, maybe I am missing its meaning completely, since for now it's my impression that the whole sequence is driven by the end attractor of the Steiner equation anticipating QM.

[AshvinP]

(...) these storylines are our dim way of thinking about the superimposed, vertically nested potential in which our states of being unfold. In response to Cleric's previous post, for ex., I had mentioned how we often evaluate the value of decisions we are making, whether utility value or moral value (which can overlap), by comparing them to alternate branching structures of our stream that will unfold (for decisions not yet made) or would have unfolded (for decisions completed).

I'm really not following. Yes, I noticed that example about comparing made decisions with what could have happened in case of a different decision, and I didn't get it, as I'm not getting it now. Again, it seems to me that you are putting in the same basket memory and remembrances. I don't find that from a pure phenomenological perspective we experience memory as superposition. We experience Memory with a big M as identity, as continuity of consciousness, and we experience a remembrance as a new thought in its own right, since every thought we consciously experience is a remembrance, in a big sense. We don't experience a recollection as a superposition, I don't get it... it's another thought, a thought perception, as fresh as the first time one thinks about anything.

I will do my best and read your sequence of posts again tomorrow, maybe I am missing its meaning completely, since for now it's my impression that the whole sequence is driven by the end attractor of the Steiner equation anticipating QM.

Let's break it down into smaller steps. Do you agree that 'what could have happened' in different circumstances should be understood as real, in the sense that some perspective in reality experiences that alternate storyline as its manifest reality (not necessarily as we would have experienced it)? Put another way, some perspective's first-person ideational experience is what we may conceptually label the 'field of potential' in which our actual states of being unfold, states of being which could have followed a different trajectory within that potential?

[Federica]

(...) these storylines are our dim way of thinking about the superimposed, vertically nested potential in which our states of being unfold. In response to Cleric's previous post, for ex., I had mentioned how we often evaluate the value of decisions we are making, whether utility value or moral value (which can overlap), by comparing them to alternate branching structures of our stream that will unfold (for decisions not yet made) or would have unfolded (for decisions completed).

I'm really not following. Yes, I noticed that example about comparing made decisions with what could have happened in case of a different decision, and I didn't get it, as I'm not getting it now. Again, it seems to me that you are putting in the same basket memory and remembrances. I don't find that from a pure phenomenological perspective we experience memory as superposition. We experience Memory with a big M as identity, as continuity of consciousness, and we experience a remembrance as a new thought in its own right, since every thought we consciously experience is a remembrance, in a big sense. We don't experience a recollection as a superposition, I don't get it... it's another thought, a thought perception, as fresh as the first time one thinks about anything.

I will do my best and read your sequence of posts again tomorrow, maybe I am missing its meaning completely, since for now it's my impression that the whole sequence is driven by the end attractor of the Steiner equation anticipating QM.

Let's break it down into smaller steps. Do you agree that 'what could have happened' in different circumstances should be understood as real, in the sense that some perspective in reality experiences that alternate storyline as its manifest reality (not necessarily as we would have experienced it)? Put another way, some perspective's first-person ideational experience is what we may conceptually label the 'field of potential' in which our actual states of being unfold, states of being which could have followed a different trajectory within that potential?

Ashvin, I appreciate the help, thanks. But I don't want to engage you further in a floating discussion that would essentially waste time and space. I have a growing sense of unstable anchorage for thinking, a growing sense that every piece of understanding, as soon as gained, immediately falls back into a process of erosion, so that all attempts to develop holistic understanding become like a vain battle. One may be tempted to create a system or structure in response, but to the extent that responsibility is externalized to the structure, that's also not the way. So I feel I have to first find a proper inner attitude to respond to the chaos that seems to fiercely oppose my efforts to expand understanding, both from the outside and from the inside. I know it's not going to come from a methodology, but from a mode of consciousness. Still, I am struggling to uncover that centered mode of consciousness that would overcome recession and allow for every new piece to smoothly integrate into the whole. Therefore - and not because I refuse to further discuss the topic - I would save this topic of memory as superposition for later.

[AshvinP]

I'm really not following. Yes, I noticed that example about comparing made decisions with what could have happened in case of a different decision, and I didn't get it, as I'm not getting it now. Again, it seems to me that you are putting in the same basket memory and remembrances. I don't find that from a pure phenomenological perspective we experience memory as superposition. We experience Memory with a big M as identity, as continuity of consciousness, and we experience a remembrance as a new thought in its own right, since every thought we consciously experience is a remembrance, in a big sense. We don't experience a recollection as a superposition, I don't get it... it's another thought, a thought perception, as fresh as the first time one thinks about anything.

I will do my best and read your sequence of posts again tomorrow, maybe I am missing its meaning completely, since for now it's my impression that the whole sequence is driven by the end attractor of the Steiner equation anticipating QM.

Let's break it down into smaller steps. Do you agree that 'what could have happened' in different circumstances should be understood as real, in the sense that some perspective in reality experiences that alternate storyline as its manifest reality (not necessarily as we would have experienced it)? Put another way, some perspective's first-person ideational experience is what we may conceptually label the 'field of potential' in which our actual states of being unfold, states of being which could have followed a different trajectory within that potential?

Ashvin, I appreciate the help, thanks. But I don't want to engage you further in a floating discussion that would essentially waste time and space. I have a growing sense of unstable anchorage for thinking, a growing sense that every piece of understanding, as soon as gained, immediately falls back into a process of erosion, so that all attempts to develop holistic understanding become like a vain battle. One may be tempted to create a system or structure in response, but to the extent that responsibility is externalized to the structure, that's also not the way. So I feel I have to first find a proper inner attitude to respond to the chaos that seems to fiercely oppose my efforts to expand understanding, both from the outside and from the inside. I know it's not going to come from a methodology, but from a mode of consciousness. Still, I am struggling to uncover that centered mode of consciousness that would overcome recession and allow for every new piece to smoothly integrate into the whole. Therefore - and not because I refuse to further discuss the topic - I would save this topic of memory as superposition for later.

I understand, Federica, and that is probably the wise approach. The fact that you have noticed this habitual process of intellectual building up and destruction, of inner and outer circumstances conspiring against holistic understanding, means you are already tracing your current thinking-states to the deeper layers of time-potential from which they condense, the deeper currents of feelings and desires. That is the most important thing to do - everything we explore in metaphorical terminology here should be traced to our first-person stream of experience. The 'superposition of memory' is nothing other than a metaphor for the fact that our deeper curvatures of preferences, inclinations, emotions, desires, temperament, etc. are guiding our thinking-perceptual states that recede into memory. From that stream of memory, they can be resurrected. In our animal state, our thinking-perceptual states recede into memory but almost immediately vanish into unconsciousness. When the "I" incarnates - when we become truly human - the tide shifts via memory. These states remain accessible to consciousness longer - as if 'superimposed' on our current state - and thereby we also begin anticipating and planning for the future, capable of participating in the steering of our states towards high ideals.

That has served human civilization well for the last few thousand years, but now we have reached a ceiling. That fact was captured by philosophers like Hume when he pointed to the ‘problem of induction’ - no matter how many times we have experienced the Sun rising in the past, this doesn’t guarantee that it will rise again the next day. That is a perfectly valid problem of knowledge for the intellect, with its epistemic limitations and unrealistic expectations. That is why the only path forward is to retrace back through the forces of thinking (imagination), feeling (inspiration) and will (intuition) that originally made our thinking-perceptual states possible and are therefore embedded in our stream of individual-collective memory. Then we are no longer trying to accurately model the state of the world 'out there' with our 'inner' thoughts, but actively participate in the actual ideational process of evolution, whereby the Earth-humanity will become a Sun to compensate for the fading light of the old Sun.

I say all of this not to restart the conceptual discussion of ‘superposition of memory’, but to simply provide some context for the fact that you, in noticing how the inner attitude is narrowing your potential of thinking-states to ones that erode quickly after they form, and striving to do something about it, are already engaging in the supra-intellectual process of retracing the depth structure. That is what modern initiation is all about. It’s exactly as Cleric said in that post I referenced to Scott on the other thread. These are the most important things to pay attention to on a daily basis for our higher spiritual development. If we do that, then the holistic conceptual understanding will naturally coalesce around our living and conscious experience – as the water vapor crystallizes around a grain of pollen - of its own accord.

If I've had an argument with someone, I've moved in a certain region of soul life, from whence my states crystalize. It depends on my inner life mastery how quickly I can move to another region. If I'm too easily affected, I'll be bogged down in a swampy region for a long time and I'll keep manifesting thoughts and feelings which continue to iterate over the argument. This doesn't mean that our thoughts arrive pre-made on a conveyer belt. Yet it's admissible to speak of origin of thoughts inasmuch as we speak of the potential well of states from within which we narrow down our thinking states.
...
This is key. We can understand this only if we properly grasp the hierarchical time rhythms within whose context we manifest our states. At the tip of our thinking becoming we always feel that we're creatively involved in the manifestation of thoughts. Yet we're barely conscious of the palette of possible thought-states that is being continually narrowed down until it becomes perceptible at the horizon.

In this sense, to trace the origin of thinking we shouldn't fantasize some conveyer belt where verbal thoughts approach us premeditated but we should seek the feeling for the living context which continually gets narrowed down into perceptions (which recede as memory).

[Federica]

I understand, Federica, and that is probably the wise approach. The fact that you have noticed this habitual process of intellectual building up and destruction, of inner and outer circumstances conspiring against holistic understanding, means you are already tracing your current thinking-states to the deeper layers of time-potential from which they condense, the deeper currents of feelings and desires. That is the most important thing to do - everything we explore in metaphorical terminology here should be traced to our first-person stream of experience. The 'superposition of memory' is nothing other than a metaphor for the fact that our deeper curvatures of preferences, inclinations, emotions, desires, temperament, etc. are guiding our thinking-perceptual states that recede into memory. From that stream of memory, they can be resurrected. In our animal state, our thinking-perceptual states recede into memory but almost immediately vanish into unconsciousness. When the "I" incarnates - when we become truly human - the tide shifts via memory. These states remain accessible to consciousness longer - as if 'superimposed' on our current state - and thereby we also begin anticipating and planning for the future, capable of participating in the steering of our states towards high ideals.

That has served human civilization well for the last few thousand years, but now we have reached a ceiling. That fact was captured by philosophers like Hume when he pointed to the ‘problem of induction’ - no matter how many times we have experienced the Sun rising in the past, this doesn’t guarantee that it will rise again the next day. That is a perfectly valid problem of knowledge for the intellect, with its epistemic limitations and unrealistic expectations. That is why the only path forward is to retrace back through the forces of thinking (imagination), feeling (inspiration) and will (intuition) that originally made our thinking-perceptual states possible and are therefore embedded in our stream of individual-collective memory. Then we are no longer trying to accurately model the state of the world 'out there' with our 'inner' thoughts, but actively participate in the actual ideational process of evolution, whereby the Earth-humanity will become a Sun to compensate for the fading light of the old Sun.

I say all of this not to restart the conceptual discussion of ‘superposition of memory’, but to simply provide some context for the fact that you, in noticing how the inner attitude is narrowing your potential of thinking-states to ones that erode quickly after they form, and striving to do something about it, are already engaging in the supra-intellectual process of retracing the depth structure. That is what modern initiation is all about. It’s exactly as Cleric said in that post I referenced to Scott on the other thread. These are the most important things to pay attention to on a daily basis for our higher spiritual development. If we do that, then the holistic conceptual understanding will naturally coalesce around our living and conscious experience – as the water vapor crystallizes around a grain of pollen - of its own accord.

If I've had an argument with someone, I've moved in a certain region of soul life, from whence my states crystalize. It depends on my inner life mastery how quickly I can move to another region. If I'm too easily affected, I'll be bogged down in a swampy region for a long time and I'll keep manifesting thoughts and feelings which continue to iterate over the argument. This doesn't mean that our thoughts arrive pre-made on a conveyer belt. Yet it's admissible to speak of origin of thoughts inasmuch as we speak of the potential well of states from within which we narrow down our thinking states.
...
This is key. We can understand this only if we properly grasp the hierarchical time rhythms within whose context we manifest our states. At the tip of our thinking becoming we always feel that we're creatively involved in the manifestation of thoughts. Yet we're barely conscious of the palette of possible thought-states that is being continually narrowed down until it becomes perceptible at the horizon.

In this sense, to trace the origin of thinking we shouldn't fantasize some conveyer belt where verbal thoughts approach us premeditated but we should seek the feeling for the living context which continually gets narrowed down into perceptions (which recede as memory).

Thank you

[Federica]

As I keep striving for an intuitive understanding of QM and light, I have to link this 2023 short essay published on Aeon by physicist Heinrich Päs titled:

"All is One
The ancient philosophy of monism and the physics of quantum entanglement agree: all that exists is one unified whole"

It traces the context that led to the formulation of the idea of universal wave function as fundamental description of the one universe and points to the rewired understanding of reality flooding present-day physics from that perspective.

Thus, even after decoherence had explained how our everyday experience can follow from a monistic quantum reality, the idea remained the outsider view of a small group of renegade physicists. And, in fact, for most of us, the notion of an all-encompassing ‘One’ doesn’t feel like proper science. It comes with a scent of New Age bullshit.

But why does this idea sound so bizarre to us? To understand this bias, we have to leave quantum mechanics for a moment and look back to how monism evolved in Europe over the past 800 years. It turns out, the controversy about how to interpret QM is part of the larger story – the conflict about who was entitled to define the foundation of reality: religion, or science?

According to Everett and Zeh, the fundamental description of the Universe is a single entangled state, described by a universal wave function. Everything we experience in our daily lives emerges from this fundamental quantum reality.

If this is correct, it implies that the traditional approach of physics to understand things in terms of constituents doesn’t work anymore. If physicists explain how everyday objects such as chairs, tables and books are made of atoms, atoms are composed of atomic nuclei and electrons, atomic nuclei contain protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons consist of quarks, they ignore that these particles aren’t fundamental but just abstractions from the fundamental whole.

[AshvinP]

As I keep striving for an intuitive understanding of QM and light, I have to link this 2023 short essay published on Aeon by physicist Heinrich Päs titled:

"All is One
The ancient philosophy of monism and the physics of quantum entanglement agree: all that exists is one unified whole"

It traces the context that led to the formulation of the idea of universal wave function as fundamental description of the one universe and points to the rewired understanding of reality flooding present-day physics from that perspective.

Thus, even after decoherence had explained how our everyday experience can follow from a monistic quantum reality, the idea remained the outsider view of a small group of renegade physicists. And, in fact, for most of us, the notion of an all-encompassing ‘One’ doesn’t feel like proper science. It comes with a scent of New Age bullshit.

But why does this idea sound so bizarre to us? To understand this bias, we have to leave quantum mechanics for a moment and look back to how monism evolved in Europe over the past 800 years. It turns out, the controversy about how to interpret QM is part of the larger story – the conflict about who was entitled to define the foundation of reality: religion, or science?

According to Everett and Zeh, the fundamental description of the Universe is a single entangled state, described by a universal wave function. Everything we experience in our daily lives emerges from this fundamental quantum reality.

If this is correct, it implies that the traditional approach of physics to understand things in terms of constituents doesn’t work anymore. If physicists explain how everyday objects such as chairs, tables and books are made of atoms, atoms are composed of atomic nuclei and electrons, atomic nuclei contain protons and neutrons, and protons and neutrons consist of quarks, they ignore that these particles aren’t fundamental but just abstractions from the fundamental whole.

Thanks for sharing, Federica. I am sure you realize most of this already, but perhaps it is an opportunity to further strengthen our intuitive orientation for these ideational realities. We should be careful with some of these assertions, such as what follows, not because they are 'wrong', but because they merge with our normal habits of thinking in misleading ways:

Taking this logic at face value, nothing we see around us really exists; there are no particles or physicists or cats or dogs. The only thing that truly exists is the Universe as a whole.

The aliased perspective of consciousness that views the interference of spiritual relations as discrete units interacting through the 'laws of nature' in spacetime, is a real intuitive stream with a real moral purpose in the Cosmic telos. I would say that is a big part of the (appropriate) resistance to the 'Oneness' spiritual interpretation by modern scientists - it seems to sweep under the rug the fact that everyday life for most people proceeds from a definite relational perspective, with definite utilitarian and moral tasks. For the fulfillment of these tasks, the reality of particles, physicists, cats, and dogs and their interaction through laws of nature cannot be ignored. There is something great lost if the scientists stop doing research, probing to see how the Oneness lawfully expresses itself in various domains of experience from the microscopic to the macroscopic, the inner to the outer, and just declare that they have now come back to the reality of ancient monism and rest satisfied.

As we know, what quantum physicists are really probing, as all modern scientists, is their own thinking activity-structure. The first step for awakening is for them to simply recognize that they were the ones who intricately designed the experiments that unveiled the 'strange' quantum effects of interacting states that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Nature can only present these subtle effects to us once human consciousness has reached into the layer of more archetypal ideas and can therefore resonate with the former. The reality that our thinking consciousness has now reached (back) into that layer is reflected by the conception of the various experiments that cleverly provide opportunities for us to discern more of Nature's mysterious secrets. At the level of the microscopic, our thinking cannot rest on the sense-perceptible spectrum (already manifested thoughts) anymore so it begins chasing its own thought-forms abstracted from the spectrum (sub-atomic particles, quanta of energy, etc.), trying to catch up with them in real-time. It is similar to what we try to attain directly in concentration/meditation from a much different spiritual angle, when we focus on a thought-image unrelated to normal sensory experience.

Because they are chasing their thinking in an indirect manner, through the confines of the intellect designing outer experiments, they cannot make the connection between the effects of what they are observing and their own first-person activity and states of being across the rhythms of Time-consciousness. I think a few of them, like perhaps Bohm and Wigner, have traced it to the 'agency of the mind' in the abstract, but that's about as far as they get. If all these quantum effects are taken as metaphorical for spiritual (moral) inner processes that structure our souls and outer nature, on the other hand, then we get closer to their real meaningful significance. It's interesting how many aspects of the QM paradigm can be used as metaphors for our dream experience - nonlocality, entanglement, superposition, path of least action, etc. Our dream states are often nonlinear, with 'strange' time experiences, objects and characters in the dream are entangled with no clear delineations of quantitative 'properties', with more multi-layered qualitative experiences, and so forth.

Normally most of our dream experiences escape the stream of memory and the ones that are embedded in that stream fade into unconsciousness rapidly because the "I" is hardly present for them (spiritual science reveals exactly why this is the case). Through higher development, our "I" can remain present in the dream state which unfolds during sleep but is also superimposed on our waking state. This gives us a much more concrete sense of what QM has been outwardly exploring - the cognitive rhythms of feeling that narrow down our thinking-perceptual states from the 'quantum potential'. If we were to intensely remember most of our dream experiences (like they are almost present with us in our current state), then we would discern interfering patterns of feeling that structure our waking life.

These rhythms guide our states of being along certain curvatures that lead our waking experience to deviate more or less from the 'path of least action', i.e. the most effective stream of experience for the perfection of our thinking-feeling-willing activity. (keep in mind the examples from Cleric's post referenced before). With that higher knowledge, we would start to understand many of the real reasons we think-perceive the way we do and the content that we perceive, i.e. we would begin to know the real reasons how the Newtonian, discrete, linear, particles-as-apples perspective emerges from the disorganized currents of our soul-life. And we begin to realize how Nature is so intelligently and wisely structured that true knowledge of her secrets is only that which tends towards inner moral transformation-perfection.

Children, trees, and rainbows exist. About this neither Barfield nor I wish to argue. What they are in themselves, in their essence, we may not fully know, but we do "represent" them to ourselves in robust colors and character. And strangely, our entire contemporary culture represents them roughly as we do. If we take to seeing rainbows and trees when others do not, our hallucinations may land us in a psychiatrist's office. Thus the peoples of every time and place shared representations. Barfield calls them "collective representations."

Now comes the critical two-part question: How do such representations arise, and can they differ from one place or time to another? Think back to our discussion of vision. Recall the puzzle of the interior ray, the light that spreads from the lamp of the body, our eyes. From the case of S.B. and others born blind, we learned that seeing entails far more than the possession of an operational sense organ. Into raw sensations flow things such as memory, imagination, mental habits, feelings, and even our will (in as much as we attend to something). Without the light that we bring to sensations, the world is meaningless and dark. If the physical eye is a camera obscura, a “dark chamber,” then sight requires, in addition, a spiritual eye for which Empedocles' image of the lantern is a more fitting metaphor.

[Federica]

Thanks for sharing, Federica. I am sure you realize most of this already, but perhaps it is an opportunity to further strengthen our intuitive orientation for these ideational realities. We should be careful with some of these assertions, such as what follows, not because they are 'wrong', but because they merge with our normal habits of thinking in misleading ways:

Taking this logic at face value, nothing we see around us really exists; there are no particles or physicists or cats or dogs. The only thing that truly exists is the Universe as a whole.

The aliased perspective of consciousness that views the interference of spiritual relations as discrete units interacting through the 'laws of nature' in spacetime, is a real intuitive stream with a real moral purpose in the Cosmic telos. I would say that is a big part of the (appropriate) resistance to the 'Oneness' spiritual interpretation by modern scientists - it seems to sweep under the rug the fact that everyday life for most people proceeds from a definite relational perspective, with definite utilitarian and moral tasks. For the fulfillment of these tasks, the reality of particles, physicists, cats, and dogs and their interaction through laws of nature cannot be ignored. There is something great lost if the scientists stop doing research, probing to see how the Oneness lawfully expresses itself in various domains of experience from the microscopic to the macroscopic, the inner to the outer, and just declare that they have now come back to the reality of ancient monism and rest satisfied.

As we know, what quantum physicists are really probing, as all modern scientists, is their own thinking activity-structure. The first step for awakening is for them to simply recognize that they were the ones who intricately designed the experiments that unveiled the 'strange' quantum effects of interacting states that otherwise would have gone unnoticed. Nature can only present these subtle effects to us once human consciousness has reached into the layer of more archetypal ideas and can therefore resonate with the former. The reality that our thinking consciousness has now reached (back) into that layer is reflected by the conception of the various experiments that cleverly provide opportunities for us to discern more of Nature's mysterious secrets. At the level of the microscopic, our thinking cannot rest on the sense-perceptible spectrum (already manifested thoughts) anymore so it begins chasing its own thought-forms abstracted from the spectrum (sub-atomic particles, quanta of energy, etc.), trying to catch up with them in real-time. It is similar to what we try to attain directly in concentration/meditation from a much different spiritual angle, when we focus on a thought-image unrelated to normal sensory experience.

Because they are chasing their thinking in an indirect manner, through the confines of the intellect designing outer experiments, they cannot make the connection between the effects of what they are observing and their own first-person activity and states of being across the rhythms of Time-consciousness. I think a few of them, like perhaps Bohm and Wigner, have traced it to the 'agency of the mind' in the abstract, but that's about as far as they get. If all these quantum effects are taken as metaphorical for spiritual (moral) inner processes that structure our souls and outer nature, on the other hand, then we get closer to their real meaningful significance. It's interesting how many aspects of the QM paradigm can be used as metaphors for our dream experience - nonlocality, entanglement, superposition, path of least action, etc. Our dream states are often nonlinear, with 'strange' time experiences, objects and characters in the dream are entangled with no clear delineations of quantitative 'properties', with more multi-layered qualitative experiences, and so forth.

Ashvin,

Yes, I follow your warning that we should be careful not to fall in mysticism and not to remain satisfied with the abstract idea of one universe, one universal wave function, etcetera. I would add: the few words you have quoted from the essay, when read in the context of the paragraph and in the context of the whole essay, don't suggest that scientists should stop investigations because materials, forces, researchers and experimental hutches alike don't exist.

At the level of the microscopic, our thinking cannot rest on the sense-perceptible spectrum (already manifested thoughts) anymore so it begins chasing its own thought-forms abstracted from the spectrum (sub-atomic particles, quanta of energy, etc.), trying to catch up with them in real-time. It is similar to what we try to attain directly in concentration/meditation from a much different spiritual angle, when we focus on a thought-image unrelated to normal sensory experience.

It's strange, I have actually written a thought similar to your above in my comment to Scott's essay, on the other thread.

Normally most of our dream experiences escape the stream of memory and the ones that are embedded in that stream fade into unconsciousness rapidly because the "I" is hardly present for them (spiritual science reveals exactly why this is the case). Through higher development, our "I" can remain present in the dream state which unfolds during sleep but is also superimposed on our waking state. This gives us a much more concrete sense of what QM has been outwardly exploring - the cognitive rhythms of feeling that narrow down our thinking-perceptual states from the 'quantum potential'. If we were to intensely remember most of our dream experiences (like they are almost present with us in our current state), then we would discern interfering patterns of feeling that structure our waking life.

These rhythms guide our states of being along certain curvatures that lead our waking experience to deviate more or less from the 'path of least action', i.e. the most effective stream of experience for the perfection of our thinking-feeling-willing activity. (keep in mind the examples from Cleric's post referenced before). With that higher knowledge, we would start to understand many of the real reasons we think-perceive the way we do and the content that we perceive, i.e. we would begin to know the real reasons how the Newtonian, discrete, linear, particles-as-apples perspective emerges from the disorganized currents of our soul-life. And we begin to realize how Nature is so intelligently and wisely structured that true knowledge of her secrets is only that which tends towards inner moral transformation-perfection.

These last two paragraphs are the most interesting to me. I'm not sure I properly understand the connection you are making between QM and rhythms of feeling. I do see how our subjective soul life of preferences and affinities seamlessly pushes us towards certain constrained patterns in our flow of becoming, and that remain opaque to us (we don't see how our flow could have evolved very differently if free from those constraints and we imagine external causes).
I do see how QM provides a portrait of this 'randomness', this instability bias generated by our arbitrary soul qualities, but is this the meaning of the "rhythms of feeling"? Also, I am not sure what post by Cleric you are pointing to?