On the (Quantum) Decision to Act
Every breath, every heartbeat is a decision made by the organs of our body. Automatic actions do not require making decisions. They can form long chains. However, a decision is not just a choice to do or not to do. A decision is a will to act, a spiritual force that sets physical forces in motion.
A decision can be seen as a push that sets a mechanism in motion. Willpower, which is at its maximum at the moment of transition from thought to action, dissipates during the execution of automatic actions. Therefore, regular decision-making is required by the body as a recharge.
Atoms and elementary particles (which turned out to be not elementary at all) also make decisions. It is precisely because of their decisiveness that we have the opportunity to observe them when we put them with experimental conditions before a choice.
The transition from decision to action is precisely “the appearance of a definite position of an electron during an observation” that Wolfgang Pauli called “a creation outside the laws of nature”.
If by the laws of nature we mean only the laws of the physical world, then he was right. If we extend them to the laws of consciousness, it turns out that nature is simply much more multifaceted than we always thought. Multifaceted does not mean more complex. Complexity arises from dividing nature (God, Brahman, etc.) into parts.
The ancient Greeks separated the physical world from consciousness in order to make it easier to study. This was the greatest scientific breakthrough in human history. However, their model has exhausted itself. The division that led to simplification now creates complexity that we can neither calculate nor understand (which is, however, the same thing, only the types of calculation are different).
The exit is where the entrance is. This happens quite often. Yesterday, before going to bed, I read Werner Heisenberg about how he and Niels Bohr saw a glow around the heads of their shadows cast on a cloud. Bohr suggested that this phenomenon — a halo — served as a prototype for the halos around the heads of saints in paintings. Heisenberg said that this was true, but only half so, because when we say that a good person glows, we understand perfectly well that this light cannot be measured with a photometer. However, this does not mean that the physical meaning of the word light is primary in relation to the spiritual. Therefore, it is quite possible that the artists painted the light they saw around the heads of the saints, although this light was not physical.
Here I thought that physical light could be called light by analogy with spiritual light, and not vice versa, as I always thought before. By the way, Bohr completely agreed with Heisenberg.
These people made a tremendous breakthrough in science. Therefore, it is inappropriate to reproach them for not going further along the path of studying the unified nature of consciousness. Erwin Schrödinger wrote directly on this matter that a new type of religion is needed, but he does not know how to create it, and hopes that future generations will be able to do this. Future generations are us.
So they left us a huge reserve for the future, for the development of a new type of science, which can be called a religion to the extent that it will study not only the physical, but also the moral laws of the nature of consciousness. For this we can only thank them. My heart makes a decision with every beat. My lungs make a decision with every breath. I try to make a decision with every action that really makes sense to take. Like breathing.
