Our World (Picture) Is Broken. Can We Fix It?

Photo by ZCH: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sun-behind-a-round-planet-12498767/

“Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny, says the battlefield reminds him of the great conflict of a century ago. “Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” he says” [1].

The war in Ukraine isn’t the only situation that takes us back a century or more ago as if we all are living in a huge time machine. On the background of enormous breakthroughs in science and technology, socially, politically, and, most importantly, morally the behavior of humans as individuals, groups and species remains unchanged. In the age of space travel and nuclear energy we keep trying to tackle both routine and existential challenges to society and humankind with approaches which are Medieval at best.

You may claim that it isn’t the first time in history when we, as human beings, are lagging behind our own intellectual advancement. I fully agree but when it was happening earlier we, as humankind, didn’t have the Bomb.

The Bomb that can destroy us all is already exploding. It’s the world picture bomb. Its explosion was triggered in science by the advent of quantum mechanics and in the rest of the world by the advent of the two gifts of quantum mechanics — the atomic bomb (global threat) and the transistor (global connectivity) — which let the spirit of quantum mechanics to circulate freely in the entire civilization. Each person, each nation, each culture was forced to deal with this spirit regardless of their level of preparedness to comprehend and to accept it [2].

Werner Heisenberg created the matrix mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics. Erwin Schrödinger a bit later created the wave mathematical apparatus of quantum mechanics and proved its equivalence to Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics. This couple created quantum mechanics. Both believed that the collapse (resurrection) of the wave function occurs in consciousness and wrote clearly and unambiguously on this subject [3,4]. In fact, they described the role of consciousness more clearly and explicitly than John von Neumann and Eugine Wigner who are now firmly associated with the “consciousness causes collapse” interpretation of quantum mechanics [5]. I guess it could never occur to the latter that someone would challenge this thesis, and they simply omitted a detailed explanation of it as a triviality. So what happened?

“In other words, method and object can no longer be separated. The scientific world-view ceased to be a scientific view in the true sense of the word.” [6] Heisenberg wrote these words in 1958 mistakenly believing that the scientific world picture revolution that already manifested itself in enormous scientific and technological breakthroughs occurred also in the mind of scientists.

While he was concerned about the clash of the spirit of quantum mechanics with the least scientifically and technologically advanced cultures [2] his fellow physicists conspired and implemented a counter-revolutionary coup at the very source of the new world picture — in the domain of quantum mechanics. Ironically, that biggest counter-revolutionary coup in human history was conducted under the auspices of the social theory that proclaimed itself the most revolutionary in the world.

“We do not need to abandon the precise rational and objective description of individual systems in the realm of quantum theory,” — proclaimed David Bohm, the creator of the pilot wave interpretation of quantum theory, the motto of cartesian revisionism. However, his assertion, like many other “objective” interpretations , comes at the cost of the creation of “a kind of “ideological superstructure” which has little to do with immediate physical reality”, as Heisrnberg pointed out [7].

Interestingly, Bohm himself in 1980 made an attempt to overcome the cartesian dualism of the old scientific world-view by introducing his metaphysical implicate order theory. “The new form of insight can perhaps best be called Undivided Wholeness in Flowing Movement. This view implies that flow is in some sense prior to that of the ‘things’ that can be seen to form and dissolve in this flow,” he wrote [8].

The cancel culture didn’t just emerge yesterday. The revolutionary ideas of social justice and equality proclaimed by marxist ideology found a fertile ground in the cartesian, materialist world-view that dominated science since the Nineteenth century. No, I’m not talking about the political views of real scientists, but about mediocrity snatching a chance. It was that same all-averaging trend that Norbert Wiener, the creator of cybernetics, wrote with enragement, disappointment, and grief about [9].

According to Wiener, mediocrity and triviality began to dominate the academic environment as early as the 1950s. So today we are seeing the long-term consequences of this shift. The leftist revolution became, in essence, a scientific counter-revolution. It canceled the new picture of the world that arose with the creation of quantum mechanics.

The consequences of this cancellation affected not only science that stalled. Universities have stopped encouraging students to think independently. The phrase “shut up and calculate” underlies the formation of flocks of intellectual sheep among students, who, as recent events have shown, are extremely easy to manipulate for political purposes.

Israel lost the information field of Western universities because it appealed to people capable of thinking independently, and Hamas won because it appealed to herd instincts.

Of course, I’m not talking about the political views of real scientists who managed to stay open-minded and unbiased.

Paul Dirac, for example, was a leftist by political conviction, but he was, first of all, a real scientist. Therefore, he expressed a very important idea regarding the collapse of the wave function, which connects with Schrödinger’s idea of unitary consciousness [10].

In Dirac’s biography, he is quoted as saying that nature itself makes the choice of the measurement result (collapses the wave function) because that choice “is irreversible and will affect the entire future state of the world” [11].

The naive realism as a world picture is broken beyond repair. It used to be the naturally accepted world picture of the vast majority of people.Now they are seeking for the new world picture but find nothing but old scientific and religious world pictures both laying in ruins. The Bomb didn’t just bring the new world picture into existence. It keeps demolishing all the old ones which hasn’t rejected naive realism.

However, today I saw a post by Stephen Wolfram, in which he proposes a theory of “how we take the world as it is, and derive from it the impressions of it” [12]. In the post quantum mechanics reality we are not even trying to derive the world as it is from our impressions as Geof Hinton et al. suggested introducing the Helmholtz machines as a blueprint for modern self-supervised generative AI models [13].

Quantum mechanics doesn’t bother to derive from impressions anything else but the probability connections between impressions [14]. The ultimate success of this, arguably, the most productive physics theory of all times is based on the total abandonment of the concept of the world as it is or the objective reality in other words.

It’s much harder to do science without the world as it is but it’s the only way forward. All the theories which reinstate the world as it is into the scientific world picture are taking two steps back, and depart not even into the Twentieth century but straight into the Nineteenth.

Anyway, today the entire humankind is in a stalemate because it can manage technologies of the nuclear age no better than a troop of baboons, whose leaders are using red buttons instead of red asses. The World-View Discrepancy Bomb keeps exploding. It’s impossible to stop this explosion by reinstating the old broken world picture.

People as all living creatures are naturally born scientists [15]. Naive realism enabled them to stay comfortably numb as scientists for ages. The time has come to wake us up. We need to make the spirit (and the math) of quantum mechanics work once again for the sake of humanity. To be continued…

References:

1. Ukraine’s Commander-In-Chief on the Breakthrough He Needs to Beat Russia. The Economist. November 1st, 2023.
2. Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy — The Revolution in Modern Science. 1958. Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York. Page 27.
3. Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy — The Revolution in Modern Science. 1958. Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York. Pages 54–55.
4. Schrödinger, Erwin. The Present Status of Quantum Mechanics. Die Naturwissenschaften 1935. Volume 23, Issue 48.
5. Von Neumann–Wigner interpretation. 2023. Wikipedia.
6. Heisenberg, Werner. The Physicist’s Conception of Nature. 1958, Hutchinson & Co.Ltd., London. Page 29.
7. Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy — The Revolution in Modern Science. 1958. Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York. Pages 131–132.
8. Bohm, David. Wholeness and the Implicate Order. 1980. Routledge, UK. Page 11.
9. Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings. Free Association Books, London. 1989. Page 135.
10. Schrödinger, Erwin. Mind and Matter. 1959. Cambridge University Press. Page 62.
11. Kragh, H. Dirac: A Scientific Biography. 1990. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
12. Dayan P, Hinton GE, Neal RM, Zemel RS. The Helmholtz machine. Neural Comput. 1995 Sep;7(5):889–904. doi: 10.1162/neco.1995.7.5.889. PMID: 7584891.
13. Wolfram, Stephen. Observer Theory. Stephen Wolfram Writings. December 11, 2023
14. Wigner, Eugene P. The Problem of Measurement, American Journal of Physics 31, 6 (1963); https://doi.org/10.1119/1.1969254
15. Pavlov, I.P. (in Russian). Psychology as a Science. 1933. Unpublished and Little-known Materials of I.P. Pavlov (1975)