Process and Pilgrimage explores science and experience in their mutual illumination
Brian: ‘Dear Basil: Philip Franses and I would love to visit you some time before Christmas to talk about your views on morphogenesis and quantum mechanics from the perspective of superposition or ambiguity or multiple possibilities that get resolved appropriately in context.’
Philip: 'Brian Goodwin and myself take ambiguity as a starting point for understanding biological processes, taking as a metaphor language, where meaning resolves ambiguity according to the context of the sentence in which the words appear.'
Basil: 'It looks as if there is an essential ambiguity in nature and this provides the freedom for creativity to enter. I should add that the ambiguity is a space-time ambiguity, not a process ambiguity. It is in the process domain that information with meaning becomes active. I think this is essentially what we need to generalise physics so that it includes biological systems.'
Philp: 'Brian and I would both like to continue the discussion we had at Birkbeck and extend process into agency, taking advantage of the opportunity given by the presence of Chris at Schumacher College'
Chris: 'For me the excitement of (conventional) QM comes from the opening up of context-dependent truth and a role for meaning and non-locality, with a correspondingly greater place for creativity in evolution.'
Philip: 'As it is possible to go from 'ambiguity of context-dependent truths' downward into an underlying order, so one can also follow the path of ambiguity upward, staying within process, to a new defining idea or meaning, that is able to work collectively as a higher focus of expression. One goes through ambiguity upward until the order as a whole comes in freely to structure what is possible. Like in a sentence, it is not necessary to structure the words about a particular description, but a writer will follow a sense of the meaning he is trying to convey, ascending through possible interpretations until a higher conceptual clarity informs the prose.'
Chris: 'The word 'potential' was used in its traditional mechanical sense: as a causal influence that perturbs a previously given 'free' dynamics. It then transpires that this was misleading ... that it is like a formative, not a mechanical, causation and 'the field is shaped by the environment' etc. But if something is being guided into a form, what exactly is that 'something'?'
Basil: 'The nearest I have got to finding a suitable term is the 'quantum blob', a finite area of quasi-stable, semi-autonomous structure process.’
What is your experience of process of the quantum blob?