Science in Transition
Process and Pilgrimage
paper describing forum at Birkbeck 31st May – Philip Franses
While recently travelling
to Italy, having gone through security we found ourselves high above the Alps,
carried along in reverie, imagination, dreams. The relaxed laughter of
passengers freed from the stress of departure was tempered by an officious
Italian border-guard who meticulously examined each document allowing two long
cues to build up. The stern atmosphere declared that the frivolity of free air
space was being left behind… whether one had arrived at this land with any
special insight from the journey, should one even have travelled through
galaxies and eons, was unimportant before the stamp of acceptance by the
authority of the identity of the State of Italy. So how, I wondered, does one
tell a story of experience that has bearing to the land of arrival, if all that
is scrutinised is one’s eligibility to enter that order?
A similar feeling
abounds in academic circles where one is first and foremost judged on the
etiquette of a particular way of knowledge. Experiment, measurement and
reproducible order are the gates by which one enters into discussion of a
pre-envisioned landscape. The original developers of quantum theory, scientists
from all over the world, prided themselves on the consensus of their
interpretation and fiercely refuted any counter suggestions.
Bohm’s different
vision proclaims an otherness that shows itself equivalent in the language of
experience. Bohm who was without a country for a while, having been evicted
from the USA, learnt to appreciate the journey and its arrival rather than the
static order waiting to receive it. As professor at Birkbeck he was given the
freedom to explore, at the college where the forum Process and Pilgrimage is
convened.
In the last fifty
years, complexity theory and information theory have combined to give an
alternative foundation to formative phenomena, based on potential and
coherence. Information describes a redundancy in potential that in the
mathematics of complexity theory is able to resolve coherently to a whole
attractor bounding different possible local trajectories.
It is in the
suspension of causality that information resides. Where there is only one
causal path universally determined, there is no room in the phenomena for
additional information. It is the redundancy of potential paths at the
micro-level that allows for additional properties to characterise the whole
nature at the macro-level. Thus it requires questioning of an existence to
uncover its essential properties, whether this is going deeper into a person’s
true character or really observing a flower in its delicate composition. No
information is apparent at the surface of causal-sufficiency.
Science has tended to
see information as pools of multiple-possibility residing within an essentially
causal landscape of concepts and laws. Information in our view extending this
analogy might be more akin to the sea, in primary formative relation to the
land of causality.
Quantum theory has
successfully furnished a theory where the sea of potential is incorporated
implicitly in the description of journey between ports. It allows us to
understand potential, as a dark crossing in which no measurement is possible,
as an influence upon the arrival and departure of vessels on the land, the
illuminations of objects in their knowable properties.
The classical
interpretation contrasts with that of David Bohm and Basil Hiley, where the same
equations are interpreted as a patterning of the realm of potential in what is
called an informational field. Importantly instead of understanding potential
from its effect on causal concepts, a dynamic formative influence is depicted.
From the perspective of latent potential, it is now form that creatively arises
to substantiate existence in a greater pattern according to an informational
field.
At the moment where
individual meets with the universal and causality is suspended, the apparent
disorder of properties in the redundancy of micro-potential is free to be
informed coherently. The properties that we call information are able to align
about the individual’s own unity and to synchronise with others in similar
quest.
The confusion as to
how to maintain a causal description of phenomena dominated the debate in the
wake of quantum theory’s conception. Bohr-Heisenberg developed an
interpretation applying uncertainty, non-locality and other quantum mysteries
to a causal framework embedded in the system of known concepts.
Bohr ‘However far the phenomenon transcend the scope of classical
physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in
classical terms.’[i]
Einstein in a letter to Schroedinger: ‘Your
claim that the concepts p, q [momentum, position] will have to be given
up, if they can only claim such “shaky” meaning seems to me to be fully
justified. The Heisenberg-Bohr tranquilizing philosophy-or religion?-is so
delicately contrived that, for the time being, it provides a gentle pillow for
the true believer from which he cannot very easily be aroused. So let him lie
there.’ [ii]
The Bohr-Heisenberg
interpretation described the mathematical representation of possibilities or
tendencies and the transition to the actual at the point of observation.[iii]
Bohm on the other hand
explored the phenomena from the complementary side of informational potential.[iv]
He re-formulated the classical quantum equation through the ‘Quantum potential
field’, a global prescriptive influence upon the behaviour of particles. This
separates from the formula the informational aspect of how the union between
causality and potential is realised. Basil Hiley has recently explained this:
‘We found that the potential was totally different from any classical potential that we know. It has no external source in the sense that the electric field has its source in a distribution of charges. It does not act mechanically on the system. In this sense it cannot be thought to act like an efficient cause. It is more like a formative cause that shapes the development of the process. Indeed as we explored its properties in many different physical systems it reminded me very much of the morphogenetic field generated in biological systems.
The information field is shaped by the environment in a way that is very similar to the way the development of a plant is shaped by its environment. Thus we can think of the information as active from within giving shape to the whole process and this shape depends on the environment in key ways. In other words the meaning in the wave is expressed through the form that develops.’[v]
Just as Bohr and
Heisenberg succeed in entraining the possibility aspect of information into a
causal (at least at statistical level) quantum law, so Bohm and Hiley suspend
causality for the entrance of an informational field that steers free flowing
potential.
In changing from a
causal to an informational emphasis we have not changed the nature of the
quantum formulation as exhibiting a basic union between the two types of order.
Yet this union is visible from two very different perspectives, each
description generative to the other.
It is in the
juxtaposition of two equally valid approaches that the combined meaning of the
information-potential: causal-stability interplay is brought to the fore.
|
Classical quantum
interpretation –Bohr-Heisenberg |
Formative
informational potential Bohm_Hiley |
|
hides phenomena in an elusive world of statistical
average; |
celebrates form in wholeness; |
|
causality breaks multiply
into infinite possibilities only recovered by a statistical averaging; |
causality breaks singularly
and dramatically in the admission of a global information field that
restores causality as after-influence; |
|
aligns a global
nature to permeate the weird world of local phenomena; |
local relationships
utilise to the maximum the symmetry and exchange of basic properties
to allow the potential for a global phenomena to resonate in its midst; |
|
alerts us to the stability
of the atomic founded substance over all inducement to change; |
triumphs momentarily
over causality to cohere potential into new form. |
Table 1: Comparison of Bohr conceptual model with Bohm’s
informational perspective
The anthropologist
Victor Turner explored African ceremonial rituals of coming-of-age rites[vi].
This could be a commoner making transition to head or adolescents at the
turning point to manhood. In the ritual the passager would leave behind their
connection, rites, identity conferred by an old order, and enter into a liminal
threshold state. The commoner would be humiliated before the village, with all
his standing scorned as the village exulted in his weaknesses, faults and
foibles. The adolescent would be removed to a location far distant from their
friends, relatives, grounds of play. From this separation, the otherness of
un-attachment to any fixed order would make itself evident, as a primary state
of ambiguity, irresolution and openness.
Otherness is freely
entered and predicated by its gamble of conversion to new order. Instead of
otherness being marshalled into some subspace of order, the question of how the
liminality of decision is going to win out over the indecisiveness of the
journey is a living engagement inherent in the process. Otherness forms a state
of creative suspension where the outcome is irresolute and order is
un-particulate. The conundrum how to leave the old order and find handhold in
the new draws otherness into the process of resolution itself, rather than
keeping otherness tidily within the boundary of order.
A particular facility
of letting go, of being nothing in the old so that one might exchange this for
an authentic whole vision of the new, characterises the process of transition,
from the perspective of allowing decisive input as resolution. One enters into
the realm of the in-between, sacrificing one’s belonging to the old, so that
one is led to the demand of the new. One feels the pull on the nothingness of
the old, with the inevitable fate of the new.
Otherness dominates by
describing the journey through the dissolution of old order, where the outcome
of the new is purposefully suspended to manifest its resolution.
This is the nature of the
journey we are on with Process and Pilgrimage, that we open ourselves to that
state of being called with a question. Satish Kumar makes the comparison
between the tourist and the pilgrim. The tourist has no question, he is
visiting a scene painted by the encyclopaedic guidebook of knowledge, able to
extract that which is useful for his own taking. A pilgrim knows otherness in
the question of his journey, where no destination is predetermined. Otherness
is listed to the tourist in a book of standard questions that allow the world
to be stopped and used. While for the pilgrim, otherness is celebrated in the
trust of something new.
As a pilgrim one is
taunted by the fact one could have stayed at home in the old order; at the end
of the journey one’s life is illuminated as if one walked about a far shore to
return to the same ground with a different message. The question leaves open
otherness to the floating destiny of new order.
As Francoise
Wemelsfelder the second speaker shows there is a coherence in the language of
qualities when we address the living aspect of the animal. Where order on its
own quantifies an animal in terms of weight, growth milestones, protein
content, Francoise has developed a practical approach, depicting consensus in
the observed qualities of animal behaviour. In starting with the experience of
encountering the animal, a qualitative chart emerges characterising the
individual behaviours.
Instead of imposing an
order by selecting categories of departmentalised identification, the
observation of the animal is through qualitative assessment whose significance
is realised only in the map of connection realised by a statistical method. One
finds a pattern that is answering to the question what is the health of the
animals in various situations. The order rather magically and beautifully
presents itself as gradations of nuances in a plot of descriptors of behaviour
and mood. The question of health is not answered abruptly and singly but
fluidly at many different levels.
The plot shows that as
soon as we choose for one type of order, in this case the response of the whole
animal to its environment, then the symmetry of states and relationships in
nature immediately translates into coherence in the geometrical realm. The
possibilities of animal states, though remaining unexplained, demonstrate in
their symmetry, a coherent pattern of behaviours. Symmetry is the key to
quantum theory, allowing us to recognise pattern, where the definition of the
individual particle is outside exact distinct determinism.
Underpinning the
theory, our approach is to see the basic element as described through process,
rather than identity. The symmetry uncovers a relationship to the whole that
exhibits as the finiteness of the animal behaviour or the course of the
particle. The basic question, what is my relationship to the whole, is asked in
the symmetry of relationship. These symmetries, instead of ending at a model of
explanation of a static world, concentrate possibility through choices, before
arriving at a unique point where new resolution can emerge!
Chris Clarke describes
man’s relation to the world in terms of two modes, the propositional of
rational analysis and the implicational of direct experience. The implicational
describes where one is implicated in the order of things, where one’s
participation is implicated by the primary order with a certain responsibility,
where one’s action is not passively considered but follows in the lines of
existence.
The holism of Bohr’s view
was packed into a detailed philosophical study of the role of the observer.
Quantum theory tells how the suggestions of possible world orders harmonise
amongst themselves, so that an observation will create one world-order in
sensitivity to the possibility of the many. The observation in this way does
not destroy the holism of the underlying fabric, or the integrity of the
classical order that is selected.
Bohm in his forthright
manner named wholeness actively as the implicate order, which naturally connects
to the implicational model of experience. This stands between the qualities of
the realms of wholeness and of order. The implicational mode of being can
reveal itself in several ways;
-
as an inner
motion that tries to bring about some different manifestation of the world of
explicate order;
-
as a synthesizing
of series of events in order to implicate a new address of their whole message;
-
as a faith in acting that some later whole
sense will be made of one’s involvement.
The implicate is not
something remote and mathematical in its origin, but our implicational mode of
being in the everyday brings the implicate into play naturally in the ordered
world. The whole mystery of the implicate resolves in the notion of our common
acquaintance with its qualities. The implicational is an active response to the
whole in our knowledge of the particular (in contrast with observation – a
passive recording of the particular with knowledge of the whole).
The implicational mode
of being is thus both
-
a gateway by which
whole value enters into the world of order in general;
-
primary in the
sense we have of ourselves, the higher goals of life, the whole foundation to
an orientation of self in a world of manifest orders.
In including the implicational
aspect of being, it is no longer possible to frame existence in terms of space
and time, or any partial order, so how are we to imprint the realm of wholeness
with a formative logic, as we require?
The case being put
forward by Brian Goodwin and myself is our study of a certain type of order, as
set out in a mathematical paper by Cancho and Sole[vii].
Their computer study, relating to a simple model of language, showed the
following. Where there is total order in a system, there is no ambiguity and
thus can be no informational potential to be resolved subtly by context. Where
there is total disorder, ambiguity is total and informational potential is so
unbounded as to be unable to convey any meaning. Between these two states, the
computer model of Cancho and Sole identifies a dynamic transition ordering
symbols to possible meanings. This intermediate state of creative ambiguity has
enough flexibility for meaning to enter through context intelligibly while
preserving the integrity of the elements basic representations. (This
intermediate state is further characterised by a power law distribution.)
An intelligible
ordering of the world, as a creative language of the intermediate type, is
characterised by an informational potential which reflects the transparency of
the basic ordering elements to be shaped by context. The information of a
particular ordering is a measure of its transparency to be effected by meaning
in a given context.
In biology the
observation of power law distribution within the connective network of proteins
or RNA expression suggests that a similar creative ordering is operative. What
we are looking for in these biological cases is just how the implicate realm of
wholeness is able to give rise to information-rich meaningful orders that are
able to express different ‘languages’ according to different circumstance.
Order itself becomes a fluid concept that is able to express different
interaction with the environment to output a different collective message from
its encounter. Order we suggest, as a language, overlays a medium of
understanding upon the encounter with the world.
The ‘higher
dimensional reality’ in which the orders of the quantum world play out was
first described mathematically by Basil Hiley at a more abstract level of
process, through what is known as a Clifford algebra. Basil Hiley shows how one
can go from this process reality to any variant of ordered geometries, be they
relativistic or quantum, in nature, detailing how particles behave in a particular
order. Process can relate to an object waiting to be understood, but also to a
journey of transition that is seeking to find ‘order’ at the far shore of
resolution.
Each ‘order’ is known
by the symmetry of its relationships; one moves into transition by breaking the
symmetry of one’s belonging to the old order. A new possibility presents
itself, as sporulation to the bacteria or manhood to the youth that is
non-compassable within the symmetry pattern of existing relationships. The
liminal phase is an exploration in which this fresh possibility is incorporated
into a new symmetry.
This new transitory
symmetry is not fixed into a static pattern of relationships: instead the
symmetry is as an outer boundary, pointing in its roundness of form to an inner
space at which ultimate resolution may occur. The symmetry of the transitory is
thus an in-between space relating only to its own development, shaping the
platform on which a resolution that involves participation in a new symmetry of
connection, may unfold. The new of each individual is thus channelled to cohere
in an inward space that borders upon the exclusion of the old order that has
been left.
Our aim then is to
follow symmetry to focus upon a point of particular resolution to the journey
of otherness. The symmetry of relationship reveals how otherness in its
challenge to the world may be resolved by presenting the space of paradox
between dark and light to a new point of equivalent justice.
The broken symmetry in
channelling its difference inward and holding to shared sameness in
relationship, allows for the novel otherness to find the woven tune of its
acceptance.
In asking the question of otherness, one pushes back the frontier of
potential, until a unique response of order returns from a far shore of
possibility. Order is re-established as the future consensus re-envisioned
through otherness.
Any identity, be it
particle or organism, owes its wholeness to symmetry that bounds its being
separately from the environment; this symmetry has the potential to break, relinquishing
this spatial separation for a journey in symmetry with a new completion. Master
of its own symmetry, it thus is able to explore the symmetry in its breaking
and remaking. The identity, that chooses to break, has within its command of
symmetry, the destiny to return.
Thus symmetry has two
routes, the breaking and return through the liminal phase of vulnerability in
the whole; and the spatial transition from an order inclusive of one pattern of
symmetry to the stability of another. The strength of the world is given both
by the physical stability of a conserved symmetry of forces, as typified by the
atom, but also by the opposite tendency of the creative freedom within
individuality to break with the old in the dynamic of the world to provide unique
return. The causal certitude contrasts with the breaking and resealing of order
in new form.
The two ways of
journeying to quality are illustrated in the scientist who travels the road of
inspiration to emerge with a symmetry defining a new order and the artist who
knows his materials and technique to depict the journey to the new.
The breaking of
symmetry to arrive at new form is of the same order of wonder as the
containment of the world’s energy in the symmetry of the atom or cell. All that
is added is the capacity of the individual to break with the outer symmetry of
time and for order to be recast though the journey of return to wholeness.
Symmetry is freed to travel between the orders, where symmetry is contained as
system.
The possibility,
created from the freedom that has relinquished all order, either remains an
explosive force outside the boundaries of a static explanatory science or is
integrated by allowing the beauty of its return in the timeliness of life.
In the most primal of single
celled organisms, this transition is evident. Bacteria that have individual
identities of defending personal boundaries, seeking food, ensuring personal
survival, when environmental conditions threaten, seek the solution of an order
better befitting the environment. Billions of bacteria will then come together
in a joint quest, relinquishing their individuality, collectively entering a
spore state and when water is again plentiful, recommencing their individual
lives. The bacteria explore the symmetry of their options.
‘Sporulation is a process executed collectively and beginning only after “consultation” and assessment of the colonial stress as a whole by the individual bacteria. Simply put, starved cells emit chemical messages to convey their stress. Each of the bacteria uses the information for contextual interpretation of the state of the colony relative to its own situation.
Accordingly, each of the cells decides to send a message for or against sporulation. Once all of the colony members have sent out their decisions and read all other messages, sporulation occurs if the majority vote is in favor.’ [viii]
Just as language has
sprung forth in recent evolutionary time by jumps of the conceptual capacity of
the meaning won from the world, so life in its own slow way has explored the
ordering overlay by which it relates its resources to the changing environment.
Experience leads directly into frames of order capable of housing the alignment
of process.
As the environment
changed, so bacteria transformed to metabolise different constitutional
molecules, using the subtlest and most ingenious adaptations of their previous
organisation. A lengthy chain of classical modifications must be imagined to
adapt a static molecular organisation. By reinterpreting the ordering principle
(through a switch of ‘language’) only the smallest of reconfiguration of
possibility is necessary.
Four types of bacteria
achieved an improbable symbiosis of the nucleated cell, capable of founding more
complex life forms. The radical conceptual adjustment that took place also
involves the recasting of the meaning of being to its environment, in which the
bounded cell allowed life to develop complexly inwardly.
The hallmarks of
identity interchange with an otherness capable of delivering a new order. Just
as Schrodinger’s cat seems to suspend life forever in the minute detail of its
demise, we present an equivalent tale of creation where potential is remixed to
startle life into new inhabitancy defying the running down of the causal order.
The fluidity for transformation between death and life is born in the same free
breath as the form in potential is safeguarded. The two interpretations when released from their competing
rivalry, unite biological form with physical foundation in the prescience of
quality.
[i] Niels Bohr; The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr Vol 2 Essays 1933-1957 on atomic physics and human knowledge; Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics; Ox Bow press; 1987
[ii] Arthur Fine (1996) The Shaky Game: Einstein Realism and the Quantum Theory, The University of Chicago Press Letter Einstein to Schrödinger on May 31st 1928 ( page 18.)
[iii] Werner Heisenberg (1958) Physics and Philosophy; The Copenhagen Interpretation; Penguin
[iv] David Bohm (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order; Hidden Variables in the Quantum Theory; Routledge and Keegan Paul
[v] Hiley, B. J. (2004). Information, quantum theory and the brain. In G. Vitiello (Ed.), Brain and Being (Vol. 58, pp. 197-214). Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
[vi] Victor Turner (1969); The Ritual process; Structure and Anti-structure; Aldine de Gruyter; New York
[vii] Ramon Cancho and Ricard Sole; Least effort and the origin of scaling in human language; PNAS 788-791; February 4 2003 vol 100 no 3.
[viii] E. Ben Jacob, Y. Shapira, and A. Tauber (2006); Seeking the foundation of cognition in bacteria: From Schrodinger’s negative entropy to latent information; Physica A 359 495-524