A Quantum Self?
This essay comes from a letter I wrote to Dr. Amit Goswami, who in his book THE VISIONARY WINDOW suggests that 1. consciousness is the basis of all reality, and 2. the observer's well-known impact on the observed, which collapses the quantum "probability smear" of a particle down into something we can measure, is how we make our universe for ourselves.
Dr. Goswami teaches at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, where I attend school.
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Although I’ve read science (and some quantum physics) for years, until your class I hadn’t appreciated the very spiritual image—Wilber would call it involutional, and the alchemists coagulatio—of downward causation via the awareness that collapses transfinite possibilities and potentialities into macro-world actualities. As you mentioned, this fits nicely with the humanistic psychologies; Frankl also discusses how our creative choices fashion us. (Have you read the Western philosopher Whitehead? He too puts creativity at the center of living.)
Jung, of course, who wrote about something similar in his own language, was greatly influenced by Henri Bergson, who called creation “continuous” and who distinguished between sensorimotor memory and “pure recollection” not reducible to brain functions. It seems to me that this parallels your distinction between the classical and quantum selves. Bergson and Jung saw the brain as a kind of transformer station for stepping down higher-order operations—incarnating them, in effect, and primarily through intuition. (Bertrand Russell has criticized the overvaluing of intuition, which he says works best in “bats, bees, and Bergson.” But Russell could in turn be criticized for overvaluing intellect. He is also a fine example of how noble philosophies don’t necessarily spring from noble lives.)
So I like this metaphor of quantum collapse. And the idea that quantum discontinuities can make for cosmological integrity. At this time, though, I don’t feel qualified to decide how literally to take the metaphor. That physicists like Stephen Hawking look down on quantum/mystical parallels and attack quantum idealism as an unwarranted generalization from micro to macro interests me, but it’s not what gives me pause.
What does is the apparent solipsism. Here is what confuses me—and I hope to be able to ask you to explain this some day; we didn’t have time in class: “In unconscious seeing there is no collapse,” as you explain in The Visionary Window. Collapse requires an awareness that can choose. A single electron doesn’t revert from probability smear to particle unless people monitor the Geiger counters and slit and mirror and cloud chamber experiments. Otherwise the universal superconsciousness (or God, if you like) would continually collapse all possibilities into actuality, and there’d be no possibility waves to compute mathematically.
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