On the Spirituality of Physics: Three

A blackboard in a quantum physics class

For most people, quantum physics is mysterious and unfathomable. When shown a blackboard full of symbols, our eyes tend to glaze over.

For people who actually work with the theory, things aren’t much better. They’ve been trying for a century to understand what the theory tells us about the world we live in without much success. One cliche often used to describe this mysterious quality of quantum physics is, “shut up and calculate.”

That’s actually good advice for most engineers. The theory allow us to design our age’s most powerful tools, from the transistor to the cell phone and beyond. Never mind that it also tells us that the supposed building blocks of the world, the fundamental particles, don’t have definite values, such as position and momentum, until they’re measured. It’s worth thinking about this well-established result. It casts grave doubt on the idea that the world exists as it is whether anybody’s looking at it or not.

My interpretation of this finding is that the world we experience is fully dependent on our observation of it. It’s not that there is nothing out there without us looking for it. It’s that we shape the world we encounter according to the way we’ve learned to see it.

If that’s true… that we shape the world we encounter by our beliefs and expectations, then our strategies for living are rendered obsolete. Our cherished strategies for getting along in life are all dependent on the idea that the world is an “is.” An “is” is something that appears to us as it actually is, and is something that would be that way whether or not there is somebody around to observe it. According to quantum theory, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

This begs the question, “What does this mean for human beings?”

Ruediger Schack, in the online publication The Conversation, has pointed out that “The starting point for most philosophers of physics is that quantum mechanics must somehow provide a description of the world as it is independently of us, the users of the theory.”

Quantum physics, I believe, flatly denies this argument. It makes statistical predictions about the results of future experiments. It says nothing about the actual reality upon which we are doing our experimenting. Nor does it tell us how those statistical possibilities can collapse into the one possibility we actually measure.

Since we always start from the assumption that the world exists independently of us, once we encounter quantum theory as a description of probable outcomes of experiment, we might assume that these probabilities are somehow inherent in the physical system we’re observing. Yet, a century and more of theorizing has yet to provide a mechanism that yields these probabilities. That’s what gives rise to the cliche I quoted earlier: “Shut Up and Calculate.”

I believe that the most plausible resolution of this quandary lies in the recognition that the world we experience is actually a picture formed in our brains by interpretation of sensory data. That is, what we think of as the external world is in reality an interpretation of electrical impulses, and all such interpretations are conditioned by past experience, trauma, memory, and many other subjective factors.

I find it a strange but somehow compelling idea: we never have direct access to the “real” world, whatever that is, because we have only our pictures, formed by our brains from raw electrical data and conditioned by our beliefs. When we look at the world as an interpretation of something that is in itself essentially unknowable, optimizing our experience is no longer about solving problems or trying to change conditions. Instead, it is about crafting our interpretations to optimize the quality of our experience.

One of our culture’s profound illusions is that the resources required for our physical and emotional wellbeing are limited. That would be true if the world were “real” in the scientific sense. The definition of “real” in physics is that “objects have definite properties independent of observation.” The 2022 Nobel Prize in physics was in part awarded for the demonstration that this is not the case, that the objects composing the world do not have definite properties when they are not being observed. We are interpreting signals that represent something, but that something is not the objective reality we think it is.

We filter out most possibililties to create the world

So, here’s an idea I think is worth considering: the world we experience is the product of interpretation of something which is itself unknowable. Scarcity, the limits we believe apply to the available supply of physical stuff, is part of this interpretation. The field of possibilities we are interpreting is not limited; that field is infinite. Scarcity can’t live in unlimited possibilities. It must arise in our finite interpretations. If I free myself from a belief in limitation, I am free to interpret the field of possibililties so as to optimize the quality of my own experience.

This argument shows, I believe, that so-called zero-sum games are artificial. Zero-sum games are systems in which what one gains another must lose. Again, that would be true if the world were “real,” if the stuff of the world were limited.

Believing in the finiteness of resources is required for zero-sum games. And this belief is the source of most, if not all, of our human misery. Ultimately, we fight over scarce resources: territory, wealth, and ideas which are themselves based on scarcity, such as markets, politics and religious beliefs.

I no longer believe in the finiteness of any of that which is required for the most joyful and satisfying experience of life.

In order to see the world as it really is, I find I must relinquish the habit of describing it incessantly. I find I must quiet the internal dialog that constantly interprets the world according to my needs, fears, and desires. Obviously, that’s been called “Be Here Now.” And in the right-now, the experience is complete and satisfying.