© 2003 Ken Glasziou
© 2003 The Brotherhood of Man Library
“If man’s personality can experience the universe, there is a divine mind and an actual personality somewhere concealed in that universe.”
“There is a divine mind somewhere concealed in the universe.” Thousands upon thousands of the philosophically minded would have made a similar assertion over the ages. In this century, many quantum physicists have expressed this same thought, but not simply as a phenomenon of rational thinking.“”
Rather, it is because of their experimental work and the hard evidence gained from empirical testing that they have been led to speculate on the reality of an intelligence, perhaps operating in another dimension of space and time, that appears to participate in ordering the outcome of experiments done at the atomic level or below.
Two of the greatest, Werner Heisenberg and Wolfgang Pauli, both Nobel laureates, called this “out there somewhere” intelligence, “the Central Order of Things.” Others have used terms such as “Universal Consciousness” for this hypothetical intelligence.
Naturally there have been many who have sought what they would term a rational explanation for these results–one closer to the norm of materialistic, mechanistic thought. David Bohm, for example introduced the concept of a “pilot wave” as a substitute for “Universal Consciousness,” but ended up giving this wave semi-miraculous properties. Woj Zurek invented the term “decoherence” which he attributes to environmental factors in order to account for a set of properties that are normally associated with mind and intelligence.
For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them. Ecclesiastics 9:12
I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Ecclesiastics 9:11
The mechanistic interpretation of all natural phenomena goes back to antiquity. The modern trend is often attributed to Pierre-Simon Laplace (d. 1827) and his statement, “if at one time we knew the position and motion of all the particles in the universe, then we could calculate their behavior at any other time in the past or the future.”
Taken to its logical conclusion the Laplace concept means the whole future of the universe and all things therein, down to the very finest of details including our thoughts and our dreams, are completely pre-determined by the past. It also means we have no control over anything we say, do, or think.
For many years now, this materialist-determinist philosophy has shaped attitudes in the Western world. The concept even demands that criminals are not held responsible for their actions, they do as they do because they cannot do otherwise. It follows that to inflict serious punishment upon criminals is as inhuman as the crimes they commit. But surely a determinist would have to argue that criminals are punished because the society in which they live cannot do otherwise, and not because of any free will choice.
For those who carry the materialist-determinist logic through to its end point, meaning, value, purpose, and any such entity as a “Universal Intelligence” are but the fantasies of deluded minds. Thus their world is a clockwork universe in which hope has no meaning and from which there is no escape. Such considerations led French philosophers and authors like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre to postulate the philosophy of the absurd, from which arose the view that life itself is not only absurd but an obscene joke.
In some ways, this way of thinking is the logical outcome of applying the methodology of empirical science to areas of human activity in which it is simply not applicable. As it was proposed by David Hume (d. 1776), the scientific method requires that something makes sense when and only when its truth can be demonstrated by appropriate empirical testing–otherwise it is non-sense, “fit only to be committed to the flames.” This attitude is responsible for the fantastic technical progress of recent centuries–but it ignores as irrelevancies such things as beauty, compassion, love, mercy, art, music, ethics, religion–all those attributes and activities that elevate mankind above his animal heritage.
“God exists.” By the method of Hume, this thesis is an untestable hypothesis, so is nonsense, fit only for the flames. But note that its antithesis, “God does not exist” is also an untestable hypothesis and therefore nonsense. This is the foolishness that arises when we mechanistically apply a methodology to a subject for which it has no reasonable application.
Quite remarkably, from the early part of the twentieth century, researchers in quantum physics have been discovering many empirically demonstrable phenomena that do not fit the materialist-determinist interpretation of reality. Factually, so many such misfits have now been unraveled that scientific materialism and determinism must be classified as being hopelessly naïve. In their own defense, materialists dismissed these findings as being confined to the sub-atomic world and irrelevant to the “real world.” But that defense, too, has fallen with demonstrations of quantum phenomena that have now been shown to occur at atomic and molecular levels that must be included as the “real world.”
‘Contrariwise,’ continued Tweedledee, ‘if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.’
Lewis Carroll in “Through the Looking Glass”
I have set my life upon a cast,
And I Will stand the hazard of the die.William Shakespeare, Richard 111
One of the early postulates was Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle according to which it is impossible to know both the exact position and speed of any particle at the same moment of time. In fact, the more we can define one of these, the less we can know about the other.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle should have shattered Laplace’s dictum that if we knew the position and motion of all the particles in the universe, the whole of the future could be calculated. A general ignorance of physics and a “not wanting to know” attitude among a materialist-minded population ensured that it did not. And as it turned out, not even Heisenberg guessed how truly strange his principle would eventually be shown to be.
For our purposes it will be necessary to know a little about why some physicists have become interested in the problem of consciousness. First, something about light. In 1803, Thomas Young carried out his famous two-slit experiment that convinced physicists of the wave nature of light. By arranging for a light beam to pass through two close-together slits in an opaque screen, Young showed that when the light beam was focused onto a second screen, a pattern of light and dark bands appeared. He interpreted these as being due to light waves interfering with one another–just as waves from two sources traveling in a pond of water interfere with one another so that their crests add together to give a bigger wave and their troughs add together to give a deeper trough to the wave pattern, or when a crest from one source meets a trough from another source, they cancel one another.
This concept of light as being uniquely a wave phenomena lasted for a hundred years until shattered by Albert Einstein when he interpreted the photo-electric effect–the same kind of effect that we use with solar panels to convert sunshine to electricity–as being evidence for light occurring in discrete particle-like packets each with its own “quantum” of light energy and now known as “photons.” And so arose the puzzle of the century–light is a wave and particle at the same time. How can that be?
As a point of interest, the puzzle of the dual nature of light has never really been resolved–we have just learned to live with it. It was given a name by Neils Bohr, he called it “complementarity,” and the materialists were happy to announce that Bohr had solved the problem though he had really only given it a name.
Young’s two slit work was extended, and the puzzle deepened, in 1927 by Davisson and Germer at the Bell Laboratories but using a beam of electrons. Since our eyes do not see electrons, Davisson used a screen constructed from a very large number of tiny Geiger tubes that register a hit on a counter when struck by an electron. With just one of the slits open, there was enough scatter of the electrons during their passage so that every Geiger tube in the screen managed to score a hit. But with both screens open a strange thing happened. Not only did Davisson get an interference pattern similar to that obtained by Young with a light beam–an alternating barred pattern indicative of waves–but there were whole columns of tubes that did not score any hits, even though they had done so when only a single slit was open.
Because of advances in technology over the more than one hundred year interval, Davisson and Germer could perform experiments that were not even remotely possible for Young. They could cut back the rate at which electrons were being fired at a screen to less than one per minute. Hence, there is no obvious way in which successive electrons fired at the screen could interfere with one another. But left for a long period of time, this system also produced a barred interference pattern!!
The startling conclusion!! With both slits open single electrons were going through both slits at the same time–and interfering with themselves.
This conclusion has been confirmed over and over again, not only for electrons but also for photons of light and even for atoms. For light, it is also confirmed when, instead of slits, a beam splitter is used.
One form of beam splitter is actually a mirror with holes so that any photon impinging on its surface has a fifty percent chance of passing through a hole or being reflected by the mirror. Given these alternative pathways in experiments designed to show “which way”, the single photon will take both paths.
As more and more of this type of work was performed, many experimenters gained the impression that their own minds were part of the system under study. And so the idea arose that the particle/wave under study remained in a “superposed” state in which it retained both particle and wave properties until forced to reveal one of the alternatives to a conscious observer. If the experimenter set up to distinguish a wave, that was what was seen, but if set up to detect a particle, that, too, was what was seen. This concept was much ridiculed as God-playing by many materialists.
This state of superpositioning was found to be general, and not confined to just wave or particle phenomena. Electrons can be separated into classes that can be considered to have up or down and left or right spin[1], and light can be vertically or horizontally polarized. These states can also exist in “twin” pairs, so that if one of a pair of “entwined” electrons is forced to reveal a spin state, its twin must take the opposite state.
One of the greatest of all time among physicists, Albert Einstein, always hated the notion that, at the quantum level, probability rather than certainty holds center stage. Einstein believed firmly in the cause-effect deterministic relationships of classical physics that appear to be so reliable in the macro-world. For him, probability at the quantum level was a measure of incompleteness of the theory. When its deficiencies were corrected, Einstein believed the probabilities would disappear. So firmly held was this belief that he spent a considerable period of his life in devising thought experiments to disprove quantum theory.
The world is everything that is the case.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Logical consequences are the scare crows of fools and the beacons of wise men.
Thomas Huxley
One of the thought experiments devised by Einstein and two associates, Podolsky and Rosen, saw the superpositioning proposal for “intertwined” or “correlated” electrons as a means to discredit the theory. If one of a pair of electrons was shown to have say, “up” spin then, automatically, its super-positioned partner must display “down” spin, regardless of whether they were at opposite sides of the universe. Classical physics requires some kind of force operating between the two particles for this to occur and relativity theory requires that no signal should be transmitted at speeds greater than the speed of light. For many years, Einstein appeared to be right. But eventually improved technology provided the means by which the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen (E-P-R) proposal could be tested experimentally.
Although preceded by several experiments of a statistical nature that came out in favor of quantum theory, one devised by Alaine Aspect and associates in France was the first to produce truly convincing results. It was performed with correlated photons, twin photons that are emitted in opposite directions from radioactive calcium.
Aspect placed polarizers in front of the detectors for each photon beam, including a switching device in front of one that changed the angle of polarization every 1/10 billionth of a second. This time interval was too short for any signal travelling at the speed of light to pass between the detectors.
The result from Aspect’s experiment was that whatever happened to the first photon to arrive at its detector was reflected by its twin–thus confirming quantum theory expectations and refuting the Einstein, Podolsky, Rosen objections.
The distance between the detection systems in Aspect’s laboratory experiment was not great but this same experiment has since been confirmed by workers in Switzerland who used the fiber optic cable system connecting two villages that are separated by a large mountain.
An important result of this work was the demonstration of “non-local” effects, meaning that the entwined photons remain entwined and react to one another even though separated by a distance greater than can be traversed by any signal travelling at the speed of light. Quantum physicists believe that such non-local effects are independent of time and space and would occur simultaneously even if the photons were at opposite ends of the universe–a distance equivalent to about twenty billion light years or more.
The work initiated by Aspect has been confirmed and extended in experiments using correlated properties other than polarization of light. Rarity and Tapster, for example, used momentum as the correlated property, this being the one originally suggested by Einstein et al.
A question many ask is whether there is some kind of conscious agency operative throughout the universe that is being revealed to us at the quantum level.
An impressive example of how some external “Universal Intelligence” appears to participate and even regulate what the experimenter is permitted to know is illustrated in work done using the left or right component of the spin of an electron and an up or down component of electron spin[1:1]. Instruments are available to separate left spinning from right spinning electrons and up spinning from down spinning. So if the right spin group is separated, is it then possible to carry out another separation to get right spinning electrons with only an up or only a down spin component?
The answer to this question was no. Apparently the ‘rule’ is that we are permitted to know about one component of spin only. So if we know an electron has right spin we are not permitted to know anything about its up or down components.
A valid question arises, "Is it the effect of apparatus that separates the up and down spin that messes up the left/right components and nothing to do with an intelligence from ‘out there’ enforcing its rules?
This question was answered in an ingenious way (see Part B). The experimenter separated right spinning electrons then fed these through an apparatus to separate up from down spin–but he did not look to see what the result was. Instead he fed both streams back into a mixing box so that he lost his potential knowledge about the up/down spin component. From the mixing box the electrons again went to the left/ right separator. The result was that the right spin was completely retained.
“A” ilustrates the separation of either left/right or up/down spin components. If we take either the left or right spin electrons and pass them through the up/down separator, we lose our information about left/right spin. Similarly if we pass up or down spin electrons through a left/right separator, electrons in either the let or right stream will be found to have randomized the up/down component. CONCLUSION: It appears that having knowledge of both spin components simultaneously may be forbidden to the observer.
In “B” we take right spin electrons, feed them through an up/down separator, but reflect the back into a mixing box thus losing any information on up/down spin. If the electrons from the mixing box are then passed through a left/right separator they are found to retain 100% right spin.
However blocking the path of the “up” stream so these do not enter the mixing box, gives only "down’ electrons in the mixing box. But considering what happened in “B” there is no obvious reason that these should have other than right spin. However, after passing them through our left/right separator, a randomized mix of left/right spin electrons was obtained—which is consistent with the hypothesis that knowledge of both kinds of spin simultaneously is forbidden to the observer. (reference: David Z. Albert, Scientific American 270 (5) 32 (1994))
QUESTION: "Who or what does the “forbidding?”
To extend these results, the mirror reflecting the up spinning electrons so as they entered the mixing box was removed. Otherwise the experiment was identical with Part B. But since only “down” electrons went to the mixing box, the experimenter appears to have knowledge of both the right and the down components of spin–for why would simply deflecting the up electrons have any physical effect that would cause randomization of the right spin? (see Part C). However it did! When these electrons were passed through the right from left separator, the left/right spin was completely randomized!!
It is well worth while pondering upon these results and making sure they are well understood. The apparatus used was a constant throughout. The only possible interpretation appears to be concerned with what the observer is allowed to know and it is difficult to see how anything other than an intelligence ‘out there somewhere’ applied the rule prohibiting simultaneous knowledge of both up/down and left/right spin attributes.
In recent years, quantum effects have graduated to the “real world” in experiments not only with work with sodium atoms but also with what are called Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC’s). Proposed early in the twentieth century, these BEC’s were expected to occur when gases condensed to a solid state at extremely low temperatures and in such a way that they formed a giant molecule with its millions of atoms all in a single state of super-positioning. Only very recently has it been technically possible to achieve the very low temperature conditions in which BEC’s will form. In one reported experiment two such condensates, both large enough to be visible to the naked eye, were brought together in a way that permitted their wave components to form an interference pattern with one another.
As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain, will also be a mystery.
Santiago Cajal
There may always be another reality to make fiction of the truth we think we’ve arrived at.
Christopher Fry
Finally and apparently irrefutably, though mysteries remain, the quantum world and the “real” world have been shown to be components of one and the same reality.
Science was a primary catalyst that led the world to embrace Laplace’s concept of the mechanical universe in which all things are predetermined through cause-effect relationships, the logical extension of which meant that we live meaningless lives on a meaningless planet doomed to eventual extermination in a universe also ultimately doomed.
Quantum theory collapsed all that. It states there is no certainty, only probability. It therefore leaves room for choice, for free will, for a God who cares. It proves none of these things, simply leaves the subject open. And although it cannot “prove” the existence of a “Universal Intelligence,” it can produce evidence that is consistent with the concept–and impossible to refute.
What do the Urantia Papers have to say that might help us to understand mind and consciousness? Dispersed throughout its pages, it describes a hierarchical structure with the mind of the Infinite Spirit at the apex.
We are told that consciousness and self-conscious are, to some extent, properties of mind. However, subjective self-consciousness derives mainly from personality which is a direct gift from the Universal Father. What we normally think of simply as mind is actually a complex. It is in partnership with our personality which adds its own inherent properties to the partnership. Our minds also interact with divine spirit, directly with the indwelling spirit of the Father, and also with the Spirit of Truth representing the combined spirits of the Father and Creative Son.
Another aspect of mind is non-teachable or mechanical mind. It is the “mind” of primitive creatures and comes under the direction of the Master Physical Controllers–who may also be responsible for supervising the quantum rules?
When the Papers were received in the 1920-35 period only a handful of physicists had any real knowledge of the conflict between the classical materialist-determinist view of reality and the probabilistic view held, and later confirmed experimentally, by quantum theorists. So what do the Papers say?
“These three Absolutes of potentiality must be the presences abroad in the universe which render it impossible for physicists to predict with certainty.” (UB 4:1.9)
“The agencies of the Third Source and Center are the levers of intelligence which motivate the material level and inject spontaneity into the mechanism of the physical creation.” (UB 9:3.8)
“Since mind co-ordinates the universe, fixity of mechanisms is nonexistent. The phenomenon of progressive evolution associated with cosmic self-maintenance is universal. The evolutionary capacity of the universe is inexhaustible in the infinity of spontaneity.” (UB 42:11.7)
“The finite universe of matter would eventually become uniform and deterministic but for the combined presence of mind and spirit. The influence of the cosmic mind constantly injects spontaneity into even the material worlds.” (UB 195:6.15)
From which it may be discerned that whoever wrote the Urantia Papers was fully aware of these fundamentals long before science and its empirical evidence commenced its revelation of experimentally demonstrable facts.
The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.
Celia Green
We know the human brain is a device to keep the ears from grating on one another.
Peter de Vries
Addendum: An analogy that may assist our comprehension of the mind problem is to think of cosmic mind as a ‘field,’ (similar to the electromagnetic fields that can be made visible with iron filings). The cosmic mind field permeates the whole universe and, like an electromagnetic field, it can be manipulated. It is the Universe Mother-Spirit who manipulates the interaction of cosmic mind with the neuro-anatomy of our brains in ways that permit us to think and to experience self-consciousness and God-consciousness.