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A literal quantum leap is the abrupt transition of an electron, atom, or molecule from one quantum state to another. In physics, a quantum jump is a sudden change in a physical quality such as energy from one fixed level to another. References in periodicals archive? Such a wave-function shape allowed us to find a method to observe the neutron quantum states: Investigation of the neutron quantum states in the Earth's gravitational field.
The connections between the Jones polynomial and both computers and quantum physics caught Freedman's eye in the late s. My Meeting With Michael. The assertion is made that quantum mechanics has ruled invalid the materialistic, reductionist view of the universe, introduced by Newton in the seventeenth century, which formed the foundation of the scientific revolution. The myth of quantum consciousness. With quantum dots, scientists can simultaneously view many different markers in the same cell. Tiny semiconductor crystals reveal cellular activity like never before.
His fields of research span the range from modern aspects of classical optics to quantum optics and quantum information. Entanglement remained a curiosity of quantum mechanics until the s, when theorists started to get an inkling of just how powerful entanglement-exploiting computers might be. Gadgets from the quantum spookhouse: Through the alliance, consumers who make their holiday purchases through a certified Quantum representative will have the option to donate their goods directly to the Toys for Tots program.
Lately, it's become evident that quantum dots may be turned into extraordinary beacons or sponges of light. This article contains some speculation that is the inescapable outcome of dealing with speculative realism or panpsychism. We may, however, gain valuable and necessary insight through this exercise even if it means that previously held 'certainties' may become so contaminated by the present topic that we have to give up the idea that we enjoy firm and certain knowledge.
We know that consciousness needs a body to operate and mind cannot exist without brain. But panpsychism sees consciousness as typical of all matter, whether it has a brain or not, which in a way turns materialism on its head. Materialism in its strict sense reduces everything to matter.
Panpsychism turns this around. Basic to all things that exist is consciousness. Panpsychism can be seen as new animism or new materialism or speculative realism. It also fits into absolute idealism or what can be called panconsciousness. Bertrand Russell noted as long ago as that physics is no longer materialistic in the old seventeenth-century sense of the word, holding matter as permanent substance.
The notion of force, for example, implies allowing particles of matter to interact with each other through void space without any material link see Strawson b: We know from particle physics today that matter is balanced by anti-matter and that particles fluctuate in and out of existence all the time 3 see Carroll The notion of panpsychism seems to gain momentum and it is worth revisiting it as expression of the so-called Speculative Turn that seems to characterise the twenty-first century.
Panpsychism must be seen against the background of new developments and how these feature in pseudo-science, religion, the New Age movement and popular culture. It is captured by the notion of a non-human turn, which describes developments from the last decades of the twentieth century. The human has always coevolved, coexisted or collaborated with the non-human.
The human is characterised precisely by this lack of distinction from the non-human. Without pursuing these points the following can be added. Although some of the claims made may border on the fictitious, they presently enjoy attention: With the latest developments in particle physics we have entered a new era where the distinction between physics and metaphysics including religion is not so clear any more.
Science has to deal increasingly with metaphysical questions. Without the opposites no movement, formation of matter, development of galaxies, solar systems and ultimately life itself would have been possible. A new kind of metaphysics challenges philosophy: On the quantum level the double slit experiment has indicated the role of the conscious observer in determining the collapse of the wave function, which is determinative in grappling with the quantum world and is elaborated upon when we focus on Kauffman's view below.
We know that autopoietic systems are operative in the biological sphere and physicists claim that the universe itself is self-explanatory. There is no need for a supernatural force to explain it. Nevertheless, the unfolding of the universe and the development of life on our planet are so fabulous that many cannot but posit a divine architect. Science rejects any intelligent designer.
The universe itself has become intelligent, conscious and self-reflective in thinking human beings. The notion of consciousness is metaphorically transferred to the universe by panpsychism.
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On an ecological level the planet earth is seen as one big living organism, Gaia. The geosphere, lithosphere ground , hydrosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, stratosphere and noosphere all interact as part of this living organism. As a living organism there will be levels of awareness and consciousness that characterise the various spheres. The universe is alive. On this level cosmic consciousness emerges. We know that human life consists of elements that were formed in the stars and that our planet and galaxy would not exist were it not for developments on a much larger and older universal scale.
We are part of this history, which explains us. The information metaphor plays a crucial role in understanding this. Only such a model makes sense of the holistic universe that exists, according to his view. This idea falls back on the notion of David Bohm that all that unfolds before our eyes is only a small part of an unbroken wholeness O'Murchu Bohm found that electrons, once introduced into a plasma with a high density of electrons and positive ions, started behaving as if they were part of an interconnected whole. This idea was extrapolated to include all reality.
It was equally powerful everywhere. It did not diminish with distance. It expressed something of the identity of reality that could never be understood by studying the individual wholeness' O'Murchu This idea is in line with the quest to find one substance or entity that explains everything. We know that energy and matter are reversible and that consciousness can be seen as a form of energy.
Does this make consciousness and matter to some extent reversible? We know that all matter is imbued with information. If the information inherent in a specific kind of matter the atomic and molecular structure changes, then the matter will change as well. On the level of human-animal interaction, research has indicated interconnectedness at various levels.
Research on the great hominids can be singled out as a factor that contributed much to respect for all animals, and the development of animal rights in some countries. The new appreciation for environmental ethics and the development of a creaturely theology see Deane-Drummond have contributed to eco-awareness. On the level of health and medical research, humans may in future reprogram their genes to attain immortality.
Artificial limbs may be linked to the brain to operate like normal organic limbs. We know that we share our genes to various degrees with other organisms and that all life on earth is related. We will soon be able to develop supercomputers that will far exceed the human brain's capacity.
These supercomputers may eventually start to think for themselves, develop programmed emotions and reach a state of 'mind' similar to consciousness. On a religious level the notion of 'deep incarnation' stresses the importance of God's saving presence in nature. This importance elevates nature, along with humans, into the soteriological sphere of God's saving and regenerating grace.
The notion of panentheism unifies all creation in God and this is not that different from the notion of consciousness as a unifying principle. The ubiquity of God implies, like the ubiquity of consciousness, the omnipresence of the mental. Panpsychism is in a sense a secular version of panentheism. To be in God affects the dwellers and endows them with some form of awareness of 'being in God'.
The speculative basis of most of these points cannot be denied. The question is whether science will eventually provide sufficient reasons and examples to ground such claims or to disprove them convincingly. Along with the increase of secularism there is a new interest in the value of nature and natural things, especially in the field of secular spirituality. Panpsychism considers mind as fundamental to all things. Various versions of panpsychism have been articulated in the past by classical thinkers such as Spinoza, Leibniz, Fechner, Lotze, Pierce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, Hartshorne and Sprigge see Basile Darwin's evolutionary model became accepted in biology and continued the Platonic organic metaphor based on the empirical sciences Cooper Plato regarded the universe as an intelligent living being see Timaeus.
This idea was fuelled by Darwinism, the biological design of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the brilliant work of biologists such as Valera and Maturana and the notion of self-making autopoietic systems, which emphasises some form of cognition, will and intention in very primal matter. Common to these questions is the relation between organic and inorganic matter mind and matter and the forces that determine this.
Before the science revolution mind and matter were not strictly separated. The notions of animism, vitalism see Bergson [] in Barnard , which would come much later , pantheism and panentheism attribute some kind of force life to matter. In pantheism all matter is God and God is in all matter. In panentheism all matter exists in God. In both cases the relationship with God affects the matter in one way or another. Only deism separates God from matter see also Plotinus's strict separation between matter and spirit [ logos ] in his Enneads. The question is, to use panentheism as an example: If there is no difference for matter between being in God en theos or being not in God quod non est in Deo , the whole notion of 'being in God' becomes insignificant.
The doctrine of God's preservation preservatio Deo means that God upholds and governs everything, including matter, as well as all miniscule components and circumstances it entails atoms, quarks, fields, etc. If God 'withdraws' his hand all crumbles to dust. God created ex nihilo and if he withdraws his hand his presence everything will collapse venire ad nihilum ; this can only mean in the case of matter that collapsing into nothingness means nothing to it [matter] and has implications only for the observer humans or God ; or it does have implications for matter, which implies some form of awareness of the difference between being and not-being, which in turn implies some form of awareness or proto-awareness.
It boils down to the scientific realist position that assumes that reality exists objectively and independently of perception or measurement, which may be true, but if it is true reality is insignificant. Perhaps this is why brute matter has an 'inherent' drive or will to develop into consciousness. Hence, the suggestion that matter wants to be known has a drive to self-consciousness. Humans are composed of brute matter and emerged from brute matter into self-conscious, thinking matter.
We are thinking matter simply because we exist in the right combination of matter. The reformed notion of God's preservatio implies that he has a special relation with matter creation. Romans 8 personifies nature, which waits in anticipation upon the action of God. No I-thou relation is possible without some form of awareness on both sides. Is this valid in the case of an I-it relationship as well?
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Matter can be imbued with sentiment, may carry symbolic worth or be of special value to us. Sentimental value attached to things relates to the experiential history we remember in which a specific object had a special place. But that is because the object mediates relation with something or somebody else a loved one. I can care for inanimate matter but without the possibility of a mutual relationship. I may care for my car but it is unaware of me. We know that we get attached to things, to objects, artefacts, places, images.
Inherent in this sentiment is the unexpressed 'feeling' that the dead object knows and senses this.
The recognition of ' your property' in a criminal case where your goods have been stolen confirms this relationship. You recognise the stolen item as bound to you, as 'your property'. The thief does not enjoy this attachment history. It is only possible for the 'lawful' owner. The thief's attachment will always be an 'attachment' to stolen property. This example concerns the existential level of human beings' attachment to things.
The question is whether one can think in terms of a mutual relation that implies some form of 'awareness' or of 'being affected' on the part of the thing. Hegel indicated that a mutual relation can exist between conscious human beings and inanimate matter. Humans learn from 'inanimate, dead matter' when they try to figure it out or study it. In the process of knowledge acquisition both parties change - the human investigator as well the investigated object, and this is similar to what happens between two intelligent human interlocutors.
But this is once again seen from the side of the human subject. The inanimate object is 'not aware' of the change that has taken place through this experience. Without going into any detail, we know that the 'double slit' experiment has proven sufficiently that a particle photon and inanimate matter responds to the observation of an observer, which changes its state from a wave to a particle. Seager and Allen-Hermanson refer to the division between mind and matter inaugurated by the science revolution in the fifteenth century and the resultant choice to give preference to matter as the object of science.
Thus, everything that could not be accounted for in terms of the interactions of simple material components was conveniently labelled a 'secondary quality' inhabiting not the 'real' world but merely the conscious mind the classical example is colour, which was banished from the world of matter and replaced with the mind mechanisms that make us experience colour. The mind was not to be trusted and physics would reveal how the world 'actually' is.
The world was made safe for physics. George Berkeley denied that anything exists or could conceivably exist except insofar as it was consciously experienced. Berkeley's notion of esse est percipi being is sensual perception means that ontology is determined by our senses 9 and nothing exists except sentient experience. This is subjective idealism. This, coupled with the 'doctrine of ideas' - that what we immediately perceive is restricted to our own states of consciousness - leads him to the conclusion that all physical objects are systems of possible conscious perceptions, which means that matter is not mind-independent.
Panpsychism had its greatest flourishing in the nineteenth century due to the prominence of idealism; panpsychism is a kind of new vitalism. Henri Bergson had his own version of panpsychism Barnard Gustav Fechner endorsed a 'world-soul' or 'world-mind' of which everything is a part without explaining how 'world-soul' itself came into being.
Schopenhauer saw everything as conscious but not necessarily as alive. Alfred North Whitehead is the twentieth-century champion of panpsychist philosophy. He saw events or items that are more event-like than thing-like and the ongoing processes of their emergence and disappearance as the core feature of the world, rather than the traditional triad of matter, space and time.
His panpsychism arises from the idea that the elementary events occasions that make up the world partake of mentality in terms of notions such as creativity, spontaneity and perception. For lifeless matter these functionings impede each other and average out to produce a negligible total effect. Whitehead's panpsychism faces the same objections as any other version and stems from the same basic anti-emergentist intuition. After the publication of Whitehead's panpsychist Process and Reality and the publication of C.
Broad's emergentist-oriented Mind and Its Place in Nature there was little interest in either panpsychism or emergentism. Characteristic of the speculative turn, according to Sheldon In Basile's view it cannot be rejected as an historical anomaly Still, most philosophers devote not more than a few adverse sentences when dealing with panpsychism, preferring instead to cling to materialism Barnard Sprigge and Nagel and the 'what-it-is-like-ness' of subjective inwardness. Thomas Nagel sees panpsychism as 'the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties, whether or not they are part of living organisms' Shaviro In opposition to idealism and Cartesian dualism, eliminative physicalism like panpsychism maintains that thought is neither merely epiphenomenal 11 nor something that exists in a separate realm from the material world Shaviro Nagel's article was well received and is pivotal to understanding the interest in panpsychism.
Nagel got his idea from Galen Strawson Timothy Sprigge independently came to the same conclusion as Thomas Nagel about the question of consciousness by arguing that there must be an answer to what it was like being her or it at that time McHenry According to McHenry From this base he moved on to construct his panpsychist ontology in which consciousness or sentience is omnipresent in the universe.
For Sprigge, human consciousness is the noumenal reality behind phenomena perceived as physical reality. For him nothing can exist if it is not experience McHenry Nagel's article What is it like to be a bat? Consciousness, in this view, has an essentially subjective character, a what-it-is-like aspect.
Nagel moves from the problem of access epistemology to the problem of being ontology Shaviro This subjective aspect of consciousness cannot be captured by any familiar analysis of the mental state or by any explanatory system of functional or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behave like people though they experience nothing.
Nagel says that it is useless to base a defence of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal with the subjective character of entities Bat sonar, for example, is not similar to anything we can experience or imagine.
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No method will allow us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case Nagel The problem we are faced with is that what we perceive through our senses is already processed reality. The end product of seeing or hearing or feeling something is because of the intricate bodily processes that make this possible.
But we do not have access to these processes and the processes themselves do not 'feel', 'see' or 'smell'; they issue in feeling, seeing and smelling. Nagel expresses the same sentiment when he says 'If mental processes are indeed physical processes, then there is something it is like, intrinsically, to undergo certain physical processes. What it is for such a thing to be the case remains a mystery' These ideas influenced contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists, who hold the following theses Hacker But the bat's inner experience is not a Nothing either.
This means that it is indeed 'like something' to be a bat, even though 'what it is like' is not a Something. In this regard Strawson's panpsychism makes for him the most sense, as he considers mentality of some sort more certain than the existence of anything else, whether we call this mentality experience, consciousness, conscious experience, phenomenology, experiential 'what-it's-like-ness', feeling, sensation or explicit conscious thought Shaviro Strawson echoes Descartes' cogito without the dualism.
We must reject the notion that the physical is essentially non-experiential. If we reject dualism and supernaturalism, then mentality itself must be entirely physical Strawson a: But only a human can pose the question 'what is it like to be a bat? An important point to note is that it is our current concept of matter as that which is wholly and utterly non-experiential non-conscious which makes it impossible to understand how mind, the experiential and conscious, could emerge from it see Basile There is no physical evidence that inanimate objects are conscious.
To allot consciousness to 'dead' matter implies a metabasis eis allo genos , an unwarranted transition into another genus. It makes sense to ask what it is like to be a bat but not what it is like to be a stone. A stone is inanimate matter and has no consciousness, awareness or any feeling of presence.
To aver that an inanimate thing has some form of awareness, feeling or presence is animism and we outgrew that long ago. But then we are not stones, although we are made up of inorganic matter. But neither can we know for certain that other people are really conscious because we have no access to their inner selves.
We do recognise behaviour in other humans similar to our own and we do recognise in some mammals emotions similar to our own. The radical jump made by panpsychism is the formulation of a naturalised metaphysics where all objects of nature are themselves subjects of experience. Panpsychism is all about the extrapolation of consciousness experience to non-brain-dependent entities.
This transcends the notion that consciousness is the direct and exclusive consequence of brain physicality. This boils down to a naturalisation of mind and a mentalisation of nature McHenry Intuitively we feel that inanimate reality cannot be alive or experiential. To be experiential means to be able to feel, think, control or process what happens to you.
It presupposes some form of a 'self'. It seems plausible that different levels of consciousness or awareness characterise most life-forms. Shaviro expresses this well: But what about things that are not alive? How many non-stoned people will agree … that a rock has a mind? One possibility is to extend the notion of 'experience', as it is used by panpsychism, to such a level that it is not understood in terms of human perception.
Human experience is impossible without our senses, and non-living matter is senseless as far as we know. Royce tries to make sense of this with his notion of apperceptive time. What we perceive as inorganic nature is not dead, 'experienceless' matter, but nature 'alive' in various degrees see McHenry To experience anything one needs the mediation and operation of one's senses. How can inanimate matter sense anything without having senses? This is 'possible' through Whitehead's understanding of 'prehension'. Prehension is non-sensory perception and all experience begins with this.
In a sense our body 'knows' before we know. Our senses convey light, sound and smell to our brain, which interprets them on a different level. On a primary level our bodily senses prehend before the brain apprehends. We attribute mind or soul to moving things and this entails experience, history, even memory. A rock is stationary and as such has no experience. But the molecules, atoms and other subatomic particles of which the rock consists are not devoid of experience. The resulting position can be called process philosophy's version of 'panexperientialism', which is applicable to all individuals but not to all things whatsoever Griffin One could also think of Whitehead's concept of causal efficacy as the basic mode of perception in nature: A jellyfish advances and withdraws, and in so doing, exhibits some perception of causal relationships with the world beyond itself; a plant grows downwards to the damp earth, and upward towards the light.
There is thus some direct reason for attributing dim, slow feelings of causal nexus, although we have no reason for ascription of the definite percepts in the mode of presentational immediacy … As we pass to the inorganic world, causation never for a moment seems to lose grip. Whitehead quoted in McHenry For Sprigge innumerable streams of experience exist independently of human and animal consciousness.
The inanimate world is nothing but sentient experience McHenry This means that terms such as 'experience', 'sentience', 'consciousness' are applied to inanimate nature McHenry In the case of humans, consciousness is unthinkable without language and various types of symbolic representation of our experience Hacker ; McHenry In the case of non-human reality various options are available, ranging from some form of consciousness and awareness on the level of animals and living organisms to some form of 'proto-consciousness' on an inanimate level.
Panpsychism depends to a large degree on the fact that we do not really know what consciousness is, how to define or explain it. We have direct access to it from within the inner world of the mind.
The possibility this raises is that maybe the part of reality that we know indirectly through science has the same inner nature as the part we know through conscious introspection. This was the conclusion reached by Bertrand Russell in The analysis of matter , and Arthur Eddington said quoted in Holt This means that consciousness pervades all of physical nature, and subjective experience is not confined to human consciousness but is present in every piece of matter Holt The argument runs as follows: The basic particles such as electrons, protons and neutrons that make up our brains are similar to those that make up the universe.
The entire universe thus consists of little bits of consciousness Holt All of this presupposes that consciousness is an enigma that humans 'participate' in consciousness but that the consciousness realm exceeds human experience. This position represents a kind of consciousness ontology where all reality forms part of the panconscious expanse. The moment consciousness becomes the ontological basis of the universe, the notions of design and teleology come into play. Keith Ward exemplifies this when he says: This implies some form of intelligent design. How can the universe 'act', 'plan', 'have in mind'?
Even the laws of nature exist for a reason, and the best reason is that they exist for the sake of desirable goals which the universe may realise. We are then to think of a primordial mind that can envisage and evaluate possible goals and bring them about intentionally. Consciousness cannot be introduced into the universe as a foreign element. It emerges from the universe and may even be an inevitable 'outcome' in most universes, but to say that the universe has the forming of consciousness 'in mind' presupposes an intelligent designer behind all.
There is a theory that material under the influence of entropy and increasing complexity drives towards the formation of organic material as an outcome of the movement of energy. A New Physics Theory of Life has proposed that life exists because the law of increasing entropy drives matter to acquire life-like physical properties. An interesting point in panpsychism is that consciousness is not made up of particles that come together and are arranged in the right relation with the resultant emergence of consciousness.
The particles are themselves bits of consciousness. Panpsychism cannot really cope with the problem of the unity of consciousness.
quantum leap
If the thermostat is conscious, are its parts conscious as well? Is there a separate consciousness to each screw and molecule? If this is so, what is the unifying factor uniting these bits of consciousness to one unit see Basile A single ontology underlies the subjective information states in human minds and the objective information states of the physical world. Hence Chalmers' slogan 'Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside' Holt This rules out emergence as the possibility of creating a 'higher' level of existence from 'lower' preconditions.
But how do little bits of mind-stuff combine to form a bigger mind, such as the human brain, and how can many 'small' consciousnesses unite to form one consciousness? Here quantum entanglement may come to the rescue, says Holt, where distinct particles, no matter how far separated from each other, lose their individual identities and act as a unified system Holt De-coherence also takes place when particles entangle with the macro-world. We do not yet know all the processes that play a role during the double-slit experiment.
There is also a borderline area where Newtonian laws kick in on a macro-level. How quantum rules translate into the macro-world is still unknown. Galen Strawson's take on panpsychism. Galen Strawson is the son of the renowned analytical philosopher PF Strawson and one of the best present-day campaigners of panpsychism. He describes himself as a stuff monist, a materialist or physicalist. He explains the basic tenets of panpsychism through the following well-known German distinctions: Stoff ist kraft matter is energy: All physical stuff is energy in one form or another; therefore, Strawson believes that all energy is an experience-involving phenomenon Strawson Strawson uses the concept 'energy' in the Heisenbergian sense of energy as substance, and the characteristic of substance is that it acts.