philosophy – Second Slope

In touch with the wave function // philosophical musings on quantum mechanics

To begin with, I’m not a physicist or natural scientist. Math was a struggle for most of my education. But I have been fascinated by theoretical physics since I watched some documentaries on public TV. It was the education I was missing in middle school. I loved the marvels it described, proliferating dopplegangers, objects phasing through walls. I thought science was justifying surrealism. –At least, quantum mechanics could be surrealistic in its implications, with the infinite degrees of freedom in a finite quantum field.

The lockdown in 2020 reawakened this fixation, with the help of the Sixty Symbols YouTube channel and in particular the work of Sean Carroll, who has quickly become my science communicator of choice.

In the decades since I watched those documentaries, I’ve received a decent amount of philosophical training. And looking back on my (superficial, popularized) learning in physics, so much of the ideological and theoretical commitments I hold to are corroborated by this very scientific field that has left so many professionals baffled and in need of positivism, pragmatism, and straight up metaphysics to cope with what quantum mechanics is telling us about the universe, namely that it’s a single, smoothly evolving wave function.

I listened to these professional physicists talk about the history of their own field, and it got me thinking about revolutionary history. It’s popular to believe that rigorous science can only be applied to the natural sciences specifically, while a science of society is impossible. The name of that science of society traditionally is Marxism. Marxism has no business calling itself a science, people say. But the history of the Communist movement has been and is a history of line struggles within Communist Parties, and of social revolutions, in which various state systems were torn down and new ones organized, and class modes of production were consciously surpassed. What about physics? There too is a history of revolutions, of one paradigm overthrowing another, of line struggles over fundamental questions about quantum mechanics, entropy, the arrow of time, the origins of spacetime, and so on.

In this video for the Sixty Symbols channel Carroll talks about how there is no winning majority framework theory of quantum mechanics. The plurality goes to the Copenhagen interpretation, but against the yardstick of philosophical materialism, this is actually an agnostic position: the physical reality of particles only exists when we are looking at them?? This is a pragmatist orientation to science, an orientation that says that the math in quantum physics (the Schrödinger equation) is only a practical recipe to help our endeavors in approximating a “ghostly” matter, rather than taking mathematics to be the theoretical reflection of reality’s basic fabric.

The interpretation that Carroll puts forward is the Everettian or “many worlds” framework, which, I learn in his book SOMETHING DEEPLY HIDDEN, is simply the “austere” form of quantum mechanics, the one that takes up the math as it is without any more tweaking (he quips that it’s the other interpretations that should be considered “disappearing worlds” theories). Not only is Carroll’s position in my mind the most consistently materialist, but there is also contradiction (i.e., dialectical reasoning) at work in his very prose:

You know who didn’t like the probability interpretation of the Schrödinger equation? Schrödinger himself. His goal, like Einstein’s, was to provide a definite mechanistic underpinning for quantum phenomena, not just to create a tool that could be used to calculate probabilities [emphasis mine]. “I don’t like it, and I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with it,” he later groused. The point of the famous Schrödinger’s Cat thought experiment, in which the wave function of a cat evolves (via the Schrödinger equation) into a superposition of “alive” and “dead,” was not to make people say, “Wow, quantum mechanics is really mysterious.” It was to make people say, “Wow, this can’t possibly be correct.” But to the best of our current knowledge, it is. (66)

The apparent strangeness of what quantum mechanics describes about reality’s fundamentals has been an occasion for many to disregard the materialist outlook and keep the door open for New Age and metaphysical explanations for reality, with a whole subset of literature applying “entanglement” and other concepts in kooky ways, usually just a fancy way to talk about “Karma.” It is similar to the situation in the nineteenth century, when the mysteries of electromagnetism led some positivistic circles in Europe’s scientific community to abandon “naive” realism and claim reality was made of mathematical approximations. A certain author known in the indie circles has made much of the fact that the quantum theory of gravity is incomplete, and voices skepticism against Einstein’s general relativity. Are these people right? Does the framework of quantum mechanics justify idealism, subjectivism, and agnosticism? Is it the intervention of the observing consciousness that brings the variables of particles into existence?

So, is the weirdness of the quantum measurement process sufficiently intractable that we should discard physicalism itself, in favor of an idealistic philosophy that takes mind as the primary ground of reality? Does quantum mechanics necessarily imply the centrality of the mental?

No. We don’t need to invoke any special role for consciousness in order to address the quantum measurement problem. We’ve seen several counterexamples. Many-Worlds is an explicit example, accounting for the apparent collapse of the wave function using the purely mechanistic process of decoherence and branching. We’re allowed to contemplate the possibility that consciousness is somehow involved, but it’s just as certainly not forced on us by anything we currently understand. (224)

The only reason why our minds have anything to do with these processes is because we implicate our conscious experiences when we “map the quantum formalism” onto the world as we experience it. Science is indeed a subjective activity in this sense, in explaining conscious experience to ourselves, and reflecting the natural world and its structures in our minds, in the form of logical concepts and mathematics. The universe is physical and exists independently of our consciousness.

As with electromagnetism and biological evolution, successes in science have historically been grounds for reactionary ideologies to gain traction. But we should not pass over the knowledge science has accumulated because general relativity hasn’t yet been reconciled with the quantum field theory of gravity, any more than the successes in physics and chemistry in the late nineteenth century justified passing over physical matter entirely.

Carroll is not merely a brilliant working scientist but a great writer and communicator. His instinct for narrative served well (and his openness to storytelling technique as well as other humanities topics on his podcast is refreshing). SOMETHING DEEPLY HIDDEN is organized like a good quest plot of the Michael Moorcock type, where every new discovery promises to be the key to solving the next, greater riddle, like how a quantum theory of gravity becomes the key to unlocking the entropy of black holes.

So how is it that a mainstream branch of natural science is not necessarily naturalistic, or more precisely consistently materialist in the way other branches of natural science spontaneously are? Sean Carroll makes many polemical points, to the effect that bourgeois science is wilfully disinterested in the fundamental questions. The slogan, he says, is “Shut up and calculate.” But why should this be the case?

I think Sean Carroll answers the question in the YouTube video when he says the Copenhagen interpretation is “good enough for government work.”

In a word, it’s a matter of bourgeois society’s rampant utilitarianism. As advanced as technology has become, the capitalist mode of production can’t actually use science in the most complete way that is possible. I think with the global warming problem this issue has become transparent for a great deal of people in the last few years. Even more acute, perhaps, is the COVID situation where we see scientific expertise subsumed under the bourgeoisie’s “political expertise” at every turn.

Quantum mechanics, special relativity and general relativity, electromagnetism, theory of atoms—these are success stories of science that nevertheless, because they put a question mark over the structure of reality as it was then understood, prompted backward steps in philosophy and theory, birthing positivism (which tries to end philosophy altogether) and putting a question mark over matter itself. At this point who hasn’t seen a wise Twitter user “discover” for the zillionth time the “metaphysics” of dialectical materialism, because it posits a world independent of our first person experience of consciousness? Such a worldview allows me and I imagine the majority of the masses to move through the world just fine; it’s only the “progressive”philosophical postmodernists who take issue with such “naive” intuitions.

Actually, materialism is corroborated by the progress made in theoretical physics. Reality is much more contradictory and alive than the drab world of dead matter that the anti-materialist camp of Bataille and Deleuze and company (fashionable heroes for certain writers these days) are so fond of decrying. And a good thing, too.

No double bagging needed

Oooofff, how I put off writing this post on THE TUNNEL by William H. Gass.

So much so that I’m two thirds of the way through at time of writing. After this I will have read all of Gass’s fiction except OMENSETTER. This is by far his greatest, most enjoyable, most consistent and sustained writing, I mean really his magnum opus, where he gave himself so much freedom and yet also displays the most control.

This was the first Gass I’ve read in a long while—in fact I haven’t read much of him since he died—and this great novel has been so recharging; I want to go back to the rest of his corpus.

After the first hundred pages or so it lets up, both the cruelty of the content (as far as representing the Holocaust is concerned) and all that restless play with typography and fragments. Then for long stretches it’s very accessible writing, easier than Henry James and Faulkner for sure.

A labor of love for three decades, THE TUNNEL came out in the early 90s, along with so many other great works of late modernism by Evan Dara, Sebald, Saramago—but I would actually single out INFINITE JEST. For Gass is doing something similar in the figures of his asshole history professor Kohler and his contemptible colleague as DFW does in his own big book: a collection of impressions and pastiches of philosophy, concepts from the bourgeois canon given “novelistic” concreteness. Except DFW was a follower of Wittgenstein and analytical positivism (the branch of Western learning Planmantee in Gass’s work is lampooning); whereas Gass sticks to Continental philosophy—much better!

How to describe? You may be familiar with TRISTRAM SHANDY by Laurence Sterne, where the author tries to write his autobiography but has inked hundreds of pages before even getting to his birth; how can he possibly catch up to the present while stuffing the manuscript full of knowledge and digressions and ravings? Similarly, William Kohler in THE TUNNEL was beginning to write the introduction to his new book, but can’t write in that rigorous academic idiom. Instead he produces these pages of sprawling, nasty, spiteful language, his hatred of everyone he knows, the human race, his fringe and off-putting interest in the history of facscism and Nazi genocide. He’s literally digging a tunnel, since there’s nothing left for him to do but withdraw. His relationship with his wife Martha is dead in the water; he’s accused of assaulting a student that he calls “Betty Boop.” He has traumatic memories of a window exploding in front of his alcoholic mother during a Midwestern storm, and of his unwashed foreskin (a hilarious sequence). He’s hiding his tunnel project from his wife, as well as the pages of this deranged book within the pages of his scholarly work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. Kohler is a shallow, crass, unrelentingly cruel asshole with a ridiculously wide field of references in the humanities.

And thanks to Gass’s prose, Kohler has a poetic utterance that every so often hits Ashbery levels—but there is none of Ashbery’s warmth here; this is the voice of a dad turning around in the driver’s seat to yell at his children to shut the fuck up.

Is this novel doing anything more? A kind of transposition into Gass’s balls-out style of aesthetic philosophy and epistemology as it’s been hacked out by philosophers from the ancients up to the Germans, with lines from Rilke and a bunch of doggerel and dirty limericks stitched in? Does that intellectual meatiness need to come with graphic details of bathroom business plus Kohler’s depraved and bitter inner life, his hatred of women, and the material of the history he studies? That does seem to be the point: you just enjoy the writing so much you don’t mind that it keeps going. I never understood the people in the writing program who thought TRISTRAM SHANDY needed to be cut down. How do you edit Sterne or Gass?

And the writing can be dense as tungsten–but in THE TUNNEL, never abstract and ersatz as I’ve felt it can be in the essays sometimes. There are just really complicated, scholarly ideas that are conveyed in the “novelist way,” a flow of images and material processes. Here’s an early paragraph from his Preface to IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY.

Literature once held families together better than quarreling. It carved a common ancestry simply from vibrating air, peopling an often empty and forgotten past with gods, demons, worthy enemies and proper heroes, until it became largely responsible for that pride we sometimes still take in being Athenian or Basque, a follower or fan. Think of the myths we’ve wrapped around Lincoln, that figure we have made a fiction in order to make him mortal. Think of the satisfaction there is in supporting a winning team of any kind. It’s no small gift, this sense of worth which reaches us ahead of any action of our own, like hair at birth, and makes brilliant enterprises possible.

There’s a lot in these 115 words, no? Daunted by unpacking all of it, you want to throw your hands up and say Just check out Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” check out the end of Marx’s 1857 “Introduction”… But we can see he’s talking about the consolidating and binding role of “literature” (more properly the epic?) in premodern times. The orality of narrative (“simply from vibrating air”). From the primitive community to sentimental nationalism. And yet also a necessary ground to make “brilliant enterprises” possible; so literature is not simply a luxury, though even if it were, lovely language is an affordable luxury as far as they go.

What’s up with this William Kohler? There are many hysterical male narrators like him in American literature of course, from Heller and Bellow and Nabokov—plus the suburban nihilism of Richard Yates. Gass supplements all of that with his philosophy; he converts classical German idealism into lovely writing that I could almost read endlessly. And Kohler strikes me very much as a Nietzschean.

Only Kohler isn’t a philosopher of the future, as much as his history book purports to go beyond ethics, beyond “guilt and innocence.” No, he’s a pudgy middle-aged reactionary asshole humanities professor who attacks his students, and he is aware of being part of the herd. He shares that contempt for self-satisfied liberal cosmopolitanism that makes up the politics and culture of modernity, the celebration of mediocrity and wimpiness that the German identified with Christianity and the democratic bourgeoisie. This para captures it:

But the streets are full of people being obnoxious in the cause of peace. I remembered the storm troopers and the meaningful discipline of their violence. Just like Lire, their banners spoke of the public weal while their boots settled private scores. I find the weaknesses of the present—its pedestrian vices, its paltry passions, its press-agent posturing—embarrassing, as though I were witnessing a poorly performed play; and I have, in effect, left the theater. Although much of the hoopla is inescapable, I nevertheless have, as the sillies sort of say, turned in, turned out, dropped off, gone quite away into the peaceful silence of my page, the slow cold work of my cellar, the sweet reenactment of my bitter former days. (411)

So Kohler can’t be a critic or a future philosopher the way FN describes it in BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. (This passage comes just before Kohler’s colleague Governali has a life-altering trip on LSD; the humor in this novel killed me at times!) Not even invested enough in the world to critique it, he can just be indecent and withdraw into his tunnel project. And why the tunnel? Ultimately the same reason why so much great writing has so much cruelty baked in.

With my tunnel I have committed the ultimate inactive act. After all, what is a useless hole? I can honestly say I have accomplished Nothing. (Ulysses answered Polyphemus with a similar riddle.) Such doughnut-shaped deeds have amassed this pile of paper, determined my present detachment from my work, developed my unimpinging personality—’unim-,’ yes—endlessly rehearsed these unheard lectures, projected my antiutopian visions only a darkly boarded black screen, formed there my disheveling plans. I’ve done nothing except fill her drawers with dirt. When she finds out, what then? (468)

This is partially what leads Kohler toward the PdP, the Party of Disappointed People. There’s much more to say here. I thought instead I might zero in on just one page (of a great deal of small type) that holds Kohler’s deeper take on bourgeois philosophy, specifically the materialist-idealist antithesis. These thoughts come about around a third of the way into the book, amongst cartoonish visions of tourists in hell, and a discussion with Kohler’s colleague Herschel (the conventional Hegelian amongst the history department).

By hiding our basic urges, leanings, dispositions, sometimes inside their opposite like a tramp in a tux, we make them look—feel—sinful, as Freud saw, when, of course, they aren’t in the least. And the concrete corrupts; particular cases always make their general principles look ridiculous. Even the laws of nature have to express themselves in crudities and outrage, in bee stings and earthquakes. That fan there, for instance—there’s not a thing it does that doesn’t exemplify the highest and most important principles of physics; yet look at it: how does it distinguish and ennoble them?

Here universals, general principles, can only find expression within crude particularities. To bring in the concrete at all seems to “disgrace” or deflate the ideal. This is one way (a bougie asthete’s way) to explore that fundamental question in philosophy of the relation between thought and being.

Is there a wall or a window between the world and our sensations from and ideas about it? The line of classical idealism, from Bishop Berkeley to Hume and Kant disputes any such direct connection with independently existing matter, or the things in themselves. Hume, the full agnostic, outlawed the question entirely, whereas Kant said the thing in itself was unknowable. Any positing of an external world, of which our ideas are more or less accurate mental reflections, that is, the materialist line, was for these thinkers an illegal passage, or a positing of an external world that constituted metaphysics. Though perhaps one reason is that these bourgeois thinkers, in their pining for rational purity, found concreteness too intolerable; they wanted to get out of the world.

I’ll Marxist hat for a second and point out that in the historical materialist perspective, the more progressive classes (as the bourgeoisie was at a certain epoch of capitalism’s history) are the ones more in touch with reality in their philosophy (are more materialist).

If the materialist line that bridges the world and the ideas together is too “narrow” (as it seems to students who have imbibed so much idealist and counterintuitive metaphysics), Kholher problematizes the interaction between matter and sense through the imagery of war.

In a war, then, there is nothing to argue about: how can Body and Mind trade blows, for instance? Only, I should say, if they can find mercenaries to do the trading, and a common field for the fight. But the sword beats only upon the shield, and body thrusts itself only against another body, reason wrestles reasons not angels, feelings collide with feelings not cars, sensations interfere with other sensations—the spirit is as crazed as a plate—so that any passion which would cloud perception must find a percept willing to make itself a mist, and any part of Spirit that would trip the tongue or heat the heart will have to enlist an organ or a nerve to carry out its wishes. The Marxist believes that the mind is another organ of the body, whereas the Idealist believes the weapons fire the other way; but, in fact, the real catastrophe which their quarrel is designed to cover up is the irreconcilable divisions that cut us, not into pieces as a cake might be, but into heteronymous kinds.

Words and language introduces a wrinkle of course. It’s one thing to knock on a wooden table, and feel confident that an actually existing table has excited your nervous system and given you the sense impressions of the feel and sight and even smell of the wooden table. But words, unities of sound images and concepts, are the only way we can exchange complex ideas about our relation to the world, and of course words don’t immediately connect with the world, or as Wallace Stevens would say, there is no communion with the world.

Like many thinkers before him, Kohler believes he can transcend this ancient quarrel. Neither idealism nor materialism, but the abyss.

The One and the Many can occupy the same camp because every Many is made of Ones; but between Mind and Matter, and who knows how many other oppositions, there is no sweet little worm-shaped serpent—a pineal gland—there is no mark of recognition like a circumcision; there is only the abyss.

One mystery to crack here is the nature of the connection between all this philosophy talk and Kholer’s fascism. At a larger scale you pose that to a 20th century Europe that fell into reaction. We like to think this pile of bourgeois culture is valuable in some sense. So why was it also the earliest source of reaction (Mariategui pointed out that the first expressions of fascism in Europe came from the literary arts rather than politics). Gass put more answers out there for us in the mid 90s than perhaps anyone could have expected.

Readers have thrown bookstores into turmoil by ordering the same 10 bestselling anti-racist manuals; do you suppose they would turn to a 650-page screed by a dickhead professor composed by a white male author for insight? Philosophy, politics, and art all swirl about in Gass’s corpus, but central all along is also the question of why we read what we read at all.