In The One, particle physicist Heinrich Päs presents a bold idea: fundamentally, everything in the universe is an aspect of one unified whole. The idea, called monism, has a rich three-thousand-year history: Plato believed that “all is one” before monism was rejected as irrational and suppressed as a heresy by the medieval Church. Nevertheless, monism persisted, inspiring Enlightenment science and Romantic poetry. Päs aims to show how monism could inspire physics today, how it could slice through the intellectual stagnation that has bogged down progress in modern physics and help the field achieve the grand theory of everything it has been chasing for decades. Blending physics, philosophy, and the history of ideas, The One is an epic, mind-expanding journey through millennia of human thought and into the nature of reality itself.
quotes
“Insofar as the active observation has anything to do with what we ascribe reality to… then we can say this observer who was brought into existence by the universe has by his act of observation a part in bringing that universe itself into being.”
Quantum weirdness can be boiled down to three concepts utterly alien to our everyday experience: superposition, complementarity, and entanglement.
As we will see, the entanglement of observer and observed and the quantum phenomenon of decoherence help explain how a hidden One is experienced as emergent individual objects in parallel realities and worlds.
As a consequence, “it seems necessary… to give up the idea that the world can correctly be analyzed into distinct parts, and to replace it with the assumption that the entire universe is basically a single, indivisible unit,” as David Bohm wrote in his 1951 textbook Quantum Theory.
By installing the dogma that “there is no quantum world,” the Copenhagen physicists revived a narrative that originated among Christians in late antiquity and the Middle Ages and that claimed a strict separation between the material world and a divine realm.
Ironically, Everett’s theory became famous as the “many worlds interpretation” of quantum mechanics. In fact, it was an entirely monistic description of quantum reality.
As a consequence, every single quantum process results in a multitude of observers, witnessing each possible outcome and thus living in their private individual realities, universes, or “Everett branches”
About this point, Everett completely agreed with David Bohm, who had emphasized already in his 1951 textbook that “at the quantum level of accuracy the entire universe must be regarded as forming a single, indivisible unit with every object linked to its surroundings.”
According to Zeh and Joos, what looks like matter emerges via decoherence from the quantum mechanical wave.
Bell’s work established that the fundamental quantum reality is nonlocal, that it exists in a “nowhere land” beyond space and time.
What is understood as entanglement and decoherence in the context of quantum mechanics, Nicholas described as the “enfolding and the unfolding of all things,” emerging from a hidden reality that “while remaining incomprehensibly above all the senses and every mind… appear[ s]… manifoldly in the different images multiplied from it.” 91 Cusanus’s One is the fundamental reality, the “oneness of the universe” that “is the root of all things.”
An interesting solution to this problem was proposed by University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Giulio Tononi. According to him, consciousness may arise as a by-product of a certain type of information processing that is sufficiently complex and highly cross-linked and may be quantified by a computable quantity known as “integrated information,” or Φ: “The more integrated the system is, the more synergy it has and the more conscious it is.
So maybe the emergence of “self” and a “classical world” are hopelessly entwined then, a self-reinforcing process. If we trust Douglas R. Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, such feedback loops are indeed an essential constituent of the phenomenon of “consciousness”: “It was almost as if this slippery phenomenon called ‘consciousness’ lifted itself up by its own bootstraps, almost as if it made itself out of nothing,” Hofstadter writes in his book I Am a Strange Loop.
“The pantheist ‘God’ is the community of all beings. It is not a He, or a She, or an It. It is a ‘We,’ and a we in the broadest and most inclusive sense, embracing everything from rocks and algae, through butterflies and humans, to suns and planets,”
The question of what unifies and what separates all beings, subjects and objects alike, appears to have absorbed humanity from its very beginning. And indeed, an obvious answer to this question is “nothing”: there are no individual objects or subjects; everything and everyone is part of an integrated whole.
In order for humanity to benefit from monism, it must become more inclusive.
related