The Quandary
For three hundred years or more, scientific method has been based on detached observation. Experimenters study ‘it’ as if from a dualistically separate rational mind, which philosophically is also an ‘it’ (a noun), but a different sort of ‘it’.
Then came quantum physics (now for about 100 years!), with its discovery that every measurement is an act of participation. No longer is the rationalising mind dualistically separated from ‘the experimental system’. Philosophers, metaphysicians, cosmologists, and the general thinking public are placed in a quandary. The old Greco-Roman categories of matter and mind seem inadequate to explain the interface, of a foundational quantum substratum that is nonlocal and dynamic (beyond space-time-substance) from which emerges a deterministically solid, localised and predictably world (in space-time-substance) that births living forms and creates conversational interactions that are meaningful.
Regression and Comparison
The temptation is to hold onto old categories when reconsidering dualist interfaces, such as mind and matter, or beyond and in space-time-substance. Giving a nondual alternative some new name may sound as if we know more than before, without letting go of the old moral security that a preferred category had provided. For example, if it is in my mind, then it is not real, so I can get away with it.
That has been my worry until recently about the trend to say that consciousness must be a foundational feature of the cosmos, such that it is inherent in every object and particle to some extent – panpsychism. This is offered as a step beyond materialism to put ‘brain science’ in its place as a filter of consciousness (not a material producer of ‘it’). But this filtering strategy has the weakness that, while the term remains ill-defined, it suggests an ontology that is as meaningless when generalised into panpsychism as is the generalised notion of material. The term consciousness becomes a conversational code that signifies self and other are in the same quandary as everyone else.
A further weakness is that this code connects to a long history of Eastern, Middle Eastern and Greek Stoic monistic or gnostic traditions, which have packaged their slightly differing paths to a higher consciousness of enlightenment in secrecy. There is currently, however, a very active process of comparing the language used in these different Sanskrit, Chinese, Zoroastrian, and Kabbalistic traditions. Following the work of David Bohm on ‘the implicate and explicate orders’, this process of comparison can now extend to include the language used by quantum physicists and New Science philosophers.
Danger
A process of comparison brings its own risks. Just because a common thread of ideas can be found does not mean that there is Truth in them about the quantum nature of reality discovered in high energy particle physics. Could there be another feature common to both consciousness and wave-particles that bridges this potential polarising of ‘reality’ to either of these opposite extremes? How would any such common feature explain an interface between nonlocality and solid locality without dissolving one or the other into some figment of imagination?
This article will go on to suggest that movement is just such a bridge – process philosophy.
Old categories of thinking, such as a cultural concept of higher consciousness, may restrict imaginative thinking about new discoveries. Behind the various culturally framed paths to states of higher consciousness is responsive movement. There is a teacher or guide. Therefore, a conversational or nonlocal relational element is part of the process even in silence or stillness (although the inner musical coordination of embodied movement may also contribute). That same conversational movement may contribute also to material substance unfolding as mutual transactions between wave-particles. David Bohm’s concept of holomovement as the implicate order of nonlocal vibrational states could be proportioned in its inner mutuality by Golden Ratio stabilisation and Fibonacci scaling, creating substates of possibilities and probabilities for change. These dynamic nonlocal substates could unfold into an actualized locality, where the probabilities for change are much reduced from the implicate order, resulting in movement that seems deterministic and mostly predictable, as if between objects with boundaries to their inner patterns of movement.
It is a fact that explicate order material localities continue to exist and transform their patterning in their time-frames, long after the conscious life forms that have emerged within them for their time-frames have returned to dust. Perhaps the same core principles of movement – changing relatedness repatterning forms – could account simultaneously for transience in both realms of material and intelligent life. The focal conscious life of a person, having progressively unfolded from the implicate order of possibilities (with implicate order holomovement connection still at heart and filtering up into their rationalised mind) might also complete a cycle of life by enfolding back into holomovement as a continuing existence with different possibilities after the death of their embodiment. In process philosophy, which is utterly relational, a better concept of this survival of a focus of personal values after the physical form dies would be a resonant resurrection in implicate order nonlocality by responding to the relational call of someone who loves you, rather than the continuing gnostic self-existence of an independent soul.
Old categories of the uninterrupted existence of some personal features such as ‘a soul’ may become a sort of mental veil preventing people from seeing that they are stumbling blocks to new ways of processing through life. It is possible to respect the value of these historical insights while not being constrained by them when new information unfolds. For amateur physicists, such a stumbling block may arise from previously thinking only about linear energy processes in the explicate order, from transmitter to receiver. Linearity tends to assume the self-existence of transmitter, receiver, and measurable information – as nouns in process. ‘Linearity’ could mistakenly be transferred to thinking only of matter as emerging from a quantum implicate substratum into an explicate existence. The stumbling block not yet seen is that explicate order processes also enfold back into implicate order probabilities. In a renewed process view, primary informational movement would transform ‘transmission of an object’ in the explicate order into a ‘mutual transformational process‘ that unfolds and enfolds as what we currently know as nouns. These nouns are not solid, but are continuously recreated as patterning of their inner movements in a the more restricted probabilities of explicate order.
Secure and safe in the processes of life
In a process view of continuous re-creation from within, space-time-substance as a whole unfolds as one integrated, transactionally repatterning dynamic at the interface of implicate and explicate orders. Life forms are localised, repatterning focuses of informational intelligence that gather as stabilities temporarily within the dynamic. Their continuously changing forms adapt in responsive relatedness with other stabilised life forms and varying ecological conditions. They conversationally interact with each other and their ecologies (vibrationally); in humans this includes symbolic language to extend meaning.
In a process cosmology, the potential for mutual vibrational change and its progression as helicoid informational spin is the foundational reality. Each organism structures its focal experience (phenomena) of changing possibilities in that wider spin, shaping and stabilising their own explicate orders of qualities and quantities. Human beings experience this stabilisation in everyday settings as solidity, but we cannot assume all creatures do. Some human beings additionally go beyond solidity under certain conditions, such as meditation, prayerful connection, or with psychoactive chemicals.
Beyond solidity, the Schrödinger equation for wave forms describes the potential for change from a present ‘state’ among vibrational waves. It does not describe anything self-existent about the state itself. In the explicate order, the probabilities of change in ‘solid matter’ (an Aristotelian perspective) are influenced constantly by the unfolding of nonlocal potentials for change coming from elsewhere and other times in the implicate order of life. ‘Explicate order’ is therefore an accumulation of many cyclical processes, emerging in biochemistry, biophysics, and conversationally between ‘minds’, whether meaningful or nonsense communications. These cycles stretch over an infinite range of different time frames, from a brief instant, to the ever-presence of eternity bringing wholeness and fullness (shalom, or ubuntu) as an influence into each present ‘moment’, and into the moving heart of each noun.
Imagine…
Measurable energy-particle processes in the explicate order are cyclical and helicoid spin movements that seem to have material substance as we relate to (move with) their changes. These movements stretch into variable time frames, within which there are influences unfolding from implicate order nonlocality as probabilities within material substance. In a process view, this unfolding into deterministic restrictions as an actualized realm is completed by an enfolding feedback of the local explicate process into their implicate order context of nonlocality. Thus the interface is itself a cycle, of remote influence into the ‘horizontal cycles’ of the explicate actualized order (for example gravity), while those implicate probabilities are being shaped also (if not more so) by local enfoldment. This local influence into implicate order will diversify holomovement into patterned substates that are nonlocally entangled . Diversified holomovement substates would nonlocally distribute the probabilistic effects of local deterministic events that have been guided by our choices.
This interface process of actualized feedback would influentially pattern the quantum substratum probabilities into substates of progressively unfolding effects through potentially (holographically) the entire space-time-substance cosmos. Although subtle, a holomovement trend towards the restoration of wholeness is manifest in physics as gravitational attraction, shaping local transactions. Physics scales up into biophysics; which scales up into neuropsychology and social systems. Human conversational transactions would therefore be embedded in the quantum substratum of nonlocally distributed patterning of probabilities and possibilities. The human experience of this connectedness into a bigger whole could scale out into a potential for loving relatedness in social settings. Our chosen actions in the present social setting would co-create the way the future holds together, or gets torn apart in cruelty. Holomovement is a moral order.
Finally – Evolution and Involution
In a process cosmology, deterministic progression of the events in the actualized explicate order would proceed with an arrow of time, but in an integrated and evolving space-time-substance manifold. Subsequent (consequent) actualities[1] feedback as a process of involution[2] into the nonlocal probabilities of implicate order holomovement. We know this holomovement in our inner biophysical hearts, as the eternal now. We contribute as participators in the informational helicoid spin of this cyclical reality, because we conscious humans also span actuality and potential. Our choices are having subtle, nonlocal impact on qualities of life. We are therefore moral creatures, manifest in our capacity for learned responsiveness to change.
This is not panpsychism. This is the dynamic embodiment of cosmological principles of movement unfolding in matter as life with different qualities of consciousness. This shift into process thinking is subtle, but significant, placing all paths to higher consciousness as special cases of living a more general heart level presence of intelligent love among dynamic substates of wholeness.
These ideas are developed further by Dr Trevor Griffiths in Clearing a Way: Unveiling the Mental Tricks That Hide Reality, available now for pre-orders here.
[1] Ruth Kastner. The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press. 2022.
[2] Philippa Rees. Involution: An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God. CollaborArt Books. 2013.
