Artur Nilsson - A Non-Reductive Science of Personality, Character, and Well-Being Must Take the Person's Worldview into Account

This brief opinion paper from Frontiers in Psychology: Personality and Social Psychology offers a moderately integral model of personality assessment, one that incorporates worldviews, but more importantly, also includes inner sense (subjectivity) and experience, his version of non-reductive materialism. 

Interesting stuff.

Full Citation: 
Nilsson A. (2014). A non-reductive science of personality, character, and well-being must take the person's worldview into account. Frontiers in Psychology: Personality and Social Psychology; 5:961. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00961

A non-reductive science of personality, character, and well-being must take the person's worldview into account

Artur Nilsson

• Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

In his foundational work for personality psychology, Allport (1927, 1937) distinguished personality from character. Personality was, on Allport's account, a descriptive concept referring to a psycho-physical structure, whereas character was personality evaluated in accordance with moral norms. When he introduced the paradigmatic “lexical” method of deriving personality trait terms from the dictionary, he therefore sought to exclude all trait terms with ostensive normative content. This approach had a profound effect upon the field, and researchers are still today working on how to optimally purge personality of normative content (e.g., Bäckström et al., 2009; Pettersson and Turkheimer, 2010). Its appropriateness as a paradigm for the entire field of personality psychology can, however, be questioned (Kristjánsson, 2012; Nilsson, 2014). It is plausible that some personality characteristics particularly relevant to psychic illness, human flourishing, and moral behavior are intrinsically value-laden (Cloninger et al., 1993; Cawley et al., 2000; Peterson and Seligman, 2004).

I will focus on Cloninger's approach here, because he has, in addition to introducing an influential model of character, discussed the philosophical foundations of the study of character and well-being. For Cloninger (2004), character is not only value-laden; it refers to uniquely human aspects of personality representing “what people make of themselves intentionally” (p. 44), as contrasted with their animalistic temperament. He wants the science of character and well-being to transcend the dichotomy between materialist reductionism and Cartesian dualism, by taking the person's consciousness, agency, and processes of self-growth seriously while integrating this with knowledge about the human physical and biological constitution. Although I agree with this idea of having a non-reductive psychological science, I disagree with Cloninger about what it entails. I will therefore review Cloninger's (2004) approach from a philosophical perspective, in a critical and, hopefully, constructive way. I will defend a notion of non-reductive psychology based upon contemporary academic philosophy and argue that Cloninger's approach is not genuinely non-reductive. I will suggest that a non-reductive psychological science must take the person's worldview into account and argue that Cloninger's approach limits our understanding of human psychology by not considering the role of worldviews in the development of character and well-being.

Non-Reductive Materialism

Today, philosophers who seek to transcend the dichotomy between reductive materialism and Cartesian dualism generally adopt some version of non-reductive materialism (Davidson, 1963, 1970; Fodor, 1974; Searle, 1983, 1992; Chalmers, 1996), claiming that although all mental states and events are causally realized in the brain, there is not a particular type of brain state corresponding to each type of mental state. The reason for this is that we identify and individuate mental states in terms of a folk psychological language of “attitudes,” “beliefs,” “desires,” “emotions,” “goals,” etc., which is holistic, insofar as it describes mental states as partly constituted by their relations to each other and their neurophysiological realization and behavioral manifestation as therefore dependent upon the entire network of mental states. In other words, on non-reductive materialism, no particular belief, goal, desire, or other intentional state, let alone a more complex folk psychological concept such as “personality,” “character,” or “well-being,” can even in principle be isolated and reduced to neurophysiology or behavior, and these irreducible folk psychological concepts are crucial for understanding human psychology.

A key implication of non-reductive materialism is that human experiences and actions are imbued with meaning; to treat human beings as persons, rather than mere mechanical systems or animals, is to treat them as linguistic beings, who construct reasons and act upon them (Hacker, 2007), partly driven by needs to create and sustain meanings and to assuage fears and anxieties fueled by their uniquely human awareness of their existential condition (Nilsson, 2013). Although meaning-making is today studied in such different fields as the psychology of adaptation and well-being (Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Wong, 2012), social psychology (Greenberg et al., 1986; Heine et al., 2006), and neuropsychology (Gazzaniga, 2005), researchers rarely take into consideration the fact that meaning is constructed within a worldview—the person's most basic beliefs, values, constructs, and scripts for understanding, evaluating, and acting upon reality, which ground the network within which more specific beliefs, goals, intentions, etc., are embedded. A person necessarily lives through a worldview—s/he can only, for example, act, morally or immorally, upon a worldview, and experience well-being, in its distinctly human form, through a worldview. A non-reductive psychological science must therefore treat the person's worldview as an aspect of personality in its own right, not reducible to behavioral or mental regularities (i.e., traits; Nilsson, 2014). Although personalists (Allport, 1937; Stern, 1938; Mounier, 1952; Lamiell, 1987), narrative psychologists (Tomkins, 1965, 1979; McAdams, 1992, 2008), and construct psychologists (Kelly, 1955; Little, 2005) have contributed to such an endeavor, worldviews do not receive the attention they deserve in contemporary psychology (Koltko-Rivera, 2004; Nilsson, 2013, 2014).

Cloninger's Transcendentalism

Cloninger's (2004) approach instead merges elements of folk spirituality (cf. Forman, 2004), Eastern thought, Hegelian metaphysics, and quantum physics. He suggests that a person's consciousness can be developed, through a process catalyzed by meditation, reflection, and contemplation, toward increasing self-awareness, wisdom, goodness, and well-being. In the final, self-transcendent stage, the person is freed of all “dualistic” thought of body, mind, and spirit as separate and recognizes that “the individual mind is like a node in a universal Internet of consciousness” (p. 36), thereby attaining “coherence” of body, mind, and spirit, unconditional well-being, potential access to other minds, and “direct self-aware perception of what is real and true without misunderstanding as a result of preconceptions, prejudices, fears, desires, and conflicts” (p. 325). Cloninger (2004) also draws parallels between self-transcendent consciousness and quantum phenomena, including the impossibility of precisely determining the state and location of quantum particles (“non-locality”) and the Higgs field within which particles acquire mass, and he claims, furthermore, that the unpredictability (“non-causality”) of quantum physical events is “another way of talking about freedom” (p. 73) and that “the thought of gifted people involves intuitive leaps or quantum jumps, not deductive algorithms” (p. 65; cf. Capra, 1975).

Cloninger (2004, p. 317) makes clear that what he is proposing is not just a psychological theory, but also a philosophy of science:

The science of well-being is founded on the understanding that there is an indissoluble unity to all that is or can be. The universal unity of being is recognized widely as an empirical fact, as well as an essential organizing principle for any adequate science [..] the universal unity of being is the only viewpoint consistent with any coherent and testable science.

This passage is puzzling insofar as it describes the postulated unity of being both as empirical fact, which implies that it is open to empirical refutation, and as essential organizing principle constitutive of research in this area, which implies that it is, in Quine's (1953) terminology, close to the center of the scientific field and therefore not easily changed. Given that Cloninger (2004) suggests that recognition of the unity of being-thesis is ultimately intuitive and not amenable to rational argumentation or objective test, and that its critics lack self-awareness, this thesis is more properly treated as a presupposition and interpretive framework than as an empirical fact (Popper, 1959).

But whether this is an appropriate, non-reductive foundation for the study of persons is questionable. On the non-reductive account I am proposing, what is essential is that we take the person's subjective experiences and their meanings seriously, in psychological terms, treating them as real and irreducible; not that we assume that special forms of experience convey true insight into the nature of reality. One problem with Cloninger's approach is precisely that it does not give meaning-making the role that it deserves in personality measurement and explanation of experience and action. Cloninger (2004) offers parallels to quantum physics rather than an account of reason-based explanation (Davidson, 1963; Searle, 1983) and Cloninger et al. (1993) measure character with traditional trait-type items which focus on typical behaviors and experiences, rather than worldview-type items which ask persons about their most basic beliefs, values, goals, and so on (Nilsson, 2014). Cloninger's use of quantum physics to describe the mind is, furthermore, whether interpreted as an “analogy” (p. 65) or as an explanation of “actual” processes underlying self-aware consciousness (p. 328), difficult to reconcile with non-reductive materialism. Although it is conceivable that the hitherto unidentified mechanisms through which the brain causes consciousness, agency, and certain qualitative feels operate at the quantum level (Chalmers, 1996; Searle, 1997), the folk psychological concepts that render our experiences and actions meaningful and agentic are, because of their logical holism, as irreducible to quantum physics as to classical physics, and we have little reason to assume that the causes of conscious experiences are isomorphic with their qualitative feels (Stenger, 1993; cf. Brown et al., 2013). Similar to this, Cloninger's (p. 38) invocation of Allport's definition of personality as a “psycho-physical system” is inconsistent with non-reductive materialism, insofar as it is understood as implying that personality can be reduced to a neuro-physiological causal system (Nilsson, 2013). Finally, the Hegelian monist metaphysics Cloninger (2004) draws upon is rejected today even by Hegelians. For example, Pippin (1989, p. 4)—one of several philosophers reinterpreting Hegel in non-metaphysical terms in order to rehabilitate his philosophy—thinks that the “metaphysical monist or speculative, contradiction-embracing logician [..] is not the historically influential Hegel.”

Implications for Research

Cloninger et al. (1993) model divides character into: (1) self-directedness, or agency, which incorporates acting deliberatively on personal goals and values, taking responsibility for actions, and developing resources for goal pursuit and self-acceptance, (2) cooperativeness, or communion, which incorporates compassion, empathy, helpfulness, acceptance of others, and acting on moral principles rather than self-interest, and (3) self-transcendence, which incorporates a sense of unity underlying the universe and connecting the self with the world around it, intuitive apprehension of relationships that cannot be explained rationally or observed objectively, and experiences of flow, absorption, and self-forgetfulness. These aspects of character correspond, respectively, to the person's relation to the self, to others, and to the universe. As such, they undoubtedly refer to basic aspects of our intentional engagement with the world. But the model does not take different worldviews into account. Self-transcendence, in particular, appears conflated with spiritual self-transcendence—that is, self-transcendence through spirituality. Self-transcendence, in a more general sense, can be understood as the pursuit of meaning and identity through participation in, and selfless contribution to, something larger than the self, whether this is a divine or spiritual reality, a community of persons or sentient beings, or an ideological ideal (Schwartz, 1992; MacDonald et al., 1998; Koltko-Rivera, 2004). It requires only that the person is connected to the outside world through intentional directedness at, and engagement with, that world; it does not require an actual physical or spiritual connection between the person and that toward which s/he directs him-/herself.

More generally, I suggest that character can be understood in terms of the interaction between the three proposed dimensions and the person's worldview, and that researchers therefore need to investigate how different worldviews facilitate and inhibit the development of character. Because character is an intrinsically normative concept, what counts as character is partly an empirical question—character is what turns out to produce desirable psychological, moral, and social consequences. We might ask, for example, if, and if so how, different worldviews can be reconciled with ethical self-transcendence, selfless love, genuine happiness, tolerance, creativity, autonomy, and experiences of wonder, beauty, and awe. It is, I suggest, unlikely that there is one ultimate path of character development suitable for all persons. Cloninger's (2004, p. 29) own observation that “outstanding exponents of positive philosophy have often had limited success in helping their followers develop coherence” is true, I suggest, partly because neither worldview nor the development of character and well-being is a one-size-fits-all. By considering the full potential range of personalities emerging from the diversity of human worldviews, we can, I contend, better understand and encourage the development of character and well-being, thus potentially harnessing the full positive potentials of humanity for cultural and social progress (cf. Cloninger, 2004, 2008, 2013).

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

References at the Frontiers site

Time’s Arrow Traced to Quantum Source - Entanglement (via Quanta Magazine)

This is an interesting article on the role of quantum entanglement in creating equilibrium in systems. This is very physics-y. Like this:

Using an obscure approach to quantum mechanics that treated units of information as its basic building blocks, Lloyd spent several years studying the evolution of particles in terms of shuffling 1s and 0s. He found that as the particles became increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them (a “1” for clockwise spin and a “0” for counterclockwise, for example) would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. It was as though the particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing, like coffee that has cooled to room temperature.

If you can get through that paragraph, you'll have no problem with the whole article - and it's worth the read!

Time’s Arrow Traced to Quantum Source

Cups of coffee cool, buildings crumble and stars fizzle out, physicists say, because of a strange quantum effect called “entanglement.”

By: Natalie Wolchover
April 16, 2014


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Coffee cools, buildings crumble, eggs break and stars fizzle out in a universe that seems destined to degrade into a state of uniform drabness known as thermal equilibrium. The astronomer-philosopher Sir Arthur Eddington in 1927 cited the gradual dispersal of energy as evidence of an irreversible “arrow of time.”

But to the bafflement of generations of physicists, the arrow of time does not seem to follow from the underlying laws of physics, which work the same going forward in time as in reverse. By those laws, it seemed that if someone knew the paths of all the particles in the universe and flipped them around, energy would accumulate rather than disperse: Tepid coffee would spontaneously heat up, buildings would rise from their rubble and sunlight would slink back into the sun.

“In classical physics, we were struggling,” said Sandu Popescu, a professor of physics at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “If I knew more, could I reverse the event, put together all the molecules of the egg that broke? Why am I relevant?”

Surely, he said, time’s arrow is not steered by human ignorance. And yet, since the birth of thermodynamics in the 1850s, the only known approach for calculating the spread of energy was to formulate statistical distributions of the unknown trajectories of particles, and show that, over time, the ignorance smeared things out.

Now, physicists are unmasking a more fundamental source for the arrow of time: Energy disperses and objects equilibrate, they say, because of the way elementary particles become intertwined when they interact — a strange effect called “quantum entanglement.”

“Finally, we can understand why a cup of coffee equilibrates in a room,” said Tony Short, a quantum physicist at Bristol. “Entanglement builds up between the state of the coffee cup and the state of the room.”


Courtesy of Tony Short
A watershed paper by Noah Linden, left, Sandu Popescu, Tony Short and Andreas Winter (not pictured) in 2009 showed that entanglement causes objects to evolve toward equilibrium. The generality of the proof is “extraordinarily surprising,” Popescu says. “The fact that a system reaches equilibrium is universal.” The paper triggered further research on the role of entanglement in directing the arrow of time.

Popescu, Short and their colleagues Noah Linden and Andreas Winter reported the discovery in the journal Physical Review E in 2009, arguing that objects reach equilibrium, or a state of uniform energy distribution, within an infinite amount of time by becoming quantum mechanically entangled with their surroundings. Similar results by Peter Reimann of the University of Bielefeld in Germany appeared several months earlier in Physical Review Letters. Short and a collaborator strengthened the argument in 2012 by showing that entanglement causes equilibration within a finite time. And, in work that was posted on the scientific preprint site arXiv.org in February, two separate groups have taken the next step, calculating that most physical systems equilibrate rapidly, on time scales proportional to their size. “To show that it’s relevant to our actual physical world, the processes have to be happening on reasonable time scales,” Short said.

The tendency of coffee — and everything else — to reach equilibrium is “very intuitive,” said Nicolas Brunner, a quantum physicist at the University of Geneva. “But when it comes to explaining why it happens, this is the first time it has been derived on firm grounds by considering a microscopic theory.”

If the new line of research is correct, then the story of time’s arrow begins with the quantum mechanical idea that, deep down, nature is inherently uncertain. An elementary particle lacks definite physical properties and is defined only by probabilities of being in various states. For example, at a particular moment, a particle might have a 50 percent chance of spinning clockwise and a 50 percent chance of spinning counterclockwise. An experimentally tested theorem by the Northern Irish physicist John Bell says there is no “true” state of the particle; the probabilities are the only reality that can be ascribed to it.

Quantum uncertainty then gives rise to entanglement, the putative source of the arrow of time.

When two particles interact, they can no longer even be described by their own, independently evolving probabilities, called “pure states.” Instead, they become entangled components of a more complicated probability distribution that describes both particles together. It might dictate, for example, that the particles spin in opposite directions. The system as a whole is in a pure state, but the state of each individual particle is “mixed” with that of its acquaintance. The two could travel light-years apart, and the spin of each would remain correlated with that of the other, a feature Albert Einstein famously described as “spooky action at a distance.”

“Entanglement is in some sense the essence of quantum mechanics,” or the laws governing interactions on the subatomic scale, Brunner said. The phenomenon underlies quantum computing, quantum cryptography and quantum teleportation.


Courtesy of Seth Lloyd
Seth Lloyd, now an MIT professor, came up with the idea that entanglement might explain the arrow of time while he was in graduate school at Cambridge University in the 1980s.

The idea that entanglement might explain the arrow of time first occurred to Seth Lloyd about 30 years ago, when he was a 23-year-old philosophy graduate student at Cambridge University with a Harvard physics degree. Lloyd realized that quantum uncertainty, and the way it spreads as particles become increasingly entangled, could replace human uncertainty in the old classical proofs as the true source of the arrow of time.

Using an obscure approach to quantum mechanics that treated units of information as its basic building blocks, Lloyd spent several years studying the evolution of particles in terms of shuffling 1s and 0s. He found that as the particles became increasingly entangled with one another, the information that originally described them (a “1” for clockwise spin and a “0” for counterclockwise, for example) would shift to describe the system of entangled particles as a whole. It was as though the particles gradually lost their individual autonomy and became pawns of the collective state. Eventually, the correlations contained all the information, and the individual particles contained none. At that point, Lloyd discovered, particles arrived at a state of equilibrium, and their states stopped changing, like coffee that has cooled to room temperature.

“What’s really going on is things are becoming more correlated with each other,” Lloyd recalls realizing. “The arrow of time is an arrow of increasing correlations.”

The idea, presented in his 1988 doctoral thesis, fell on deaf ears. When he submitted it to a journal, he was told that there was “no physics in this paper.” Quantum information theory “was profoundly unpopular” at the time, Lloyd said, and questions about time’s arrow “were for crackpots and Nobel laureates who have gone soft in the head.” he remembers one physicist telling him.

“I was darn close to driving a taxicab,” Lloyd said.

Advances in quantum computing have since turned quantum information theory into one of the most active branches of physics. Lloyd is now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, recognized as one of the founders of the discipline, and his overlooked idea has resurfaced in a stronger form in the hands of the Bristol physicists. The newer proofs are more general, researchers say, and hold for virtually any quantum system.

“When Lloyd proposed the idea in his thesis, the world was not ready,” said Renato Renner, head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics at ETH Zurich. “No one understood it. Sometimes you have to have the idea at the right time.”

Lidia del Rio
As a hot cup of coffee equilibrates with the surrounding air, coffee particles (white) and air particles (brown) interact and become entangled mixtures of brown and white states. After some time, most of the particles in the coffee are correlated with air particles; the coffee has reached thermal equilibrium.

In 2009, the Bristol group’s proof resonated with quantum information theorists, opening up new uses for their techniques. It showed that as objects interact with their surroundings — as the particles in a cup of coffee collide with the air, for example — information about their properties “leaks out and becomes smeared over the entire environment,” Popescu explained. This local information loss causes the state of the coffee to stagnate even as the pure state of the entire room continues to evolve. Except for rare, random fluctuations, he said, “its state stops changing in time.”

Consequently, a tepid cup of coffee does not spontaneously warm up. In principle, as the pure state of the room evolves, the coffee could suddenly become unmixed from the air and enter a pure state of its own. But there are so many more mixed states than pure states available to the coffee that this practically never happens — one would have to outlive the universe to witness it. This statistical unlikelihood gives time’s arrow the appearance of irreversibility. “Essentially entanglement opens a very large space for you,” Popescu said. “It’s like you are at the park and you start next to the gate, far from equilibrium. Then you enter and you have this enormous place and you get lost in it. And you never come back to the gate.”

In the new story of the arrow of time, it is the loss of information through quantum entanglement, rather than a subjective lack of human knowledge, that drives a cup of coffee into equilibrium with the surrounding room. The room eventually equilibrates with the outside environment, and the environment drifts even more slowly toward equilibrium with the rest of the universe. The giants of 19th century thermodynamics viewed this process as a gradual dispersal of energy that increases the overall entropy, or disorder, of the universe. Today, Lloyd, Popescu and others in their field see the arrow of time differently. In their view, information becomes increasingly diffuse, but it never disappears completely. So, they assert, although entropy increases locally, the overall entropy of the universe stays constant at zero.

“The universe as a whole is in a pure state,” Lloyd said. “But individual pieces of it, because they are entangled with the rest of the universe, are in mixtures.”

One aspect of time’s arrow remains unsolved. “There is nothing in these works to say why you started at the gate,” Popescu said, referring to the park analogy. “In other words, they don’t explain why the initial state of the universe was far from equilibrium.” He said this is a question about the nature of the Big Bang.

Despite the recent progress in calculating equilibration time scales, the new approach has yet to make headway as a tool for parsing the thermodynamic properties of specific things, like coffee, glass or exotic states of matter. (Several traditional thermodynamicists reported being only vaguely aware of the new approach.) “The thing is to find the criteria for which things behave like window glass and which things behave like a cup of tea,” Renner said. “I would see the new papers as a step in this direction, but much more needs to be done.”

Some researchers expressed doubt that this abstract approach to thermodynamics will ever be up to the task of addressing the “hard nitty-gritty of how specific observables behave,” as Lloyd put it. But the conceptual advance and new mathematical formalism is already helping researchers address theoretical questions about thermodynamics, such as the fundamental limits of quantum computers and even the ultimate fate of the universe.

“We’ve been thinking more and more about what we can do with quantum machines,” said Paul Skrzypczyk of the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona. “Given that a system is not yet at equilibrium, we want to get work out of it. How much useful work can we extract? How can I intervene to do something interesting?”

Sean Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, is employing the new formalism in his latest work on time’s arrow in cosmology. “I’m interested in the ultra-long-term fate of cosmological space-times,” said Carroll, author of “From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time.” “That’s a situation where we don’t really know all of the relevant laws of physics, so it makes sense to think on a very abstract level, which is why I found this basic quantum-mechanical treatment useful.”

Twenty-six years after Lloyd’s big idea about time’s arrow fell flat, he is pleased to be witnessing its rise and has been applying the ideas in recent work on the black hole information paradox. “I think now the consensus would be that there is physics in this,” he said.

Not to mention a bit of philosophy.

According to the scientists, our ability to remember the past but not the future, another historically confounding manifestation of time’s arrow, can also be understood as a buildup of correlations between interacting particles. When you read a message on a piece of paper, your brain becomes correlated with it through the photons that reach your eyes. Only from that moment on will you be capable of remembering what the message says. As Lloyd put it: “The present can be defined by the process of becoming correlated with our surroundings.”

The backdrop for the steady growth of entanglement throughout the universe is, of course, time itself. The physicists stress that despite great advances in understanding how changes in time occur, they have made no progress in uncovering the nature of time itself or why it seems different (both perceptually and in the equations of quantum mechanics) than the three dimensions of space. Popescu calls this “one of the greatest unknowns in physics.”

“We can discuss the fact that an hour ago, our brains were in a state that was correlated with fewer things,” he said. “But our perception that time is flowing — that is a different matter altogether. Most probably, we will need a further revolution in physics that will tell us about that.”

This article was reprinted on Wired.com.

George Musser - The Quantum Mechanics of Fate (Nautilus)

Uh, no. George Musser offers an interesting and terribly mind-bending defense of the notion of fate, one that relies on the ability of information to travel forward as well as backward in time. From Nautlius.

The Quantum Mechanics of Fate

How time travel might explain some of science’s biggest puzzles

By George Musser | Illustration by Chad Hagen
January 30, 2014

“THE OBJECTIVE WORLD simply is, it does not happen,” wrote mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl in 1949. From his point of view, the universe is laid out in time as surely as it is laid out in space. Time does not pass, and the past and future are as real as the present. If your common sense rebels against this idea, it is probably for a single reason: the arrow of causality. Events in the past cause events in the present which cause events in the future. If time really is like space, then shouldn’t events from the future influence the present and past, too?

They actually might. Physicists as renowned as John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, Dennis Sciama, and Yakir Aharonov have speculated that causality is a two-headed arrow and the future might influence the past. Today, the leading advocate of this position is Huw Price, a University of Cambridge philosopher who specializes in the physics of time. “The answer to the question, ‘Could the world be such that we do have a limited amount of control over the past,’ ” Price says, “is yes.” What’s more, Price and others argue that the evidence for such control has been staring at us for more than half a century.

That evidence, they say, is something called entanglement, a signature feature of quantum mechanics. The word “entanglement” has the same connotations as a romantic entanglement: a special, and potentially troublesome, relationship. Entangled particles start off in close proximity when they are produced in the laboratory. Then, when they are separated, they behave like a pair of magic dice. You can “roll” one in Las Vegas (or make a measurement on it), your friend can roll the other in Atlantic City, N.J., and each die will land on a random side. But whatever those two sides are, they will have a consistent relationship to each other: They could be identical, for example, or always differ by one. If you ever saw this happen, you might assume the dice were loaded or fixed before they were rolled. But no crooked dice could behave this way. After all, the Atlantic City die changes its behavior depending on what is going on with the Las Vegas die and vice versa, even if you roll them at the same moment.

The standard interpretation of entanglement is that there is some kind of instant communication happening between the two particles. Any communication between them would have to travel the intervening distance instantaneously—that is, infinitely fast. That is plainly faster than light, a speed of communication prohibited by the theory of relativity. According to Einstein, nothing at all should be able to do that, leading him to think that some new physics must be operating, beyond the scope of quantum mechanics itself.

Suppose it is not the case that the particles (or dice) communicate instantaneously with each other, and it is also not the case that their values were fixed in advance. There seem to be no options remaining. But here Price asks us to consider the impossible: that doing something to either of the entangled particles causes effects which travel backward in time to the point in the past when the two particles were close together and interacting strongly. At that point, information from the future is exchanged, each particle alters the behavior of its partner, and these effects then carry forward into the future again. There is no need for instantaneous communication, and no violation of relativity.

At first glance, this interpretation of entanglement replaces one troublesome behavior—instantaneous communication across arbitrary distances—with another—information traveling backward in time. But should we actually be troubled by the idea of information from the future traveling into the past? After all, mathematically, entanglement in time is identical to entanglement in space, and we have no qualms with information traveling in all directions across space.

To think about this problem, consider the most prosaic of objects: a popsicle stick. The stick will bend or buckle, depending on the pressure you apply to both ends. Now imagine a popsicle stick whose ends are separated in time, rather than in space. The same logic should apply: What happens to the middle of the stick will depend on the situation at each end. For entangled particles, the endpoints happen to be in time. At one end is the moment they were created next to each other in the laboratory, and at the other end is the moment when they are far apart and a measurement is taken. Their behavior at some intermediate time depends on information flowing from both past and future.

As with so much else in quantum mechanics, this concept of retrocausality is limited in scope. Only in certain circumstances can we see the future influence the past. Although individual particle processes can move backward or forward in time, the universe as a whole is skewed in the forward direction, because its past endpoint was highly ordered, and its future endpoint is highly disordered. Our mortality is this asymmetry in microcosm.

So is our sensation of time’s passage and, by extension, of free will. We have the feeling that the past is fixed because we have records of it, created as the universe slid from its highly ordered origins toward a messier future. We have no such records of the future. In fact, you could define the future as “that we know not of.” And one of the many things we don’t know about the future is what we ourselves will do in it. We acquire this knowledge only in the act of living. Our decisions might be preordained, but we still have to go through the paces, and that is what gives our volition meaning.

But at the quantum level, time gets fuzzy. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle causes us to have as little knowledge of certain past events as we do of future ones. In a deep sense, those events are not really “past” to us because we do not know what happened—they lie in the open “future.” It is therefore consistent to expect that we can influence those past events. Quantum mechanics redraws the line between ignorance and knowledge, and therefore between future and past.

But our control of the past is very limited—as it must be, if the universe is to avoid imploding in a big logical paradox. Quantum mechanics is set up to deny you that influence. It creates an eddy in the river of time, but only a little one.

Retrocausality skeptics complain, not that retrocausality is weird—all the options for explaining entanglement are—but that proponents have yet to flesh out their ideas into a full-fledged theory. “You can’t just take quantum mechanics as it is and say, ‘I’ll interpret it retrocausally,’” says David Wallace, a University of Oxford philosopher. “You need to come up with a retrocausal, empirically equivalent alternative to quantum mechanics. And that hasn’t been done.”

Proponents accept this criticism. “Those of us who do want to investigate retrocausality have to come up with the goods,” says Matt Leifer, a physicist at the Perimeter Institute. “The fact that not everyone takes it seriously right now, I think they’re right not to.” One of the most developed retrocausal models is the so-called transactional interpretation developed by physicist John Cramer of the University of Washington. According to Cramer, every event sends out a wave propagating both forward and backward in time, connecting the measurement of a particle with its earlier preparation, but canceling out at other locations in spacetime. But even this picture, Wallace says, is just “a sketch of ideas.” There remains no complete model for retrocausality.

But even if retrocausality doesn’t exist, it has inspired new thinking about quantum physics. For instance, it used to be an article of faith that no particle can be measured without disturbing it, but in studying retrocausal models akin to Cramer’s, Yakir Aharonov and his colleagues came up with a technique for “weak measurement.” They realized that you can probe a quantum system so gently that the effects of the probing are lost in the intrinsic uncertainty of the system, yet you can still retrieve useful information by sifting through repeated trials. Aharonov and his colleagues have used this technique in experiments which they say provides evidence of retrocausality—but you don’t need to buy into retrocausality to make use of this technique.

Other researchers are using retrocausality to explain existing results. For example, Price’s collaborator, theoretical physicist Ken Wharton of San José State University, argues that retrocausality is a natural way to understand a process known as frustrated spontaneous emission. An atom that normally emits light will cease emitting when its surroundings become incapable of absorbing that light. Thus one event (emission) depends on something that does or doesn’t happen in the future (absorption). “That’s one of the examples of a particle probing the future and seeing what’s there, and then making a decision based on it, and just not decaying,” Wharton says. “It’s hard to understand in a causal model.”

Retrocausal models have forced physicists to reconsider long-standing taboos. In affording a role for future events in the present day, it joins a line of thought stretching to Plato and Aristotle. They argued that nature, like man, is organized around final ends and goals. Just as the purpose of the baker is to bake, the purpose of the raindrop is to fall, and of the seed to grow into a tree. These so-called teleological approaches fell out of the scientific mainstream when Newton and his contemporaries proved that you could predict the future of natural objects using only present circumstances. There was no explicit role for the future, or need for it. With retrocausality, physics may be forcing a very old idea back into the conversation.


~ George Musser is a writer on physics and cosmology and the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory. He was a senior editor at Scientific American for 14 years and has won such honors as the American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award.

 

The Jungians have had a fascination with quantum physics ever since CG Jung collaborated with physicist Wolfgang Pauli (and Albert Einstein) in developing his concept of synchronicity. It seems, in principle, that the idea or theory of synchronicity is an essential underpinning to the article presented below, so here is a more in-depth conceptualization of synchronicity from Wikipedia:

Synchronistic events reveal an underlying pattern, a conceptual framework that encompasses, but is larger than, any of the systems that display the synchronicity. The suggestion of a larger framework is essential to satisfy the definition of synchronicity as originally developed by Carl Gustav Jung.[3]

Jung coined the word to describe what he called "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events." Jung variously described synchronicity as an "acausal connecting principle", "meaningful coincidence" and "acausal parallelism". Jung introduced the concept as early as the 1920s, but gave a full statement of it only in 1951 in an Eranos lecture[4] and in 1952, published a paper, Synchronizität als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhänge (Synchronicity – An Acausal Connecting Principle),[5] in a volume with a related study by the physicist (and Nobel laureate) Wolfgang Pauli.[6]

It was a principle that Jung felt gave conclusive evidence for his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious,[7] in that it was descriptive of a governing dynamic that underlies the whole of human experience and history – social, emotional, psychological, and spiritual. Concurrent events that first appear to be coincidental but later turn out to be causally related are termed incoincident.

Jung believed that many experiences that are coincidences due to chance in terms of causality suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances in terms of meaning, reflecting this governing dynamic.[8]

Even at Jung's presentation of his work on synchronicity in 1951 at an Eranos lecture, his ideas on synchronicity were evolving. Following discussions with both Albert Einstein and Wolfgang Pauli, Jung believed that there were parallels between synchronicity and aspects of relativity theory and quantum mechanics.[9] Jung was transfixed by the idea that life was not a series of random events but rather an expression of a deeper order, which he and Pauli referred to as Unus mundus. This deeper order led to the insights that a person was both embedded in an orderly framework and was the focus of that orderly framework and that the realisation of this was more than just an intellectual exercise, but also having elements of a spiritual awakening. From the religious perspective, synchronicity shares similar characteristics of an "intervention of grace". Jung also believed that in a person's life, synchronicity served a role similar to that of dreams, with the purpose of shifting a person's egocentric conscious thinking to greater wholeness. A close associate of Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, stated towards the end of her life that the concept of synchronicity must now be worked on by a new generation of researchers.[10] For example, in the years since the publication of Jung’s work on synchronicity, some writers largely sympathetic to Jung's approach have taken issue with certain aspects of his theory, including the question of how frequently synchronicity occurs. For example, in "The Waking Dream: Unlocking the Symbolic Language of Our Lives", Ray Grasse suggests that instead of being a "rare" phenomenon, as Jung suggested, synchronicity is more likely all-pervasive, and that the occasional dramatic coincidence is only the tip of a larger iceberg of meaning that underlies our lives. Grasse places the discussion of synchronicity in the context of what he calls the "symbolist" world view, a traditional way of perceiving the universe that regards all phenomena as interwoven by linked analogies or "correspondences." Though omnipresent, these correspondences tend to become obvious to us only in the case of the most startling coincidences.

Here is a diagram of that model as Jung envisioned it:

With that, on to the paper. I have included the first three sections and then two later sections - the whole paper is available online at the link given in the title (or you can download it from the link provided for the pdf).

Full Citation:
Ponte, DV, Schäfer, L. (2013, Nov 13). "Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century." Behav. Sci. 3, no. 4: 601-618.

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Analytical Psychology: Theory and Practice)
Download PDF Full-Text [75 KB, uploaded 13 November 2013]

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Carl Gustav Jung, Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Mind: A Mystical Vision of the Twenty-First Century

Diogo Valadas Ponte 1, and Lothar Schäfer 2

1. Associação AVC (Cerebral Vascular Diseases), 4750-175 Barcelos, Portugal
2. Physical Chemistry, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR 72701, USA

Abstract: 

We describe similarities in the ontology of quantum physics and of Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology. In spite of the fact that physics and psychology are usually considered as unrelated, in the last century, both of these disciplines have led at the same time to revolutionary changes in the Western understanding of the cosmic order, discovering a non-empirical realm of the universe that doesn’t consist of material things but of forms. These forms are real, even though they are invisible, because they have the potential to appear in the empirical world and act in it. We present arguments that force us to believe, that the empirical world is an emanation out of a cosmic realm of potentiality, whose forms can appear as physical structures in the external world and as archetypal concepts in our mind. Accordingly, the evolution of life now appears no longer as a process of the adaptation of species to their environment, but as the adaptation of minds to increasingly complex forms that exist in the cosmic potentiality. The cosmic connection means that the human mind is a mystical mind.

1. Introduction

When René Descartes declared that the world consisted of two kinds of material, i.e., thinking substance and extended substance, and when Isaac Newton ([1], p. 400) declared that “God in the beginning formed Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles...so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces”, Western Science then became a form of materialism, and anything that wasn’t matter didn’t matter. When Darwin introduced Newton’s materialism into biology, having-or-not-having stuff became the essence of life, and greed and aggression became the natural virtues of our society, segregating one individual from the next, one country from another, and one species from the next. In this way, the classical world was a segregative world, and all aspects of life were affected: The physical sciences had nothing to do with ethics, philosophy had nothing to do with the arts, and the order of the universe had nothing to do with the way in which we should live. As Jacques Monod described it: “Man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes” ([2], p. 160).

In this totalitarian materialistic environment, Carl Gustav Jung had the courage to propose that our mind is guided by a system of forms, the archetypes, which are powerful, even though they don’t carry any mass or energy, and which are real, even though they are invisible. The archetypes exist, as Jung ([3], pp. 43–44) described, in a “psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature”. Out of this system, the invisible forms can appear in our mind and guide “our imagination, perception, and thinking”.

As it turns out, Carl Gustav Jung’s revolutionary views of the human mind are in perfect agreement with the discoveries of Quantum Physics, which, during the last century, also came as a shock, because they revealed the fundamental errors of Classical Physics and led to a radical change in the Western view of the world. The quantum phenomena now force us to think that the basis of the material world is non-material, and that there is a realm of the world that we can’t see, because it doesn’t consist of material things, but of non-material forms. These forms are real, even though they are invisible, because they have the potential to appear in the empirical world and to act on us. They form a realm of potentiality in the physical reality, and all empirical things are emanations out of this realm. There are indications that the forms in the cosmic potentiality are patterns of information, thought-like, and that they are hanging together like the thoughts in our mind. Accordingly, the world now appears to us as an undivided wholeness, in which all things and people are interconnected and consciousness is a cosmic property.

In this essay, we will describe the similarities between Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology and Quantum ontology. Our description will show that Jung’s teaching is more than psychology: it is a form of spirituality. By “spirituality”, we mean a view of the world that accepts the numinous at the foundation of the cosmic order. In the same way, Quantum Physics is more than physics: it is a new form of mysticism, which suggests the interconnectedness of all things and beings and the connection of our minds with a cosmic mind.

2. Quantum Physics and the Spiritual Foundation of the Empirical World

If we want to characterize Carl-Gustav Jung’s psychology in one sentence, we can say that Analytical Psychology, embodied in the archetype structure, leads us to the view that there is a part of the world that we can’t see, a realm of reality that doesn’t consist of material things but of non-material forms. These forms are real even though they are invisible, because they have the potential to appear in our mind and act in it. In the following sections, we will show that this view of the world is identical with the ontology of Quantum Physics. Our description is necessarily short, but the interested reader will find many details and references in our previous works [4–22]; particularly, in a recent book, “Infinite Potential. What Quantum Physics Reveals About How We Should Live” [23].

3. The Basis of the Material World is Non-Material

The first aspect of the quantum world that we have to consider concerns the fact that the basis of material things is not material. This view is in complete contrast to our experience of the world, but it follows from Schrödinger’s quantum mechanics, which is currently the only theory that allows us to understand the properties of atoms and molecules. In this theory, the electrons in atoms and molecules aren’t tiny material particles, little balls of matter, but standing waves or forms.

All atoms consist of a positively charged nucleus, which contains most of the mass of an atom, and of electrons, which are somehow arranged in the space surrounding the nucleus. Electrons are tiny elementary particles: they have a definite mass and, whenever we see one, it appears as a tiny dot: for example, as a flash on a TV screen or a little mark on a photographic film.

In contrast to their appearances, the electrons in atoms and molecules aren’t tiny material particles or little balls, which run around atomic the atomic nuclei like planets around the sun, but they are standing waves: when an electron enters an atom, it ceases to be a material particle and becomes a wave. We owe Max Born for the discovery that the nature of these waves is that of probability waves. That is, the electrons in atoms are probability fields.

When this aspect of electrons first became known was unclear. What are probabilities? Probabilities are dimensionless numbers, ratios of numbers. Probability waves are empty and carry no mass or energy, just information on numerical relations. Nevertheless, the visible order of the world is determined by the interference of these waves. The interferences of atomic wave patterns, for example, determine what kind of molecules can form. In addition, the interferences of molecular wave forms determine how molecules interact. The molecules in your body, for example, interact in such a way that they keep you alive.

In view of these properties of the elementary units of matter, we have to conclude that the order of the visible world is based on phenomena, which transcend the materialism of classical physics. If one pursues the nature of matter to its roots, at the level of atoms and molecules all of a sudden one finds oneself in a realm of mathematical forms and numbers, where all matter is lost: Thus, one is led to the view that the basis of reality is nonmaterial.

In modern science, this finding was unexpected, and many scientists still don’t accept it, but the idea isn’t new. For example, in the sixth century B.C.E. Pythagoras ([24], p. 54) was already teaching that “all things are numbers” and that “the entire cosmos is harmony and number.” In Plato’s philosophy, atoms are mathematical forms. St. Augustine wrote in his Confessions: “The older I got, the more despicable became the emptiness of my thought, because I could think of no entity in any other way than as bodily visible”. Moreover, Nicolas da Cusa, a fifteenth century German theologian, is credited with the statement: “Number was the first model of things in the mind of the Creator.”

At this point, the reader may already note the importance of the quantum world for Carl Gustav Jung’s psychology: The discovery of a realm of non-material forms, which exist in the physical reality as the basis of the visible world, makes it possible to accept the view that the archetypes are truly existing, real forms, which can appear in our mind out of a cosmic realm, in which they are stored. Thus, we can confirm here on the basis of the quantum phenomena Jung’s view that “it is not only possible but fairly probable, even, that psyche and matter are two different aspects of one and the same thing” ([25], para. 418).

* * * * *

6. Quantum Physics Is the Psychology of the Universe

An important concept in quantum chemistry is the concept of virtual states: virtual states are the empty states of atoms and molecules. (For a more detailed description of the concept of virtuality in chemistry, with additional examples, see “Infinite Potential” [23]).

All atoms and molecules exist in quantum states. You can think of a molecule like of a mountain range with countless hills and valleys. Each valley is an energy hole, which contains an energy ladder. The steps of these ladders represent fixed, or quantized, amounts of energy: they are the quantum states of a molecule. Each molecule must occupy one of its states—it must stand on one of the steps of its ladders—so that a large number of states are empty. Quantum chemists call the empty states of things their virtual states. Virtual states are mathematical forms or patterns of information. They have the forms of waves, but these waves are invisible, because they are empty: there is nothing there to see. But they are real and they truly exist, even though we can’t see them, because a molecule can jump into such a state and make it a visible state. You can think of virtual states as the logical structure of a system, which contains its future empirical possibilities: All that a molecule can do is to jump from an occupied state into a virtual state.

In an empirical science the appearance of entities, which have no matter, no energy and are invisible, is an embarrassment. You can very well compare the situation to Jung’s thesis that behind our conscious thinking there is a realm of unconscious forms. If you have to describe the world by referring to an invisible, numinous realm of reality, you are leaving the realm of empirical science. Thus, many of the pioneers of quantum physics tried to explain the virtual states away as mere constructs that don’t really exist. However, we have no choice: we have to think that the empty states of atoms and molecules are real, because they can control empirical phenomena.

For example, all chemical reactions are steered by the virtual states of the reacting molecules, which determine what kinds of molecules can form in a reaction. In a specific type of reactions, called Redox reactions, the products appear with characteristic magnetic properties, which are determined by their virtual states. In addition, oxygen can serve our metabolism, because it contains what chemists call degenerate states. Degenerate states are invisible and yet they are the basis for the particular reactivity of oxygen.

There is no doubt: invisible virtual states are real. Since their inner forms can affect visible phenomena, they must be truly existing, real entities. Molecules are guided in their actions by the wave forms of their virtual states, like by inner images.

The concept of the inner images derives from psychology. Brain scientist Gerald Hüther ([37], p. 17) calls inner images all that “which is hidden” behind the visible surface of living beings and steers their actions. Similarly, Jung [3] believed that archetypal images exist in our consciousness, which are manifestations of the pure forms of archetypes, which are unknowable.

In chemistry, a molecule doesn’t do anything that isn’t allowed by a wave form—an inner image—of one of its virtual states. In life, a human being does nothing that isn’t allowed by an inner image of the mind. There is an equivalence of the mental and the physical. Psychology is the physics of the mind: Quantum physics is the psychology of the universe.

7. Quantum Wave Functions Are Archetypes

It is no accident that the development of psychology as a science took a quantum leap after 1900 C.E, when the era of the Classical Sciences came to an end and the Quantum era began. Jung’s view of the human psyche presupposes a structure of the universe that is in perfect agreement with the Quantum universe, but impossible in Newton’s world. For example, Jung’s assumption that an invisible part of the world exists, which doesn’t consist of material things, but of forms—the archetypes—is unacceptable in a Newtonian universe, in which all phenomena depend on the properties of matter.

Jung’s collective unconscious is a non-personal part of the human psyche. It is a realm of forms—the archetypes—which can appear spontaneously in our consciousness and act in it, influencing “our imagination, perception, and thinking” ([3], p. 44). The archetypes are “typical modes of  apprehension” ([25], p. 137), which shape, regulate and motivate the conscious forms in our mind in the same way, in which the virtual states of atoms and molecules shape and control empirical phenomena. We must constantly reach into the realm of the archetypes and actualize their virtual forms, in order to be able to live and to give meaning to life.

We have described above, how molecules are guided in their actions by the wave forms of their quantum states, like by inner images. Since the inner images control all the processes of the world, they must have guided, too, the evolution of life. In this way, biological evolution appears primarily not as an adaptation of life forms to their environment, but as the adaptation of minds to increasingly complex forms—archetypes—in the cosmic potentiality. In our minds, the cosmic forms appear as thoughts; in the physical reality they appear as material structures. We can understand the world, because the forms within our mind and the structures of the world outside, both derive from the same cosmic source.

It makes sense to think that all of reality is like the reality of the atoms. That is, behind the visible surface of things there is a realm of invisible forms, which have the potential to appear in the empirical world and act in it. As pointed out above, we can think of this realm like of an ocean, whose waves are hanging together and are mind-like, so that the universe now appears as an indivisible wholeness, and consciousness is a cosmic property.

The appearance of the archetypes in our mind shows our connection with a transpersonal order. Beyond the narrow confines of our personal psyche, Jung pointed out, the collective unconscious is

“a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad…where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me…There I am utterly one with the world, so much a part of it that I forget all too easily who I really am.” ([3], p. 21).

Idealist philosophers and mystics have pursued such ideas through the ages. In the nineteenth century, for example, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel taught that “Absolute Spirit” is the primary structure of the universe. Everything that exists is the actualization of spirit, and everything is connected with it. Spirit is everything, creates everything, and thinking and being, subject and object, the real and the ideal, the human and the divine—all are One. Thus, Hegel concluded, our thinking is the thinking of the Cosmic Spirit, who is thinking in us.

Thousands of years prior to Hegel, the Indian Sages invented the allegory of the water pots, which are filled with water and placed into the sun: You can see the sun in each one of them, but there is only one sun. Similarly, you can find consciousness in countless human minds, but there is only one consciousness: the Cosmic Consciousness.

The word, “consciousness” derives from the Latin, “con” and “sciencia”, and it means a state of “knowing together”. Interestingly, when we speak of our consciousness and that of other people, we always speak of “our consciousness”, and never use the plural form, speaking of our consciousnesses. There is no plural form, because there is only one consciousness: the cosmic consciousness. If our personal consciousness is merely a part of a cosmic system, it isn’t amazing that archetypes can appear in our mind and act in it.

By the way, in which it describes the world, quantum physics has taken science into the center of ancient spiritual teachings. For example, molecular wave functions have no units of matter or energy. They are pure, non-material forms. The same is true for Jung’s archetypes: like the wave functions of quantum systems, they are pure, non-material forms. In Aristotle’s metaphysics, all things are mixtures of matter and form. There was only one pure form: God.

The name that quantum chemists have given the empty states of atoms and molecules—that is, calling them “virtual states”—is a peculiar expression and one wonders, where it is coming from? As it turns out, the concept wasn’t invented by quantum chemists, but by Meister Eckhart, a medieval Dominican Monk and Mystic. “The visible things are out of the oneness of the divine light”, Meister Eckhart (cit. in [38], pp. 63–64) wrote, and their existence in the empirical world is due the “actualization of their ‘virtual being’”.

What a stunning phenomenon! The same unusual term appears in the mind of a medieval mystic and then, hundreds of years later, in the mind of a quantum chemist. The example shows, that absolute truths can appear, again and again, with the same messages, through thousands of years, in different minds, different ages and different parts of the world. It is difficult to avoid the impression that our minds are connected to a cosmic realm of thoughts: the realm of Jung’s archetypes.

Jung’s archetypes and the wave functions of quantum states are so similar that we could think of the archetypes as the virtual state functions of our mind; and we could speak of the virtual quantum wave functions as the archetypes of the physical reality. Because they “have never been in consciousness” before ([3], p. 42), the archetypes appear out of a nonempirical realm of the world. For each one of us the birth of a conscious self is out of a realm of nonempirical forms, in the same way in which the birth of an empirical world is out of a realm of virtual states. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the two families of forms have their home in the same cosmic realm; that is, in the realm of the cosmic consciousness. “That the world inside and outside ourselves rests on a transcendent background is as certain as our own existence.” (Jung cit. in [30], p. 4).

Introducing the Amplituhedron: A Mathematical Object Encoding the Probabilities of Outcomes of Particle Interactions (Resembles a Jewel in Higher Dimensions)

Weird, cool, and marginally outside of my ability to fully grok without the aid of entheogens (or a bong, according to Conan). What I can grasp is the significance of it - with this simple object researchers can now perform calculations that once would have taken massive computers.

Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

The article is well-written and easy to follow even for people (such as myself) who are bamboozled by math.

A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics

By: Natalie Wolchover
September 17, 2013


Artist’s rendering of the amplituhedron, a newly discovered mathematical object resembling a multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated — the probabilities of outcomes of particle interactions. Illustration by Andy Gilmore.
Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.

“This is completely new and very much simpler than anything that has been done before,” said Andrew Hodges, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University who has been following the work.

The revelation that particle interactions, the most basic events in nature, may be consequences of geometry significantly advances a decades-long effort to reformulate quantum field theory, the body of laws describing elementary particles and their interactions. Interactions that were previously calculated with mathematical formulas thousands of terms long can now be described by computing the volume of the corresponding jewel-like “amplituhedron,” which yields an equivalent one-term expression.

“The degree of efficiency is mind-boggling,” said Jacob Bourjaily, a theoretical physicist at Harvard University and one of the researchers who developed the new idea. “You can easily do, on paper, computations that were infeasible even with a computer before.”

The new geometric version of quantum field theory could also facilitate the search for a theory of quantum gravity that would seamlessly connect the large- and small-scale pictures of the universe. Attempts thus far to incorporate gravity into the laws of physics at the quantum scale have run up against nonsensical infinities and deep paradoxes. The amplituhedron, or a similar geometric object, could help by removing two deeply rooted principles of physics: locality and unitarity.

“Both are hard-wired in the usual way we think about things,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and the lead author of the new work, which he is presenting in talks and in a forthcoming paper. “Both are suspect.”

Locality is the notion that particles can interact only from adjoining positions in space and time. And unitarity holds that the probabilities of all possible outcomes of a quantum mechanical interaction must add up to one. The concepts are the central pillars of quantum field theory in its original form, but in certain situations involving gravity, both break down, suggesting neither is a fundamental aspect of nature.

In keeping with this idea, the new geometric approach to particle interactions removes locality and unitarity from its starting assumptions. The amplituhedron is not built out of space-time and probabilities; these properties merely arise as consequences of the jewel’s geometry. The usual picture of space and time, and particles moving around in them, is a construct.

“It’s a better formulation that makes you think about everything in a completely different way,” said David Skinner, a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University.

The amplituhedron itself does not describe gravity. But Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators think there might be a related geometric object that does. Its properties would make it clear why particles appear to exist, and why they appear to move in three dimensions of space and to change over time.

Because “we know that ultimately, we need to find a theory that doesn’t have” unitarity and locality, Bourjaily said, “it’s a starting point to ultimately describing a quantum theory of gravity.”

Clunky Machinery

The amplituhedron looks like an intricate, multifaceted jewel in higher dimensions. Encoded in its volume are the most basic features of reality that can be calculated, “scattering amplitudes,” which represent the likelihood that a certain set of particles will turn into certain other particles upon colliding. These numbers are what particle physicists calculate and test to high precision at particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland.


The iconic 20th century physicist Richard Feynman invented a method for calculating probabilities of particle interactions using depictions of all the different ways an interaction could occur. Examples of “Feynman diagrams” were included on a 2005 postage stamp honoring Feynman.
The 60-year-old method for calculating scattering amplitudes — a major innovation at the time — was pioneered by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. He sketched line drawings of all the ways a scattering process could occur and then summed the likelihoods of the different drawings. The simplest Feynman diagrams look like trees: The particles involved in a collision come together like roots, and the particles that result shoot out like branches. More complicated diagrams have loops, where colliding particles turn into unobservable “virtual particles” that interact with each other before branching out as real final products. There are diagrams with one loop, two loops, three loops and so on — increasingly baroque iterations of the scattering process that contribute progressively less to its total amplitude. Virtual particles are never observed in nature, but they were considered mathematically necessary for unitarity — the requirement that probabilities sum to one.

“The number of Feynman diagrams is so explosively large that even computations of really simple processes weren’t done until the age of computers,” Bourjaily said. A seemingly simple event, such as two subatomic particles called gluons colliding to produce four less energetic gluons (which happens billions of times a second during collisions at the Large Hadron Collider), involves 220 diagrams, which collectively contribute thousands of terms to the calculation of the scattering amplitude.

In 1986, it became apparent that Feynman’s apparatus was a Rube Goldberg machine.

To prepare for the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas (a project that was later canceled), theorists wanted to calculate the scattering amplitudes of known particle interactions to establish a background against which interesting or exotic signals would stand out. But even 2-gluon to 4-gluon processes were so complex, a group of physicists had written two years earlier, “that they may not be evaluated in the foreseeable future.”

Stephen Parke and Tommy Taylor, theorists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, took that statement as a challenge. Using a few mathematical tricks, they managed to simplify the 2-gluon to 4-gluon amplitude calculation from several billion terms to a 9-page-long formula, which a 1980s supercomputer could handle. Then, based on a pattern they observed in the scattering amplitudes of other gluon interactions, Parke and Taylor guessed a simple one-term expression for the amplitude. It was, the computer verified, equivalent to the 9-page formula. In other words, the traditional machinery of quantum field theory, involving hundreds of Feynman diagrams worth thousands of mathematical terms, was obfuscating something much simpler. As Bourjaily put it: “Why are you summing up millions of things when the answer is just one function?”

“We knew at the time that we had an important result,” Parke said. “We knew it instantly. But what to do with it?”

The Amplituhedron

The message of Parke and Taylor’s single-term result took decades to interpret. “That one-term, beautiful little function was like a beacon for the next 30 years,” Bourjaily said. It “really started this revolution.”


Twistor diagrams depicting an interaction between six gluons, in the cases where two (left) and four (right) of the particles have negative helicity, a property similar to spin. The diagrams can be used to derive a simple formula for the 6-gluon scattering amplitude. Arkani-Hamed et al.
In the mid-2000s, more patterns emerged in the scattering amplitudes of particle interactions, repeatedly hinting at an underlying, coherent mathematical structure behind quantum field theory. Most important was a set of formulas called the BCFW recursion relations, named for Ruth Britto, Freddy Cachazo, Bo Feng and Edward Witten. Instead of describing scattering processes in terms of familiar variables like position and time and depicting them in thousands of Feynman diagrams, the BCFW relations are best couched in terms of strange variables called “twistors,” and particle interactions can be captured in a handful of associated twistor diagrams. The relations gained rapid adoption as tools for computing scattering amplitudes relevant to experiments, such as collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. But their simplicity was mysterious.

“The terms in these BCFW relations were coming from a different world, and we wanted to understand what that world was,” Arkani-Hamed said. “That’s what drew me into the subject five years ago.”

With the help of leading mathematicians such as Pierre Deligne, Arkani-Hamed and his collaborators discovered that the recursion relations and associated twistor diagrams corresponded to a well-known geometric object. In fact, as detailed in a paper posted to arXiv.org in December by Arkani-Hamed, Bourjaily, Cachazo, Alexander Goncharov, Alexander Postnikov and Jaroslav Trnka, the twistor diagrams gave instructions for calculating the volume of pieces of this object, called the positive Grassmannian.

Named for Hermann Grassmann, a 19th-century German linguist and mathematician who studied its properties, “the positive Grassmannian is the slightly more grown-up cousin of the inside of a triangle,” Arkani-Hamed explained. Just as the inside of a triangle is a region in a two-dimensional space bounded by intersecting lines, the simplest case of the positive Grassmannian is a region in an N-dimensional space bounded by intersecting planes. (N is the number of particles involved in a scattering process.)

It was a geometric representation of real particle data, such as the likelihood that two colliding gluons will turn into four gluons. But something was still missing.

The physicists hoped that the amplitude of a scattering process would emerge purely and inevitably from geometry, but locality and unitarity were dictating which pieces of the positive Grassmannian to add together to get it. They wondered whether the amplitude was “the answer to some particular mathematical question,” said Trnka, a post-doctoral researcher at the California Institute of Technology. “And it is,” he said.


A sketch of the amplituhedron representing an 8-gluon particle interaction. Using Feynman diagrams, the same calculation would take roughly 500 pages of algebra. Nima Arkani-Hamed.
Arkani-Hamed and Trnka discovered that the scattering amplitude equals the volume of a brand-new mathematical object — the amplituhedron. The details of a particular scattering process dictate the dimensionality and facets of the corresponding amplituhedron. The pieces of the positive Grassmannian that were being calculated with twistor diagrams and then added together by hand were building blocks that fit together inside this jewel, just as triangles fit together to form a polygon.

Like the twistor diagrams, the Feynman diagrams are another way of computing the volume of the amplituhedron piece by piece, but they are much less efficient. “They are local and unitary in space-time, but they are not necessarily very convenient or well-adapted to the shape of this jewel itself,” Skinner said. “Using Feynman diagrams is like taking a Ming vase and smashing it on the floor.”

Arkani-Hamed and Trnka have been able to calculate the volume of the amplituhedron directly in some cases, without using twistor diagrams to compute the volumes of its pieces. They have also found a “master amplituhedron” with an infinite number of facets, analogous to a circle in 2-D, which has an infinite number of sides. Its volume represents, in theory, the total amplitude of all physical processes. Lower-dimensional amplituhedra, which correspond to interactions between finite numbers of particles, live on the faces of this master structure.

“They are very powerful calculational techniques, but they are also incredibly suggestive,” Skinner said. “They suggest that thinking in terms of space-time was not the right way of going about this.”

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