Janus (36 page)

the model
can never include a complete model of itself
, because it must always
lag one step behind the process which it is supposed to represent. With
each upward-shift of awareness towards the apex of the hierarchy -- the
self as an integrated whole -- it recedes like a mirage. 'Know thyself'
is the most venerable and the most tantalizing command. Total awareness
of the self, the identity of the knower and the known, though always in
sight is never achieved. It could only be achieved by reaching the peak
of the hierarchy, which is always one step removed from the climber.

 

 

This is an old conundrum, but it seems to blossom into new life in the
context of the open-ended holarchy. Determinism fades away not only
on the sub-atomic quantum level, but also in the upward direction,
where on successively higher levels the constraints diminish, and
the degrees of freedom increase, ad infinitum. At the same time the
nightmarish concept of predictability and predestination is swallowed
up in the infinite regress. Man is neither a plaything of the gods,
nor a marionette suspended on his chromosomes. To put it more soberly,
similar conclusions are implied in Sir Karl Popper's proposition
that
no information-processing system can embody within
itself an up-to-date representation of itself,
including that
representation
.
^[5]
Somewhat similar arguments
have been advanced by Michael Polanyi
^[6]
and Donald
MacKay.
^[7]

 

 

Some philosophers dislike the concept of infinite regress because it
reminds them of the little man inside the little man inside the little man.
But we cannot get away from the infinite. What would mathematics, what would
physics be without the infinitesimal calculus? Self-consciousness has been
compared to a mirror in which the individual contemplates his own activities.
It would perhaps be more appropriate to compare it to a Hall of Mirrors
where one mirror reflects one's reflection in another mirror, and so
on. Infinity stares us in the face, whether we look at the stars or
search for our own identities. Reductionism has no use for it, but a
true science of life must let infinity in and never lose sight of it.

 

 

 

4

 

 

The problem of Free Will versus Determinism has haunted philosophers and
theologians from time immemorial. Ordinary mortals are rarely bothered
by the paradox concerning the agency which directs one's thinking, and of
the agency behind that agency, because, paradoxical or not, they take it
for granted that 'I' am responsible for my actions. In
The Ghost in the
Machine
I invented a short parable to illustrate the point, It took the
form of a dialogue at high table at an Oxford college between an elderly
don of strictly deterministic persuasion, and a young Australian guest of
uninhibited temperament.

 

The Australian exclaims: 'If you go on denying that I am free to
make my own decisions, I'll punch you in the nose!'
The old man gets red in the face: 'I deplore your unpardonable
behaviour.'
'I apologize. I lost my temper.
'You really ought to control yourself.'
'Thank you. The experiment was conclusive.'

 

It was indeed. 'Unpardonable', 'ought to', and 'control yourself'
are all expressions which imply that the Australian's behaviour was
not determined by his chromosomes and upbringing, that he was free to
choose whether to behave politely or rudely. Whatever one's philosophical
convictions, in everyday life it is impossible to carry on without the
implicit belief in personal responsibility; and responsibility implies
freedom of choice. The subjective experience of freedom is as much a
given datum as the sensation of colour, or the feeling of pain.

 

 

Yet that experience is constantly being eroded by the formation of habits
and mechanical routines, which tend to turn us into automata. When the
Duke of Wellington was asked whether he agreed that habit was man's second
nature he exclaimed: 'Second nature? It is ten times nature.' Habit is
the denial of creativity and the negation of freedom; a self-imposed
straitjacket of which the wearer is unaware.

 

 

Another enemy of freedom is passion, or more specifically, an excess
of the self-asserting emotions. When these are aroused, the control of
behaviour is taken over by those primitive levels in the hierarchy which
are correlated to the 'old brain'. The loss of freedom resulting from
this downward shift is reflected in the legal concept of 'diminished
responsibility', and in the subjective feeling of acting under a
compulsion -- expressed by colloquialisms such as: 'I couldn't help it',
'I lost my head', 'I must have been out of my mind'.

 

 

It is at this point that the moral dilemma of judging others arises. Ruth
Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in England -- for shooting her lover
'in cold blood', as it was said. How am I to know, and how could the jury
know, whether and to what extent her responsibility was 'diminished'
when she acted as she did, and whether she could 'help it'? Compulsion
and free will are philosophical concepts at opposite ends of a scale,
but there is no pointer attached to the scale which I could read. In
dilemmas like this the safest procedure is to apply two different
standards: to ascribe a minimum of free will to the other, and a maximum
to oneself. There is an old French saying:
Tout comprendre c'est tout
pardonner
-- to understand all is to forgive all. In the light of the
above, this should be altered to:
Tout comprendre, ne rien se pardonner
:
understand all -- forgive yourself nothing.

 

 

It may be difficult to live up to, but at least it is a safe maxim.

 

 

 

 

 

XIII

 

 

PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS

 

 

 

1

 

 

'Half of my friends accuse me of an excess of scientific pedantry;
the other half of unscientific leanings towards preposterous subjects
such as extra-sensory perception (ESP), which they include in the
domain of the supernatural. However, it is comforting to know that
the same accusations are levelled at an elite of scientists, who make
excellent company in the dock.' Thus the opening paragraph of
The Roots
of Coincidence
. Since then, the 'elite' of scientists has apparently
grown into a majority. In 1973 the
New Scientist
, that much respected
English weekly, sent out a questionnaire to its readers, inviting them to
express their opinions on the subject of extra-sensory perception. Out of
the i,500 readers -- nearly all of them scientists and engineers --
who answered the questionnaire, 67 per cent regarded ESP either as an
'established fact' or 'a likely possibility'. [1]

 

 

Even earlier (1967), the New York Academy of Science held a symposium on
parapsychology, and in 1969 the American Association for the Advancement
of Science (the equivalent of the British Association) approved the
application of the Parapsychology Association to become affiliated to that
august body. Two previous applications had been rejected; the approval
of the third was a sign of the changing intellectual climate; and for
parapsychology the ultimate seal of respectability.

 

 

Accordingly, it seems to me unnecessary to recapitulate here the progress
of parapsychology, from spiritistic seances in darkened Victorian
drawing-rooms to a modern empirical science employing computerized
statistics, Geiger counters and other sophisticated electronic equipment.
In the pages that follow I shall no longer be concerned with the question
whether telepathy and kindred phenomena
exist
-- which, in view of the
large body of accumulated evidence, I have come to take for granted* --
but the implications of these phenomena for our world-view.

 

* Some of this evidence is discussed in The Roots of Coincidence,
The Challenge of Chance and several lectures included in
The Heel of Achilles.

 

That world-view, in so far as the educated lamyan is concerned, places
parapsychology and physics at opposite ends of the spectrum of knowledge
and experience. Physics is regarded by the educated layman as the queen
of the 'exact sciences', with direct access to the immutable 'laws
of nature' which govern the material universe. In contrast to this,
parapsychology deals with subjective, capricious and unpredictable
phenomena which manifest themselves in apparently lawless ways, or in
direct contradiction to the laws of nature. Physics is, as the academic
jargon has it, a 'hard-nosed' science, completely down to earth, whereas
parapsychologists float somewhere in nebulous Cloud-cuckoo-land.

 

 

This view of physics was indeed perfectly legitimate and immensely
productive during the roughly two centuries when the term 'physics' was
practically synonymous with Newtonian mechanics. To quote a contemporary
physicist, Fritjof Capra:

 

Questions about the essential nature of things were answered in
classical physics by the Newtonian mechanistic model of the universe
which, much in the same way as the Democritean model in ancient
Greece, reduced all phenomena to the motions and interactions of hard
indestructible atoms. The properties of these atoms were abstracted
from the macroscopic notion of billiard balls, and thus from sensory
experience. Whether this notion could actually be applied to the
world of atoms was not questioned. [2]

 

Or, in Newton's own words:

 

It seems probable to me that God in the beginning formed matter in
solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, movable particles, of such sizes
and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion
to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them;
and that these primitive particles being solids, are incomparably
harder than any porous bodies compounded of them; even so very hard,
as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able
to divide what God himself made one in the first creation. [3]

 

If you leave out the reference to God, the above quotation, dating from
A.D. 1704, still reflects the implicit credo of our educated layman. Of
course he knows that the formerly indivisible atoms can be split (with
sinister results); but he believes -- if he gives any thought to the
matter -- that inside the atom there are other, truly indivisible
billiard balls called protons, neutrons, electrons, etc. However,
if he were sufficiently interested, he would also discover that the
giant atom-smashers have made mincemeat of protons, neutrons, etc.;
that the ultimate (to date) elementary particles are called 'quarks'*,
and that some quarks have a physical attribute called 'charm'. The exotic
terminology of sub-atomic physicists also includes 'the eightfold way',
'strangeness', and the 'bootstrap principle' -- which goes to show that
they are well aware of the surrealistic nature of the world they have
created; behind the schoolboyish humour there is the awed recognition
of mystery. For on this sub-microscopic level the criteria of reality
are fundamentally different from those we apply on our macro-level;
inside the atom our concepts of space, time, matter and causality are no
longer valid, and physics turns into metaphysics with a strong flavour
of mysticism. As a result of this development, the unthinkable phenomena
of parapsychology appear somewhat less preposterous in the light of the
unthinkable propositions of relativity and quantum physics.

 

* A term borrowed from Finnegans Wake. 'Quark' in German means
curds or soft cheese of a pungent and generally evil-smelling sort.

 

One such proposition I have already mentioned: the Principle of
Complementarity which turns the so-called 'elementary building-blocks'
of classical physics into Janus-faced entities that behave under certain
circumstances like hard little lumps of matter, but in other circumstances
as waves or vibrations propagated in a vacuum. As Sir William Bragg
put it, they seem to be waves on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and
particles on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. We have seen that some of
the pioneers of quantum physics, as well as their contemporary successors,
regarded the Principle of Complementarity as a fitting paradigm for
the mind-body dichotomy. This was cheering news to parapsychologists;
we must remember, however, that Cartesian dualism recognizes only the
two realms of mind and matter, whereas the present theory proposes a
series of levels, equipped with 'swing-gates', opening now this way,
now that. Both in our daily behaviour and on the sub-atomic level,
the gates are kept swinging all the time.

 

 

 

2

 

 

The concept of matter-waves, launched in the 1925 by de Broglie
and Schrödinger, completed the process of the dematerialization of
matter. It had started much earlier, with Einstein's magic formula E =
mc² * which implies that the mass of a particle must not be conceived as
some stable elementary material but as a concentrated pattern of energy,
locked up in what appears to us as matter. The 'stuff' of which protons
and electrons are made is rather like the stuff of which dreams are made,
as a glance at the illustration on p. 246 suggests. It is an example of
the type of events which takes place all the time in the physicists'
bubble chambers, where high-energy 'elementary' particles collide and
annihilate each other or create new particles which give rise to a new
chain of events. The particles in question are of course infinitesimally
small and many have a lifetime much shorter than a millionth of a second;
yet they leave tracks in the bubble chamber comparable to the visible
trails which invisible jet-planes leave in the sky. The length, thickness
and curvature of the tracks enables the physicists to decide which of
the two-hundred-odd 'elementary particles' has caused it, and also to
identify 'particles' previously unknown.