Quantum Physics and Ultimate Reality: Mystical Writings of Great Physicists 

by Michael Green

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Last annotated on May 17, 2014

Preface 

Does quantum physics support mysticism? Are there some parallels between mysticism and quantum physics? In this book, intriguing questions like these will be answered by eleven great physicists of the 20th Century, all of whom are the founding fathers of quantum mechanics or made significant contributions to the theory[1]. They are Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, Wolfgang Pauli, James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, Eugene Wigner, David Bohm, and Freeman Dyson. Most of them argue that quantum physics does not support mysticism, and there are no parallels between them either. However, they also express a deep belief that mysticism has its own place in our quest for reality, and we need to go beyond the limits of our current scientific paradigm to accommodate mysticism and further bridge the gap between science and religion[2]. In this sense, these great physicists are also religious men and even mystics.  Read more at location 66

Max Planck 

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, FRS (April 23, 1858 - October 4, 1947) was a German physicist who originated quantum theory. He made many contributions to theoretical physics, but his fame rests primarily on his role as originator of the quantum theory. This theory revolutionized human understanding of matter and light, just as Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity revolutionized the understanding of space and time. These two theories are two pillars of modern physics. Planck was also a philosopher of science. In his Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, he stated

*****  the so-called Planck's Principle, which holds that “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Planck received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918 for his “his discovery of energy quanta”. The following sections are taken from Where Is Science Going (1932) and Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949).  Read more at location 82

The Mystery of Our Being 

We might naturally assume that one of the achievements of science would have been to restrict belief in miracle. But it does not seem to do so.  ...Is there, in the last analysis, some basically sound foothold for this belief in miracle, no matter how bizarre and illogical may be the outer forms it takes? Is there something in the nature of man, some inner realm, that science cannot touch?  Read more at location 100

is there a point at which the causal line of thought ceases and beyond which science cannot go? This brings us to the kernel of the problem in regard to free will.  Read more at location 103

****  The fact is that there is a point, one single point in the immeasurable world of mind and matter, where science and therefore every causal method of research is inapplicable, not only on practical grounds but also on logical grounds, and will always remain inapplicable. This point is the individual ego. It is a small point in the universal realm of being, but, in itself, it is a whole world, embracing our emotional life, our will, and our thought. This realm of the ego is, at once, the source of our deepest suffering and, at the same time, of our highest happiness. Over this realm, no outer power of fate can ever have sway, and we lay aside our own control and responsibility over ourselves only with the laying aside of life itself.  Read more at location 105

The road to the future always starts in the present. It is, here and now, part and parcel of the ego. And for that reason, the individual can never consider his own future purely and exclusively from the causal standpoint. That is the reason why fancy plays such a part in the construction of the future. It is in actual recognition of this profound fact that people have recourse to the palmist and the clairvoyant to satisfy their individual curiosity about their own future. It is also on this fact that dreams and ideals are based, and here the human being finds one of the richest sources of inspiration. Science thus brings us to the threshold of the ego and there leaves us to ourselves.  Read more at location 119

mankind has need of fundamental postulates for the conduct of everyday existence, and this need is far more pressing than the hunger for scientific knowledge.  Read more at location 127

****  The law of causation is the guiding rule of science, but the Categorical Imperative—that is to say, the dictate of duty—is the guiding rule of life. Here intelligence has to give place to character, and scientific knowledge to religious belief.  Read more at location 130

*******  There can never be any real opposition between religion and science. Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony.  Read more at location 140

****  Science enhances the moral values of life because it furthers a love of truth and reverence—love of truth displaying itself in the constant endeavor to arrive at a more exact knowledge of the world of mind and matter around us, and reverence, because every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being.  Read more at location 145

A dialogue between Planck and Murphy 

*******  Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: Ye must have faith. It is a quality which the scientists cannot dispense with.  Read more at location 154

(Note: speaking of faith in science)  no order can emerge from that chaos of elements unless there is the constructive quality of mind which builds up the order by a process of elimination and choice. Again and again the imaginary plan on which one attempts to build up that order breaks down and then we must try another. This imaginative vision and faith in the ultimate success are indispensable. The pure rationalist has no place here.  Read more at location 158

Kepler is a magnificent example of what I have been saying.  ...what rendered him so energetic and tireless and productive was the profound faith he had in his own science, not the belief that he could eventually arrive at an arithmetical synthesis of his astronomical observations, but rather the profound faith in the existence of a definite plan behind the whole of creation.  Read more at location 168

******  Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and, therefore, part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.  Read more at location 181

As Einstein has said, you could not be a scientist if you did not know that the external world existed in reality, but that knowledge is not gained by any process of reasoning. It is a direct perception and, therefore, in its nature akin to what we call Faith. It is a metaphysical belief. Now that is something which the skeptic questions in regard to religion, but it is the same in regard to science.  Read more at location 190

On to God! 

****  Science and religion do not exclude each other; rather they are complementary and mutually interacting. Man needs science as a tool of perception; he needs religion as a guide to action.  Read more at location 202

It is the steady, ongoing, never-slackening fight against skepticism and dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition, which religion and science wage together. The directing watchword in this struggle runs from the remotest past to the distant future: 'On to God!'"  Read more at location 208

Albert Einstein 

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 - 18 April 1955) was a German-born physicist who is widely regarded as one of the most influential scientists of all time. Although he is most famous for his theory of relativity and specifically mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc2 (which has been dubbed “the world's most famous equation”), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.” The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory. Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works. His great intellectual achievements and originality have made the word “Einstein” synonymous with genius. The following sections are taken from The World As I See It (1949) and Ideas and Opinions (1954).  Read more at location 211

Experience the Mystery 

(Note: ironic in light of manhattan project)  What an extraordinary situation is that of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he feels it. But from the point of view of daily life, without going deeper, we exist for our fellow-men--in the first place for those on whose smiles and welfare all our happiness depends, and next for all those unknown to us personally with whose destinies we are bound up by the tie of sympathy.  Read more at location 221

I am strongly drawn to the simple life and am often oppressed by the feeling that I am engrossing an unnecessary amount of the labour of my fellow-men. I regard class differences as contrary to justice and, in the last resort, based on force. I also consider that plain living is good for everybody, physically and mentally.  Read more at location 225

In human freedom in the philosophical sense I am definitely a disbeliever. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity. Schopenhauer's saying, that "a man can do as he will, but not will as he will,"  Read more at location 228

To inquire after the meaning or object of one's own existence or of creation generally has always seemed to me absurd from an objective point of view. And yet everybody has certain ideals which determine the direction of his endeavours and his judgments. In this sense I have never looked upon ease and happiness as ends in themselves--such  Read more at location 233

ideals which have lighted me on my way and time after time given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.  Read more at location 236

The ordinary objects of human endeavour--property, outward success, luxury--have always seemed to me contemptible.  Read more at location 238

My political ideal is that of democracy. Let every man be respected as an individual and no man idolized. It is an irony of fate that I myself have been the recipient of excessive admiration and respect from my fellows through no fault, and no merit, of my own.  Read more at location 245

An autocratic system of coercion, in my opinion, soon degenerates. For force always attracts men of low morality, and I believe it to be an invariable rule that tyrants of genius are succeeded by scoundrels.  Read more at location 250

The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the State but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling. This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of the herd nature, the military system, which I abhor.  Read more at location 256

****  War seems to me a mean, contemptible thing: I would rather be hacked in pieces than take part in such an abominable business. And yet so high, in spite of everything, is my opinion of the human race that I believe this bogey would have disappeared long ago, had the sound sense of the nations not been systematically corrupted by commercial and political interests acting through the schools and the Press.  Read more at location 262

****  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle.  Read more at location 265

It was the experience of mystery--even if mixed with fear--that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms--it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man. I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.  Read more at location 267

Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvellous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavour to comprehend a portion, be it never so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.  Read more at location 272

Cosmic Religious Feeling 

Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human endeavour and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present itself to us.  Read more at location 275

With primitive man it is above all fear that evokes religious notions--fear of hunger, wild beasts, sickness, and death.  ...am speaking now of the religion of fear. This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between the people and the beings they fear, and erects hegemony on this basis.  Read more at location 283

The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence who protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes,  Read more at location 287

This is the social or moral conception of God. The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament. The religions of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a great step in a nation's life.  Read more at location 291

But there is a third state of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form, and which I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to explain this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it.  Read more at location 298

He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.  ...Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.  Read more at location 303

The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on it.  Read more at location 305

In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it. We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very different from the usual one.  Read more at location 310

A man's ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.  Read more at location 317

Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the mentality of the men who, surrounded by a sceptical world, have shown the way to those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth and the centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious feeling that gives man strength of this sort. A contemporary has said, not unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are the only profoundly religious people.  Read more at location 325

Science and Religion 

the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other.  Read more at location 342

knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source.  Read more at location 344

The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.  Read more at location 348

To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man.  Read more at location 353

states it is the rulers themselves who strive actually to destroy that spirit of humanity. In less threatened parts it is nationalism and intolerance, as well as the oppression of the individuals by economic means, which threaten to choke these most precious traditions.  Read more at location 373

Science is the century-old endeavor to bring together by means of systematic thought the perceptible phenomena of this world into as thoroughgoing an association as possible. To put it boldly, it is the attempt at the posterior reconstruction of existence by the process of conceptualization.  Read more at location 382

a person who is religiously enlightened appears to me to be one who has, to the best of his ability, liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings, and aspirations to which he clings because of their superpersonal value. It seems to me that what is important is the force of this superpersonal content and the depth of the conviction concerning its overpowering meaningfulness, regardless of whether any attempt is made to unite this content with a divine Being, for otherwise it would not be possible to count Buddha and Spinoza as religious personalities. Accordingly, a religious person is devout in the sense that he has no doubt of the significance and loftiness of those superpersonal objects and goals which neither require nor are capable of rational foundation. They exist with the same necessity and matter-of-factness as he himself.  Read more at location 388

****  If one conceives of religion and science according to these definitions then a conflict between them appears impossible. For science can only ascertain what is, but not what should be, and outside of its domain value judgments of all kinds remain necessary. Religion, on the other hand, deals only with evaluations of human thought and action: it cannot justifiably speak of facts and relationships between facts.  Read more at location 395

****  The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.  Read more at location 410

This qualification has to do with the concept of God. During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image,  Read more at location 413

Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is, if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him? The main source of the present-day conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God.  Read more at location 418

It is the aim of science to establish general rules which determine the reciprocal connection of objects and events in time and space. For these rules, or laws of nature, absolutely general validity is required--not proven. It is mainly a program, and faith in the possibility of its accomplishment in principle is only founded on partial successes.  Read more at location 425

when the number of factors coming into play in a phenomenological complex is too large, scientific method in most cases fails us.  Read more at location 433

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural events.  Read more at location 441

To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge has not yet been able to set foot. But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which is able to maintain itself not in clear light but only in the dark, will of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human progress.  Read more at location 443

whoever has undergone the intense experience of successful advances made in this domain is moved by profound reverence for the rationality made manifest in existence. By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man. This attitude, however, appears to me to be religious, in the highest sense of the word. And so it seems to me that science not only purifies the religious impulse of the dross of its anthropomorphism but also contributes to a religious spiritualization of our understanding of life.  Read more at location 458

Are They Irreconcilable? 

Science, in the immediate, produces knowledge and, indirectly, means of action. It leads to methodical action if definite goals are set up in advance.  Read more at location 474

While it is true that science, to the extent of its grasp of causative connections, may reach important conclusions as to the compatibility and incompatibility of goals and evaluations, the independent and fundamental definitions regarding goals and values remain beyond science's reach. As regards religion, on the other hand, one is generally agreed that it deals with goals and evaluations and, in general, with the emotional foundation of human thinking and acting,  Read more at location 475

When we consider the various existing religions as to their essential substance, that is, divested of their myths, they do not seem to me to differ as basically from each other as the proponents of the "relativistic" or conventional theory wish us to believe.  Read more at location 487

****  great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living.  Read more at location 494

When considering the actual living conditions of present-day civilized humanity from the standpoint of even the most elementary religious commands, one is bound to experience a feeling of deep and painful disappointment at what one sees. For while religion prescribes brotherly love in the relations among the individuals and groups, the actual spectacle more resembles a battlefield than an orchestra. Everywhere, in economic as well as in political life, the guiding principle is one of ruthless striving for success at the expense of one's fellow. men. This competitive spirit prevails even in school and, destroying all feelings of human fraternity and cooperation, conceives of achievement not as derived from the love for productive and thoughtful work, but as springing from personal ambition and fear of rejection. There are pessimists who hold that such a state of affairs is necessarily inherent in human nature; it is those who propound such views that are the enemies of true religion, for they imply thereby that religious teachings are utopian ideals and unsuited to afford guidance in human affairs.  Read more at location 500

**** While it is true that scientific results are entirely independent from religious or moral considerations, those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were all of them imbued with the truly religious conviction that this universe of ours is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge. If this conviction had not been a strongly emotional one and if those searching for knowledge had not been inspired by Spinoza's Amor Dei Intellectualis, they would hardly have been capable of that untiring devotion which alone enables man to attain his greatest achievements.  Read more at location 516

Niels Bohr 

Niels Henrik David Bohr (7 October 1885 - 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922 “for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them”. The following sections are taken from Physics and Beyond (1971) and Niels Bohr, Essays and Papers (1987).  Read more at location 522

The Whole Reality 

The idea of a personal God is foreign to me…but we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science… [it] is more closely related to the language of poetry.  Read more at location 528

****  But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and subjective side much too arbitrary.  Read more at location 531

The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into objective and subjective sides won’t get us very far. That is why I consider those developments in physics during the last decades, which have shown how problematic such conceptions as ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, are a great liberation of thought.  Read more at location 532

Today we know that 'simultaneity' contains a subjective element, inasmuch as two events that appear simultaneous to an observer at rest are not necessarily simultaneous to an observer in motion.  Read more at location 538

In quantum mechanics the departure from this ideal has been even more radical. We can still use the objectifying language of classical physics to make statements about observable facts.  ...But we can say nothing about the atoms themselves. And what predictions we base on such findings depend on the way we pose our experimental question, and here the observer has freedom of choice. Naturally, it still makes no difference whether the observer is a man, an animal, or a piece of apparatus, but it is no longer possible to make predictions without reference to the observer or the means of observation. To that extent, every physical process may be said to have objective and subjective features.  Read more at location 543

The fact that different religions try to express this content in quite distinct spiritual forms is no real objection. Perhaps we ought to look upon these different forms as complementary descriptions which, though they exclude one another, are needed to convey the rich possibilities flowing from man's relationship with the central order…  Read more at location 550

our attitude to religious questions cannot be separated from our attitude to society.  ...the relationship between critical thought about the spiritual content of a given religion and action based on the deliberate acceptance of that content is complementary. And such acceptance, if consciously arrived at, fills the individual with strength of purpose, helps him to overcome doubts and, if he has to suffer, provides him with the kind of solace that only a sense of being sheltered under an all-embracing roof can grant. In that sense, religion helps to make social life more harmonious; its most important task is to remind us, in the language of pictures and parables, of the wider framework within which our life is set…  Read more at location 562

already ancient Indian thinkers understood the logical difficulties in giving exhaustive expression for such wholeness. In particular, they found escape from apparent disharmonies in life by stressing the futility of demanding an answer to the question of the meaning of existence, realizing that any use of the word ‘meaning’ implies comparison, and with what can we compare the whole existence?  Read more at location 570

Werner Heisenberg 

Werner Karl Heisenberg (5 December 1901 - 1 February 1976) was a German physicist and one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932 "for the creation of quantum mechanics". The following sections are taken from The Physicist’s Conception of Nature (1955) and Across the Frontiers (1974).  Read more at location 575

If Science Is Conscious of Its Limits 

It may be relevant to discuss the concept of scientific truth more generally and to enquire what are the criteria which allow us to call scientific knowledge consistent and final.  ...With respect to the finality of the results, however, we must remind the reader that in the realm of the exact sciences there have always been final solutions for certain limited domains of experience.  ...More precisely, I ought perhaps to say: Newton's laws are valid to that degree of accuracy to which the phenomena concerned can be described by these concepts. The fact that this accuracy has limits was, of course, well known even to classical physicists, none of whom ever claimed he could measure to any desired degree of accuracy.  ...The fact, however, that the accuracy of measurements is limited in principle, i.e., by uncertainty relations, is something quite new, something we first encountered in the atomic field.  Read more at location 598

With the reservations mentioned, it is therefore possible to say that Newtonian mechanics is a completed theory.  Read more at location 601

In the nineteenth century, the theory of heat, in particular, took on final form, in this sense, as a statistical statement about systems with very many degrees of freedom. The fundamental axioms of this theory define and connect such concepts as temperature, entropy, and energy, of which the first two, temperature and entropy, make no appearance whatever in Newtonian mechanics, while the last, energy, plays an important role in every field of experience and not merely in mechanics. Since the work of Willard Gibbs, the statistical theory of heat can likewise be reckoned a final and closed-off theory,  Read more at location 606

the phenomena of electromagnetism have been studied with ever greater exactness, their relationships to chemistry being demonstrated by Faraday and those to optics by Heinrich Hertz. The fundamental facts of atomic physics were first disclosed by findings in chemistry and then explored in every detail by experiments in electrolysis, in discharge processes in gases, and later, in radioactivity. For an understanding of this gigantic new territory, the closed-off theories of an earlier day were inadequate. And so new and more comprehensive theories were framed, which can be regarded as idealizations of these new regions of experience. The theory of relativity emerged from the electrodynamics of moving bodies and has led to new insights into the structure of space and time. The quantum theory gives an account of the mechanical processes in the interior of the atom, but it also incorporates Newtonian mechanics, as the limiting case in which we are able to objectify the events completely and can neglect the interaction between the object under investigation and the observer himself. Relativity theory, no less than quantum mechanics, can also be viewed as a closed-off theory, a very comprehensive idealization of exceedingly large tracts of experience, of whose laws we can take it that they are valid everywhere and at all times—but again only for those areas of experience which can be apprehended by means of these concepts.  Read more at location 618

Accordingly, in the exact sciences the word "final" obviously means that there are always self-contained, mathematically representable systems of concepts and laws applicable to certain realms of experience, in which realms they are always valid for the entire cosmos and cannot be changed or improved. Obviously, however, we cannot expect these concepts and laws to be suitable for the subsequent description of new realms of experience. It is only in this limited sense that quantum-theoretical concepts and laws can be considered as final, and only in this limited sense can it ever happen that scientific knowledge is finally formulated in mathematical or, for that matter, in any other language.  Read more at location 629

The exact sciences also start from the assumption that in the end, it will always be possible to understand nature, even in every new field of experience, but that we may make no a priori assumptions about the meaning of the word "understand." In the sciences, we find that the mathematical formulations of previous epochs are "final" but by no means universal.  Read more at location 636

Many modern creeds which claim that they are, in fact, not dealing with questions of faith, but are based on scientific knowledge, contain inner contradictions and rest on self-deception.  Read more at location 641

natural science is one whose propositions on limited domains of nature can have only a correspondingly limited validity; that science is not a philosophy developing a worldview of nature as a whole or about the essence of things. Hertz points out that propositions in physics have neither the task nor the capacity of revealing the inherent essence of natural phenomena.  Read more at location 649

the hypothetical picture of a causal relationship with which we invest natural phenomena must prove its usefulness in practice. The catena far assessing the suitability of a picture are that (x) it must be admissible, ie correspond with our laws of thought; (z) it must be correct, i.e., agree with experience; (3) it must be relevant, i.e., contain the maximum of essential and the minimum of superfluous or empty relations of the object.  Read more at location 654

1. Modern science, in its beginnings, was characterized by a conscious modesty; it made statements about strictly limited relations that are only valid within the framework of these limitations.

2. This modesty was largely lost during the nineteenth century. Physical knowledge was considered to make assertions about nature as a whole. Physics wished to turn philosopher, and the demand was voiced from many quarters that all true philosophers must be scientific.

3. Today physics is undergoing a basic change, the most characteristic trait of which is a return to its original self-limitation.

4. The philosophic content of a science is only preserved if science is conscious of its limits. Great discoveries of the properties of individual phenomena are possible only if the nature of the phenomena is not generalized a priori. Only by leaving open the question of the ultimate essence of a body, of matter, of energy, etc., can physics reach an understanding of the individual properties of the phenomena that we designate by these concepts, an understanding which alone may lead us to real philosophical insight.  Read more at location 663

Scientific and Religious Truths 

In the history of science, ever since the famous trial of Galileo, it has repeatedly been claimed that scientific truth cannot be reconciled with the religious interpretation of the world. Although I am now convinced that scientific truth is unassailable in its own field, I have never found it possible to dismiss the content of religious thinking  Read more at location 675

The place of immediate experience, has therefore been taken by an idealization of experience, which claims to be recognized as the correct idealization by virtue of the fact that it allows mathematical structures to become visible in the phenomena. There can be no doubt that in this early phase of modern science the newly discovered conformity to mathematical law has become the true basis for its persuasive power.  Read more at location 700

man can develop his mental and spiritual powers only in relation to a human society. The very capacities that distinguish him above all other living creatures, the ability to reach beyond the immediate sensory given, the recognition of wider interrelations, depend upon his being lodged in a community of speaking and thinking beings.  Read more at location 715

It is only within this spiritual pattern, of the ethos prevailing in the community, that man acquires the points of view whereby he can also shape his own conduct wherever it involves more than a mere reaction to external situations; it is here that the question about values is first decided. Not only ethics, however, but the whole cultural life of the community is governed by this spiritual pattern. Only within its sphere does the close connection first become visible between the good, the beautiful, and the true, and here only docs it first become possible to speak of life having a meaning for the individual. This spiritual pattern we call the religion of the community. The word "religion" is thereby endowed with a rather more general meaning than is customary.  Read more at location 720

Religion proper speaks not of norms, however, but of guiding ideals, by which we should govern our conduct and which we can at best only approximate. These ideals do not spring from inspection of the immediately visible world but from the region of the structures lying behind it, which Plato spoke of as the world of Ideas, and concerning which we are told in the Bible, "God is a spirit."  Read more at location 732

all that has here been said about religion is naturally well known; it has been repeated only in order to emphasize that even the natural scientist must recognize this comprehensive significance of religion in human society, if he wants to try to think about the relation of religious and scientific truth.  Read more at location 736

Science tries to give its concepts an objective meaning. But religious language must avoid this very cleavage of the world into its objective and its subjective sides; for who would dare claim the objective side to be more real than the subjective? Thus we ought not to intermingle the two languages;  ...The care to be taken in keeping the two languages, religious and scientific, apart from one another, should also include an avoidance of any weakening of their content by blending them. The correctness of tested scientific results cannot rationally be cast in doubt by religious thinking, and conversely, the ethical demands stemming from the heart of religious thinking ought not to be weakened by all too rational arguments from the field of science.  Read more at location 749

If there is much unhappiness among today's student body, the reason is not material hardship, but the lack of trust that makes it too difficult for the individual to give his life a meaning. Wc must try to overcome the isolation which threatens the individual in a world dominated by technical expediency. Theoretical deliberations about questions of psychology or social structure will avail us little here, so long as we do not succeed in finding a way back, by direct action, to a natural balance between the spiritual and material conditions of life. It will be a matter of reanimating in daily life the values grounded in the spiritual pattern of the community, of endowing them with such brilliance that the life of the individual is again automatically directed toward them.  Read more at location 766

Modern Science and Mysticism 

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli once spoke of two limiting conceptions, both of which have been extraordinary fruitful in the history of human thought, although no genuine reality corresponds to them. At one extreme is the idea of an objective world, pursuing its regular course in space and time, independently of any kind of observing subject; this has been the guiding image of modern science. At the other extreme is the idea of a subject, mystically experiencing the unity of the world and no longer confronted by an object or by any objective world; this has been the guiding image of Asian mysticism. Our thinking moves somewhere in the middle, between these two limiting conceptions; we should maintain the tension resulting from these two opposites.  Read more at location 781

Erwin Schrödinger 

Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (12 August 1887 - 4 January 1961) was an Austrian physicist, one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics, an early western promoter of Vedanta and Buddhist philosophy, and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics. He is popularly well known for his proposal of the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. The following sections are taken from What Is Life? (1947), Science and Humanism (1951), Nature and the Greeks (1954), Mind and Matter (1958), and My View of the World (1964).  Read more at location 788

Subject and Object 

I cannot  believe (and this is my first objection)—I cannot believe that [for example] the deep philosophical enquiry into the relation between subject and object and into the true meaning of the distinction between them depends on the quantitative results of physical and chemical measurements with weighing scales, spectroscopes, microscopes, telescopes, with Geiger-Muller-counters, Wilson-chambers, photographic plates, arrangements for measuring the radioactive decay, and whatnot. It is not very easy to say why I do not believe it. I feel a certain incongruity between the applied means and the problem to be solved.  Read more at location 797

On the other hand (and this is my second objection), the mere contention that every observation depends on both the subject and the object, which are inextricably interwoven, is hardly new; it is almost as old as science itself.  Read more at location 805

I think it is true that in previous centuries, when discussing this question, one mostly had in mind two things, viz. (a) a direct physical impression caused by the object in the subject, and (b) the state of the subject that receives^ impression. As against this, in the present order of ideas the direct physical, causal, influence between the two is regarded as mutual. It is said that there is also an unavoidable and uncontrollable impression from the side of the subject onto the object. This aspect is new, and, I should say, more adequate anyhow. For physical action always is inter-action; it always is mutual.  Read more at location 815

(Note: dualistic)  What remains doubtful to me is only just whether it is adequate to term one of the two physically interacting terms the "subject." For the observing mind is not a physical system, it cannot interact with any physical system. And it might be better to reserve the term "subject" for the observing mind.  Read more at location 823

We are given to understand that we never observe an object without its being modified or tinged by our own activity in observing it. We are given to understand that under the impact of our refined methods of observation and of thinking about the results of our experiments that mysterious boundary between the subject and the object has broken down. In order to criticize these contentions let me at first accept the time-hallowed distinction or discrimination between object and subject, as many thinkers both in olden times have accepted it and in recent times still accept it.  Read more at location 830

some of these thinkers might have in mind only a more or less strong or slight distortion, Kant landed us with a complete resignation: never to know anything at all about his "thing-in-itself." Thus the idea of subjectivity in all appearance is very old and familiar. What is new in that present setting is this: that not only would the impressions we get from our environment largely depend on the nature and the contingent state of our sensorium, but, inversely, the very environment that we wish to take in is modified by us, notably by the devices we set up in order to observe it. Maybe this is so—to some extent it certainly is.  Read more at location 837

Still I would not like to call this a direct influence of the subject on the object. For the subject, if anything, is the thing that senses and thinks. Sensations and thoughts do not belong to the "world of energy." They cannot produce any change in this world of energy as we know from Spinoza and Sir Charles Sherrington.  Read more at location 843

****  The world is given to me only once, not one existing and one perceived. Subject and object are only one. The barrier between them cannot be said to have broken down as a result of recent experience in the physical sciences, for this barrier does not exist.  Read more at location 847

Inability of Science 

The scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.  Read more at location 851

we do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We arc only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it.  Read more at location 856

I feel myself partly the author of these goings- on. But then comes the impasse, this very embarrassing discovery of science, that I am not needed as an author. Within the scientific world- picture all these happenings take care of themselves—they are amply accounted for by direct energetic interplay. Even the human body's movements "are its own" as Sherrington put it. The scientific world- picture vouchsafes a very complete understanding of all that happens—it makes it just a little too understandable. It allows you to imagine the total display as that of a mechanical clockwork which, for all that science knows, could go on just the same as it does, without there being consciousness, will, endeavor, pain and delight and responsibility connected with it—though they actually are. And the reason for this disconcerting situation is just this: chat, for the purpose of constructing the picture of the external world, we have used the greatly simplifying device of cutting our own personality out, removing it; hence it is gone, it has evaporated, it is ostensibly not needed.  Read more at location 861

Science is reticent too when it is a question of the great Unity—the One of Parmenides—of which we all somehow form part, to which we belong. The most popular name for it in our time is God—with a capital "G." Science is, very usually, branded as being atheistic. After what we said, this is not astonishing. If its world-picture does not even contain blue, yellow, bitter, sweet—beauty, delight, and sorrow—, if personality is cut out of it by agreement, how should it contain the most sublime idea that presents itself to human mind?  Read more at location 875

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question, the same for every one of us. Science has no answer to it.  Read more at location 882

The Oneness of Mind 

****  The reason why our sentient, percipient, and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven words: because it is itself that world picture. It is identical with the whole and therefore cannot be contained in it as a part of it.  Read more at location 885

Is there one real world to be distinguished from its pictures introjected by way of perception into every one of us? And if so, are these pictures like unto the real world or is the latter, the world "in itself," perhaps very different from the one we perceive? Such questions are ingenious, but, in my opinion, very apt to confuse the issue. They have no adequate answers. They all are, or lead to, antinomies springing from the one source, which I called the arithmetical paradox; the many conscious egos from whose mental experiences the one world is concocted.  Read more at location 891

There are two ways out of the number paradox, both appearing rather lunatic from the point of view of present scientific thought (based on ancient Greek thought and thus thoroughly "Western"). One way out is the multiplication of the world in Leibniz's fearful doctrine of monads: every monad to be a world by itself, no communication between them; the monad "has no windows," it is "incommunicado." That, nonetheless, they all agree with each other is called "pre-established harmony."  Read more at location 898

There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth, there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads. And not only of the Upanishads. The mystically experienced union with God regularly entails this attitude unless it is opposed by strong existing prejudices; this means that it is less easily accepted in the West than in the East.  Read more at location 903

(Note: hive mind?)  One thing can be claimed in favour of the mystical teaching of the "identity" of all minds with each other and with the supreme mind—as against the fearful monadology of Leibniz. The doctrine of identity can claim that it is clinched by the empirical fact that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.  ...If I say that there cannot be more than one consciousness in the same mind, this seems a blunt tautology—we are quite unable to imagine the contrary.  Read more at location 921

Sir Charles Sherrington, who was at the same time (rare event!) a man of highest genius and a sober scientist. I will give you the main conclusion in Sherrington's own words: It is not spatial conjunction of cerebral mechanism which combines the two reports. ... It is much as though the right-and left-eye images were seen each by one of two observers and the minds of the two observers were combined to a single mind. It is as though the right-eye and left-eye perceptions are elaborated singly and then psychically combined to one.... It is as if each eye had a separate sensorium of considerable dignity proper to itself, in which mental processes based on that eye were developed up to even full perceptual levels. Such would amount physiologically to a visual sub-brain. There would be two such sub-brains, one for the right eye and one for the left eye. Contemporaneity of action rather than structural union seems to provide their mental collaboration.  ...When it is a question of "mind" the nervous system docs not integrate itself by centralization upon a pontifical cell. Rather it elaborates a million-fold democracy whose each unit is a ceil ... the concrete life compounded of sublives reveals, although integrated, its additive nature and declares itself an affair of minute foci of life acting together.... When however we turn to the mind there is nothing of all this.  Read more at location 936

(Note: granular actions leads to synchronicity that affects action on a larger scale)  Matter and energy seem granular in structure, and so does "life," but not so mind.  Read more at location 941

The previous one was briefly, the one world crystallizing out of the many minds. Sherrington's is the one mind, based ostensibly on the many cell-lives or, in another way, on the manifold sub-brains, each of which seems to have such a considerable dignity proper to itself that we feel impelled to associate a sub-mind with it.  Read more at location 948

(Note: challenge to “singular mind”:  minsky ‘society of mind’)  Mind is, by its very nature, a singulare tantum. I should say: the overall number of minds is just one. I venture to call it indestructible since it has a peculiar timetable, namely mind is always now. There is really no before and after for mind. There is only a now that includes memories and expectations.  Read more at location 953

****  For do not let us forget: to say, as we did, that the becoming of the world is reflected in a conscious mind is but a cliche, a phrase, a metaphor that has become familiar to us. The world is given but once. Nothing is reflected. The original and the mirror-image are identical. The world extended in space and time is but our representation (Vorstellung). Experience does not give us the slightest clue of its being anything besides that—as Berkeley was well aware.  Read more at location 967

No personal god can form part of a world-model that has only become accessible at the cost of removing everything personal from it. We know, when God is experienced, this is an event as real as an immediate sense perception or as one's own personality. Like them, he must be missing in the space-time picture. I do not find God anywhere in space and time—that is what the honest naturalist tells you. For this, he incurs blame from him in whose catechism is written: God is spirit.  Read more at location 999

The Mystic Vision 

****  the plurality that we perceive is only an appearance; it is not real. Vedantic philosophy, in which this is a fundamental dogma, has sought to clarify it by a number of analogies, one of the most attractive being the many-faceted crystal which, while showing hundreds of little pictures of what is in reality a single existent object, does not really multiply that object.  Read more at location 1010

to grasp the basis of phenomena through logical thought may, in all probability, be impossible since logical thought is itself a part of phenomena and wholly involved in them;  Read more at location 1015

According to our usual way of looking at it, everything that you are seeing has, apart from small changes, been there for thousands of years before you. After a while—not long—you will no longer exist, and the woods and rocks and sky will continue, unchanged, for thousands of years after you. What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you?  ...A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you, he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light on the glaciers. Like you, he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you, and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this "someone else" really have?  Read more at location 1038

Looking and thinking in that manner you may suddenly come to see, in a flash, the profound Tightness of the basic conviction in Vedanta: it is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling, and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. But not in this sense—that you are a part, a piece, of an eternal, infinite being, an aspect or modification of it, as in Spinoza's pantheism. For we should then have the same baffling question: which part, which aspect are you? what, objectively, differentiates it from the others? No, but, inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you—and all other conscious beings as such—are all in all.  ...This, as we know, is what the Brahmins express in that sacred, mystic formula which is yet really so simple and so clear: Tat tvam asi, this is you. Or, again, in such words as "I am in the east and in the west, I am below and above, I am this whole world."  Read more at location 1058

Wolfgang Pauli 

Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (25 April 1900 - 15 December 1958) was an Austrian physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum physics. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 for “his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle". The following sections are taken from The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1955) and Across the Frontiers (1974).  Read more at location 1069

Physis and Psyche 

What is the nature of the bridge between the sense perceptions and the concepts? All logical thinkers have arrived at the conclusion that pure logic is fundamentally incapable of constructing such a link. It seems most satisfactory to introduce at this point the postulate of a cosmic order independent of our choice and distinct from the world of phenomena.  Read more at location 1078

Every partial recognition of this order in nature leads to the formulation of statements that, on the one hand, concern the world of phenomena and, on the other, transcend it by employing, "idealizingly," general logical concepts. The process of understanding nature as well as the happiness that man feels in understanding, that is, in the conscious realization of new knowledge, seems thus to be based on a correspondence, a "matching" of inner images pre-existent in the human psyche with external objects and their behaviour. This interpretation of scientific knowledge, of course, goes back to Plato and is, as we shall see, very clearly advocated by Kepler. He speaks in fact of ideas that are pre-existent in the mind of God and were implanted in the soul, the image of God, at the time of creation. These primary images which the soul can perceive with the aid of an innate "instinct" are called by Kepler archetypal ("archetypalis"). Their agreement with the "primordial images" or archetypes introduced into modern psychology by C. G. Jung and functioning as "instincts of imagination" is very extensive.  Read more at location 1084

the universal desire for a greater unification of our world view is greatly intensified by the fact that, though we now have natural sciences, we no longer have a total scientific picture of the world. Since the discovery of the quantum of action, physics has gradually been forced to relinquish its proud claim to be able to understand, in principle, the whole world. This very circumstance, however, as a correction of earlier one-sidedness, could contain the germ of progress toward a unified conception of the entire cosmos of which the natural sciences are only a part.  Read more at location 1106

man is in fact never able to compare images with real objects but only registers the sensory impressions that result from the stimulation of certain areas of the retina. The general problem of the relation between psyche and physis, between the inner and the outer, can, however, hardly be said to have been solved  Read more at location 1114

modern physics has generalized the old confrontation of the apprehending subject with the apprehended object into the idea of a cleavage or division that exists between the observer or the means of observation, on the one hand, and the system observed, on the other. While the existence of such a division is a necessary condition of human cognition, modern physics holds that its placement is, to a certain extent, arbitrary and results from a choice co-determined by considerations of expediency and hence partially free.  Read more at location 1121

In microphysics, however, the natural laws are of such a kind that every bit of knowledge gained from a measurement must be paid for by the loss of other, complementary items of knowledge. Every observation, therefore, interferes on an indeterminable scale both with the instruments of observation and with the system observed and interrupts the causal connection of the phenomena preceding it with those following it. This uncontrollable interaction between observer and system observed, taking place in every process of measurement, invalidates the deterministic conception of the phenomena assumed in classical physics: the series of events taking place according to pre-determined rules is interrupted, after a free choice has been made by the beholder between mutually exclusive experimental arrangements, by the selective observation which, as an essentially non-automatic occurrence, may be compared to a creation in the microcosm or even to a transmutation the results of which are, however, unpredictable and beyond human control.  Read more at location 1134

The reaction of the knowledge gained on the gainer of that knowledge gives rise, however, to a situation transcending natural science, since it is necessary for the sake of the completeness of the experience connected therewith that it should have an obligatory force for the researcher.  ...This connection can only be comprehended through symbols which both imaginatively express the emotional aspect of the experience and stand in vital relationship to the sum total of contemporary knowledge and the actual process of cognition.  Read more at location 1146

Toward a Synthesis of the Rational and the Mystical 

Excerpt from “Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Outlook”, Chapter 3 of Across the Frontiers, written by W. Heisenberg 

The elaboration of Plato's thought had led, in neo-Platonism and Christianity, to a position where matter was characterized as void of Ideas. Hence, since the intelligible was identical with the good, matter was identified with evil. But in the new science the world-soul was finally replaced by the abstract mathematical law of nature.  Read more at location 1194

Platonic thought, originally directed toward the unity of matter and spirit, leads eventually to a cleavage into the scientific and the religious views of the world, while the spiritual trend determined by gnosticism and alchemy produces scientific chemistry on the one hand and, on the other, a religious mysticism again divorced from material processes,  Read more at location 1206

In scientific thinking, which is especially characteristic of the West, the soul turns outward and asks after the why of things. "Why is the one reflected in the many, what is the reflector and what the reflected, why did not the one remain alone?" Mysticism, conversely, which is equally at home in both East and West, endeavors to experience the unity of things, in that it seeks to penetrate beyond multiplicity, which it treats as an illusion.  ...Pauli sees Western thought as strung out, so to speak, between these two limiting ideas. "There will always be two attitudes dwelling in the soul of man, and the one will always carry the other already within it, as the seed of its opposite. Hence arises a sort of dialectical process, of which we know not wither it leads us.  ...we must also recognize that in every endeavor to know or solve we depend upon factors which are outside our control, and which religious language has always entitled 'grace.'"  Read more at location 1220

****  in every experiment, every incursion into nature, we have the choice of which aspect of nature we want to make visible, but that we simultaneously make a sacrifice, in that we must forgo other such aspects—this coupling of "choice and sacrifice," proved spontaneously congenial to Pauli's philosophical outlook. In the center of his philosophical thinking here there was always the wish for a unitary understanding of the world, a unity incorporating the tension of opposites, and he hailed the interpretation of quantum theory as a new way of thinking, in which the unity can perhaps be more easily expressed than before.  Read more at location 1224

I suspect that the alchemistical attempt at a unitary psychophysical language miscarried only because it was related to a visible concrete reality. But in physics today we have an invisible reality (of atomic objects) in which the observer intervenes with a certain freedom (and is thereby confronted with the alternatives of "choice and sacrifice"); in the psychology of the unconscious we have processes which cannot always be unambiguously ascribed to a particular subject. The attempt at a psychophysical monism seems to me now essentially more promising,  Read more at location 1231

In regard to this unitary order of the cosmos, which still cannot be rationally formulated, Pauli is also skeptical of the Darwinian opinion, extremely widespread in modern biology, whereby the evolution of species on earth is supposed to have come about solely according to the laws of physics and chemistry, through chance mutations and their subsequent effects. He feels this scheme to be too narrow and considers the possibility of more general connections, which can neither be fitted into the general conceptual scheme of causal structures nor be properly described by the term "chance." Repeatedly, we encounter in Pauli an endeavor to break out of the accustomed grooves of thought in order to come closer, by new paths, to an understanding of the unitary structure of the world.  Read more at location 1254

It goes without saying that Pauli, in his wrestlings with the "One," was also continually obliged to come to terms with the concept of God; when he writes in a letter of the "theologians, to whom I stand in the archetypal relation of a hostile brother," this remark is certainly also seriously intended. Little as he was in the position of simply living and thinking within the tradition of one of the old religions, so equally little was he prepared to go over to a naive, rationalistically grounded atheism. No better account could well be given of Pauli's attitude to this most general of questions than that which he himself has offered in the concluding section of his lecture on science and Western thought: I believe, however, that to anyone for whom a narrow rationalism has lost its persuasiveness, and to whom the charm of a mystical attitude, experiencing the outer world in its oppressive multiplicity as illusory, is also not powerful enough, nothing else remains but to expose oneself in one way or another to these intensified oppositions and their conflicts. Precisely by doing so, the inquirer can also more or less consciously tread an inner path to salvation.  Read more at location 1260

consider the ambition of overcoming opposites, including also a synthesis embracing both rational understanding and the mystical experience of unity, to be the mythos, spoken or unspoken, of our present day and age.  Read more at location 1272

James Jeans 

Sir James Hopwood Jeans OM FRS (11 September 1877 - 16 September 1946) was an English physicist, astronomer and mathematician. He is well known for the Rayleigh-Jeans law. The following sections are taken from The Mysterious Universe (1930).  Read more at location 1276

In the Mind of Some Eternal Spirit 

****  The essential fact is simply that all the pictures which science now draws of nature, and which alone seem capable of according with observational fact, are mathematical pictures.  Read more at location 1280

Many would hold that, from the broad philosophical standpoint, the outstanding achievement of twentieth-century physics is not the theory of relativity with its welding together of space and time, or the theory of quanta with its present apparent negation of the laws of causation, or the dissection of the atom with the resultant discovery that things are not what they seem; it is the general recognition that we are not yet in contact with ultimate reality. To speak in terms of Plato's well-known simile, we are still imprisoned in our cave, with our backs to the light, and can only watch the shadows on the wall.  Read more at location 1284

nature seems very conversant with the rules of pure mathematics as our mathematicians have formulated them in their studies, out of their own inner consciousness and without drawing to any appreciable extent on their experience of the outer world. By "pure mathematics" is meant those departments of mathematics which are creations of pure thought, of reason operating solely within her own sphere, as contrasted with "applied mathematics" which reasons about the external world, after first taking some supposed property of the external world as its raw material.  Read more at location 1317

a scientific study of the action of the universe has suggested a conclusion which may be summed up, though very crudely and quite inadequately, because we have no language at our command except that derived from our terrestrial concepts and experiences, in the statement that the universe appears to have been designed by a pure mathematician.  Read more at location 1341

The new mathematical interpretation of nature cannot all be in our spectacles—in our subjective way of regarding the external world since if it were we should have seen it long ago. The human mind was the same in quality and mode of action a century ago as now; the recent great change in scientific outlook has resulted from a vast advance in scientific knowledge and not from any change in the human mind; we have found something new and hitherto unknown in the objective universe outside ourselves.  ...It would now seem to be beyond dispute that, in some way, nature is more closely allied to the concepts of pure mathematics than to those of biology or of engineering, and even if the mathematical interpretation is only a third man-made mould, it at least fits objective nature incomparably better than the two previously tried.  Read more at location 1361

We could not, of course, draw any conclusion from this if the concepts of pure mathematics which we find to be inherent in the structure of the universe were merely part of, or had been introduced through, the concepts of applied mathematics which we used to discover the workings of the universe. It would prove nothing if nature had merely been found to act in accordance with the concepts of applied mathematics; these concepts were specially and deliberately designed by man to fit the workings of nature. Thus it may still be objected that even our pure mathematics does not, in actual fact, represent a creation of our own minds so much as an effort, based on forgotten or subconscious memories, to understand the workings of nature. If so, it is not surprising that nature should be found to work according to the laws of pure mathematics. It cannot, of course, be denied that some of the concepts with which the pure mathematician works are taken direct from his experience of nature. An obvious instance is the concept of quantity, but this is so fundamental that it is hard to imagine any scheme of nature from which it was entirely excluded. Other concepts borrow at least something from experience; for instance, multi-dimensional geometry, which clearly originated out of experience of the three dimensions of space.  Read more at location 1414

****  (Note: Max Tegmark must be a big fan of Jean’s, no?)  In any event, it can hardly be disputed that nature and our conscious mathematical minds work according to the same laws. She does not model her behaviour, so to speak, on that forced on us by our whims and passions, or on that of our muscles and joints, but on that of our thinking minds. This remains true whether our minds impress their laws on nature, or she impresses her laws on us, and provides a sufficient justification for thinking of the universe as being of mathematical design.  Read more at location 1427

we may say that we have already considered with disfavour the possibility of the universe having been planned by a biologist or an engineer; from the intrinsic evidence of his creation, the Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician.  Read more at location 1431

the concepts which now prove to be fundamental to our understanding of nature—a space which is finite; a space which is empty, so that one point differs from another solely in the properties of the space itself; four-dimensional, seven- and more dimensional spaces; a space which forever expands; a sequence of events which follows the laws of probability instead of the law of causation—or, alternately, a sequence of events which can only be fully and consistently described by going outside space and time—all these concepts seem to my mind to be structures of pure thought, incapable of realization in any sense which would properly be described as material.  Read more at location 1437

****  anyone who has written or lectured on the finiteness of space is accustomed to the objection that the concept of a finite space is self-contradictory and nonsensical. If space is finite, our critics say, it must be possible to go out beyond this finite space, and what can we possibly find beyond it except more space, and so on ad infinitum?— which proves that space cannot be finite. And again, they say, if space is expanding, what can it possibly expand into, if not into more space?— which again proves that what is expanding can only be a part of space, so that the whole of space cannot expand. The twentieth-century critics who make these comments are still in the state of mind of the nineteenth-century scientists; they take it for granted that the universe must admit of material representation. If we grant their premises, we must, I think, also grant their conclusion—that we are talking nonsense—for their logic is irrefutable. But modem science cannot possibly grant their conclusion; it insists on the finiteness of space at all costs. This, of course, means that we must deny the premises which our critics unknowingly assume. The universe cannot admit of material representation, and the reason, I think, is that it has become a mere mental concept.  Read more at location 1442

Considerations such as these led Berkeley to postulate an Eternal Being, in whose mind all objects existed. And so, in the stately and sonorous diction of a bygone age, he summed up his philosophy in the words: All the choir of heaven and furniture of earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any substance without the mind. ... so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some Eternal Spirit.  Read more at location 1483

Physical science, troubling little about C, D, proceeds directly to the far end of the chain; its business is to study the workings of X, Y, Z. And, as it seems to me, its conclusions suggest that the end links of the chain, whether we go to the cosmos as a whole or to the innermost structure of the atom, are of the same nature as A, B—of the nature of pure thought; we are led to the conclusions of Berkeley, but we reach them from the other end. Because of this, we come upon the last of Berkeley's three alternatives first, and the others appear unimportant by comparison. It does not matter whether objects "exist in my mind, or that of any other created spirit" or not; their objectivity arises from their subsisting "in the mind of some Eternal Spirit."  Read more at location 1492

A Universe of Pure Thought 

If it is true that the "real essence of substances" is beyond our knowledge, then the line of demarcation between realism and idealism becomes very blurred indeed; it becomes little more than a relic of a past age in which reality was believed to be identical with mechanism. Objective realities exist because certain things affect your consciousness and mine in the same way, but we are assuming something we have no right to assume if we label them as either "real" or "ideal." The true label is, I think, "mathematical," if we can agree that this is to connote the whole of pure thought, and not merely the studies of the professional mathematician. Such a label does not imply anything as to what things are in their ultimate essence, but merely something as to how they behave.  Read more at location 1501

substantiality is a purely mental concept measuring the direct effect of objects on our sense of touch. We say that a stone or a motorcar is substantial, while an echo or a rainbow is not. This is the ordinary definition of the word, and it is a mere absurdity, a contradiction in terms,  Read more at location 1510

Johnson is reported to have expressed his opinion on Berkeley's philosophy by dashing his foot against a stone and saying: "No, Sir, I disprove it thus." This little experiment had, of course, not the slightest bearing on the philosophical problem it claimed to solve; it merely verified the substantiality of matter. And, however science may progress, stones must always remain substantial bodies, just because they and their class form the standard by which we define the quality of substantiality.  Read more at location 1513

the final truth about a phenomenon resides in the mathematical description of it; so long as there is no imperfection in this, our knowledge of the phenomenon is complete. We go beyond the mathematical formula at our own risk; we may find a model or picture which helps us to understand it, but we have no right to expect this, and our failure to find such a model or picture need not indicate that either our reasoning or our knowledge is at fault. The making of models or pictures to explain mathematical formulae and the phenomena they describe is not a step towards, but a step away from reality; it is like making graven images of a spirit.  Read more at location 1543

In brief, a mathematical formula can never tell us what a thing is, but only how it behaves; it can only specify an object through its properties. And these are unlikely to coincide in toto with the properties of any single macroscopic object of our everyday life. This point of view brings us relief from many of the difficulties and apparent inconsistencies of present-day physics. We need no longer discuss whether light consists of particles or waves; we know all there is to be known about it if we have found a mathematical formula which accurately describes its behavior, and we can think of it as either particles or waves, according to our mood and the convenience of the moment.  Read more at location 1554

If the universe is a universe of thought, then its creation must have been an act of thought. Indeed, the finiteness of time and space almost compel us, of themselves, to picture the creation as an act of thought;  ...Indeed, the doctrine dates back as far as Plato: Time and the heavens came into being at the same instant, in order that, if they were ever to dissolve, they might be dissolved together. Such was the mind and thought of God in the creation of time.  Read more at location 1575

the stream of knowledge is heading towards a nonmechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter—not, of course, our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts.  Read more at location 1580

The old dualism of mind and matter, which was mainly responsible for the supposed hostility, seems likely to disappear, not through matter becoming in any way more shadowy or insubstantial than heretofore, or through mind becoming resolved into a function of the working of matter, but through substantial matter resolving itself into a creation and manifestation of mind. We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds— not, so far as we have discovered, emotion, morality, or aesthetic appreciation, but the tendency to think in the way which, for want of a better word, we describe as mathematical.  Read more at location 1585

our main contention can hardly be that the science of today has a pronouncement to make, perhaps it ought rather to be that science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.  Read more at location 1599

Arthur Eddington 

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, FRS (28 December 1882 - 22 November 1944) was a British astrophysicist. He is famous for his work regarding Einstein’s theory of relativity. On 29 May 1919, he conducted an expedition to observe the Solar eclipse that provided one of the earliest confirmations of general relativity. The following sections are taken from The Nature of the Physical World (1929), Science and the Unseen World (1929), and New Pathways in Science (1935).  Read more at location 1602

From Physical to Spiritual Realities 

The recognition that our knowledge of the objects treated in physics consists solely of readings of pointers and other indicators transforms our view of the status of physical knowledge in a fundamental way. Until recently it was taken for granted that we had knowledge of a much more intimate kind of the entities of the external world.  Read more at location 1625

****  (Note:  funny)    In science we study the linkage of pointer readings with pointer readings. The terms link together in endless cycle with the same inscrutable nature running through the whole.  Read more at location 1643

(Note: very funny. cyclical, self referential understanding)   Einstein's law, in its analytical form, is a statement that in empty space certain quantities called potentials obey certain lengthy differential equations. We make a memorandum of the word "potential" to remind us that we must later on explain what it means. We might conceive a world in which the potentials at every moment and every place had quite arbitrary values. The actual world is not so unlimited, the potentials being restricted to those values which conform to Einstein's equations. The next question is: What are potentials? They can be defined as quantities derived by quite simple mathematical calculations from certain fundamental quantities called intervals, (mem. Explain "interval.") If we know the values of the various intervals throughout the world, definite rules can be given for deriving the values of the potentials. What are intervals? They are relations between pairs of events which can be measured with a scale or a clock or with both. (mem. Explain "scale" and "clock.") Instructions can be given {or the correct use of the scale and clock so that the interval is given by a prescribed combination of their readings. What are scales and clocks? A scale is a graduated strip of matter which ... (mem. Explain "matter.") On second thoughts, I will leave the rest of the description as "an exercise to the reader" since it would take rather a long time to enumerate all the properties and niceties of behaviour of the material standard which a physicist would accept as a perfect scale or a perfect clock. We pass on to the next question: What is matter? We have dismissed the metaphysical conception of substance. We might perhaps here describe the atomic and electrical structure of matter, but that leads to the microscopic aspects of the world, whereas we are here taking the macroscopic outlook. Confining ourselves to mechanics, which is the subject in which the law of gravitation arises, matter may be defined as the embodiment of three related physical quantities, mass (or energy), momentum, and stress. What are "mass," "momentum," and "stress?" It is one of the most far-reaching achievements of Einstein's theory that it has given an exact answer to this question. They are rather formidable looking expressions containing the potentials and their first and second derivatives with respect to the coordinates. What are the potentials? Why, that is just what I have been explaining to you!  Read more at location 1651

Let us see how it goes: This is the potential that was derived from the interval that was measured by the scale that was made from the matter that Mr. X knows. Next question: What is Mr. X? Well, it happens that physics is not at all anxious to pursue the question: What is Mr. X? It is not disposed to admit that its elaborate structure of a physical universe is "The House that Mr. X Built." It looks upon Mr. X—and, more particularly, the part of Mr. X that knows—as a rather troublesome tenant who, at a late stage of the world's history, has come to inhabit a structure which inorganic Nature has, by slow evolutionary progress, contrived to build. And so it turns aside from the avenue leading to Mr. X—and beyond—and closes up its cycle leaving him out in the cold.  Read more at location 1685

Physics provides a highly perfected answer to one specialised problem which confronts us in experience. I do not wish to minimise the importance of the problem and the value of the solution. In order to focus the problem, the various faculties of the observer have been discarded, and even his sensory equipment simplified, until the problem becomes such as our methods are adequate to solve. For the physicist, the observer has become a symbol dwelling in a world of symbols. But before ever we handed over the problem to the physicist, we had a glimpse of Man as a spirit in an environment akin to his own spirit.  Read more at location 1709

It is, therefore, somewhat of an anomaly that among the many extraphysical aspects of experience, religion alone should be singled out as specially in need of reconciliation with the knowledge contained in science: Why should anyone suppose that all that matters to human nature can be assessed with a measuring rod or expressed in terms of the intersections of world-lines? If defence is needed, the defence of a religious outlook must, I think, take the same form as the defence of an aesthetic outlook. The sanction seems to lie in an inner feeling of growth or achievement found in the exercise of the aesthetic faculty and equally in the exercise of the religious faculty.  Read more at location 1721

In our own nature, or through the contact of our consciousness with a nature transcending ours, there are other things that claim the same kind of recognition—a sense of beauty, of morality, and finally, at the root of all spiritual religion, an experience which we describe as the presence of God.  Read more at location 1730

I would say that when from the human heart, perplexed with the mystery of existence, the cry goes up, "What is it all about?" it is no true answer to look only at that part of experience which comes to us through certain sensory organs and reply: "It is about atoms and chaos; it is about a universe of fiery globes rolling on to impending doom; it is about tensors and non-commutative algebra." Rather, it is about a spirit in which truth has its shrine, with potentialities of self-fulfillment in its response to beauty and right.  Read more at location 1733

****  If God means anything in our daily lives, I do not think we should feel any disloyalty to truth in speaking and thinking of him unscientifically, any more than in speaking and thinking unscientifically of our human companions.  Read more at location 1742

What is the ultimate truth about ourselves? Various answers suggest themselves. We are a bit of stellar matter gone wrong. We are physical machinary—puppets that strut and talk and laugh and die as the hand of time pulls the strings beneath. But there is one elementary inescapable answer. We are that which asks the question. Whatever else there may be in our nature, responsibility towards truth is one of its attributes. This side of our nature is aloof from the scrutiny of the physicist. I do not think it is sufficiently covered by admitting a mental aspect of our being. It has to do with conscience rather than with consciousness. Concern with truth is one of those things which make up the spiritual nature of Man.  Read more at location 1793

It would be foolish to deny the magnitude of the gulf between our understanding of the most complex form of inorganic matter and the simplest form of life.  Read more at location 1804

****  The scientist might point to motions in the brain and say that these really mean sensations, emotions, thoughts, and perhaps supply a code to translate the motions into the corresponding thoughts. Even if we could accept this inadequate substitute for consciousness as we intimately know it, we must still protest: "You have shown us a creature which thinks and believes; you have not shown us a creature to whom it matters that what it thinks and believes should be true." The inmost ego, possessing what I have called the inescapable attribute, can never be part of the physical world unless we alter the meaning of the word "physical" so as to the synonymous with "spiritual"—a change scarcely to the advantage of clear thinking.  Read more at location 1809

****  What we are dragging to light as the basis of all phenomena is a scheme of symbols connected by mathematical equations. That is what physical reality boils down to when probed by the methods which a physicist can apply. A skeleton scheme of symbols proclaims its own hollowness. It can be—nay it cries out to be—filled with something that shall transform it from skeleton into substance, from plan into execution, from symbols into an interpretation of the symbols.  Read more at location 1828

Let us now consider our answer to the question whether the nature of reality is material or spiritual or a combination of both.  ...I will first ask another question. Is the ocean composed of water or of waves or of both?  ...Similarly, I assert that the nature of all reality is spiritual, not material nor a dualism of matter and spirit. The hypothesis that its nature can be, to any degree, material does not enter into my reckoning, because as we now understand matter, the putting together of the adjective "material" and the noun "nature" does not make sense.  Read more at location 1843

The elements of consciousness are particular thoughts and feelings; the elements of the brain cell are atoms and electrons. But the two analyses do not run parallel to one another. Whilst, therefore, I contemplate a spiritual domain underlying the physical world as a whole, I do not think of it as distributed so that to each element of time and space there is a corresponding portion of the spiritual background. My conclusion is that, although for the most part our inquiry into the problem of experience ends in a veil of symbols, there is an immediate knowledge in the minds of conscious beings which lifts the veil in places; what we discern through these openings is of mental and spiritual nature. Elsewhere we see no more than the veil.  Read more at location 1856

If today you ask a physicist what he has finally made out the aether or the electron to be, the answer will not be a description in terms of billiard balls or fly-wheels or anything concrete; he will point instead to a number of symbols and a set of mathematical equations which they satisfy. What do the symbols stand for? The mysterious reply is given that physics is indifferent to that; it has no means of probing beneath the symbolism. To understand the phenomena of the physical world, it is necessary to know the equations which the symbols obey but nor the nature of that which is being symbolised. Feeling that there must be more behind, we return to our starting point in human consciousness—the one centre where more might become known. There we find other stirrings, other revelations (true or false) than those conditioned by the world of symbols.  Read more at location 1866

In comparing the certainty of things spiritual and things temporal, let us not forget this: mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience; all else is remote inference. That environment of space and time and matter, of light and colour and concrete things, which seems so vividly real to us is probed deeply by every device of physical science and at the bottom we reach symbols. Its substance has melted into shadow.  Read more at location 1896

Mind-Stuff 

To put the conclusion crudely—the stuff of the world is mind-stuff. As is often the way with crude statements, I shall have to explain that by "mind" I do not here exactly mean mind and by "stuff" I do not at all mean stuff. Still, this is about as near as we can get to the idea in a simple phrase. The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds, but we may think of its nature as not altogether foreign to the feelings in our consciousness. The realistic matter and fields of force of former physical theory are altogether irrelevant—except in so far as the mind-stuff has itself spun these imaginings.  Read more at location 1913

It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our environment from which the world of physics is constructed, has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness. Obviously, the messages travel in code. When messages relating to a table are travelling in the nerves, the nerve-disturbance does not in the least resemble either the external table that originates the mental impression or the conception of the table that arises in consciousness.  ...We are acquainted with an external world because its fibres run into our consciousness; it is only our own ends of the fibres that we actually know; from those ends, we more or less successfully reconstruct the rest, as a palaeontologist reconstructs an extinct monster from its footprint. The mind-stuff is the aggregation of relations and relata which form the building material for the physical world.  Read more at location 1933

Bertrand Russell writes: What the physiologist sees when he examines a brain is in the physiologist, not in the brain he is examining.  Read more at location 1941

It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote interference—inference either intuitive or deliberate.  Read more at location 1975

Physical science has seemed to occupy a domain of reality which is self-sufficient, pursuing its course independently of and indifferent to that which a voice within us asserts to be a higher reality. We are jealous of such independence. We are uneasy that there should be an apparently self- contained world in which God becomes an unnecessary hypothesis.  Read more at location 1983

****  Life would be stunted and narrow if we could feel no significance in the world around us beyond that which can be weighed and measured with the tools of the physicist or described by the metrical symbols of the mathematician.  Read more at location 2018

Of course, it was an illusion. We can easily expose the rather clumsy trick that was played on us. Aethereal vibrations of various wavelengths, reflected at different angles from the disturbed interface between air and water, reached our eyes, and by photoelectric action caused appropria tc stimuli to travel along the optic nerves to a brain-centre. Here I the mind set to work to weave an impression out of the stimuli. The I incoming material was somewhat meagre, but the mind is a great storehouse of associations that could be used to clothe the skeleton. Having I woven an impression, the mind surveyed all that it had made and decided that it was very good. The critical faculty was lulled. We ceased to analyse and were conscious only of the impression as a whole. The warmth of the air, the scent of the grass, the gentle stir of the breeze, combined with the visual scene in one transcendent impression, around us and within us. Associations emerging from their storehouse grew bolder. Perhaps we recalled the phrase "rippling laughter." Waves—ripples—laughter—gladness—the ideas jostled one another. Quite illogically, we were glad, though what there can possibly be to be glad about in a set of aethereal vibrations no sensible person can explain. A mood of quiet joy suffused the whole impression. The gladness in ourselves was in Nature, in the waves, everywhere. That's how it was. It was an illusion.  Read more at location 2020

****  by following this course we reach a cyclic scheme which, from its very nature, can only be a partial expression of our environment. It is not reality but the skeleton of reality. "Actuality" has been lost in the exigencies of the chase. Having first rejected the mind as a worker of illusion we have in the end to return to the mind and say, "Here are worlds well and truly built on a basis more secure than your fanciful illusions. But there is nothing to make any one of them an actual world. Please choose one and weave your fanciful images into it. That alone can make it actual." We have torn away the mental fancies to get at the reality beneath, only to find that the reality of that which is beneath is bound up with its potentiality of awakening these fancies. It is because the mind, the weaver of illusion, is also the only guarantor of reality that reality is always to be sought at the base of illusion.  Read more at location 2039

Symbolic Knowledge and Intimate Knowledge 

****  We have two kinds of knowledge which I call symbolic knowledge and intimate knowledge. I do not know whether it would be correct to say that reasoning is only applicable to symbolic knowledge, but the more customary forms of reasoning have been developed for symbolic knowledge only. The intimate knowledge will not submit to codification and analysis, or, rather, when we attempt to analyse it the intimacy is lost and it is replaced by symbolism.  Read more at location 2076

For an illustration let us consider Humour. I suppose that humour can be analysed to some extent and the essential ingredients of the different kinds of wit classified. Suppose that we are offered an alleged joke. We subject it to scientific analysis as we would a chemical salt of doubtful nature, and perhaps after careful consideration of all its aspects we are able to confirm that it really and truly is a joke. Logically, I suppose, our next procedure would be to laugh. But it may certainly be predicted that as the result of this scrutiny we shall have lost all inclination we may ever have had to laugh at it. It simply does not do to expose the inner workings of a joke. The classification concerns a symbolic knowledge of humour which preserves all the characteristics of a joke except its laughableness. The real appreciation must come spontaneously, not introspectively. I think this is a not unfair analogy for our mystical feeling for Nature, and I would venture even to apply it to our mystical experience of God.  ...as laughter cannot be compelled by the scientific exposition of the structure of a joke, so a philosophic discussion of the attributes of God (or an impersonal substitute) is likely to miss the intimate response of the spirit which is the central point of the religious experience.  Read more at location 2091

There are some to whom the sense of a divine presence irradiating the soul is one of the most obvious things of experience. In their view, a man without this sense is to be regarded as we regard a man without a sense of humour. The absence is a kind of mental deficiency.  Read more at location 2087

Defence of Mysticism 

A defence of the mystic might run something like this. We have acknowledged that the entities of physics can from their very nature form only a partial aspect of the reality. How are we to deal with the other part? It cannot be said that that other part concerns us less than the physical entities. Feelings, purpose, values, make up our consciousness as much as sense impressions. We follow up the sense impressions and find that they lead into an external world discussed by science; we follow up the other elements of our being and find that they lead not into a world of space and time, but surely somewhere.  Read more at location 2095

Reality and Mysticism 

In most subjects (perhaps not excluding philosophy), it seems sufficient to agree on the things that we shall call real, and afterward try to discover what we mean by the word.  Read more at location 2148

In the mystic sense of the creation around us, in the expression of art, in a yearning towards God, the soul grows upward and finds the fulfillment of something implanted in its nature. The sanction for this development is within us, a striving born with our consciousness or an Inner Light proceeding from a greater power than ours. Science can scarcely question this sanction, for the pursuit of science springs from a striving which the mind is impelled to follow, a questioning that will not be suppressed.  Read more at location 2166

The starting point of belief in mystical religion is a conviction of significance or, as I have called it earlier, the sanction of a striving in the consciousness. This must be emphasised because appeal to intuitive conviction of this kind has been the foundation of religion through all ages and I do not wish to give the impression that we have now found something new and more scientific to substitute.  Read more at location 2172

It is necessary to examine further the nature of the conviction from which religion arises; otherwise, we may seem to be countenancing a blind rejection of reason as a guide to truth. There is a hiatus in reasoning, we must admit, but it is scarcely to be described as a rejection of reasoning. There is just the same hiatus in reasoning about the physical world if we go back far enough. We can only reason from data and the ultimate data must be given to us by a non-reasoning process—a self- knowledge of that which is in our consciousness. To make a start we must be aware of something. But that is not sufficient; we must be convinced of the significance of the significance of that awareness. We are bound to claim for human nature that, either of itself or as inspired by a power beyond, it is capable of making legitimate judgments of significance. Otherwise, we cannot even reach a physical world.  Read more at location 2179

It has been the task of science to discover that things are very different from what they seem. But we do not pluck out our eyes because they persist in deluding us with fanciful colourings instead of giving us the plain truth about wavelength. It is in the midst of such misrepresentations of environment (if you must call them so) that we have to live.  ...It is not misrepresentation but rather achievement—the result perhaps of long ages of biological evolution—that we should have fashioned a familiar world out of the crude basis. It is a fulfillment of the purpose of man's nature. If likewise the spiritual world has been transmuted by a religious colour beyond anything implied in its bare external qualities, it may be allowable to assert with equal conviction that this is not misrepresentation but the achievement of a divine element in man's nature.  Read more at location 2199

I have sometimes been asked whether science cannot now furnish an argument which ought to convince any reasonable atheist. I could no more ram religious conviction into an atheist than I could ram a joke into the Scotchman. The only hope of "converting" the latter is that through contact with merry-minded companions he may begin to realise that he is missing something in life which is worth attaining. Probably in the recesses of his solemn mind there exists inhibited the seed of humour, awaiting an awakening by such an impulse. The same advice would seem to apply to the propagation of religion;  Read more at location 2215

****  We cannot pretend to offer proofs. Proof is an idol before whom the pure mathematician tortures himself. In physics, we are generally content to sacrifice before the lesser shrine of Plausibility. And even the pure mathematician—that stern logician—reluctantly allows himself some prejudgments; he is never quite convinced that the scheme of mathematics is flawless, and mathematical logic has undergone revolutions as profound as the revolutions of physical theory. We are all alike stumblingly pursuing an ideal beyond our reach.  Read more at location 2220

We have to build the spiritual world out of symbols taken from our own personality, as wc build the scientific world out of the metrical symbols of the mathematician. If not, it can only be left ungraspable—an environment dimly felt in moments of exaltation, but lost to us in the sordid routine of life. To turn it into more continuous channels we must be able to approach the World- Spirit in the midst of our cares and duties in that simpler relation of spirit to spirit in which all true religion finds expression.  Read more at location 2232

A tide of indignation has been surging in the breast of the matter-of-fact scientist and is about to be unloosed upon us.  ...I will not say that I have been half-convinced, but at least I have felt a homesickness for the paths of physical science where there are more or less discernible handrails to keep us from the worst morasses of foolishness.  ...Starting from aether, electrons, and other physical machinery, we cannot reach conscious man and render count of what is apprehended in his consciousness. Conceivably, we might reach a human machine interacting by reflexes with its environment, but we cannot reach rational man morally responsible to pursue the truth as to aether and electrons or to religion.  Read more at location 2242

****  (Note: funny, newtonian)  There was a time when the whole combination of self and environment which makes up experience seemed likely to pass under the dominion of a physics much more iron bound than it is now. That overweening phase, when it was almost necessary to ask the permission of physics to call one's soul one's own, is past.  Read more at location 2248

It will perhaps be said that the conclusion to be drawn from these arguments from modem science is that religion first became possible for a reasonable scientific man about the year 1927.  ...If our expectation should prove well founded that 1927 has seen the final overthrow of strict causality by Heisenberg, Rohr, Born, and others, the year will certainly rank as one of the greatest epochs in the development of scientific philosophy.  Read more at location 2310

The conflict [between science and religion] will not be averted unless both sides confine themselves to their proper domain, and a discussion which enables us to reach a better understanding as to the boundary - should be a contribution towards a state of peace.  Read more at location 2314

Mystical Religion 

We have seen that the cyclic scheme of physics presupposes a background outside the scope of its investigations. In this background we must find, first, our own personality, and then perhaps a greater personality. The idea of a universal Mind or Logos would be, I think, a fairly plausible inference from the present state of scientific theory, at least it is in harmony with it. But if so, all that our inquiry justifies us in asserting is a purely colourless pantheism.  Read more at location 2349

think that that is an example of the limitation of physical schemes that has troubled us before—namely, that in all such schemes opposites are represented by + and -. Past and future, cause and effect, are represented in this inadequate way. One of the greatest puzzles of science is to discover why protons and electrons are not simply the opposites of one another, although our whole conception of electric charge requires that positive and negative electricity should be related like + and —. The direction of time's arrow could only be determined by that incongruous mixture of theology and statistics known as the second law of thermodynamics; or, to be more explicit, the direction of the arrow could be determined by statistical rules, but its significance as a governing fact "making sense of the world" could only be deduced on teleological assumptions. If physics cannot determine which way up its own world ought to be regarded, there is not much hope of guidance from it as to ethical orientation. We trust to some inward sense of fitness when we orient the physical world with the future on top, and, likewise, we must trust to some inner monitor when we orient the spiritual world with the good on top.  Read more at location 2354

As scientists, we realise that colour is merely a question of the wavelengths of aethereal vibrations, but that does not seem to have dispelled the feeling that eyes which reflect light near wavelength 4800 are a subject for rhapsody whilst those which reflect wavelength 5300 are left unsung.  Read more at location 2379

****  The materialist who is convinced that all phenomena arise from electrons and quanta and the like controlled by mathematical formulae, must presumably hold the belief that his wife is a rather elaborate differential equation, but he is probably tactful enough not to obtrude this opinion in domestic life. If this kind of scientific dissection is felt to be inadequate and irrelevant in ordinary personal relationships, it is surely out of place in the most personal relationship of all—that of the human soul to a divine spirit.  Read more at location 2383

(Note: great. Very funny)  I am standing on the threshold about to enter a room. It is a complicated business. In the first place, I must shove against an atmosphere pressing with a force of fourteen pounds on every square inch of my body. I must make sure of landing on a plank travelling at twenty miles a second round the sun—a fraction of a second too early or too late, the plank would be miles away. I must do this whilst hanging from a round planet head outward into space, and with a wind of aether blowing at no one knows how many miles a second through every interstice of my body. The plank has no solidity of substance. To step on it is like stepping on a swarm of flies. Shall I not slip through? No, if I make the venture one of the flies hits me and gives a boost up again; I fall again and am knocked upwards by another fly; and so on. I may hope that the net result will be that I remain about steady, but if, unfortunately, I should slip through the floor or be boosted too violently up to the ceiling, the occurrence would be, not a violation of the laws of Nature, but a rare coincidence. These are some of the minor difficulties. I ought really to look at the problem four-dimensionally as concerning the intersection of my world-line with that of the plank. Then again, it is necessary to determine in which direction the entropy of the world is increasing in order to make sure that my passage over the threshold is an entrance, not an exit. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door. And whether the door be barn door or church door it might be wiser that he should consent to be an ordinary man and walk in rather than wait till all the difficulties involved in a really scientific ingress are resolved.  Read more at location 2387

Eugene Wigner 

Eugene Paul Wigner (November 17, 1902 - January 1, 1995) was a Hungarian American physicist. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 “for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles”. The following sections are taken from Symmetries and Reflections (1967).  Read more at location 2402

Consciousness Modifies the Laws of Physics 

Until not many years ago, the "existence" of a mind or soul would have been passionately denied by most physical scientists. The brilliant successes of mechanistic and, more generally, macroscopic physics and of chemistry overshadowed the obvious fact that thoughts, desires, and emotions are not made of matter, and it was nearly universally accepted among physical scientists that there is nothing besides matter. The epitome of this belief was the conviction that, if we knew the positions and velocities of all atoms at one instant of time, we could compute the fate of the universe for all future.  Read more at location 2410

the brilliant successes of mechanics not only faded into the past; they were also recognized as partial successes, relating to a narrow range of phenomena, all in the macroscopic domain. When the province of physical theory was extended to encompass microscopic phenomena, through the creation of quantum mechanics, the concept of consciousness came to the fore again: it was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to the consciousness.  Read more at location 2418

it will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the conclusion that the content of the consciousness is an ultimate reality.  Read more at location 2424

****  The statement that it "exists" means only that: (a) it can be measured, hence uniquely defined, and (b) that its knowledge is useful for understanding past phenomena and in helping to foresee further events.  Read more at location 2429

The Language of Quantum Mechanics 

wave function. This is a mathematical concept the exact nature of which need not concern us here - it is composed of a (countable) infinity of numbers. If one knows these numbers, one can foresee the behavior of the object as far as it can be foreseen. More precisely, the wave function permits one to foretell with what probabilities the object will make one or another impression on us if we let it interact with us either directly, or indirectly.  Read more at location 2440

The important point is that the impression which one gains at an interaction may, and in general does, modify the probabilities with which one gains the various possible impressions at later interactions. In other words, the impression which one gains at an interaction, called also the result of an observation, modifies the wave function of the system. The modified wave function is, furthermore, in general unpredictable before the impression gained at the interaction has entered our consciousness: it is the entering of an impression into our consciousness which alters the wave function because it modifies our appraisal of the probabilities for different impressions which we expect to receive in the future. It is at this point that the consciousness enters the theory unavoidably and unalterably.  Read more at location 2481

even in this case, in which the observation was carried out by someone else, the typical change in the wave function occurred only when some information (the yes or no of my friend) entered my consciousness. It follows that the quantum description of objects is influenced by impressions entering my consciousness. Solipsism may be logically consistent with present quantum mechanics, monism in the sense of materialism is not.  Read more at location 2496

The Reasons for Materialism 

In the words of Niels Bohr, "The word consciousness, applied to ourselves as well as to others, is indispensable when dealing with the human situation." In view of all this, one may well wonder how materialism, the doctrine that "life could be explained by sophisticated combinations of physical and chemical laws," could so long be accepted by the majority of scientists. The reason is probably that it is an emotional necessity to exalt the problem to which one wants to devote a lifetime.  Read more at location 2503

Simplest Answer to the Mind-Body Question 

(Note: clear now that mind states influence body (placebo))  does the human body deviate from the laws of physics, as gleaned from the study of inanimate nature? The traditional answer to this question is, "No": the body influences the mind but the mind does not influence the body. Yet at least two reasons can be given to support the opposite thesis, which will be referred to as the second thesis.  Read more at location 2530

The first and, to this writer, less cogent reason is founded on the quantum theory of measurements,  Read more at location 2533

(Note: yes is 1, no is 2)  Let us assume again that the object has only two states, ψ1 and ψ2.  ...Let us consider now an initial state of the object which is a linear combination aψ1 + bψ2 of the two states ψ1 and ψ2. It then follows from the linear nature of the quantum mechanical equations of motion that the state of object plus observer is, after the interaction, aψ1x1 + bψ2x2.  ...The probability is zero that the observer will say "Yes," but the object gives the response which ψ2 would give because the wave function aψ1x1 + bψ2x2 of the joint system has no ψ2x1 component.  ...If we substitute for "friend" some simple physical apparatus, such as an atom which may or may not be excited by the light-flash, this difference has observable effects and there is no doubt that aψ1x1 + bψ2x2 describes the properties of the joint system correctly, the assumption that the wave function is either ψ1x1 or ψ2x2  does not. If the atom is replaced by a conscious being, the wave function aψ1x1 + bψ2x2 (which also follows from the linearity of the equations) appears absurd because it implies that my friend was in a state of suspended animation before he answered my question.11  Read more at location 2579

the difference in the roles of inanimate observation tools and observers with a consciousness—hence for a violation of physical laws where consciousness plays a role—is entirely cogent so long as one accepts the tenets of orthodox quantum mechanics in all their consequences.  Read more at location 2600

The second argument to support the existence of an influence of the consciousness on the physical world is based on the observation that we do not know of any phenomenon in which one subject is influenced by another without exerting an influence thereupon.  Read more at location 2604

David Bohm 

David Joseph Bohm FRS (20 December 1917 - 27 October 1992) was an American-born British quantum physicist who made significant contributions in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy of mind and neuropsychology. The following section is taken from his essay A new theory of the relationship of mind and matter (1990).  Read more at location 2663

Mind-Like Matter 

This article discusses some ideas aimed at bringing together the physical and mental sides of reality. It is concerned mainly with giving the general outlines of a new way of thinking, consistent with modern physics, which does not divide mind from matter, the observer from the observed, the subject from the object.  Read more at location 2667

The problem of the relationship of mental and physical sides of reality has long been a key one, especially in Western philosophy. Descartes gave a particularly clear formulation  Read more at location 2671

(Note: dualism)   when he said that there is nothing included in the concept of body that belongs to mind, and nothing in that of mind that belongs to body. Yet, experience shows that they are closely related. Descartes solved the problem by assuming that God, who created both mind and matter, is able to relate them by putting into the minds of human beings the clear and distinct thoughts that are needed to deal with matter as extended substance. It was of course also implied by Descartes that the aims contained in thoughts had somehow to be carried out by the body, even though he asserted that thought and the body had no domain in common.  Read more at location 2676

This article aims at the development of a different approach to this question, which permits of an intelligible relationship between mind and matter without reducing one to nothing but a function or aspect of the other (such reduction commonly takes the forms of materialism which reduces mind, for example, to an 'epiphenomenon' having no real effect on matter, and of idealism, which reduces matter to some kind of thought, for example, in the mind of God).  Read more at location 2685

the quantum theory, which is now basic, implies that the particles of physics have certain primitive mind-like qualities which are not possible in terms of Newtonian concepts (though, of course, they do not have consciousness). This means that on the basis of modern physics even inanimate matter cannot be fully understood in terms of Descartes' notion that it is nothing but a substance occupying space and constituted of separate objects. Vice versa, it will be argued that mind can be seen to have always a physical aspect, though this may be very subtle.  Read more at location 2693

The implicate order and the quantum theory 

The question of the relationship of mind and matter has already been explored to some extent in some of my earlier work in physics (Bohm, 1980). In this work, which was originally aimed at understanding relativity and quantum theory on a basis common to both, I developed the notion of the enfolded or implicate order. The essential feature of this idea was that the whole universe is in some way enfolded in everything and that each thing is enfolded in the whole.  Read more at location 2705

****  in some way, and to some degree everything enfolds or implicates everything, but in such a manner that under typical conditions of ordinary experience, there is a great deal of relative independence of things. The basic proposal is then that this enfoldment relationship is not merely passive or superficial. Rather, it is active and essential to what each thing is. It follows that each thing, is internally related to the whole, and therefore, to everything else. The external relationships are then displayed in the unfolded or explicate order in which each thing is seen, as has already indeed been indicated, as relatively separate and extended, and related only externally to other things.  Read more at location 2709

I called its most general form the holomovement. All things found in the unfolded, explicate order emerge from the holomovement in which they are enfolded as potentialities and ultimately they fall back into it. They endure only for some time, and while they last, their existence is sustained in a constant process of enfoldment and re-enfoldment, which gives rise to their relatively stable and independent forms in the explicate order.  Read more at location 2716

the general implicate process of ordering is common both to mind and to matter. This means that ultimately mind and matter are at least closely analogous and not nearly so different as they appear on superficial examination.  Read more at location 2724

First, the quantum theory implies that all material systems have what is called a wave-particle duality in their properties.  ...This dual nature of material systems is totally at variance with Newtonian physics, in which each system has its own nature independently of context. Secondly, all action is in the form of definite and measurable units of energy, momentum and other properties called quanta which cannot be further divided.  ...Thirdly, there is a strange new property of non-locality. That is to say, under certain conditions, particles that are at macroscopic orders of distance from each other appear to be able, in some sense, to affect each other, even though there is no known means by which they could be connected.  ...All of this can be summed up in terms of a new notion of quantum wholeness, which implies that the world cannot be analyzed into independently and separately existent parts. This sort of analysis will have at most an approximate and limited kind of applicability; i.e. in a domain in which Newtonian physics is approximately valid. But fundamentally, quantum wholeness is what is primary. In particular, such wholeness means that in an observation carried out to a quantum theoretical level of accuracy, the observing apparatus and the observed system cannot be regarding as separate.  ...For Bohr, this implies that the mathematics of the quantum theory is not capable of providing an unambiguous (i.e. precisely definable) description of an individual quantum process, but rather, that it is only an algorithm yielding statistical predictions concerning the possible results of an ensemble of experiments. Bohr further supposes that no new concepts are possible that could unambiguously describe the reality of the individual quantum process.  Read more at location 2767

The causal interpretation of the quantum theory 

A brief account of the causal interpretation of the quantum theory will now be given. The first step in this interpretation is to assume that the electron, for example, actually is a particle, following a well defined trajectory (like a planet around the sun). But it is always accompanied by a new kind of quantum field. Now, a field is something that is spread out over space.  ...As with electric and magnetic fields, the quantum field can also be represented in terms of a potential which I call the quantum potential. But unlike what happens with electric and magnetic potentials, the quantum potential depends only on the form, and not in the intensity of the quantum field. Therefore, even a very weak quantum field can strongly affect the particle.  Read more at location 2797

To see what happens with quantum systems, let us consider a very weak beam of electrons coming in to the slit system separately and independently,  ...Each electron follows a particular path, going through one slit or the other, as it arrives at the detecting screen as an individual, particle, producing, for example, an individual spot in a photographic plate located at the screen. In its movement the electron is affected by the quantum potential, which, as we recall, is determined by the wave that in general precedes the particle. However, if we follow the whole set of trajectories, which represents an initially random distribution of particles, then these are 'bunched' systematically into a fringe-like pattern (which will become apparent after many electrons have arrived at the screen in front of the slits).  ...In this way, we explain how the electron can be a particle, and yet manifest characteristics wave-like properties statistically. It is essential for this explanation, however, that the quantum potential depends only on the form of the wave, so that it can be strong even when the wave intensity is weak. Or to put it differently, what is basically new here is the feature that we have called non-locality, i.e. the ability for distant parts of the environment (such as the slit system) to affect the motion of the particle in a significant way (in this case through its effect on the quantum field).  Read more at location 2822

****  a new notion of active information that plays a key role in this context. The word in-form is here taken in its literal meaning, i.e. to put form into (rather than in it's technical meaning in information theory as negentropy). One may think of the electron as moving under its own energy. The quantum potential then acts to put form into its motion, and this form is related to the form of the wave from which the quantum potential is derived.  Read more at location 2828

The 'information' is in the program, but its activity gives shape and form to the movement of the machinery. Likewise, in a living cell, current theories say that the form of the DNA molecule acts to give shape and form to the synthesis of proteins (by being transferred to molecules of RNA).  Read more at location 2837

The information in the quantum level is potentially active everywhere, but actually active only where the particle is (as, for example, the radio wave is active where the receiver is). Such a notion suggests, however, that the electron may be much more complex than we thought (having a structure of a complexity that is perhaps comparable, for example, to that of a simple guidance mechanism such as an automatic pilot). This suggestion goes against the whole tradition of physics over the past few centuries which is committed to the assumption that as we analyze matter into smaller and smaller parts, their behaviour grows simpler and simpler. Yet, assumptions of this kind need not always be correct.  Read more at location 2840

****  (Note: scale is central to limits of perspective)   the shortest distance that could have meaning in present-day physics is of the order of 10-33 cm, the so-called Planck length, at which it is generally agreed that current concepts of space, time and matter would probably have to change radically. Between 10-16 and 10-33, there is a factor of 1017, which is about the same as that between 10-16 and ordinary macroscopic distances (of the order of 10 cm). Between 10 cm and 10-16 cm lies a tremendous possibility for structure.  Read more at location 2849

Here several new concepts appear. First, two or more particles can affect each other strongly through the quantum potential even when they are separated by long distances. This is similar to what happened with the slits, but it is more general. Such non-local action at long distances has been confirmed in experiments aimed at testing whether the Bell criterion that I mentioned earlier is satisfied. Secondly, in a many particle system, the interaction of the particles may be thought of as depending on a common pool of information belonging to the system as a whole,, in a way that is not analyzable in terms of pre-assigned relationships between individual particles. This may be illustrated in terms of the phenomenon of superconductivity.  Read more at location 2865

****  A more detailed analysis shows that the quantum potential for the whole system then constitutes a non-local connection that brings about the above described organized and orderly pattern of electrons moving together without scattering. We may here make an analogy to a ballet dance, in which all the dancers, guided by a common pool of information in the form of a score, are able to move together in a similar organized and orderly way, to go around an obstacle and re-form their pattern of movement. If the basic behaviour of matter involves such features as wholeness, nonlocality and organization of movement through common pools of information, how then do we account for ordinary large scale experience, in which we find no such features?  Read more at location 2875

Implications for mind 

It follows from the above that the possibilities for wholeness in the quantum theory have an objective significance. This is in. contrast to what happens in classical physics, which must treat a whole as merely a convenient way of thinking about what is considered to be in reality nothing but a collection of independent parts in a mechanical kind of interaction. On the other hand, in the quantum theory, the 'ballet-like' behaviour in superconductivity, for example, is clearly more like that of an organism than like that of mechanism. Indeed, going further, the whole notion of active information suggests a rudimentary mind-like behaviour of matter, for an essential quality of mind is just the activity of form, rather than of substance.  Read more at location 2886

We may begin by considering briefly some aspects of the nature of thought. Now, a major part of the significance of thought is just the activity to which a given structure of information may give rise. We may easily verify this in our subjective experience. For example, suppose that on a dark night, we encounter some shadows. If we have information that there may be assailants in the neighbourhood, this may give rise immediately to a sense of dancer, with a whole range of possible activities (fight, flight, etc.). This is not merely a mental process. But includes an involuntary and essentially unconscious process of hormones, heart-beat, and neurochemicals of various kinds, as well as physical tensions and movements.  ...More generally, with mind, information is thus seen to be active in all these ways, physically, chemically, electrically, etc. Such activity is evidently similar to that which was described in connection with automatic pilots, radios, computers, DNA, and quantum processes in elementary particles such as electrons.  Read more at location 2902

****  It seems clear from all this that at least in the context of the processes of thought, there is a kind of active information that is simultaneously physical and mental in nature. Active information can thus serve as a kind of or 'bridge' between these two sides of reality as a whole. These two sides are inseparable, in the sense that information contained in thought, which we feel to be on the 'mental' side, is at the same time a related neurophysiological, chemical, and physical activity (which is clearly what is meant by the 'material' side of this thought).  Read more at location 2911

our thoughts may contain a whole range of information content of different kinds. This may in turn be surveyed by a higher level of mental activity, as if it were a material object at which one were 'looking'. Out of this may emerge a yet more subtle level of information, whose meaning is an activity that is able to organize the original set of information into a greater whole.  ...Thus, at each level, information is the link or bridge between the two sides. The proposal is then that a similar relationship holds at indefinitely great levels of subtlety. I am suggesting that this possibility of going beyond any specifiable level of subtlety is the essential feature on which the possibility of intelligence is based.  Read more at location 2922

consider the meaning of subtle which is, according to the dictionary 'rarefied, highly refined, delicate, elusive, indefinable'. But it is even more interesting to consider its Latin root, sub-texere, which means 'finely woven'. This suggests metaphor for thought as a series of more and more closely woven nets. Each can 'catch' a certain content of a corresponding 'fineness'.  ...In this series, the mental side corresponds, of course, to what is more subtle and the physical side to what is less subtle. And each mental side in turn becomes a physical side as we move in the direction of greater subtlety.  Read more at location 2932

An extension of the quantum theory 

the quantum potential acting on atomic particles, for example, represents only one stage in the process. The content of our own consciousness is then some part of this over-all process. It is thus implied that in some sense a rudimentary mind-like quality is present even at the level of particle physics, and that as we go to subtler levels, this mind-like quality becomes stronger and more developed. Each kind and level of mind may have a relative autonomy and stability. One may then describe the essential mode of relationship of all these as participation, recalling that this word has two basic meanings, to partake of, and to take part in. Through enfoldment, each relatively autonomous kind and level of mind to one degree or another partakes of the whole.  Read more at location 2953

For the human being, all of this implies a thoroughgoing wholeness, in which mental and physical sides participate very closely in each other. Likewise, intellect, emotion, and the whole state of the body are in a similar flux of fundamental participation. Thus, there is no real division between mind and matter, psyche and soma. The common term psychosomatic is in this way seen to be misleading, as it suggests the Cartesian notion of two distinct substances in some kind of interaction  Read more at location 2963

(Note: emotion states like magnet. seek middle! no attraction, no repulsion)  To explain what is meant here, one may consider the analogy of the poles of a magnet, which are likewise a feature of linguistic and intellectual analysis, and have no independent existence outside such analysis. At every part of a magnet, there is a potential pair of north and south poles that overlap each other. But these magnetic poles are actually abstractions, introduced for convenience of thinking about what is going on, while the whole process is a deeper reality-an unbroken magnetic field that is present over all space.  Read more at location 2975

Freeman Dyson 

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is a British-American physicist, famous for his work in quantum electrodynamics. He won the 2000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. The following section is taken from his acceptance speech on May 16, in the Washington National Cathedral.  Read more at location 2990

God as a World-Soul 

To me, good works are more important than theology. We all know that religion has been historically, and still is today, a cause of great evil as well as great good in human affairs.  Read more at location 2994

Sharing the food is to me more important than arguing about beliefs. Jesus, according to the gospels, thought so too. I am content to be one of the multitudes of Christians who do not care much about the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. Both as a scientist and as a religious person, I am accustomed to living with uncertainty.  Read more at location 3015

published under the title, Infinite In All Directions. Here is a brief summary of my thinking. The universe shows evidence of the operations of mind on three levels. The first level is elementary physical processes, as we see them when we study atoms in the laboratory. The second level is our direct human experience of our own consciousness. The third level is the universe as a whole. Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom. The universe as a whole is also weird, with laws of nature that make it hospitable to the growth of mind. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus.  Read more at location 3022

When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity.  Read more at location 3034

All through our history, we have been changing the world with our technology. Our technology has been of two kinds, green and grey. Green technology is seeds and plants, gardens and vineyards and orchards, domesticated horses and cows and pigs, milk and cheese, leather and wool. Grey technology is bronze and steel, spears and guns, coal and oil and electricity, automobiles and airplanes and rockets, telephones and computers.  Read more at location 3041

Our grey technology of machines and computers will not disappear, but green technology will be moving ahead even faster. Green technology can be cleaner, more flexible and less wasteful, than our existing chemical industries.  Read more at location 3050

No matter how strongly we believe in the virtues of a free market economy, the free market must not extend to human genes.  Read more at location 3066

he draws a clear line at the temple door. Inside the temple, the ground belongs to God and profit-making must stop. While I was listening to the reading, I was thinking how Jesus' anger might extend to free markets in human bodies and human genes. In the time of Jesus and for many centuries afterwards, there was a free market in human bodies.  Read more at location 3071

The two great evils to be avoided are the use of biological weapons and the corruption of human nature by buying and selling genes.  Read more at location 3083

The message is simple. "God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". This was said by Francis Bacon,  ...what science could do and what science could not do. He is saying to the philosophers and theologians of his time: look for God in the facts of nature, not in the theories of Plato and Aristotle.  ...Here are Bacon's words again: "The subtlety of nature is greater many times over than the subtlety of the senses and understanding".  Read more at location 3095

Science and religion are both still close to their beginnings, with no ends in sight. Science and religion are both destined to grow and change in the millennia that lie ahead of us, perhaps solving some old mysteries, certainly discovering new mysteries of which we yet have no inkling.  Read more at location 3097

Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect. Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible.  Read more at location 3102

Technology must be guided and driven by ethics if it is to do more than provide new toys for the rich. Scientists and business leaders who care about social justice should join forces with environmental and religious organizations to give political clout to ethics. Science and religion should work together to abolish the gross inequalities that prevail in the modern world. That is my vision, and it is the same vision that inspired Francis Bacon four hundred years ago, when he prayed that through science God would "endow the human family with new mercies".  Read more at location 3117