Quantum Physics, Computers
and Psychology
By Kristo Ivanov, prof.em.,
Umeå University
October 2021 (work in progress, version 230903-1445)
https://www8.informatik.umu.se/~kivanov/QuantumPsyCom.html
https://archive.org/details/quantum-psy-com
CONTENTS:
Introduction
Original layout of English
Summary
Aesthetics,
Aestheticism, and Music
From
Aestheticism to Materialism
Endnote - Main
Bibliographic Data
A core of my late
professional activity has been to understand the guidelines for the ongoing
computerization of society on the basis of its consequences. In studying the
essence of computerization I see its relations to
depths psychology and to the process of increase mathematization and logic
structuring of science. I did already address this in mainly two previous works
on the conception of computers as embodied mathematics and logic, and on computerization as design of “empty” logic that I call “logic acrobatics”.
Lately I have reflected
upon what can be learnt from what has happened to modern physics as seen from
its increased mathematization in quantum physics. The following text is a
commentary starting with the English summary of a Swedish PhD dissertation by Suzanne Gieser on the relation between the theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli and
the analytical psychologist Carl Jung. It was later published as a book in
revised translation as The Innermost Kernel. Depth
Psychology and Quantum Physics: Wolfgang Pauli’s Dialogue with C.G. Jung. (See bibliographic details of the dissertation and of
the book in a note at the end of this essay).
Gieser’s work is overwhelming in its scholarly ambition and
richness of detailed references, testifying an intense and long personal
commitment that would require a comparable commitment from whoever wishes to
challenge or even comment it. Disregarding the works of philosophers that I
tried to study, I have only seen a similar writing style and tour de force in
my academic engagement with another author’s “encyclopedic” doctoral thesis
about Gnosticism and computer science. It was apparently irrefutable, consisting of more
than 700 pages with a bibliography of almost 4500 entries, partly generated in
more than 2800 notes.
Here and at my age (84), however, I will cut it short
by means of some cursory comments on the English summary of the original
Swedish text, together with somewhat unstructured reflections on the whole
English and Swedish text. It may be like a bird pecking at a tallow ball
hanging in the garden, since I perceive Gieser as standing on the shoulder of giants. It would be like reviewing Bertrand Russell’s “A
History of Western Philosophy” when I read it as a young man, with the
difference that I now have important reservations about it. In this sense my
text may be seen as a derivative work, or a great conversation. They are giants in each one of their own particular
historical stream of thought some of them having met
occasionally, and only in Gieser’s text all of them
are forced to meet each other in their likewise forced relation to the also
giant Carl Jung. She cannot, however, force a meeting with the scientific
community of e.g. the Science of Consciousness with its thoughts about e.g. Quantum Physics and
Consciousness represented by physicists
such as Roger Penrose and Sabine Hossenfelder (cf. my references in the essay on computerization), and
thoughts about panpsychism that would submerge all her argumentation . It is
what I myself experience when trying to share thoughts about the present text
of mine and about Jung with common cultured and educated engineers who already
motivated me to write a paper on Information and Debate. All this stands behind my
motivation to problematize and to write the present text.
My message in this essay will be that the
dialogue between Pauli and Jung is valuable mainly for improving the
personality of the scientist as expressed in his scientific work, as
exemplified here in the advanced field of Quantum Physics – QF (also known as
Quantum Mechanics – QM). Nevertheless, a better personality may also lead to a
change of research focus towards trying to answer better questions.
For the orientation of my reader, the Swedish
PhD dissertation’s English summary
(Spp. 417-421 = Swedish version pp. 417-421) of The Innermost Kernel. Depth
Psychology and Quantum Physics: Wolfgang Pauli's Dialogue with C.G. Jung, will be reproduced here below, first in its
original form. It is done in order to respect and make justice to the author
since this text will be chopped when followed by the same text completed
with my links to the respective terms, and interspersed with some of my
comments:
Original layout of English Summary
ENGLISH SUMMARY OF The Innermost Kernel. Depth Psychology and Quantum
Physics: Wolfgang Pauli's Dialogue with C.G. Jung.
This thesis focuses on the
dialogue between the depth psychologist C.G. Jung (1875-1961) and the physicist
Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958). The central question of the thesis asks: Why was
Pauli interested in Jung's psychology, and how was this interest expressed? One
plausible answer to this question would be that Pauli needed psychological
treatment for personal reasons. The author will try to show, however, that
several factors in Pauli's interest do not allow us to accept such a simple
answer. A more comprehensive picture emerges when his interest in Jung is
examined in the light of Pauli's own intellectual background - both his
cultural and philosophical roots as well as his scientific temperament, which
contributed to the development of quantum physics during the years of his
intimate collaboration with Niels Bohr under the influence of the philosophical
atmosphere in which the Copenhagen school thrived.
I take as my point of
departure Pauli's extensive scientific correspondence, with special emphasis on
those parts of the correspondence in which he airs and refines his particular
interests in epistemological, psychological and philosophical issues. The
correspondence with Jung himself is of course one central focus, but attention
is also paid to his communications with individuals familiar with and involved
in Jung's psychology, especially the physicist Markus Fierz,
Jung's assistant and co-worker Marie-Louise von Franz, and Jung's secretary
Aniela Jaffé. All in all more than 400 letters
furnish the foundation of the thesis.
The work is divided into
three main sections. The first presents the general historical, intellectual
and philosophical setting of the dialogue between Pauli and Jung. The second
section takes a closer look at the connection between physics and depth
psychology, by focusing on two representatives of the Copenhagen school and
presenting their views on this matter: Pascual Jordan and Niels Bohr. A
comparison of Bohr's and Jung's epistemological standpoints is also undertaken.
The third section discusses the specific philosophical bases of Pauli's
interest in the psychology of C.G. Jung and explores some of the main issues
discussed in their correspondence.
The first section of the
thesis thus sets the stage, reviewing the general cultural and intellectual
climate of Europe between the turn of the century and the period between the
world wars. The intent of this section is to place the epistemological crisis
which inundated physics during the emergence of quantum physics, as well as the
dramatis personae of this process, into the context of the history of ideas.
At the centre
we find Wolfgang Pauli: the man himself, his intellectual background, and his
specific role in the creation of quantum physics as a member of the Copenhagen
group. Accordingly, due to the influence it had on Pauli's thinking, a great
deal of attention is paid to the philosophy of Niels Bohr. The author will
attempt to demonstrate in what way his later interest in Jung's psychology was
nurtured by Pauli's close collaboration with Bohr. The connection becomes more
intelligible by placing the foundations of Bohr's philosophy in the context of
the philosophical climate of those times, a climate characterized by its focus
on man's experience and the possibility of communicating that experience. Put
simply, the focus was on the subject-object relation.
The development of quantum
mechanics displays a completely novel turn in physics: an interest in the
observer rather than the observed. Bohr's analysis is often described as being
extraordinary and pioneering, unique in the history of science. His method for
arriving at an interpretation of quantum theory free of contradictions led him
to delve deep into the analytical maze, moving from a purely scientific
analysis, to an epistemological analysis, to an analysis of perception, and
finally to an analysis of the origin of scientific concepts themselves.
The philosophical basis of
the Copenhagen group's interdisciplinary search for a new understanding of the
basic problems of scientific knowledge was heavily criticized by the adherents
of a more classical scientific criterion, such as Einstein, who accused them of
positivism. The logical positivists of the Vienna circle, on the other hand,
after failing to tie the Copenhagen physicists to their doctrine, accused them
of vitalism and irrationalism. Even today, Bohr is often described as
"obscure".
Similar accusations have
been levelled at the work of Jung, seen variously as guilty of vitalism,
mysticism and irrationalism on the one hand, and of positivism on the other. In
this connection, in order to clarify these labels, an analysis is undertaken of
the philosophical claims of positivism, phenomenalism, pragmatism,
instrumentalism and realism with respect to concepts such as metaphysics,
irrationality and mysticism. These various doctrines are presented in
historical context, but they are also examined from a semantic perspective.
The second section of the
thesis concentrates on the interest in psychology on the part of the members of
the Copenhagen school. It begins with an examination of another member of the
group: Pascual Jordan, who saw his so-called "radical positivism" as
a unifying epistemological foundation for physics, depth psychology and
parapsychology. We then take a closer look at Bohr's interest in psychology.
Taking our cues from Bohr's epistemology, steeped as it was in the Danish
intellectual milieu of his time and inspired by the likes of Poul Martin Møller, Søren Kierkegaard and Harald Høffding,
we show the proximity of Bohr's view and the psychology of William James - also
important for C.G. Jung.
A comparison of Bohr's
epistemological perspective and Jung's concept of "the reality of the
psyche" suggests that Pauli found in Jung a natural continuation and deepening
of Bohr's epistemological outlook. If Bohr moved from a purely scientific
analysis toward a more epistemological-psychological approach, then Jung can be
said to have moved in the opposite direction. He began with purely psychiatric
research and went on from the individual to an analysis of general human behaviour and ideas through his study of mythology and
folklore. From the history of religions he went on to
early scientific conceptions, and traced evidence of archetypal patterning in
the formation of ideas and theories. From there, on this notion, he moved even
further to investigate the relation between conceptions of matter and spirit,
primarily by studying early alchemical texts. His foremost ambition was to
evoke a clearer image of the human mind and its workings, by looking into how
man through the ages has tried to solve this problem of matter and spirit. Therefore he was naturally interested in contemporary
discussions of the age-old problem, as it was then being articulated in a new
form with the emergence of quantum theory.
As important as it is to
uncover the similarities between Bohr's and Jung's perspectives, it is equally
important to underline the differences. The most obvious difference may be seen
in the debate between Pauli and Bohr over the term "the detached
observer". This debate can be understood in the light of two different
conceptions of the role of the human subject and his mind in the creative
formation of ideas in science. The difference comes down to divergent views on
the psychology of man: the difference between a cognitive psychology of
consciousness and a depth psychology of the unconscious.
Finally, in the third
section, Pauli's philosophical antecedents and his position with respect to
C.G. Jung's psychology will be scrutinized. Can Pauli's early reading of
Schopenhauer, whom he called his "favourite
author", be seen as a link to his later interest in Jung? Further
questions that will be examined are: To what degree did Pauli's views
correspond with those of Jung? What was Pauli's attitude toward Jungian
psychology? The author hopes to shed some light on these questions in
connection with an analysis of the central issues discussed in the Pauli-Jung
correspondence.
One of the main issues
aired in this correspondence concerns parallels in the development of the new
physics and that of depth psychology. Pauli notes the kind of epistemological
problems brought to the fore by the new perspectives in these disciplines. Both
sciences, in the course of independent work, had run up against certain
barriers displaying similar basic characteristics. The object under
investigation, together with the human investigator's sense organs, thought
processes and their extensions, i.e. measuring instruments and procedures, were
found to be inextricably bound together. The impossibility of an exact
demarcation of subject and object is thus a dilemma shared by physics and
psychology, but Pauli went on to discover parallels in the new concepts
formulated within both disciplines for solving the dilemma. This conceptual
parallelism formed the basis for Pauli's hypothesis - inspired by alchemical
thought - that it was possible to develop a psycho-physical neutral language,
which could then be employed to describe the processes which underlie matter
and psyche. Pauli was also interested in Jung's concept of the archetype, which
he strove to clarify and refine. Most of all he argued that the archetype per
se - as a structural factor - should not be construed as psychic, but should
rather be defined as being beyond all labels referring to either psyche or
matter, yet underlying both. Taking as his point of departure his own dreams
and their spontaneous production of numinous symbols, he hoped to understand
the psychological processes attending the continuous emergence of concepts and
ideas in contemporary scientific discovery. This issue was explored in a
speculative essay not intended for publication, called Modern examples of
"background physics". Pauli also wanted to utilize the concept of the
archetype as an epistemological tool in the analysis of the history of science,
and he used this approach in his study The influence
of archetypal ideas on the scientific theories of Kepler. This essay was
published together with Jung's essay on synchronicity in the volume The interpretation of nature and the psyche. Pauli was very
interested in the issue of synchronicity, and the lengthy discussions between
the two men can be said to have given Jung the impetus to publish something on
the subject. For Pauli, the issue was connected with the search for a new kind
of natural law, a law which could deal with the unique, the creative and the
psychic in the description of nature. Pauli's later involvement in the theory
of evolution and its concept of random mutation was inspired by the same
motives. A scientific theory including such a new kind of natural law would be
a dynamic theory of becoming, thus including the irrational factor in nature.
The development of such a scientific theory would be consistent with the
epistemological lessons of quantum physics, and would present something
altogether new in the history of western science, which since classical times
had been forced to deal in closed, rational and static models. Pauli also
viewed the conflict between Bohr and Einstein in this light.
While probing into the
nature of the archetype versus the function of archetypal images and symbols,
Pauli also inquired into the nature of mathematics, and sought to uncover a
possible identity between archetypal patterns that might well underlie
mathematics, numbers and geometry. The basis for all these ideas was the
age-old question of the relation between concepts and sense-perceptions,
between theories and reality, and finally between mind and matter. If further
developed, Pauli hoped, Jung's concept of the reality of the symbol could be
the beginning of a possible answer to this enigma. Behind his search for a
philosophical and scientific perspective which could unite these opposites into
a single integrated world-view lay Pauli's need for a symmetrical approach, a
need which expressed itself in all areas of his thinking: personal,
philosophical, religious and scientific.
There is a wealth of other
issues to be found in the correspondence between these two giants; it is
impossible to explore them all within the scope of one thesis - that will be
the task of future studies. The main purpose of the present work is to present
the dialogue between Pauli and Jung in its historical and philosophical
context, and to examine in some detail a number of the central issues in order
to present them as part of a more comprehensive whole.
I wish to thank M. D.
Michael Bransome for help with the English summary.
And now the same text
complete with links and interspersed with comments:
This thesis focuses on the dialogue between the depth psychologist C.G. Jung (1875-1961) and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958). The central question of the thesis
asks: Why was Pauli interested in Jung's psychology, and how was this interest
expressed? One plausible answer to this question would be that Pauli needed
psychological treatment for personal reasons. The author will try to show,
however, that several factors in Pauli's interest do not allow us to accept
such a simple answer. A more comprehensive picture emerges when his interest in
Jung is examined in the light of Pauli's own intellectual background - both his
cultural and philosophical roots as well as his scientific temperament, which
contributed to the development of quantum physics during the years of his
intimate collaboration with Niels Bohr under the influence of the philosophical
atmosphere in which the Copenhagen school thrived.
In contrast with the given central question of
the thesis, my own question is to understand the how Pauli’s behavior possibly
reveals problems of scientific method in mathematized quantum physics – QF –
that may explain the impact of computerization seen as embodied mathematics and logic. It requires detailed knowledge of the field that
transcend my superficial engineering training in Principles of Quantum
Mechanics. On the basis of my study
of Gieser’s whole Swedish dissertation and the
international evaluations of its revision as a published book, I judge that they
display sufficient value that makes them useful for my inquiry:
I take as my point of departure Pauli's extensive scientific
correspondence, with special emphasis on those parts of the correspondence in
which he airs and refines his particular interests in epistemological,
psychological and philosophical issues. The correspondence with Jung himself is
of course one central focus, but attention is also paid to his communications
with individuals familiar with and involved in Jung's psychology, especially
the physicist Markus Fierz, Jung's assistant and co-worker Marie-Louise von Franz, and Jung's secretary Aniela Jaffé. All in all more than
400 letters furnish the foundation of the thesis.
Beyond the 400 letters that furnish the
foundations of the thesis it is to be remarked that the I counted the number of
referred printed books to be about 260.
The work is divided into three main sections. The first presents the
general historical, intellectual and philosophical setting of the dialogue
between Pauli and Jung. The second section takes a closer look at the
connection between physics and depth psychology, by focusing on two
representatives of the Copenhagen school and presenting their views on this
matter: Pascual Jordan and Niels Bohr. A comparison of Bohr's and
Jung's epistemological standpoints is also undertaken. The third section
discusses the specific philosophical bases of Pauli's interest in the
psychology of C.G. Jung and explores some of the main issues discussed in their
correspondence.
The first section of the thesis [“Depth psychology and quantum
physics: Introduction to Wolfgang Pauli’s dialog with C.G. Jung”, Spp. 3-114]
thus sets the stage, reviewing the general cultural and intellectual climate of
Europe between the turn of the century and the period between the world wars.
The intent of this section is to place the epistemological crisis which
inundated physics during the emergence of quantum mechanics, as well as the dramatis personae of this process, into the context of the
history of ideas.
At the centre we find Wolfgang Pauli: the man himself,
his intellectual background, and his specific role in the creation of quantum
physics as a member of the Copenhagen group. Accordingly, due to the influence
it had on Pauli's thinking, a great deal of attention is paid to the philosophy
of Niels Bohr. The author will attempt to demonstrate in what way his later
interest in Jung's psychology was nurtured by Pauli's close collaboration with
Bohr. The connection becomes more intelligible by placing the foundations of
Bohr's philosophy in the context of the philosophical climate of those times, a
climate characterized by its focus on man's experience and the possibility of
communicating that experience. Put simply, the focus was on the subject-object
relation.
The development of quantum mechanics displays a completely novel turn in
physics: an interest in the observer rather than the observed. Bohr's analysis
is often described as being extraordinary and pioneering, unique in the history
of science. His method for arriving at an interpretation of quantum theory free
of contradictions led him to delve deep into the analytical maze, moving from a
purely scientific analysis, to an epistemological analysis, to an analysis of
perception, and finally to an analysis of the origin of scientific concepts
themselves.
It is to be remarked that the subject-object
relation in QF also means the observer’s experience of the object that is not
object but rather the experience of measurements of mathematized entities by
means of measuring instruments that in turn embody physical theories or
presuppositions about the measurement process. This means that the instrument is also an observer or that the
observations are in part made by whoever builds or chooses the instrument. All
this implies the relevance of more or less hidden presuppositions, which I have
only seen addressed by Jan Brouwer in the discussion of
foundations of mathematics. And I consider Brouwer’s work as I present it in an
earlier paper of mine, as a main source of my doubt
about Gieser’s thesis, a matter that will be
mentioned but not be developed again here.
The philosophical basis of the Copenhagen group's interdisciplinary
search for a new understanding of the basic problems of scientific knowledge
was heavily criticized by the adherents of a more classical scientific
criterion, such as Einstein, who accused them of positivism. The logical positivists of the Vienna circle, on the other hand, after failing to tie the
Copenhagen physicists to their doctrine, accused them of vitalism and irrationalism. Even today, Bohr is often described as
"obscure".
Similar accusations have been levelled at the work of Jung, seen
variously as guilty of vitalism, mysticism and irrationalism on the one hand, and of
positivism on the other. In this connection, in order to clarify these labels,
an analysis is undertaken of the philosophical claims of positivism, phenomenalism, pragmatism, instrumentalism and realism [as represented by Henry Folse in “The Philosophy of Niels Bohr”] with respect
to concepts such as metaphysics, irrationality and mysticism. These various doctrines are
presented in historical context, but they are also examined from a semantic
perspective.
The second section [“The new physics and psychology”, Spp.
115-182] of the thesis concentrates on the interest in psychology on the part
of the members of the Copenhagen school. It begins with an examination of
another member of the group: Pascual Jordan, who saw his so-called "radical
positivism" as a unifying epistemological foundation for physics, depth
psychology and parapsychology. We then take a closer look at Bohr's interest in
psychology. Taking our cues from Bohr's epistemology, steeped as it was in the
Danish intellectual milieu of his time and inspired by the likes of Poul Martin Møller, Søren Kierkegaard and Harald Høffding, we show the proximity of Bohr's view and the
psychology of William James - also important for C.G. Jung.
Regarding Pascual Jordan as related to
parapsychology Gieser does not dwell into the role of
David Bohm in QF. I wish only to mention him and direct the reader to another
essay of mine on Computer as Embodied
Mathematics and Logic where he is commented in the
context of the exploitation of QF in the feminist agenda.
For the rest: to the extent that the psychology
of William James is appreciated in terms of philosophical pragmatism, it shows
that Bohr’s primary interest was to see the new QF as being useful for future
applications, in the sense of that “it works” (more on this below). That is:
that its truth corresponds to its ability to achieve anonymously willed
results, independently from ethical considerations. Cf. nuclear weapons.
A comparison of Bohr's epistemological perspective and Jung's concept of
"the reality of the psyche" suggests that Pauli found in Jung a
natural continuation and deepening of Bohr's epistemological outlook. If Bohr
moved from a purely scientific analysis toward a more
epistemological-psychological approach, then Jung can be said to have moved in
the opposite direction. He began with purely psychiatric research and went on
from the individual to an analysis of general human behaviour
and ideas through his study of mythology and folklore. From the history of religions he went on to early scientific conceptions, and
traced evidence of archetypal patterning
[my italics] in the formation of ideas and theories. From there, on this
notion, he moved even further to investigate the relation between conceptions of matter and spirit [my italics],
primarily by studying early alchemical texts. His foremost ambition was to evoke a clearer image of the human
mind and its workings, by looking into how man through the ages has tried to
solve this problem of matter and spirit. Therefore he
was naturally interested in contemporary discussions of the age-old problem, as
it was then being articulated in a new form with the emergence of quantum
theory.
As important as it is to uncover the similarities between Bohr's and
Jung's perspectives, it is equally important to underline the differences. The
most obvious difference may be seen in the debate between Pauli and Bohr over
the term "the detached observer". This debate can be understood in
the light of two different conceptions of the role of the human subject and his
mind in the creative formation of ideas in science. The difference comes down
to divergent views on the psychology of man: the difference between a cognitive
psychology of consciousness and a depth psychology of the unconscious.
Please observe the reference to “cognitive
psychology of consciousness” that refers to the difficulty of relating Jung’s
and Pauli’s interest for depth psychology to what Pauli really conceived and
was able to communicate to the QF-community of scientists and of what today is
referred to as the community of “Science of consciousness”.
Furthermore: it is the archetypal patterning
that is related to solution of the problem of matter and spirit and is referred
below also as matter and psyche (and/or soul), physics and psychology, object
and subject – all this implies the need of (see below): “the search for a new
kind of natural law, a law which could deal with the unique, the creative and
the psychic in the description of nature. Pauli's later involvement in the
theory of evolution and its concept of random mutation was inspired by the same
motives.” And it implies further the need to “develop a psycho-physical neutral
language, which could then be employed to describe the processes which underlie
matter and psyche.”
Finally, in the third section
[“Pauli and Jung”, Spp. 183-416], Pauli's philosophical antecedents and his
position with respect to C.G. Jung's psychology will be scrutinized. Can
Pauli's early reading of Schopenhauer, whom he called his "favourite
author", be seen as a link to his later interest in Jung? Further
questions that will be examined are: To what degree did Pauli's views
correspond with those of Jung? What was Pauli's attitude toward Jungian
psychology? The author hopes to shed some light on these questions in
connection with an analysis of the central issues discussed in the Pauli-Jung
correspondence.
One of the main issues aired in this correspondence concerns parallels
in the development of the new physics and that of depth psychology. Pauli notes
the kind of epistemological problems brought to the fore by the new
perspectives in these disciplines. Both sciences, in the course of independent
work, had run up against certain barriers displaying similar basic
characteristics. The object under investigation, together with the human
investigator's sense organs, thought processes and their extensions, i.e.
measuring instruments and procedures, were found to be inextricably bound
together. The impossibility of an exact demarcation of subject and object is
The demarcation between subject and object is a
central, important consideration (missing here) in the discussion about
introversion vs. extraversion in Jung’s theory of types, and it is the object
of the sixth volume of his collected works with the overall title Psychological Types. Jung shows in this
context (CW6, §§ 883 ff.) that he is
conscious, in his work on types, that already Greek philosophy and medicine
were considering the interface and integration of the human physical body with
the soul and the environmental physical world. Considering that various
scientists, even among those who work with QF, can be roughly close or related
to different types, there is the problem of what that “demarcation” means, not
the least in relation to the concept of abstraction
that is central to mathematics, and how it will be treated in QF. As far as
I could see, this is not discussed in Gieser’s text
and it is one of its weaknesses. As a self-imposed restriction in this essay I
will not go into it since it may be considered as a research project by itself,
and only wish to point it out for interested readers of this paper. All this
despite of my intuition that the rounding-up of one’s type is the result of
what depth-psychology calls individuation.
Since there is much quackery in psychology in
general and in this area in particular especially since the outset of the New
Age, I wish to warn
prospective researchers. Part of such a research will be to delimit the
psychology of types from certain popularizations of supposed types, useful as some may judge them to
be. One example of such popularization of “types” in management consulting as
in the book Surrounded by Idiots, related to the names of William Moulton Marston, Walter Clarke, Bill Bonstetter, and best summarized by Wikipedia in the article on the so-called DISC model.
thus a dilemma shared by physics and psychology, but
Pauli went on to discover parallels in the new concepts formulated within both
disciplines for solving the dilemma. This conceptual parallelism formed the
basis for Pauli's hypothesis - inspired by alchemical thought - that it was
possible to develop a psycho-physical
neutral language [my italics], which could then be employed to describe the
processes which underlie matter and psyche. Pauli was also
Regarding the interest in the processes which
underlie matter and psyche it is interesting to notice that it was this
interest which also underlies the problem of drugs beyond classical alcohol, as
it has gradually dominated especially the rationalized western world beginning
with the New Age. An example is considered in New age seekers: MDMA use as an adjunct to spiritual pursuit. Such drugs represent, as alcohol and smoking do, a
link between mind and matter, and we will suggest that the mathematics applied
to virtual reality – VR as to QF may have analog effects raising the question
of what is the difference. Cf. my reference to Aldous Huxley in the essay on Computers as Embodied
Mathematics and Logic and reference to drugs in Information and Theology. All this while secularization does not allow an
understanding of the meaning of the forgotten Christian Eucharist.
Interested in Jung's concept of the archetype, which he strove to
clarify and refine. Most of all he argued that the archetype per se - as a
structural factor - should not be construed as psychic, but should rather be
defined as being beyond all labels referring to either psyche or matter, yet
underlying both. Taking as his point of departure his own dreams and their
spontaneous production of numinous symbols, he hoped to understand the psychological
processes attending the continuous emergence of concepts and ideas in
contemporary scientific discovery. This issue was explored in a speculative
essay not intended for publication, called Modern examples of "background
physics". Pauli also wanted to utilize the concept of the archetype as an
epistemological tool in the analysis of the history of science, and he used
this approach in his study The Influence of Archetypal Ideas on the Scientific
Theories of Kepler. This essay was published together with Jung's essay on synchronicity in the volume The interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. Pauli was very interested in the issue of
synchronicity, and the lengthy discussions between the two men can be said to
have given Jung the impetus to publish something on the subject. For Pauli, the
issue was connected with the search for a
new kind of natural law [my italics], a law which could deal with the
unique, the creative and the psychic in the description of nature. Pauli's
later involvement in the theory of evolution and its concept of random mutation
was inspired by the same motives.
A scientific theory including such a new kind of natural law would be a
dynamic theory of becoming, thus including the irrational factor in nature. The
development of such a scientific theory would be consistent with the
epistemological lessons of quantum physics, and would present something
altogether new in the history of western science, which since classical times
had been forced to deal in closed, rational and static models. Pauli also
viewed the conflict between Bohr and Einstein in this light.
What is not mentioned about western science
having been “forced since classical time to deal in closed, rational, and
static models”, is that most models are not static depending upon what is meant
by that it. It was the need to not be “static” that lies behind the development
of differential (infinitesimal) calculus. Furthermore, this development was a step in the
increasing mathematization of science
in oblivion of the foundations of mathematics turning into in an assembly of
“mathematical tools”, which is one main problem in what we will be referring
to.
While probing into the nature of the archetype versus the function of
archetypal images and symbols, Pauli also inquired into the nature of
mathematics, and sought to uncover a possible identity between archetypal
patterns that might well underlie mathematics, numbers and geometry. The basis
for all these ideas was the age-old question of the relation between concepts
and sense-perceptions, between theories and reality, and finally between mind
and
I will return below to the question of the
“nature of mathematics”, whatever nature is
or should be, in relation to the name of Jan Brouwer and his inquiry into the
foundations of mathematics. It is a mathematics (and associate mathematical
logic) that I equate with its embodiment in computers which consequently appear
in the title of his essay. In any case, I think that the reference above to
“archetypal patterns” that underline numbers (the few initial 1,2,3,4…] should not be extended to archetypal patterns
of mathematics. Both of them should rather be searched among the (Apollonian?) archetypal patterns that
take possession of those minds that get caught by mathematics as it relates to
masculinity. Hints may be found in the works of e.g. Robert L. Moore, Robert Bly, and other sources in my presentation of Reason and Gender. Eventually people, including scientists, can get
caught by mathematics into inept mathematical play. Or, then, into “mysticism”
as the entanglement of “Number pi” or
of “Fibonacci number” and a kind of summary such as in Paul Hoffman’s book Archimedes Revenge that I bought more than 30 years ago, written in honor of the Scientific American - famous Martin Gardner. It leads my thoughts
further to addiction to aestheticist intellectual drugs such as computer
gaming.
Pauli should have had access, as Gieser did but without drawing ultimate conclusions, to
Marie-Louise von Franz’s book Number and Time:
Reflections toward a Unification of Depth Psychology and Physics, (German original published in 1970, after Pauli’s
death). Franz quotes (p.29) the mathematician Hermann Weyl who had turned from
Brouwer’s approach to his opponent David Hilbert regarding the view of
foundations of mathematics: he yet
expressed his doubts in that “it is surprising that a construct created by mind
itself, the sequence of the integers […] assumes a similar aspect of obscurity
and deficiency when viewed from the axiomatic angle”. I find the most
insightful view on the matter and on the importance of neglected spirit in
theology came from what Franz’s mentions (p. 204 f.) about the idea of a magical
idea-computer celebrated in the ars magna of Ramon Llull (ca. 1235-1315) who is mentioned as a precursor of the computer and
pioneer or computation theory. She recalls that he “invented a mandala-shaped
cybernetic machine which he hoped would answer all the questions put to it. […]
The bottom [central, my note] circle
was inscribed with the word “God” […] This magical machine naturally failed,
just as I am quite sure the modern wish-fulfilling dreams of replacing the
human brain by a giant computer will also fail”. I see this is as being what
happens when using “obscurity and deficiency” in trying to understand what
mathematics is and does to the human mind.
For the rest, the relation between sense-perceptions,
theories and reality, mind and matter have been one main worry in the
theorizing about virtual reality – VR, and to which we will return below. In my
mind they show the challenge, if not the debacle, of the understanding of what
it is all about.
matter. If further developed, Pauli hoped, Jung's concept of the reality
of the symbol could be the beginning of a possible answer to this enigma.
Behind his search for a philosophical and scientific perspective which could
unite these opposites into a single integrated world-view lay Pauli's need for
a symmetrical approach, a need which expressed itself in all areas of his
thinking: personal, philosophical, religious and scientific.
“To unite these opposites into a single
integrated world-view”, combined with my last commentary above on a new kind of
natural law and the development of a psycho-physical neutral language indicates
that what is sought is a new conception of the “philosopher’s stone”, the mythic alchemical
substance. It is not mentioned in the book but I suppose that in terms of
consciousness this is for us the union of opposites corresponds to the coniunctio (more on this below). And this is done without
problematizing the question of choice of
archetype, while Jung’s emphasis is often on the problem and danger of being possessed by an archetype as even
scientists and mathematicians are. It is the forgotten theological question of
the Discernment of Spirits. Anyway, Gieser’s above text
is further commented below, together with reflections on the “nature of
mathematics” besides archetypal patterns.
There is a wealth of other issues to be found in the correspondence
between these two giants; it is impossible to explore them all within the scope
of one thesis - that will be the task of future studies. The main purpose of
the present work is to present the dialogue between Pauli and Jung in its
historical and philosophical context, and to examine in some detail a number of
the central issues in order to present them as part of a more comprehensive
whole.
I wish to thank M. D. Michael Bransome for
help with the English summary.
--------
So far the Swedish PhD
dissertation’s English summary, edited with some of my own italics, and interspersed with my few occasional comments.
------------------
Matter and Spirit
In the preface to the English version to which I
have had only partial access but use here extensively in order to spare
translation efforts, Gieser quotes (Ep. VII, meaning
English book version, p. VII) from a letter from Pauli to Ralph König, 10 March
1946:
To sum up, I should like to say that it seems that
there must be very deep connections between soul and matter and, hence, between
the physics and the psychology of the future, which are not yet conceptually
expressed in modern science. [–––] Such deep connections must surely exist,
because otherwise the human mind would not be able to discover concepts which
fit nature at all.
Let me start by noting that
“matter” often stands for physics, body and flesh. Soul is more vaguely grasped
since in these contexts soul is only one of possible
terms among such as mind, psyche, spirit, intellect, or less appropriately,
head and brain that should be understood as “material”. The choice is important
since in various contexts there is a search for an interpretation of QF as a
sort of harmonization or synthesis between psyche and matter. Psyche and Matter are often recurring
related concepts in Gieser’s texts but I am curious
about a comparison between Pauli’s
conclusions about them, and Marie-Louise von Franz’s in the book Psyche and Matter that Gieser mentions but
does not comment.
Now, what must be mentioned
in the light of Jungian depth psychology is that Gieser’s
text never mentions, except as vague nod (Ep. 150), that an “archetypal image”
of the integration between psyche and (body) matter secondarily sought in QF,
can be originally represented by the physical and spiritual intercourse in love between man and woman. They represent the cultural archetypal masculine and feminine (originating the
misunderstandings and abuses of “gender”).
It is the question of Coniunctio (unity of opposites) where the integrated product is
the likewise archetypal creative child, corresponding to the child archetype related to “Puer aeternus”. But
culturally and most importantly it is related to the Christ Child (beyond Bala
Krishna). In the Catholic
tradition this is conceived as the sacrament of lifelong marriage with its
indissolubility that in Jung’s perspective enables and “forces” the process of
individuation through a withdrawal of psychological projections of anima-animus upon the spouse, instead
of allowing them to keep split upon several occasional human objects. In the
same tradition it is also mainly the meaning of Christ Child being begotten by Spirit in the body-matter of
virgin Mary. The
intercourse is theologically a meeting with God himself who alone can create
life in the child, and psychologically a meeting with the God-archetype in the
Self, as suggested in some of my previous work on Gender and Reason. This has historical precedents in the doctrine of Tantra, described as esoteric traditions of Hinduism and
Buddhism developed in India. Not to
mention various difficult interpretations of, and speculations on Yin and Yang, related to the Confucian I Ching in the Wilhelm-Baynes
translation that Jung is known to have written a famous foreword to.
In this perspective it is
easy to imagine that Pauli’s own life drama had made difficult, if not
precluded, such an interpretation. In the year 1929
Pauli had taken the decision to leave the Catholic Church and in December the
same year he had married a cabaret performer (Käthe Deppner, relevantly retrievable in the Internet) in Berlin.
Early in February 1930 he tells a fried that all is not well with the marriage.
He describes the matrimonial ties as very loose and gives him to
understand that he would not be surprised if his wife were to leave the home.
In November the separation duly happened. She left him for a chemist whom she
had already met before she married Pauli. He was
devastated. (Ep. 2). The divorce marked the start of a profound crisis in his
life. Gieser reports that by 1942 after
experience of psychological analysis in Jungian context followed by his
lifelong but childless marriage soon afterwards in 1934 (with Franca Bertram,
also relevantly retrievable in the net) he expanded his one-sided intellectual
personality and reached a totally
different way of looking at reality (Ep.142f.). It remains somewhat unclear
for me what it did “really” mean. I read somewhere in his collected works that
Jung recommends that whenever one hears of somebody who is particularly admired
and prestigiously dignified, one should try to hear from the spouse. Some food
of thought about how to know how Pauli really thought and who he was, can be
found in the comparison with the case of the private life of Albert Einstein. Despite of the world-wide cult of his sanctified
genius, whatever the (Kantian?) meaning of genius is, his private live suggests that also he could and should have been
analyzed and related to Jung’s psychology as Pauli did, and we could have
learnt more about the psychology of QF.
We can ask ourselves would
“a totally different way of looking at reality” meant for Pauli’s research on
physical reality. It is difficult to see that it required either the desired
archetypal influence on matter and psyche or the psycho-physical neutral
language. It is symptomatic that Charles P. Enz in a
book on Of Matter and Spirit refers to many
other relevant works such as H. van Erkelens
“Wolfgang Pauli and the spirit of matter”, and writes (Ep. 154f.):
For Pauli, to whom bodily children had been denied, this particle [the neutrino] irrationally plaid the role of a spiritual
child which had sprung from his life crisis. This he writes in one of his last
letters, dated 6 October 1958 […] “In fact, the story of this foolish child of
my life crisis (1030/31) – which also later behaved foolishly – begins with
those violent discussions between her [Lise Meitner] and Ellis on the continuous beta-spectrum which
immediately have awaked my interest.”
I mean that Pauli did not need a totally
different way of looking at reality in order to unconsciously feel the neutrino
as a child. It is, however, surprising that commentators who read and
understand that the neutrino could have played the role of a spiritual child
which had sprung from a masculine life crisis, do not imagine that also the
whole QF could play the role of a spiritual child that is sought by
unconscious, archetypally possessed physicists because of a cultural crisis in
mathematized Western science. The analogy, however, implies that such a Western
science is “masculine”, and the child is not a child who would have sprung from
a union of masculine and feminine, when the feminine itself, after the
rejection of Romanticism, was being masculinized in the West, e.g. as masculinities in American
culture, on the track of radical
feminism and animus possession.
It is interesting to note that Gieser remarks (Ep. 142) that Pauli
also had initially a very prejudiced view of women, and she comments it as
revealing that Pauli gradually understood that his contempt for women was based
on the repression and projection of a part of his own personality, his ‘dark’
feminine side (to use Jung’s term, his anima), which had not been allowed to
develop. Concerning Gieser’s neglect of the
intercourse-coniunctio problem mentioned earlier it
is interesting that she does not consider and problematize the difficulty
represented by the modern woman’s repression of the her “light” (or dark?)
masculine side as expressed especially in radical feminism as I tried to treat
in Reason and Gender, and several blog inserts such as on #MeToo, on the SCUM Manifest, and Feminism in Quantum
Mechanics.
The question is to which extent we
can hope that choice or, rather, possession
by archetypes can foster an integration between matter and psyche, while
the issue also awakens the unexplored thought that Gieser
herself may follow, or be possessed by, some important explanatory archetype.
In view of she herself being a psychotherapist and
analytical psychologist, and of her own going deep into Pauli’s personality
including his private life, it is remarkable that Gieser
does not even try to report going into the observer, i.e. herself, as she
reports that it was being required for observers and their measurement process
in the QF-scientific work. Incidentally, in view of the Bible’s “beam in my own
eye” (Matthew 7.5), I have already tried to report something relevant
about myself in the context of theology and gender.
In analytical psychology, however,
the archetypal approach was not the only option. Another related approach is by
means of the by means of the Jung’s Psychological
Types (CW6) that the reader of this present text can see summarized in Wikipedia. In this respect it is tempting for Gieser’s reader to assume that both she and Pauli are
closer to the thinking-sensation type
with less conscious feeling and intuition. This could motivate the
commitment to the theme of her dissertation.
The “rounding-up” of one’s type is the result of the process of individuation that is fostered by coniunctio. On
the basis of the available information this can be guessed only for Pauli, but
none of them suggest closeness to the strongest possible guiding archetype in
this process, the god-archetype.
Returning to the above
mentioned “legitimate” spiritual-physical child of QF would assumedly not been
a demonic child akin to the neutrino, who would have (up to now) at least
endangered the world population in the form of a contribution to the knowledge
for development of a nuclear weapon. A re-orientation of Western science, not
only of its forefront represented by QF, could have been a rework of Joseph Needham’s
Science and Civilization in
China. It would have been an
answer to Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European
Sciences, a sort of pedagogical
theological socio-psychology, a further development of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that would have facilitated world peace and a simple contented life, as
advocated in view of climate warming. Even if not a life in flaunty welfare
that is excluded by the inherent suffering in the human condition.
The psychological question
related to matter is included in Jung’s alchemical studies as concentrated in
his Collected Works (analysis of
Pauli’s dreams referred to in CW12, §§
45ff.) and extended elsewhere. Alchemical references are found in Gieser’s work but far from being detailed and developed as
from Jung’s work in, for instance, its relations to Christianism, while Jung’s
own relation to Christianism needs to be understood as I suggest in my presentation of his role in the study of Conscience and Truth. In
any case, peculiarly, enough the meeting of the masculine and feminine is mentioned
as when commenting the dream of the problematic father, who as Jung writes (CW12, §§59f., my italics):
“is the embodiment of the traditional spirit as expressed in religion or
a general philosophy of life, is standing in his way. He imprisons the dreamer
in the world of the conscious mind and its values. The traditional masculine
world with its intellectualism and rationalism is felt to be an impediment […]
The resistance of the conscious mind to the unconscious and the depreciation of
the latter were historical necessities in the development of the human psyche,
for otherwise the conscious mind would never have been able to differentiate
itself at all. But modern man’s
consciousness has strayed rather too far from the fact of the unconscious.”
In saying so, and
considering that the unconscious of man is unconsciously projected into the
woman, Jung is illustrating something that he expresses in more clear detail
elsewhere in a quotation I already wrote in a note (49) of a paper on Belief and Reason, which is found in his Collected Works (CW5,
#113, with a slightly edited layout, and my italics):
"If the flight from the world is
successful, man can build an inner, spiritual world which stands firm against
the onslaught of sense-impressions. The struggle with the world of senses
brought to birth a type of thinking independent of external factors. Man won
for himself that sovereignty of the idea which was able to
withstand the aesthetic impact, so that thought was no longer fettered by the
emotional effects of sense impressions, but could assert itself and even rise,
later, to reflection and observation. Man was now in position to enter into a
new and independent relationship with nature, to go on building upon the
foundations which the classical spirit had laid, and to take up once more the
natural link which the Christian retreat from the world had let fall. On this
newly-won spiritual level there was forged an alliance with the world and
nature which, unlike the old attitude, did not collapse before the magic of
external objects, but could regard them in the steady light of reflection.
Nevertheless, the attention lavished upon natural objects was infused with
something of old religious piety, and something of the old religious ethic
communicated itself to scientific truthfulness and honesty. Although at the
time of the Renaissance the antique feeling for nature visibly broke through in
art and in natural philosophy, and for a while thrust the Christian principle
into the background, the newly-won rational and intellectual stability of the
human mind nevertheless managed to hold its own and allowed it to penetrate
further and further into the depths of nature that earlier ages had hardly
suspected.
The more successful the penetration
and advance of the new scientific spirit proved to be, the more the latter - as
is usually the case with the victor - became the prisoner of the world it had
conquered. At the beginning of the present century a Christian writer could
still regard the modern spirit as a sort of second incarnation of the Logos
[...] It did not take us long to realize
that it was less a question of the incarnation of the Logos than of the descent
of the Anthropos or Nous into the dark embrace of Physis.
The world had not only been deprived of its gods, but had lost its soul.
Through the shifting of interest from the inner to the outer world our knowledge of nature was increased a thousandfold in comparison with earlier ages, but knowledge
and experience of the inner world were correspondingly reduced."
It is improbable that
quantum physicists in general and Pauli in particular would be able to counter
this cultural phenomenon by merely some readings, dialogue with Jung, and some
year of depth-psychological analysis based on dreams. Despite of being a
spiritually interested scientist, Pauli had programmatically left the Catholic
church and did not recognize his own second marriage as some sort of spiritual
rebirth with possible re-orientation of his profession. He may have continued
an uncounscious “descent of the Anthropos or Nous into the dark embrace of Physis”, masked by the assumption that the process of
mathematization, instead, implied a spiritualization (see below). He did not
even recognize the meaning of (the use of) advanced mathematics that, as remind
in Computers
as embodied mathematics and logic, had already been problematized by
Jan Brouwer in his foundational studies of the discipline. On the contrary,
mathematics in QF – equated to “spirit”, as music often also is as in Wagner’s and in music’s modernistic revolution, especially in serialism that I oppose to theologically inspired music - can be seen as having
been used manipulatively in order to relate measurements in logical networks. A
hint about such manipulations may be Grieser’s
account of Pauli’s “aversion to the Tamm-Dancoff
approximation
used by Heisenberg…” (E328f.), and can be further appreciated in the doubts and
controversies revealed in such texts as Did a scientist find a loophole in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle? They generate in turn the
following comment about the famous Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle:
The uncertainty principle presents a
philosophical challenge to one of our basic assumptions about the nature of
physical objects, namely, that physical variables have precise and definite objective
existence.
All this while the meaning itself of objective
and existence is called into question. In the meantime
atheists insist in the objective inexistence of God. It all recalls that
apparent absurdities of QF can be insulated from public and general scientific
criticism thanks to the opacity of prestigious esoteric mathematics that
borrows its prestige from its loose connection with a divinized concept of
intelligence and science, in lack of intellect and wisdom. This happens in
today’s computer science’s extreme claims in fanciful in artificial
intelligence – AI, as in quantum computing (cf. our talk about “quantum”), and as theoretical terminological
bewilderment about Virtual Reality – VR. They
are exemplified in a symposium paper by David
Chalmers (also here) on The Virtual as the Digital as they
can often appear associated to terms like truth, perception, illusion,
imagination, delusion, fantasy, deception, or mirage that depict what may be
also associated to human uneasiness for QF-phenomena. In VR-theorizing one can
see how the concept or reality itself
is diluted and becomes confused, sometimes appealing to (not typical of QF!) physicality in order to survive. It
happens also as in other branches of computer
science, space science and life sciences. But in QF itself, the scientist Carlo Rovelli that I consider in other essays
(here, here and here), dealing with “loop quantum gravity” and the “relational interpretation
of quantum mechanics”, problematizes very pedagogically in a couple of popular
books the concepts themselves of time and space. This to the point that the
reader wonders about their “existence” and the concept of existence itself,
which usually stands at the basis of trendy atheism. What about reality? QF is
insulated from criticism by the educated public shielded in nebulous
conceptions of “democracy” in determinations of science policy. And all this
may explain the rise of conspiracy
theories, as experienced in fake news and in the context of covid19-pandemics, as I
suggest in a blog insert.
It
is not only a question of the beauty
of the grand unified discipline of grand mathematics that in fact is not unified in its particular ad-hoc
developments and uses in QF. At the same time Bohr is reported to have agreed
that it is the abstract symbols of mathematical formalism that allow us to
predict the phenomenological expression of the atomic “objects” (E84).
Ultimately such views of mathematics lead to Pauli’s hope of a mathematical
integration between psychology and physics (E209, 347):
Pauli’s reply
to the question of the unifying link between our sensory impressions and our
concepts is thus the assumption of an objective order in the cosmos, an order
which structures not only matter but also our psyche and therefore our
conceptions. These structures are of a highly abstract nature, non-visual and
impossible to reproduce exactly in any ‘language’ known by us. On the other hand these underlying structures find expression in many
different linguistic forms, for example in artistic, theological, psychological
and physical language. An indication that one is approaching these structures
is that one is obliged to make use of abstract, multifarious symbols and
paradoxes. Mathematics might be the language that comes closest to these
structures.
Might it be
possible that the archetypes also structure matter? Pauli appeared convinced of
it. That this is so is suggested by the fact that it is apparently possible to
understand matter on a basis of mathematics, a discipline which both Kepler and
Poincaré saw as ‘the archetype of the beauty of the world’. From this angle
Pauli constructs an epistemological theory entirely of his own which we do not
find in Jung: at a certain level of abstraction our internal images and the
structures of the external objects come into congruence and overlap. When this happens man has an a-ha experience.
Let’s disregard now the rather generous use of concepts like structure as, in other contexts, function or object, or worse, mathematical
object. Elsewhere they
have deserved detailed elaboration, It is doubtful to relate mathematics to
archetype of beauty in the world without incurring into the problematic Kantian
relation between reason, ethics and aesthetics that I treat in my paper on computerization of
society. For the rest I understand from my look into the study of the foundations of
mathematics, that Jan Brouwer calls
the attention upon that it, as well as its closely related music,
derive their convincing power from its grounding in the apriority of time. The most a-priori
is probably close to the both creative and
dangerous collective unconscious, and consequently also
requires the operation of only a small part, or in any case only a part of the
human psyche.
Aesthetics, aestheticism, and music
Then let’s see the question
of aesthetics that turns into aestheticism, without ethics, and politics. The
case of Music. Concerning the faith in the aesthetics of “psychic spiritual”
mathematics as a sign of archetypal cosmic commonality between physics, psyche
(or was it mind, spirit or soul), religion and science: it is often understood
that there is a relation between (giftedness for appreciating and practicing)
mathematics and music. In our QF-context, a meaningful historical example is
the case of Albert Einstein’s love for music. If there is a close relation between giftedness for mathematics and
for music, the question is why the work of mathematicians is easily accepted to
influence politics and war up to the obliteration of mankind while the work of
musicians is not so despite its obvious sociopolitical influence. This despite
of perceived relation between, say, jazz and drugs, and between rap and crime. This to the point that Plato, possibly with intuitions about the
meaning of archetypes at his time of living myths, and long before
misunderstandings and abuse of Kant’s aesthetics led to naïve claims for artistic freedom, lets Socrates affirm (in Republic, 424 c-d, trans. P. Shorey):
[…T]he overseers of our state must cleave and
be watchful against its insensible corruption. They must throughout be watchful
against innovations in music […]. For a change to a new type of music is
something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music
are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social
conventions.
I have experience of an
academic friend who serendipitously found faith in Christianism through
experience of the sublime of mathematics in natural
science, and was rescued from falling into mathematized scientism. But I also
have a couple of other philosophically schooled academic friends who since
decades are convinced enthusiastic admirers of Wagner’s music and travel around
in Europe to appreciate advanced performances of his music. A long time ago
this motivated me to write a blog insert. Recently I wrote and as a hint
told them about a review of Alex Ross’ book ”Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music”. They answered, and an exchange of messages “from”
and “to” them, starting with the “from” them, took place as follows, slightly
edited, and with links inserted by me:
[From]
Alex Ross is a good American music critic, unpretentious and without
academic vanity (as far as I know). We have a good book on 20th century music
by him ("The Rest is Noise") and were interested in his new Wagner
book. We read a review and decided not to buy it as it focuses more on the
influence that Wagner had outside the music (on pretty much everything !!) and
not so much on the ideas that governed his operas and ways of composing.
[To]
“Thank you for the response… but when you have a cultural global view of
music, everything is connected. The article, among other things, touches upon
why homosexuality is connected with Wagner and Bayreuth, and what in music has
a political meaning ... I think. Namely, you wrote: "the influence that
Wagner had outside of music (on pretty much everything !!)...".
Wrong. It is not "outside the music", but it is the music itself and
it is with the music that he had an influence on pretty much everything! And
the question is why. What in the music that made him have such an impact through
it!
[From]
Thanks! My point was just that I am more interested in the ideas that
underlie Wagner's way of composing, his operas and aesthetics rather than a
number of other interesting and important phenomena that are of course related
to this. Ross' new Wagner book, which I assume is the basis of the article, is
more focused on the latter.
[To]
I did not manage to explain my own point: I think it may be because when
it comes to music in general and Wagner's in particular you are under
archetypal influence and can or do not want to think about what
"music" really is for something and what the word itself or the term
means. Is as a mathematical physicist who is obsessed with a passionate
commitment to quantum physics and is unable to understand Wolfgang Pauli's
collaboration with Carl Jung according to Suzanne Gieser's
dissertation https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783540208563. […] This only
confirms my belief in what Wagner's influence means for people and society. But
as I said, it is not necessary to understand this if what you want and need is
just listening but not "understanding" Wagner's music.
[From]
Here is a short reaction, which is in fact a quote from Bryan Magee’s excellent "The Tristan Chord; Wagner and Philosophy". I have not seen or read a better book
about Wagner and all the relevant aspects. The quote comes from the first
paragraph of Chapter 11, called "The Turn": "Influence is
something which is rarely possible to quantify and put sharp edges round, or
even to locate with pinpoint accuracy. Wittgenstein had a telling parable on
this. If, he said, we knew a man who had lived for many years on bacon and
potatoes we should recognize at once the absurdity of pronouncements about
which parts of his person derives from bacon and which from potato; and yet all
the time we make equivalent pronouncements when it comes to people's
intellectual and artistic nourishment."
[To]
Taking the quote seriously in this context is not a recommendation for
Wittgenstein […] Otherwise, it is just an example of the aestheticism that
characterizes the British cultural tradition in which he operated and which was
a reaction to its unfortunate naive empiricism. Incidentally, it does not take
in account the insights that can be gained from Charles Taylor’s problematization of "ad-hominem", which interests only those who take ethical
issues seriously, precisely the issues that aestheticist
view of art ignores.
[From]
The idea of Bacon-Potato has to do with how things create and influence
the course of events, including those that people are part of (as Magee clearly
says). Ethics is of course part of this problem! A major problem in this
context is that there is no good, overarching idea/theory of how this should be
perceived. The Bacon-Potato idea really puts the finger on just that "sore
spot"!
-------
“There is no good,
overarching idea/theory of how this should
be perceived”? My conclusion, which I see confirmed from an analysis of
Wikipedia’s account of the life and work of the above-mentioned Bryan Magee,
especially his personal life and death, is that there is a relation among art,
science, ethics and politics beyond whether “it works” or not. The swift
disposal of the relation between Wagner’s works with politics and theology
serendipitously and perfunctorily also avoids the controversial question of his
responsibility for the emotional and political effects of his music. Thereby Wikipedia, with the approval and sense
of relief of all contemporary Wagner enthusiasts, is allowed to write about the Nazi appropriation of his music. Appropriation? Evil appropriation of
supposedly good and well-meaning or neutral art that is loaded with powerful
archetypal stuff? Art that is supposed to be a substitute for religion in
general and Christianism in particular, after the abuse of Kant’s Critique of Judgment as I suggest in the
previously mentioned Computerization as design
of logic acrobatics.
The final discussion of
bacon and potatoes compared to intellectual factors that can affect "parts
of the person" makes it paradoxically even more important to examine
Pauli's desire to somehow compare, equalize and fuse the matter of bacon and
potatoes with the psyche, intellect, spirit and archetypes. If the author of
the dissertation and book on the relation between Pauli and Jung had subscribed
to the doctrine of bacon & potatoes, she would not have written her
original doctoral dissertation. But we see that in both music as in the closely related mathematics
there is a tendency or unconscious desire to escape from both philosophy and
God or gods into art and “design”, or some sort of cosmic religion, put in an
extraordinary supreme position and originating from a sort of “sore spot”. The
case of the posited, undiscussed but equivocal genius of Wagner recalls that
music, like the psychologically related mathematics, works. And that is exactly what Jan Brouwer dreaded about applied
mathematics, approving only pure mathematics. “It works”. As music it is needed, it must be performed and
listened to. “The rest is noise”?.
Mathematics “works” as music does, both in its melting spirit and matter, in
its spiritually structured notation and its physical empirical performance: it
is needed, it must be calculated and obeyed to. Many think
that it is also valid for gangster rap. The rest, as my thoughts
expressed in these lines, is noise?
Nevertheless there is religious music that expresses the conviction that there is music more important than
Wagner’s. Readers who understand Swedish may until further notice listen on the net a radio program by Eric Schüldt in the series Text
och Musik, broadcasted
by Sveriges Radio on 27 November 2021.
In summary: what lies
behind the idea that Wagner “is perhaps the greatest genius that ever lived”, as Einstein among a few other QF-physicists
including Pauli? One may have been possessed by some archetype since, as
Wikipedia expresses it:
Many of Wagner's concepts, including his speculation about dreams,
predated their investigation by Sigmund Freud. Wagner had publicly analyzed the Oedipus myth
before Freud was born in terms of its psychological significance, insisting
that incestuous desires are natural and normal, and perceptively exhibiting the
relationship between sexuality and anxiety. Georg Groddeck considered the Ring as the first manual of
psychoanalysis.
So, this issue touches in
depth the difference between Freud and Jung whose collected works in its
general index (CW 20, p. 712) has
about 50 entries and still more pages related to Wagner and the otherwise effects
of the powerful archetypal stuff in his music (or of the “appropriations” of
his music).
Parenthetically, without
insinuating anything about the particular cases of Pauli, Einstein or Wagner I
must confess the any reference to “genius”, the more so in esoteric activities
for domination or exploitation of nature and art, awakens in me the recall of
some words in Plato’s Republic (Rep.
495b, 519a, trans. P. Shorey):
[T]he very qualities that make up the philosophical nature do, in fact,
become, when the environment and nurture are bad, in some sort the cause of its
backsliding […]
Have you ever observed in those who are popularly spoken of as bad, but
smart men how keen is the vision of the little soul, how quick it is to discern
the things that interest it, as proof that it is not a poor vision which it
has, but one forcibly enlisted in the service of evil, so that the sharper its
sight the more mischief it accomplishes?
The more “intelligence”,
the more good and evil can be done. An example of what
happens when “laws of physics” as related to mathematics and logic are not
understood but are kidnapped by art and aesthetics (and “design”), can be the
statement about computer generated imagery – CGI, which
also recalls the mathematically and logically constructed imagery of QF: “The evolution of CGI led to the
emergence of virtual
cinematography in the 1990s, where the vision of the simulated camera is not
constrained by the laws of physics.” The
problem is illustrated in the video Trouble Deleting Videos – Math
Class Prank for April Fools 2019. It is obvious that virtual reality - VR “works” and one can guess that
its underlying (computerized) mathematical structure can make anything virtual
look as real (and perhaps the other way round?). It
may help to compare with mind-blowing theorizing on virtual reality VR that I
deal with in another context of information and theology. A more down-to-earth comparison is to compare the situation of the Copernican revolution facing its
predecessors, and to imagine that our process of
understanding reality is a reenactment of the process of human understanding in
the passage from a Ptolemaic to a Copernican view, and further
to an indefinite or infinite divine view recalling the idea of a view from the cosmic “Eye of God”. As if God were only eye.
The question is what reality is in a
manipulated environment. In my teaching I used the case of military training’s orienteering
competition where short before starting the event organizers discovered that in
the distributed maps was lacking a small hill, an elevation in the terrain.
Because of lack of time for redesigning and distributing an updated map the
organizers preferred to blow up the hill.
A nuclear weapon “works” in a
manipulated environment such as a part of the world made into a laboratory as
when weapons are shown to work, i.e. function in war, while carbon emissions in
earth’s atmosphere are hard to be politically manipulated in order to avoid
global climate warming. The step does not need to be too long for the vision of
an observation through arranged instrumentation (for, say, a nuclear explosion)
not be constrained by arranged laws of (a “new”) physics. The philosopher of
science West Churchman to whom I often refer (some readers may think: “too
often”?) explains more stringently this question when discussing a general
scientific logic in his book The
Systems Approach and Its Enemies (p. 57f.): “in a more general description of the method we would have to
discuss the design of a study from which the ability to manipulate variables is
dropped” (and the observer is part of the experiment, as in QF). The referred
“method” can be seen as the technological method that stands behind climate
warming and is paradoxically supposed to solve it.
According to the mentioned
Brouwer, what happens may very well be that the “structures of the external
objects”, whatever is meant by (external) mathematical object, are consciously
mathematically adapted to what the conscious mathematical mind (internal
aesthetic images) wants them to be: logically related. All
this requires further effort in order to express it more clearly.
Concerning the philosophy of science
exposed by my scientific advisor Churchman mentioned above, it is interesting
to note that he was indirectly influenced by philosophical pragmatism in the
spirit of William James who is surveyed by Gieser
(about 17 entries on 29 pages, in the book’s ambitious name-index on Ep. 375).
This is important in our context since it was Churchman in two of his later
books, The Design of Inquiring Systems, and
The Systems Approach and its Enemies who
directed me to Jung’s psychology, to the study of his collected works and of
literature about him.
From Aestheticism to Materialism
As a matter of fact the long-term results of QF are always justified in
terms of its “pragmatic” (but not pragmatist) applications as it is the case
for all technology. The redemption is sought along guidelines that recall
Pauli’s project to foster the role of matter and of physics in its conjunction
with spirit. It is the case of philosophy of technology that phenomenologically
relies upon the ethical role of the “flesh”. In
general, one can guess why QF, shaking the concept of physics and reality
itself, has given birth to so many strange interpretations and abuses, up to
the point of a Quantum Darwinism that “explains it all”. An alternative “Theory of everything”? As I report in another paper, Trevor Pinch, a reviewer of a paper by the feminist theorist, Karen Barad comments her message (Quantum physics and the entanglement of
matter and meaning) about QF as follows:
Bohr and indeed Einstein,
were committed to a form of humanism whereby they gave priority to humans and
how humans agree over measurements. According to Barad, this is a mistake and
leads to a subjective trap whereby it is easy to extrapolate from agreement
over outcomes of measurements to some sort of
knowing mind which recognizes the measurement as such.
It is a short step to views, such as suggested by Wigner and von Neumann, that quantum phenomena
only actualize when they encounter the consciousness of a human. […] Barad's
extension of Bohr's position into what she calls agential realism seems to rely
on three major points. First, she argues that Bohr's notion of language as being about
linguistic concepts shared between humans is too narrow, and that a more
sophisticated notion of language is needed. Here she draws upon a materialist reading of Foucault to ground language in
what she calls material discursive practices. Second, she extends the rather limited
notion of apparatus that
Bohr (and most scientists) share [… ] Third, Barad
argues, that humans themselves are produced by nature. She focuses upon bodies,
and drawing upon Monica Casper's work
on fetal parenthood and STS [Science
& Technology Studies at
Cornell University?] on ultrasound technology, she offers a materialist
critique of Judith
Butler's overly human-centered performative approach to the body.
In other words: there is no
trace of Pauli’s conceptions of the meaning of QF, but there is critique of an overly human-centered approach to the
body. The physical e spiritual is reduced to a materialist reading and to a materialist critique of the per se already highly problematic
“gender theorist” Judith Butler approach to the body, in order to efface or
relativize the concepts of masculinity and femininity. The human psyche appears
as being read materialistically into the matter of the collective? This must be
also the background for the Marxist emphasis on material manual work, workers
and labor unions that I comment upon in another paper. There I remark that in my professional life this was vindicated in a
quite noticed dissertation at my university department on Work-oriented Design of
Computer Artifacts, with a symptomatic
emphasis shifting from Marxist materialism to “design” and to an epilogue on
“postmodern reflections” on which I have myself reflected in a text on the meaning of human-computer interaction.
I think that Pauli’s own wishful thinking in
conceiving depth-psychological interpretations of QF may have been triggered by
his ethical pathos grounded in Jewish culture and philosophical readings having
definitively lost its religious anchor after Pauli left the Catholic Church at
age 29. His ethical pathos is also demonstrated in his pronounced reluctance to
work in the design of nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan project even as he, as foreigner,
may not have been allowed to go to Los Alamos for security reasons, and even as he later never had to struggle and
problematize the issue as Robert Oppenheimer did. Gieser tells (Ep.13) that religion must
have been a problematic issue in Pauli’s family, and (Ep. 39ff.) that he “harboured in his own cultural background a conflict between
Christianity and Judaism – his father had converted to Catholicism and long
concealed his Jewish identity from Pauli”. I see Jewish identity as connected
with the struggle with or for God. But Gieser quotes
below (Ep. 40) Pauli writing in a letter something that makes one wonder
whether, after all, he unconsciously subscribed to simple Gnosticism that Jung has been accused
of (and I have made an effort to absolve him from):
So I have a Jewish heritage of psychic capabilities,
together with a Catholic sense of ritual and ceremony, together with a definite
opinion, that the entire ideology of Judaeo-Christian
monotheism is of no use to me.
What did Pauli use in his further work, if use of (ideology on) God is not a
possible, meaningful and thoughtful expression in this context? What is the
“Jewish heritage of psychic capabilities” if not “Spinozian”
analytical-mathematical skills that today equated with “intelligence” without
caring for what intellect is as e.g. Jacques Barzun did in his House of Intellect. Those skills were originally justified by Wikipedia
having an article on Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence (dead link, cf.
surviving text here). It
was suddenly erased from Wikipedia leaving only secondary traces. When Pauli stated that
the entire ideology of Judaeo-Christian monotheism
was of no use for him, did he himself start dealing with an own “ideology” on
psyche and matter? When he started asking “why” matter behaved as it did he may
have incurred in the same analytical maze that QF - theoretical physicist Richard Feynman, depicted in his famous
answering the question about attraction and repulsion of magnets (“Farnam Street”
text here,
video here). It
turns out that he immediately turns the unsophisticated question into a matter
of multiple logical relations between cause and effect, which recalls Brouwer’s
observation of the enchantment with “causes” for the purpose of “effects”. Seemingly
Feynman does so without even acknowledging Aristotle’s four causes (details here and here). Even
less goes he into the question of “why and how asking why?”, i.e. the question
of what is an inquiry at all, that happens to be the core of a whole earlier
mentioned book on The Design of Inquiring
Systems.
It may be symptomatic that Gieser
dedicates about one third of her dissertation (Sp. 303ff.) and book (Ep.
247ff.) to incarnation and QF. This reveals, in view of Christ’s incarnation,
that Pauli’s interpretation of QF implied a fanciful and remarkable substitution of God or gods by
a cosmic religiosity that I already commented in a text about information and theology. It reduces Pauli’s if not also Jung’s associate speculations, as well
as theosophy and anthroposophy, to be classified as SBNR
– Spiritual But Not Religious. This with the difference that Jung differentiated
between psychology and religion in that, as I perceive it, psychology as
related to the psyche can be seen as a pedagogical approach to religion, an
epistemological rather than ontological view. (cf. Ep. 240).
This differentiation tends to be lost by Gieser, as when already initially (Ep. 6) she refers to
Pauli’s and Jung’s concerns with “the more fundamental
questions concerning the relationship between psychology and physics and
between science and religion, and the possibility of a unified worldview” (cf.
also Ep.209). Observe: psychology &
physics, and science & religion.
If both psychology and physics are science, then their unification cannot be
analog to or imply the unification between science and religion. And this
happens in contexts populated by logically gifted academics. Indeed, Gieser tells (Ep. 39f., 255) about Pauli being particularly
annoyed (as I am) by the “classical separation of religion and science with
watertight bulkheads”. But the God or gods of religion cannot be substituted by
postulated archetypal gods. Gieser’s own doubtful
conception of the issue is also exemplified in her statement that (Ep. 231)
Most religions and mythologies depict the
intra-psychic drama which all humans go through: the drama of developing from
an unconscious being into a conscious one.”
Jung, as other psychologists, may
happen to to express the whole of Western religious
history in this light but I understand that an alternative position, pending
the understanding of “depict”, would be to state
Most religions and mythologies that are depicted in
holy books and world literature are also depicted in reports of the
intra-psychic drama which all humans go through: the drama of developing from
an unconscious being into a conscious one.
If we only knew what consciousness
means, e.g. recalling Rudolf Steiner’s The Phenomenology of
Imaginative Consciousness, certainly not far from the “spirit” of the cultural
context in which Pauli himself developed.
All this in opposition to Pauli’s own remarkable and in my view absurd
statement (Ep. 255ff.) that both science and religion had to be incorporated in
a bigger picture. That is: a picture
bigger that religion? It would have to be a new better religion of which Pauli
would be its prophet, a paradoxical paraphrase of the famous anecdote of Pauli
himself commenting upon Paul Dirac’s atheism
and views on religion with “Now I understand. There is not God, and Dirac is
his prophet” (Ep. 16). But is Pauli’s vision of a “bigger picture”, without
even recurring to Nietzschean illusion of art for integration of the Apollonian-Dionysian, a better
alternative than Christianism, an alternative better than Rudolf Steiner’s
anthroposophy? The claim of a bigger-picture seems to be enough for indicating
a fundamental serious hubris. It may
be enough for invalidating Pauli’s (and Jung’s?) project. But Jung had not the
opportunity of analyzing Pauli beyond his dreams, and may have hoped (as Gieser may) to gain through him better understanding of his
own thought, as well legitimacy and influence in the field of cutting-edge
science. All this besides the proverbial effect in that the disciplines of QF
and psychology are perceived as having little in common and therefore in the land of the blind
the one-eyed man is king: Pauli among psychologists and Jung among physicists. Pauli’s position was softened by his
Jewish-Catholic background and stable marriage, but his intellectual hubris had
the support of the precedents in the cultural roots of Pauli’s own cultural
environment, exemplified by, say, Schleiermacher, Goethe, and Steiner and all the rest. Not to mention Beethoven’s “divinization” of (of the
brotherhood of) man in the Ode to Joy, adopted as the anthem of Europe as an alternative
to celebrate Europe’s Christian culture. They happen to contribute to and
belong to Germany’s background in the disastrous second world war with the
consequent recurring question of “How could it happen?” and including the
embarrassing morass around the thought and role in the war of its contemporaneous Martin Heidegger.
Dirac’s views on religion, as summarized in Wikipedia, were also significantly coupled to
fundamental physical laws being described in terms of a mathematical theory of great power and beauty, suggesting that God is a mathematician of a very high order.
Here I can see a source of physicists-mathematicians’ “priestly” hubris
when such a “Kantian” view of the sublime-spiritual in aesthetics is coupled to
the final comment: “as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we
can hope to understand the universe better”.
What happened instead, is that higher and higher mathematics consisting
of assorted mathematical “tools” and practiced by people who did not care about
its foundations and meaning, was applied in technology. It became a veil of
esoterism that protects its practitioners from criticism and justifies common
people perceiving such mathematized technology in a way that is explained in
Richard Stivers’ book Technology as Magic: The
Triumph of the Irrational.
The physicist-priest, blinded by
power and beauty only forgot to reflect upon what does it mean to “understand”,
and the related foundations and meaning of mathematics. From Jung’s quotation
above one may recall his expression: It did not take us long
to realize that it was less a question of the incarnation of the Logos than of
the descent of the Anthropos or Nous into the dark embrace of Physis.
And this is what Pauli was struggling with and, in contrast to the destiny of
e.g. Blaise Pascal, eventually may also
have succumbed to. The case of Pascal that I address in the introduction of a
text on Information
and Theology may teach much about
Pauli’s problem. What may be lacking is the dimension of love in the coniunctio. Love for a material that is a part of
a divine creation of parented matter, in analogy to the misunderstood origin of
today’s veganism and of ecological concerns including
climate warming. Symbolically it is a question of
what happens when coniunctio becomes “sex” or falls
into sentimentalism, or into what Jung in
four of this Collected Works calls
sentimentality, reminding the problematization of the concept of sexuality in the venues of analytical
psychologists.
Did Pauli only want
to have intercourse with, to control,
exploit, have power over historical matter or did he really feel and want to love it, to which he dedicated his whole
life? The question, or the “matter” (!) is touched by Jung in his Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology (CW8, §650ff.) starting with:
[N]o chain of reasoning can prove or
disprove the existence of either mind or matter. Both these concepts, as every
intelligent person today can ascertain for himself, are mere symbols that stand
for something unknown and unexplored, and this something is postulated or
denied according the temperament of the individual or as the spirit of the age
dictates. There is nothing to prevent the speculative intellect from treating
the mind as a complicated biochemical phenomenon and at bottom a mere play of
electrons, or on the other hand from regarding the unpredictable behavior of
electrons as the sign of mental life even in them.
From the confused
and abused field of “design” and design theory that I have often questioned in
my work transpires the question of rational industrialization as contrasted to
handicraft where the craftsman was supposed to “love” his material,
materialized in his work, seen in turn as an act of “spiritual” worship of
divine matter. It is that work together with workers and farmers representing
“the people”, that upon the advent of industrialization was secularized and
“divinized” by Marxist philosophy, and plunged into materialism. It is a
process that I only have seen duly analyzed and understood in Nicolas Berdyaev’s Dostoievsky: An
Interpretation, (in the chapter on
Russia, esp. pp. 167 ff.), exemplifying the genius of Dostoievsky.
Despite of my not being an enthusiast of Heidegger’s philosophy that in
academia one must come repeatedly in diffident contact with, some of these
above insights seem to be echoed in his The
Question Concerning Technology, even in its cursory summary in Wikipedia.
I guess that what happens is that,
close to but different from the new physics drawing closer to the
“transcendental” or “mystical” (Gieser, Ep. 252), the
more it tempts atheists or agnostics perceive it as computer scientists dealing
with virtual reality - VR, and to turn it into another sort of cosmic religion
of the earlier mentioned class of SBNR. Or (Ep. 253): “Pauli claims that it is quite possible to have such an
experience without belief in a God”. All this permeates Pauli (mis)conception
of the relationship between science and religion. This is done through the
(mis)use of the “symbolic approach”, which paradoxically and serendipitously
happens to match Pauli’s serious and legitimate ethical concerns for the abuse
of science as QF, which would be eventually abused. Cf. (Ep. 272):
With the
symbolic approach the interplay between cosmos and man comes into focus. One
example of this is provided by the symbolic concept of incarnation, which in
itself represents a description of how the symbol functions: it is an
interaction between ‘the possible’ and ‘the actual’ which results in
‘becoming’, incarnation or the unique creation. Science as a discipline must in
turn realize that science created by man always includes statements about man.
The object of science will therefore always be man himself and his totality; in
him is the ethical conflict between good and evil, in him is spirit and matter.
Despite of Gieser
telling (Ep. 257) about Pauli’s perception that in the modern world the
symmetry between mind and matter is disturbed, and the tension of opposites is
projected onto the political arena, in a search to eliminate “the other”, the
hope is that “by way of compensation, therefore, strong internal images with
the Coniunctio motif arise in modern man”. In the
meantime, waiting for new and creative “strong internal images”, QF colleagues
were working on weapons of mass destruction for what, if yet controversially,
could be considered as the two gravest singular criminal acts of mankind, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It also enabled a future destruction
of mankind and of nature (forget pollution and climate change) in a
worldwide nuclear warfare, presaged by the case of the Soviet nuclear false alarm incident, and the Cuban missile crisis. So much for
the cosmic “bigger picture” integrating science and religion while Pauli as
amateur theologian muses about theodicy (Ep. 38ff., 255). And we humans explore
matter in inner and outer space. We humans explore and “analytically” blow up
the atom, and now in the life sciences we blow-up the cell, while in society we
blow-up its atomic family. In our planet it is said that we pollute and blow-up
its earth, water and climate. In the meantime we
explore outer space in search of habitable exoplanets and
knowledge about how the universe was like billions of years ago. We explore how
to use science and technology under the naïve standard motivation that “it works” for improving the human condition while
ignoring the workings of greed and evil, and the problems of Theology and Technology –
Essays in Christian Analysis and Exegesis.
I asked a couple of
QF-knowledgeable academicians what they thought about the incomprehensibility
of QF. They answered with the following statements, two of them already
mentioned in the conclusion of my text on computers as embodied mathematics:
The book you mention was apparently written in 2005,
but since then the understanding of these phenomena has been partially
revalued.
Quantum mechanics [QM] is very useful, and as you know, can be used to
calculate many new verifiable results. - But no one really understands why it
is so good, so I recommend my students to just count, instead of asking
undefined questions.
[The] professor of plasma
physics is exactly on the same line as I am. Einstein also had about that same
attitude. Now, however, it seems that some experiments in recent years support
Bohr's interpretation and do not support Einstein's view of QM. But regardless
of this, one can successfully use QM without understanding it philosophically.
Your plasma physics professor's view is pragmatic and I do not think you can
blame him. Since we do not have a certain meaningful answer, we must be content
with the fact that it works in an incredibly fantastic way.
I also asked a physicist colleague
of mine who is knowledgeable in quantum physics about what he thought about a
“crazy” news that was communicated to me from another colleague: Physicists create a
holographic wormhole using a quantum computer and I stated that it is not
understandable by common scientifically educated people like me who are
supposed to pay for such tax-supported research. He answered that “this is not
crazy, so it is OK that it is paid for by us taxpayers. But what this may
result in, no one knows at present. I'll get back to your questions in a
hundred years”.
I think: “Just count”, “verifiable
results”, “successful use”, “perhaps in a hundred years”, “fantastic”. That is:
“it works”, or may work. Not only that Gieser’s book
was published in 2005: It is not that the original text of the book in the form
of a PhD dissertation was written before 1996. In other words, the problem is
analog to when one adduces the problematization of artificial intelligence in
earlier mentioned The Design of Inquiring
Systems: modern science
“advances” so rapidly that any thoughtful criticism is offset by claiming that
it aims at old problems that have been solved. The problem has not been only
the coarse pragmatic (rather than refined philosophical pragmatist) arguments that “it works”. It is obvious that when a
vast and richly financed worldwide scientific effort is made in QF or in
whatever endeavor like space science, then there will come results that are
useful. They may reveal themselves to be useful both in war or crime, and in
saving human lives, alleviating poverty and making life more comfortable.
Something is forgotten, however, by those who do care for neither religion nor
philosophy of technology. As a friend of mine who is very concerned with these
matters but still is enthusiastic admirer of mathematics and quantum physics,
defending it because "it works", suggesting that "the
forgetting" is the result of some atheist scientists "self-hypnosis". I boldly wrote
to him that this reminds me of my text about logic that can be used and seen as
rape substituting
love, meaning that:
The
"self-hypnosis" may be interpreted as triggered by the enticing belief
in the power of logic mathematics and that it "works" as exemplified
in the rape of nature by quantum physics. As also in ordinary rape: it also
demonstrably "works" in terms of ejaculation and procreation.
If we disregard the “cost” of
human suffering because of being aware of the criticism of utilitarianism, what is forgotten is one main tenet of
most basic economics. Namely that the truest concept of cost for all investment
and scientific effort, as for all effort, is opportunity cost. As the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines it: the added cost
of using resources (as for production or speculative investment) that is the
difference between the actual value resulting from such use and that of an
alternative (such as another use of the same resources or an investment of
equal risk but greater return).
In summary, pending the meaning and application of the often mentioned
term spirit with its related spiritual gifts like mathematical, logical or musical-artistic
proficiency, and pending the capacity of understanding as well confessing hubris despite of lacking religious faith: it is the case of
avoiding an ultimate “Faustian bargain”, and to consider the
wisdom and applicability of the Bible’s book Ecclesiasticus/Sirach 3:21-24:
21 Seek not what is too difficult
for you,
nor investigate what is beyond your power.
22 Reflect upon what has been assigned to you,
for you do not need what is hidden.
23 Do not meddle in what is beyond your tasks,
for matters too great for human understanding have been
shown you.
24 For their hasty judgment has led many astray,
and wrong opinion has caused their thoughts to slip.
Endnote – Main bibliographic data
Gieser’s doctoral dissertation and derived book:
Gieser,
Suzanne, (1995). Den
innersta kärnan. Djuppsykologi och kvantfysik: Wolfgang Paulis dialog
med C.G. Jung [The innermost kernel. Depth psychology and quantum physics: Wolfgang Pauli's dialogue with C.G. Jung].
Institutionen
för idé- och lärdomshistoria, Uppsala Universitet, Skrifter, No. 15, 450 pp. Uppsala. ISBN
91-506-1140-2.
A revised English version
(e-book, hard and soft covers 2004-2005) of the doctoral thesis (above) for PhD
degree in the History of Ideas and Sciences at Uppsala University is The Innermost Kernel. Depth
Psychology and Quantum Physics: Wolfgang Pauli’s Dialogue with C.G. Jung. 378 pp. Springer Verlag.
ISBN-13: 978-3642058813.