Charles Eisenstein #quack charleseisenstein.org

The above account, though suitably simplified, is beyond dispute; physics has tried and failed to preserve determinism for ninety years. The situation has not improved since Einstein’s famous protest, “God does not play dice with the universe.” Unable to remove indeterminacy altogether, physics had to settle for burying it safely in the microcosm: random quantum behavior adds up in the aggregate to approximate the determinate, causal behavior of the human world, in which, as before, nothing happens without some force being responsible.

Why does one photon go here and one go there, if not compelled by some force? Well, why do you do one thing rather than another, if not compelled by some force? You choose, so the obvious intuitive answer is that the photon chooses its course. Physics, of course, cannot countenance such an answer, so far outside the scope of scientific thought it is as to be beyond laughable. Physics—and remember, physics lies at the foundation of our Story of the World, of what is real, what is practical, how things work—says instead that the behavior is “random,” preserving, at the price of acausality, a universe of unconscious, generic building blocks. For indeed, to ascribe choice to something as humble as a photon or an electron would be to acknowledge our universe as intelligent through and through. No longer would the universe be just a bunch of stuff; no longer would we so cavalierly arrogate to ourselves the role of its lords and masters. The core project of our Story of the People would be shaken to its foundation.

Let us pause to note that most people who have ever lived on Earth would have no trouble believing that the universe is intelligent through and through. Premodern people, animists or panentheists, ascribed sentience to all beings, not only plants and animals but even rocks and clouds. Young children in our own society tend to do the same. We call it personification or projection, and think that we know better than children and animists that, actually, the universe is mostly a dead, insensate place.

Maybe you don’t want your accessing of expanded creative power to depend on accepting the proposal that even electrons bear sentience. Okay, fine—I won’t insist. Here at least is a place where force is not the cause of behavior. Moreover, modern physics offers a second, perhaps even more severe, challenge to the Story of Separation: the breakdown of the basic self/other distinction.

We are accustomed to a universe in which existence occurs against a backdrop of an objective Cartesian coordinate system of space and time. If something exists, it occupies a point X, Y, Z, at time T, and this existence is independent of you, me, or any other being in the universe. Even if we know about the quantum measurement paradox or entanglement, the assumption of objectivity is woven so deeply into our perceptions that to deny it is laughable. Say you go to bed before the election results come in. You wake up the next morning. Who won? You may not know yet, but you wouldn’t deny that it has already been decided, that there is a fact of the matter that exists independently of your knowledge. Or say that you are investigating a traffic accident. Each party to the accident has a different version of what happened. Would you deny that there is a reality, independent of their stories, consisting of what “actually happened”?

I would not indulge in these ontological musings at all, if it were not for the fact (the fact!) that the old, inaccurate Story of Being, the separate self marooned in an external objective universe, is a recipe for impotence and despair. Separate from the world, nothing we do can matter very much. In the vast, uncoordinated melee of separate selves and impersonal forces that compose the universe, our ability to change the course of events depends on the amount of force we can muster (or inspire, if only others would listen. And being separate from us, their choices are beyond our control—unless we make them listen. Back we are again to force). In particular, this story devalues most of the small, personal acts of service that we experience, on the feeling level, as important and that characterize the kind of world we would like to live in.

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Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

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